A rebel yell for the Colonel, and what the Mideast really needs

Two from Takimag:

• Colonel Sanders’ story.
• Capitalism, not democracy?

Bradley Manning, the sexual arms race, wariness of churchmen, wasting money on foreign aid, and clients from hell

• From Ad Orientem: How I feel about the Bradley Manning case. He and the more sympathetic Edward Snowden (a Ron Paul person) are arguably heroes for exposing government malfeasance. The government should be much smaller and weaker, as opposed to what the establishment right and the left want, but there is still a place for government and all are under authority, just like the natural world and just like the church. (Not hardcore libertarians’ radical selfishness.) So, just like with principled deserters who didn’t want to kill innocent Iraqis again, part of the heroism is taking the punishment. Not so sure yet if that’s so of Snowden. Arguably yes but I don’t want to say it. And he’s not military.
• From Sunshine Mary: A Red Queen alpha arms race? LAMPS and the Roissyan observation that what’s good for players isn’t good for society (because he bases it on nature, he’s profoundly conservative; Mary bases it on both nature and her conservative Protestantism). Of course it’s a contest: most fertile for women (why youth and looks matter to us) and least likely to be saber-tooth tiger food for men (why chicks dig aggressive jerks). And, reduced to pure fallen nature, both sexes are looking to trade up/get a better offer (female hypergamy, serial monogamy). Two things come to my mind: no identity politics/victimology (what’s wrong with the therapists’ fake ‘men’s movement’ and part of feminism’s problem) and the sexual market works like the free market; pursuing legitimate self-interest (by making yourself more attractive) actually helps others (a rising tide raises all boats). All men learning a smidge of game is better personally for both sexes and societally.
• From Rod Dreher: On not trusting churchmen. He titled it ‘On not trusting the church’, which grabs readers but is wrong. The idea is right. Non-Catholics often think we think priests are perfect. Catholicism is not clericalist; it’s sacerdotalist as Fr George Rutler says. (We esteem the priesthood but know priests aren’t perfect.) Pre-conciliar Catholicism/traditionalism isn’t necessarily clericalist either; it’s just that a Counter-Reformation-style priestly order is now its main group. Non-clericalism of course is normal in traditional Catholic cultures; Italians certainly don’t worship priests. Anyway, liberals have for five decades tried to usurp the church’s authority in a continuation of clericalism (even when pretending to empower the laity; they’re clericalizing the churchy, not the lay apostolate of the old church). As Archbishop Lefebvre said, a master move of Satan: destroying tradition under the guise of obeying the church. Try to follow Lefebvre’s eternal Rome and be accused of Protestant private judgement, a favorite line of Novus Ordo neocons. (The libs don’t take us seriously.) Knowledge and discernment.
• From LRC: Ron Paul: cut off ‘foreign aid’.
• From RR:
  • Abortion sneaks into Irish law. The left-libertarians are pro-death so they’re cheering. Saving the mother’s life is fine of course, however you want to finesse it theologically; it was the law in most of the United States in the ’50s. The Trojan horse seems to be the bit about the mother threatening to kill herself.
  • Why not just abolish the NSA?
  • On the Bradley Manning verdict.
• Clients from Hell. Mostly horror stories from Web designers; I can relate.

The second biggest misconception about Catholic traditionalists

Besides that It’s About Latin, that we all want to turn the church into a strict cult. Partly because the faith is big on doctrine and morals that mainstream society now hates, but also partly our fault. By historical accident (?), the most successful trad group has been the Society of St Pius X, the religious order that the saintly Archbishop Lefebvre founded. But of course real pre-conciliar Catholicism is more than the culture of a Counter-Reformation-style order. It includes everybody from Francisco Franco to Dorothy Day. As I like to say, the church is so big it couldn’t micromanage you even if it wanted to. Certainly true back when means of communication and travel were poorer. Also, R. Scott Appleby has observed that all fundamentalisms are a thoroughly modern reaction to the evils of modernity, something we’re not immune to. But it doesn’t have to be that way. As Fr Anthony Chadwick quoted a ’50s liberal but sound French priest (who stuck with the ’65 revision of the missal) saying, such is ‘not what we were’. That’s why living tradition, living links to before the council (the old stalwarts who kept the memory of the old Mass for decades), is so important, to show us how to do it right, rather than accidentally making things up so you end up with something not really pre-conciliar Catholicism. (My issue with Bishop Williamson: by recommending The Poem of the Man-God, he’s left the old church.) That said, things can and do organically change, and disciplinary rules can and do too. The big tent of the old church can include Tridentine Anglo-Catholic alumni (close enough so it’s compatible) for example.

NSA foreign shenanigans, the mainstream GOP still stinks, and so might Mark Zuckerberg and Pope Francis

• From LRC: Confessions of an economic hitman. ‘Foreign aid’ with strings attached, no different really from the colonial service of the British Empire we took over.
• From Ad Orientem: How libertarian will the Republicans be in 2016? I want to like Chris Christie, the kind of strongman the right people hate, but he’s wrong. Rand’s not his dad.
• From Steve Sailer: Zuckerberg: My net worth only went up $3.8 billion today, so America needs cheaper programmers.
• Pope Francis restricts our Mass in a thriving conservative Franciscan order. The first sign that, besides being personally low-church in a social-justicey Latin-American way, he’s not our friend. Hurtful but unsurprising. The Anti-Gnostic may be right; the church may be going south in a few ways. Of course the doctrine can’t change; I mean a reneging on Pope Benedict’s reforms, returning to the bad days of John Paul II or even Paul VI. If Benedict’s English Novus stays, it wouldn’t be as bad as that. But still. A worst-case plan: if it’s possible to be a casual parishioner at the SSPX, going to Mass but otherwise staying out of it, that’s an option. Perspective: at Dreher’s, commenter J_A on traditional cultural Catholicism, particularly in Latin America. The First World church will be much smaller and more trad as the liberals die or drop out, but a Third World-run church might be doctrinally sound but low-church. We can hope that instead it revives a traditional folk Catholicism and discovers what old-school Anglo-Catholics did, that high church and social ministry can go together.

The homosexual problem among Ruthenian Catholic priests in America

This news on ex-Fr Glenn Davidowich reminds me that the problem goes way back, even to the ’50s; I’ve run across it a couple of times. I understand that in the ’60s Bishop Elko tried to crack down on it, a reason some priests got him fired, and Rome shut down SS. Cyril & Methodius Seminary for four years because of this problem, but, run by the old crew, it came back. I’m not saying have a witch hunt, dragnetting sound priests who happen to have that temptation (some paleos say the notion of ‘orientation’ was unknown to the ancients; they saw it only in terms of behavior). Preach dissent, commit a crime, and/or cause scandal and you should be fired/laicized. A theory: it was a backfire from banning, in America, their longstanding custom of ordaining the married, dating back to being Orthodox and before the schism. The boys from the old priestly families became dentists and lawyers instead, and the priesthood became a socially favored cover for boys, from tough blue-collar towns (just like you think, Greek Catholicism isn’t a gay church by a long shot), who didn’t like girls. Married priests aren’t a cure for the vocations slump; the Orthodox are hurting there too (and the cheerfully corrupt little Orthodox denominations have their share of the gay-clergy problem). (All of the churches are shrinking as America becomes more anti-religious; the Cathedral’s a cancerous form of the once dominant mainline.) I don’t hate clerical celibacy (in the culture war including in the church, the right people hate it, and priests by and large have a great record) but it’s not a hill I’m willing to die on. Idiots among our own churchmen used it as an excuse to cause schisms in this country (Alexis Toth, to the Russians, a little over 100 years ago, and the 1930s ones to the Ukrainian Orthodox and the founding of ACROD under the Greeks), and then there’s this. No wonder Rod Dreher wouldn’t trust these men around his sons. Дякую, guys. Thanks. You’ve helped turn American Catholicism, Cardinal Spellman’s old Powerhouse, into a laughingstock in this country. (The Cathedral’s Narrative: Gay is Good. Lonely gay priests act on it, which the church says is a sin, but it’s the church’s fault because the church is Bad.) Господи, помилуй. Lord, have mercy. P.S. Novus neocons: so how’s that ‘renewal’ been working out again?

Japan, Russia’s anniversary, convertitis, libertarian populism, and Bruce Springsteen

• From LRC:
  • Eric Margolis: end the war with Japan. The choices seem to be: hope the US will block China’s expansion; or abandon the US-imposed strictures from the post-war period, develop a real foreign policy, and create credible military forces — including nuclear arms. Japan-bashing has never made sense for the U.S. In the war, they weren’t a threat to our sovereignty.
  • The productive class.
• Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev): the secularist West is totalitarian. Russia, as the Anti-Gnostic has pointed out, is authoritarian, not the same thing.
• This weekend Russia and the Ukraine are celebrating 1,025 years of being Christian, by definition historically, traditional apostolic Christians (Orthodox), originally Catholic. Поздравляю. Congratulations.
• To John at Ad Orientem on convertitis. Thanks. Mutual. Respectfully, of course I don’t think I have it. To me, convertitis is claiming everything in your new church is perfect and that your old church is all evil. For example, claiming that Greek Catholicism ‘as is’ is perfect and the Orthodox must become just like it in order to be good Catholics. That isn’t me. More important, folk traditionalism beats novusordoism, hands down. You know my line: I’m where I am because it doesn’t tell me to hate the Orthodox tradition. No, the issue is the sin of schism and the mentality it breeds. Part of what you’re seeing from me is there are things I have hated about the Orthodox Church for over 15 years (anti-Westernism), and now I don’t have to keep quiet anymore to cover for my old pro-Catholic priest, now retired. (My trip through Orthodoxy.) As I blogged recently, I respect Teena Blackburn. Someone with convertitis wouldn’t. I don’t have it regarding the Anglicans either.
• That said, Modestinus hits another one out of the park, and a word from Dale.
• The hyperdox herman is annoying but has integrity; he’s pushing a fundamentalist version of his church’s teachings, not his own. The OicwR is just narcissistic.
• From Daniel Larison: libertarian populism. As far as I’m concerned, the national Republican Party’s a lost cause, even though the right culture-wars people seem to hate it. You snubbed Ron Paul. It’s over.
• The English critic who really, really hates Bruce Springsteen. I don’t but see the problems and think this is a great example of English wit.

‘It’s called pushback. Deal with it.’

• From Modestinus: The way of Dignitatis Humanæ. A middle path between those who hold religious liberty up as an absolute right and those who condemn it as a great evil.
• From the Anti-Gnostic: Why doesn’t the GOP use the Zimmerman case to try to get the Hispanic vote it so badly wants?
• The ugliness of fallen humanity and its modern culture of death:
  • Like Roissy, Sunshine Mary shows white knights why not to put girls on a pedestal (the feminists’ childish entitlement minus responsibility): the ugliness of extreme hypergamy.
  • From Hilary: We have abortion because it gets people what they want, and the social pressure against conversion. ‘Think you’re better than me?’ P.S. She’s right that World Youth Day is naff.
• From Ad Orientem: (Ex-Orthodox) Catholic online pushback against online Orthodoxy. The convert boomlet recedes, with some backlash, after some of these little churches tried to expand by taking the shortcut of bringing in obnoxious anti-Catholic Protestants. Real Orthodox tend to be very nice: like the old American Catholicism but minus the Pope (Owen White: Midwestern OCA is Catholicky). Related: old-style assimilation. Who else has noticed that Rod Dreher doesn’t hang out with them? I’m not one of his haters but he seems like Mr. Lifestyle Accessorization, understandably mad at the church because of the big gay clergy scandal but having tried to join the cool kids by renouncing the Pope. My guess is either he’ll come back, since he’s promisingly not de rigueur anti-Catholic enough, or wig out like Franky Schaeffer, who used to be a conservative pundit too. Modestinus hits it out of the park, and Teena Blackburn’s not an online Orthodox; she left the church but tells it like it is, like a good trad. A few guesses: convert Orthodox tend to be 1) mostly marriage converts just like before the fad 20 years ago, like Tom Hanks and the plot of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (the only golden-era born Orthodox and Greek Catholics I’ve known who switched were that), 2) devout Protestants who read their way into high church (latter-day Tractarians) as Teena describes, and 3) semi-unchurched nominal Catholics, plus a small minority of the pious reading their way into Orthodox opinions like in Teena’s description, but devout Novus and trads don’t normally ’dox.
• Reputation.com’s earned a bad reputation. The Wild West of Internet employment. More.

Detroit’s demographics, the hookup-culture scare, and more anti-Western Western hipsterdox

• It’s not inevitable that a black-run city will fall apart. Atlanta has had black mayors for exactly as long as Detroit. Yet — at least so far — Atlanta’s black Democratic rulers have done a decent job of working with Georgia’s white Republican rulers to not kill the white geese who lay the corporate golden eggs. The lesson is that a black-dominated city has a much narrower margin for error. By George, Sailer’s got it. HBD’s the 500-lb. gorilla in the room of this story. Lots of things caused Detroit’s failure, such as one-party Democratic rule and its inevitable economic ruin, greedy unions (Michael Moore was a comfortable beneficiary of that lush system of entitlements; he is embittered that it didn’t continue even though it was doomed from the start by its spendthrift impracticality), and better foreign cars. But what’s a conservative, someone who doesn’t pretend not to Notice Things, to do or say in order to be decent and fair? (Real equal opportunity that keeps race out of it, not forced, fake equal outcomes, which caused the mortgage bubble and collapse.) Neither the sickle nor the swastika, neither the Narrative’s denial (Orwellian as Roissy says: observation is illusion), however well meant, nor determinism (‘It’s inevitable that a black-run city will fall apart’), which would really be racist. The Narrative, the Cathedral (a Christian heresy in which Nice White Ladies rule the world), calls Sailer’s Noticing Things and answer racist but they’re not. Just fact. ‘On average.’ A factor. Also, as Sailer notices, don’t listen to the leftoids. Watch what they do. They’re good at segregation, then sit and watch their proxies decimate the prole whites they hate. They want to turn downtown into their playground and wish conservatives would help them ethnically cleanse (disarm) it once the prole whites are out of the picture. And: ‘I am a man’; like everybody else, blacks are partly responsible, as adults, for their problems.
• From Joshua: Hookup-culture scare. Or millennials are actually on average pretty normal; was Sunshine Mary trolled? Take o tempora culture-wars bait with a grain of salt.
• Hipsterdoxy. Here. Me.

George Zimmerman rescues car-crash victims, on Britain’s baby prince, and more on Dennis Farina and ‘Crime Story’

• Unsurprisingly, Florida’s demonized neighborhood watchman is a decent guy: George Zimmerman helps rescue family from car wreck. Truth 2, Cathedral Narrative (including our narcissist-in-chief) 0.
• It’s a boy. Royal-watchers are easy targets for the elite. I’m not one but am moderately interested. Jury’s out for me on the American Revolution being justified (we could have ended up as liberal as Canada), loving the mother country is a good, naturally conservative thing (vs. the elite’s cosmopolitanism), and the Windsors are from the golden era and earlier. The trouble is these Ur-WASPs, mainline Protestants (as British law requires), are not really conservative. (Arguably neither is another golden-era institution conservatives love, the U.S. military.) And the monarchy in itself doesn’t matter much. The good things it ostensibly stands for do. After British overspending in WWI and the Depression, the center of power shifted west to Washington; since WWII the UK’s managed to dodge the euro bullet, keeping its independence from Europe (Germany), because it’s an American protectorate. Sexy celebrity couple; I think the royals like and approve these love matches with attractive commoners because it’s good publicity in a democratic age, and it stops the problems (lower IQ, etc.) from inter-royal inbreeding (the Queen and Prince Philip are distant cousins). Given Elizabeth’s and Prince Charles’ ages, there’s a good chance the people will get what they want: William, blessed with his mother’s good looks, will be king in not too long. More interesting: in theory the monarch has nearly absolute power; s/he doesn’t but, under Britain’s unwritten constitution, the government does because it acts in the monarch’s name. Not good. By the way I was next to Charles and Camilla once; if they’d turned to their left I would have met them.
• RIP Dennis Farina:
  • Ed Driscoll: CBS Chicago is reporting that the veteran actor “died Monday morning in a Scottsdale, Ariz., hospital after suffering a blood clot in his lung. He was 69.” They’re playing up his two years as Jerry Orbach’s initial replacement on Law & Order, particularly since, as CBS notes, Farina “was the only actor on ‘Law & Order’ who actually served in law enforcement, serving as a Chicago police officer for 18 years,” before becoming an actor at age 37. But the show to look for is Crime Story, which Michael Mann produced as his follow-up to Miami Vice (where Farina appeared in three episodes as a Godfather-esque Mafioso), and is available for rental on Netflix. Crime Story began to fizzle near the end of its first season, but the first 18 or so episodes, set in Chicago, before the series relocated in Las Vegas, were great fun to watch. Set in the Mies van der Rohe-era Chicago of the early, pre-Miranda JFK ’60s, it was sort of Mad Men meets Goodfellas, (years before each of those titles) with plenty of smoking, skinny ties, and fedoras, and features a highly watchable blend of Vice-like cinematography, which was still unique for television in the mid-’80s, and the great duel of wits (and occasionally guns, fists, etc.) between Farina’s tough Chicago PD lieutenant and Tony Denison as Ray Luca, the show’s lead gangster. (Denison is now a co-star on TNT’s Major Crimes series.)
  • Working with him on the show.

RIP Dennis Farina

The world was a better place when Mike Torello patrolled the streets.

The actor’s story. He was a real cop.



Requiem æternam dona ei.

Sailer fisks Obama on Zimmerman/Martin

Long and very funny, because it’s true. Classic. Like Marc Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar, the president was trying to incite a (race) riot under the guise of keeping the peace. The WASPy, lawyerly passive-aggression we’ve come to expect from our beloved chief executive.

By the way, who else has noticed and is bothered by the common referring to Martin by his first name, Trayvon? Is it part of the Narrative’s martyrology of a child, or does it strike you, as it does me, as vaguely, unconsciously racist? Guess you can file this post under ‘outdoing the Cathedral’s piety’ (after all, it’s a Christian heresy, with some of its adherents really trying to be loving and just).

The Fabulous Four

Joseph “Junior” Pirollo (lead), Bob Finizio (second tenor), Joe Milaro (baritone), and James Testa (first tenor).

In 1957 four fellows from the South Philadelphia area formed a vocal group...

Catchy, and of course I’m playing on their name to flip off the Sixties.

‘Losing Christ and finding Jesus’ at a ‘Catholic’ college

Protestantism metastasized and apostatized into the Cathedral. As Bill Tighe wrote, sad to see. But predictable. Hasn’t the Christ of faith, a make-believe character to project yourself on (Jesus of Narcissists), vs. the Christ of history (born of a man and woman, dead, and buried just like everybody else, or they project onto him too), been a stock character of mainliners and Modernists for at least 100 years, if not as far back as the ‘Enlightenment’ (Jefferson’s gelded, bowdlerized Bible, moral uplift minus the silly supernatural stuff)? The fellow Rod Dreher mentioned, whom liberal Jesuits at Santa Clara University encouraged to delve into Islam rather than Christianity. (The Cathedral fetishizing the Other, taking charity’s name in vain as it always does: anything but the boring old America. Worshipping a culture rather than God. But hey, ‘imagine there’s no heaven’.) Great comment quoting C.S. Lewis. (Quintessential believing traditional Anglican, more Catholic than his legions of evangelical fans but anti-papal.)

The council and its bogus ‘renewal’ mean ‘the system’s broke’. I went to Villanova. Better to get a good practical degree at an honestly secular school, or study the humanities at some little preppy college with no religious pretensions (trouble is a lot of those little WASPy schools, like I guess Swarthmore, are more anti-Catholic than ever), and find a conservative parish to go to and read the great books on your own (hooray for the Internet, an autodidact’s treasure) than to go to a so-called Catholic school. (Bishop Sheen said the same, and that was back in the golden era!) The ex-prez of Ohio State had a point, and I won’t play victim. Notre Dame is probably more about de facto pro sports than anything else. Though I hear you can get a good education there, and they’re so big they’re a microcosm of the church, unlike Villanova or St Joe’s here, so you really get the benefit of Pope Benedict’s reforms there, and there’s even a Tridentine Mass, because some students want it. But politics at Catholic schools? My guess is, holy welfare state, Batman: the old immigrant-labor-Democratic connection turned into a parish of the Cathedral. I think at Villanova the College Dems were school-sponsored and the College Republicans not. (The state religion at ¡No Va! 25 years ago: the Cathedral, but low-church exactly as Thomas Day described, and anti-abortion, their last marker of Catholic identity along with voting D. The secular culture: jocks, frats, and yups-in-training. The only alternative house religion was a charismatic Protestantish cult that was shut down when enough of the jocks, frats, and yups-in-training complained.) Not that the neocon Republicans are necessarily any great shakes. Just as socially liberal as the Dems (homosexual pseudo-marriage, and immigration for cheap labor and as part of the elite whites’ war on prole whites, with residual appeal to Ellis Island white ethnics) and/or, as Caelum et Terra reported on Steubenville, pro-war, pro-torture pols getting honored. Since the council, the Catholic label’s been diluted. Caveat emptor.

RIP Helen Thomas

A feisty lady journalist from the golden era, a lot like the one who really started my adult life, launching my long, now ended, career in newspapers. (I’ve moved up to Web copywriting, more lucrative and it has a future; newspapers are going the way of the dodo and the telegram.) Full of the era’s idealism, however misguided. (Progress! Yes, but. There was a lot of it. The Sixties stopped it. Inevitably?) The lady I knew was a friend of the Mercury astronauts; Miss Thomas like most of the country loved President Kennedy.

No wonder Israel competes in the Eurovision pop contest. They’re foreign, European invaders in the Middle East, at the expense of not only the Muslim majority but Catholics, including the estranged Catholics who are the Orthodox and other ancient Eastern churches. (Miss Thomas was ethnic Lebanese, more of a Semite than American Jews. By the way, she was Orthodox. Eternal memory.) Armed with and thanks to WWII guilt, they’ve done unto the Palestinians what the Nazis did unto them. Go back to Germany and Poland indeed.

Rusyn Catholics: they wanted things to stay the same

And that was a good thing. But it’s possible to make an idol out of a good thing such as your culture, without even believing in Christ or the church. And end up not even keeping the culture, turning into something else. That said, my approach is very similar to theirs. I have a remote ancestral connection to my religion, keep my Mass as it’s been done for centuries, and want to be left in peace to continue to do so.

• Family and ethnicity, and part of the old America: two videos from ACROD, one a ’54 newsreel (with the Mid-Atlantic accent, the slight English accent American announcers used to fake). Their golden era too, just like Cardinal Spellman’s Catholicism. Most Ruthenians didn’t go into schism in the ’30s but this was still a preventable wound to that community. These people had a point (the title of this post), weren’t heretics, and were pushed out of the church for no good reason. So seeing one of their big, beautiful old churches, in Saint Clair and Perth Amboy for example, is painful to me; I could tell they were originally Catholic before anyone told me.
• More history.

Bonnie

This ’58 Pontiac Bonneville’s a South Jersey car-show regular, here at Washington Township High School, Sewell. Hey, sexy. Let’s cruise.

Eastern Christianity: what is and is not boutique religion

Church was part of po-nashomu.

Ladies: Don’t be sassy. Be this instead.

Saucy. More sexy common sense from Sunshine Mary.

A sassy woman says, “You can’t make me.” And shakes her finger at him. A saucy woman says, “I want you to make me if you can.” And shakes her hips at him.

The culture war on a magazine cover

The wholly mainstream Rolling Stone:

• The left elite (Tutsi whites, the Cathedral) hates the old mainstream America (Hutu whites), even to the point of violence.
• Contradicting the Cathedral’s doctrine and conforming to the objective reality of nature, though fallen, chicks really dig jerks.

Detroit

Surprising no one, it’s bankrupt. In 50 years it went from making these to being this. Karen De Coster sees opportunity.

‘America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time’

Got to give Jimmy Carter credit. He’s no theologian — like North Vietnam apologist Jim Wallis, a venerable bishop of the Cathedral’s dominant Christian heresy, quitting the Southern Baptists (remember when he courted the evangelical vote in ’76 because he was one of them, getting laughed at for confessing lust in his heart?) and telling the church to ordain women, and likely one of the Cathedral’s canonized saints once he passes on — but is in part a gentleman from the old America (Annapolis ’46), renowned for his charitable work, with the honor to confront the current régime on wrongdoing. Seemed like the Pope Celestine V of presidents; good men don’t necessarily make competent rulers. Maybe like Nixon going to China, Carter, because of his credentials, can get away with this.

Here’s Justin Raimondo on Carter’s latest.

Is one American Orthodox church possible?

Since the Russians were here first, the OCA’s the canonical Orthodox church. (The old Russian metropolia from before the revolution.) Most parishes would be Greek, since most American Orthodox are Greek, but under the OCA with everybody else. Probably unworkable at least because of different languages, reinforced by immigration, but it makes sense on paper. Would uniting American Orthodox in one jurisdiction, strictly following Orthodoxy's rule on that, be possible or desirable, and if it’s possible, what would it look like? Is American Orthodoxy American enough now to pull that off? Will it be? If you can integrate the Greek majority into the smaller Slavic church, you’d have an American Orthodox church with normal dioceses. The current situation’s not a schism so it’s not a big deal in Orthodoxy.

Whatever happens with that, they lose newer generations as they Americanize, so they’ll keep shrinking; the question is how much.

Related: Eastern Christianity in greater Philadelphia. It started in the late 1800s with the Ruthenians at Holy Ghost then on Passyunk Avenue.

ROCOR Western Rite update, and competing sacramentologies

From Ad Orientem. Apparently the story now is they’re not shutting it down but doing some needed discipline after a lapse (again, Nathan Monk being the best-known example/last straw).

What strikes me and Modestinus is the possibly sloppy sacramentology from these Orthodox. What do they mean by not recognizing some ordinations? According to our teachings, unless Bishop Jerome was mentally ill, and there’s no sign he is, the priests he ordained in a group, the Western Catholic way, are real priests. Suspending them in order to examine and really train them before service, which apparently the bishop didn’t do, is good. Denying their priesthood wouldn’t make sense. But they have a history of not making sense.

There is a logic to what Modestinus describes as their hardliners’ thoroughly modern theology and practice of not recognizing any Catholic sacraments; arguably it goes back to St Cyprian’s opinions (church fathers’ opinions aren’t necessarily doctrine) vs. St Augustine’s, our standard, which enables us, ironically, to include the Orthodox. (We have vagantes, wacko ‘independent Catholics’, thanks to our Augustinian view of valid apostolic succession; they have non-canonical Orthodox like the Kiev Patriarchate. Call it even.)

As I’ve said, ROCOR wasn’t fanatical to begin with; it was naturally traditionalist 19th-century Russian. (I’ve met a 100+ year-old real tsarist Russian.) The Russian Orthodox Church for several centuries has mirrored our recognition of all their sacraments. (Why they didn’t allow ex-Catholic priests who married and converted to serve as priests.)

What changed much of ROCOR were the fanatical Greeks they took in during the ’60s. Just like the start of Catholic traditionalism, a modern reaction to modern phenomena, which R. Scott Appleby says all fundamentalisms are. These Greeks rejected adopting the Gregorian calendar and dialogue with Catholics; they’ve since left ROCOR. Under their influence, some of these Russians broke with the old Russian Orthodox Church and started rebaptizing and reordaining their few ex-Catholics.

(Like when Bishop Williamson recently broke with the ’50s church by recommending Maria Valtorta’s The Poem of the Man-God, which the Holy Office condemned in the ’50s; now he only speaks for himself, not the pre-conciliar church. I won’t condemn him for his view on the Holocaust; I’m not signed on but it makes me think. Questioning the magic number six million doesn’t make you a Nazi.)

So while there’s an underlying consistency (Orthodoxy has sacraments; non-Orthodox ones are an unknown, with a range of opinion), still, their sometimes recognizing us, sometimes not makes me agree with Modestinus; they’re making it up as they go along; their ordinary magisterium is the whim of the bishop.

ROCOR’s Fr John Whiteford:

The argument in favor of doing a mass ordination in the Western Rite is that this was the practice in the pre-schism West. The problem with this argument is the assumption that anything that was done in the pre-schism West is therefore acceptable.

Knee-jerk anti-Westernism as John at Ad Orientem says. Catholicism and I, on the other hand, appreciate and love the Byzantine Rite’s symbolism (one Lord, one church, so only one Liturgy on one altar per day, and only one ordination at a time) but of course we don’t think these differences in rite are de fide. (Diane Kamer says a shrinking, defensive church majors in the minors. Thus anti-Westernism.)

More important, like Bishop Williamson breaking with Pius XII’s Vatican, Fr John is condemning the pre-schism church he claims Orthodoxy is the true continuation of. If he’s right... Orthodoxy is not the pre-schism church but a sect in schism that judges the church. I’d be kinder as is the church and maintain they are an estranged part of us, the pre-schism church, as (we and they agree) there is only one church.

Let’s party like it’s 1905, Modestinus on Orthodox sacramentology, and Sunshine Mary on SWPL sluts

• From LRC: Why can’t we party like it’s 1905?
• From Modestinus: Orthodox sacramentology is less defined than Catholicism’s. Historically they mirror our recognition of their sacraments but they don’t have to.
• From Sunshine Mary: She can play the game but it’s rigged so she’ll lose in the long run. Alleged hookup culture among rich college kids.
• From Roissy: Orwell updated. Male is female. Observation is illusion. Diversity is strength. ‘If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.’

Finally saw ‘Red Tails’

I’ll always regret not seeing it on the big screen, a must for aerial combat scenes. Pretty much what I expected, only the characters were entirely fictitious (Cuba Gooding Jr.’s character is obviously based on Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., a West Pointer and general’s son later the independent Air Force’s first black brigadier general, but isn’t him). Partly a straight-ahead, good old-fashioned war movie right out of the golden era, enhanced with lots of CGI Flying Fortresses, Mustangs, Warhawks, and Messerschmitt 109s and jet 262s. Partly a noble aspect of the old America at its best, ‘The House I Live In’, starting to be fair to blacks, a chance to try, not quota promotions. (Golden-era liberal ≠ counterculture; the hippies did jack for civil rights.) And part politically correct hagiography, understandable from the Christian heresy that is modern Western culture (I think only apostate Christians could have come up with PCness; it’s our values twisted because they’ve been separated from Christ), complete with stock villains as hackneyed as any old war movie’s (nasty Southern whites and nasty Germans). At least they were nice to Italians, surprising from an anti-Catholic culture. (For about five minutes in the Sixties, all non-WASP whites were cool, part of the war on the old America, even though Catholics were part of it; then the mainstream hated us again after Roe v. Wade.)

The detractors (Takimag) have pointed out an untruth in the Narrative’s version of the history. A story in the black press in ’45 claimed the Tuskegee Airmen never lost a bomber they were protecting, which went unchallenged for decades; turns out they lost 25. Still a fine record. They also point out there were no aces; the movie seems to explain this by having the squadron stick to protecting the B-17s rather than ‘going for glory’, which the Luftwaffe had learned to take advantage of.

So like with any war movie, take it with two grains of salt, but the story’s gist is true. Heroes.

Now I want to see Go for Broke! Three cheers for what Steve Sailer calls diversity before ‘diversity’.

Catholic (universal) vs. Orthodox (authentic)

Of course it’s a false opposition.

I am still somewhat on the border between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and I think the dilemma for me lies in the meaning of the two names. I like the Catholic Church because of its influence of European history, cohesiveness, organization, size, and lack of ethnic divisions. I think this all can relate back to the universality of the Catholic Church in history as well as modern society. However, I disagree with them on several points of theology, i.e. Immaculate Conception, purgatory, papal infallibility. The Orthodox Church does not have these theological problems, and they have stayed more authentic by said pure theology (hence Orthodox). However, they have been more obscure since the Schism, they are divided on ethnic boundaries, and especially the non-ethnic Orthodox denominations (i.e. OCA) are not at all well organized episcopally. My main dilemma comes down to whether I want a church that is more influential, universal, and organized or more pure, true, and limited. Any thoughts?

I enter the discussion here.

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

• Mass: Suscepimus, Deus, misericordiam tuam in medio templi tui.
• Sermon from Fr Matthew Kirby. Interesting gospel, hard to understand, so in the old American Prayer Book it was changed to the parable of the Prodigal Son.
• Vive le roi. Bastille Day should be a day of mourning.
• The Oxford Movement. 180 years ago today, an Anglican sermon reacting against an effect of Catholic emancipation in Britain and Ireland was preached, starting a movement that ... ended up imitating the Catholic Church. Thanks to the denomination’s semi-congregationalism, the movement taught me pre-conciliar Catholic practice, in a charming form, when the church wanted nothing to do with it anymore, before Pope Benedict. From all Anglo-Catholic alumni — Tridentine people like me, the ordinariate people, and other Catholic converts — thank you.

Media, Pa. car show

And the Pennsylvania Veterans’ Museum. Album here.

George Zimmerman: justice is served

Acquitted: hooray!
Steve Sailer:

Will the jury’s repudiation of the national media’s Narrative cause any second thoughts about the press's prejudices that caused so many to get this story so wrong for so long? It would be nice to hope that this long, sad story at least causes a few people to notice the biases of the conventional wisdom.

I doubt it, though.

ROCOR stops its Western Rite

They just announced it.

Of course I don’t have a dog in that fight. My guess is the immediate reason was Bishop Jerome hastily grew his Western Rite Vicariate by receiving and ordaining lots of people without instructing them, including vagantes. More specifically the denomination is reacting, in fine stern Russian fashion keeping their good church order, to the scandal of 28-year-old ex-Fr Nathan Monk quitting after eight months.

The deeper issue, I and other observers think, is as I’ve said for some time, ROCOR’s approach to Western Rite was so halfhearted/conflicted, anti-Western (how they interpret their true-church claim: anything but the living tradition of Tridentine Rome, including an Anglican ‘Frankenrite’), byzantinized, why did they even bother? (Because they claim to be the true church but obviously don’t have the resources to compete with Rome.) So it’s just as well they stopped.

Sure, I have a little Schadenfreude over another small counterfeit Catholic church biting the dust. ROCOR tried to hurt the church so they got what they deserved. That said, I don’t per se hate ROCOR, etc., like they hate Catholicism; the church doesn’t, which is a reason I’m Catholic. In our doctrine, they are an estranged part of us; Protestants aren’t. The Orthodox are still traditional, non-Novus Ordo; a folk Catholicism that should re-teach the church. Очень хорошо. (Excellent.)

A summary for newbies: 19th-century Russian culture including its Orthodoxy is westernized: the styles of the choral music and the icons, and the scholasticism, things that modern Western society and hip Orthodox hate as part of their hating Catholicism. This Russian Orthodoxy was a would-be Rome bitterly opposing Rome, part of their nationalism. Russian bishops who escaped the Communist revolution founded the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia for Russians like them abroad, while they weren’t sure if the Orthodox church would survive in Russia. They were and are about preserving their church as I describe; not particularly anti-Catholic, just being Russian. In America it’s WWII refugees and their descendants, good people who became part of the old America. Then the Sixties radicalized some of them like it created Catholic traditionalism: they took in fanatical Greeks mad at adopting the Gregorian calendar and at dialogue with Catholics, which changed ROCOR’s character. (Actually, the nice Russians and the fanatics sometimes acted independently of each other.) So it became so conservative (and anti-Catholic) it was almost out of communion with Orthodoxy. Then Communism fell, so it eventually got back under the Russian church, and some of the fanatics left. They’re tiny and have the same problem other Orthodox have with newer generations leaving as they Americanize; post-Soviet Russian immigration’s helped keep them afloat. And they got a tiny boost from the (anti-Catholic) convert boomlet/fad from about 20 years ago.

(Most American Russian Orthodox are neither Russian nor belong to this denomination. They’re related to the Russians: Slavs from Ruthenia who left Greek Catholicism 100 years ago because American Catholic bishops treated them badly. They’re the Russian dioceses in America from before the revolution: the OCA. Small but not as small as ROCOR. Very Americanized, having been American for a century, so it’s a related but different culture from the real Russians in ROCOR. They now use the Gregorian calendar: Christmas on Dec. 25 like other Americans; Russians celebrate on Jan. 7.)

Anyway, the Russian church’s true-church claim and related Russian claim to universality rivalling Catholicism’s led them in the 1800s to approve an edited Tridentine Mass for the few ex-Roman Catholics who joined them. The Russian Orthodox denominations have been experimenting with Western rites for converts since.

Then around the ’50s the Antiochian Orthodox in North America (obscure denomination here: Arab Orthodox including Paul Anka and Jamie Farr) picked that up, in the same spirit of modifying the living traditions of Tridentine Catholicism and its near-clone, ’50s Anglo-Catholicism, for the few converts who wanted that. Not Catholic but not anti-Catholic like ROCOR; quite the opposite.

I feel bad for groups like Holy Cross who just joined. I wouldn’t be shocked if they go back to independent Anglicanism. Of course I hope they ask to join the church, but at least, as other observers have suggested, they could ask ROCOR to be released to the Antiochian Western Rite Vicariate. That way everybody can save face.

• Modestinus.
• Fr Chadwick.
• Byzantine, TX.
• Ad Orientem.

Traditionalisms

A taxonomy and brief history by Fr Christopher Smith, one of ours in the official church. He says we come in two versions, French and Roman. Interesting take on kinds of Thomism, which I admit I don’t know much about. From Modestinus, whose two cents are worth reading. Traditionalist Catholicism, being a reaction to liberal Catholicism, is itself a thoroughly modern enterprise. Sure we are. For example, because of the council fragmenting Catholics like Anglicans into incompatible and sometimes heretical churchmanships, the parish system’s broken; I jump several parishes to register in West Philly 20 minutes away. Let alone the SSPX and, due to circumstances, independent priests like the late Fr Gommar DePauw. R. Scott Appleby said the same in his mainlinish take on fundamentalism. There are natural trads and then there are those radicalized because they’re a reaction.

The real church, the pre-conciliar church, wasn’t monolithic, from medieval local versions of the Roman Rite (Sarum for example) to the different national characters (Irish vs. Italian for example, or why an American town has several Catholic parishes) to the personalities of different religious orders (Franciscan vs. Jesuit) and, part of that, even different schools of theological opinion (ultramontanism is only one of those).

There’s non-trad conservative E. Michael Jones’s observation about 20 years ago, which I’ve repeated, that there’s a difference between the European paleoconservative priests (monarchists and fascists, not a dirty word, just a description) who run the SSPX and the American patriots who are the first generation of American trads, people who remember and miss the church at its height in America, in the ’50s (a high for the rest of the country too), thriving in the American experiment of religious and economic liberty, Americanized but not sold out, yet. The sons and daughters of the immigrants. The America that had just fought the war together, the America of the Four Chaplains, ‘The House I Live In’, and the Rotary. By that point we all more or less got along. The America where Fulton Sheen was welcome to preach on early TVs. The true church, but fitting into the denominationalism with all those nice Protestants.

There are the very devotional, just like then but radicalized, Veronica Leuken’s and Fr Gruner’s audiences. Our analogue to the signs-and-wonders charismatics, now diminished, who seem to be the other Catholics in the official church who still go to Mass; Mother Angelica’s original base and big John Paul II fans (other conservative Catholics who hated our guts 30 years ago; the liberals just didn’t take us seriously).

Then there are the Mass-and-office, where I seem to have ended up, pre-conciliar’s version of high and dry churchmanship. I guess my American version’s like Fr Smith’s Roman School, and like Novus Ordo conservatives, fine with the council on paper, only insisting that the old Mass is better. (As Fr Smith points out, not as controversial as it was 10 years ago, thanks to Benedict the Great. When he reformed English Novus, we won.)

Sure, circumstances have radicalized almost all of us, but I dare say somebody 50 years ago would have understood me fine: Thomism’s great, but so’s American religious freedom, and why not do (part of) the Mass in English?

Ordinariate news, and truths about the sexes

• From Damian Thompson: Pope Francis steps up the ordinariates. Didn’t see that coming either. He’s expanding their reach by allowing born Catholics not yet confirmed to officially join. Part of Pope Benedict’s plan to restore the rest of the church, more than an ecumenical rescue, which would be small. Then you get Catholics like me and the best from St Clement’s who for whatever reason are not in the ordinariates: happy being Tridentine, or in others’ cases Benedict Novus, not married ex-Anglican priests looking to be Catholic priests, and while appreciating the old Prayer Book in our old liturgical mixes (our unofficial missals), not needing it every Sunday. On rare Novus Sundays (early Low Mass: just get it over with) I say the old Prayer Book creed from memory. Close enough and Catholics aren’t attached to English texts because they have no tradition of using them. Still want to take a road trip to Mount Calvary, Baltimore to see the ordinariates as they should be.
• In other news I read that St Barnabas ex-Episcopal Church, ex-Continuers, Omaha, came into the church literally yesterday. The picture is of one of their High Masses.
• From Sunshine Mary: Vox Day’s schema for male social roles. Slightly different Greek-letter names for the ranks from Roissy’s. One of his points, seemingly missing here, is while a woman’s looks are very important to us (everything else is commentary), men’s power and status mean more to women. (Unlike TV much of the time, a dumbed-down medium by nature visual, the handsome aren’t necessarily sexual alphas.)
• Reality and the sexes: a TV commercial. Stock sitcom characters, because stereotypes are often true. (The Cathedral to conservatives: stop Noticing Things™!) Conscious or not acknowledgement of Roissyan truths or sending them up?
• Two hobbies I learned about from doing research for my job. One’s a sport; each very specific to a sex. Elaborate forms of play. Both very easy to make fun of. (Arguably symptoms of problems in real-world society; the sexes are going for substitutes for real things.) I’m not. They’re fascinating; I’ll say that, like with other sports and hobbies, they’re both great, emotional helps not hindrances, up to a point.
  • Airsoft. Would-be military ground combat, cooler than paintball. Marksmanship, outdoor exercise, and camaraderie, if you can’t go hunting? Great! (Down side: war porn. Bet real combat vets don’t do it. Two uncles were in the Pacific; they wouldn’t have.) I’d try it.
  • Reborning. Doll collecting taken up a notch.
• From Takimag: there’s a pill for that. How the powers that be want to drug you, literally, and historically have.
• From Joshua: ‘Mad Men’: the paterfamilias makes a comeback.
• Nobody asked me, but... George Zimmerman deserves to walk.

The theoretical floor of my churchmanship, and WRO

From Bill Tighe: Holy Cross Anglican Church, ACNA, Omaha, is now Holy Cross Orthodox Church, Western Rite Vicariate, ROCOR.

Please, no more of the Celtic and/or Anglo-Saxon Orthodox myth (the evil papist Normans invaded England to punish the Orthodox Britons and Anglo-Saxons). I understand that’s a 19th-century fairy tale.

I like Holy Cross’s worship slide show. Not byzantinized (yet?). Not as Roman Catholic as I’m used to; only a little higher than the Episcopalianism I started with (which wasn't high; it had ‘Solemn High Morning Prayer’). Looks like the theoretical floor of my churchmanship. All the essentials, eastward-facing Mass, and beautiful English. Pope Benedict’s Novus Ordo is a serviceable floor for me on holy days of obligation and flea-market Sundays; make it eastward in most places and now we’re talking. But the old Mass is still better.

Western Rite Orthodoxy has two groups and several churchmanships. The Antiochian Western Rite Vicariate isn’t anti-Catholic; it’s either old-school Old Catholic (St Augustine’s, Denver) or ’50s high Episcopal. Slightly byzantinized. ROCOR’s interprets Orthodoxy’s true-church claim as ‘anything but the living, ’50s tradition of Rome’ (’50s is still in living memory): anti-Catholic. (ROCOR is about preserving unhip 19th-century Russian culture, westernized with its choral music, westernized icons, and scholasticism, a competitor to Rome, a would-be Rome.) So they have either fanciful, heavily byzantinized services that supposedly are pre-schism Western rites (their Roman Rite including Sarum, and their Gallican Rite), or cobbled-together ones based on old Anglican ones (such as here).

The Byzantine Rite of course is wonderful, including the 19th-century westernized Russian version; the problems with Orthodoxy are the related ones of schism and anti-Westernism.

It’s a nice surprise to see such a conversion from ACNA; I wasn’t expecting that. Until 10 years ago they were committed Episcopalians. ACNA is a slightly less liberal Protestant denomination.

American Catholics: ‘survey says’

• From Rod Dreher:
  • Catholics embrace gay rights. Mainstream society/the Cathedral tries to force the church to play in their frame, assuming a denomination that changes doctrine by vote is normal. Thus ‘survey says’. They’re infallible of course: ‘we hold these truths about equality to be self-evident’. (It’s a Christian heresy trying to stand up for the oppressed.) Even before they were politically correct, they’ve long wanted to separate American Catholics from Rome and assimilate them (why mainliners do Hispanic outreach). Not affecting the church in itself, sadly that’s largely happened. Vatican II and the rest of the Sixties did it. Most American Catholics are now with the program. American Catholic culture (as opposed to American culture) and the rest of Nixon’s/Pat Buchanan’s old New Majority no longer exists or at least is no longer (part of) a majority. In 1973 the council hadn’t deeply impacted most American Catholics yet and the mainline was still relatively conservative. The Archie Bunkers and the evangelicals had a shot at undoing the Sixties, and Nixon’s handlers presented him as the answer. Today, evangelicals and real Catholics are a hunted minority and have their own problems (being default mainstream Republicans, pro-war and not really conservative: it’s really the Rockefeller Republicans). I like to say that in 50 years the church will be much smaller and much more conservative, at least quasi-trad. The liberal denominations and liberal Catholics will die out, replaced by the out-and-out secular.
  • Fr Neuhaus’ near-death experience: meeting angels.
• From Sunshine Mary: the year’s highlights. Her intended audience are well-meaning Christian white-knight men putting all-too-human girls on a pedestal, and sister conservative Protestants likewise taken in by feminism. This comment’s good: The current churchian society is really nice if you are a girl and like emoting. It is sheer hell for men, unless they are highly verbal. And most of the apostles were not highly verbal geeks (Paul is the exception, and he was a hard, right on fanatic before conversion). And he’s talking about American evangelicalism, not the mainline. Hyperdox Hermans tend to be wordy and high-strung too. They fished for a living. Jesus was a carpenter. Not an effete gay friend among them.
• From Takimag: spaying the Queen’s English.
• From the redesigned LRC: caveat emptor: doctors.

Still talking up that stupid council: two more saints not to be devoted to

The latest news in the church, besides Pope Benedict’s last/Pope Francis’ first encyclical, which I’ll take on faith as fine (the nature of the papal office means nothing can seriously go wrong with these), is, unsurprisingly, two more symbolic tributes to the council with which the church blighted itself last century (in America knocking it from its height under Cardinal Spellman to today’s malaise and shrinking institution): both John XXIII and John Paul II are to be canonized.

To which I react much as to the council itself. Strictly speaking, fine; practically, no, thanks.

Blessed John XXIII was a fine fellow, not at all what the liberals now make of him. Besides being warm and kind, he was a naturally traditionalist Italian. He kept the old Mass. He wanted to step up the use of Latin in seminaries. He told religious orders not to ordain homosexuals. Legend has it he was vociferously anti-women’s ordination too. A man of the ’50s. Hardly a Cathedral saint. His council wasn’t bad in theory: American freedom of religion is great (it made America a great home for Catholics, with prosperity unknown elsewhere), and why not do (part of) the Mass in the vernacular? (It’s Not About Latin™: I only happen to worship in it because that’s the only option right now for our Mass.) But the real John has been buried, thrown down the memory hole in favor of the myth of the Sixties.

I’ve long said my piece about Blessed, soon to be St John Paul the Overrated too. His reign was no picnic for us trads. Our worst enemies weren’t the dominant liberals, who didn’t take us seriously, but other conservative Catholics, the ones who went along with the changes in the name of loyalty to the Pope.

I give him credit for three things: the right people hated him, partial for the fall of Communism, and the conservative counter-revolution Benedict enacted got started under him, as far back as the 1990s (when Mother Angelica started wearing the full habit again and broadcast eastward-facing Masses).

The right people hated him. That shaven-headed Irish has-been Sinéad O’Connor ripping up his picture on ‘Saturday Night Live’: ‘Fight the real enemy!’ The Cathedral’s war on us. Spiritual war. But I attribute that to hostility to the nature of the papacy, being Catholic, in which the Pope can’t change what they want changed, not to the man, who for all his Polish conservatism was always an appeaser, from his being a bishop in Communist Poland (Cardinal Wyszyński fought) to Assisi to altar girls to making Roger Mahony an archbishop and cardinal to throwing the saintly Archbishop Lefebvre under the bus (I know what happened but he was reacting to something real).

Anyway, when you’re Catholic, you don’t have to be personally devoted to every saint.

There are people I admire whom I can’t imagine canonized: for example, Pius XII and Cardinal Spellman (religious, not spiritual; such help the church too).

The longer the church puts off admitting it goofed with the council and putting it on history’s dusty shelf (one more time: it didn’t define any doctrine), the longer its recent problems will last. Trying to appease the Cathedral doesn’t work.

Vatican II, which John XXIII opened a year before his 1963 death, opened the church to people of other faiths.

What does this mean? Journalists aren’t theologians and shouldn’t be allowed to publish without doing research. Sounds like mainstream culture’s party line then and now, of indifferentism (Masonic): the church has finally come on board! But it didn’t. It can’t. It said, correctly, that other churches, denominations, and religions have varying shares of the truth and that freedom of religion is good. There. Was that so hard to write? But it doesn’t fit the Cathedral line, the Narrative, so the WaPo doesn’t publish things like that.

Make Bishop Fellay a voting cardinal eligible to be Pope.

Keep the faith, kids.

Also: more on Western Rite Orthodoxy.

Me aboard the USS New Jersey: peace through superior firepower

A museum on the Camden waterfront for about 12 years. A lookalike of the USS Missouri, of the Iowa class, the second biggest battleships ever, second only to the Japanese Yamato class. The airplane and aircraft carrier made ship-to-ship gun battles obsolete (our carrier planes sank the Yamato and Musashi) so these ships never served their original purpose.

The Big J was Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet flagship in the Battle of Leyte Gulf (MacArthur returning to the Philippines) and the typhoon of ’44.

Interestingly our Navy hasn’t fought another navy since THE war.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy

• The scope of the Pope. The only real difference between Rome and all the East; otherwise all are the same religion.
• WRO. The Antiochians seem nice: some byzantinization but mostly sincere old-school Old Catholic (St Augustine’s, Denver) or ’50s high Episcopal. Not Catholic but not anti-Catholic; quite the opposite. The ROCOR one’s so byzantinized I don’t know why they bother.
• Archimandrite Serge (Keleher)’s support of the traditional Latin Mass. Eternal memory for a fine churchman. More.

The Fourth

Lansdowne and Clifton Heights, Pa.

A tale of Christian heresies: from Protestantism to the ‘Enlightenment’ (America’s founding) to ‘No Place for Hate’. Lansdowne is a little over 100 years old. I’ve been told that in the golden era it was like the Main Line to the north, WASP ‘reactionary’ Republican, for Alf Landon, Thomas Dewey, and Barry Goldwater. Great. Now of course in that class they’ve been replaced by political correctness, what in the ’80s were called yuppies. Banning hate? (Thoughtcrime!) That’s nice. Ask a 100-year-old how Prohibition worked out.

Delaware County used to have an Irish Catholic Republican tradition too.

Who’s a good boy? There are pets and there’s protection.

Meanwhile Storefront Cat just wants to sleep.

’59 Galaxie: Torello’s cop car.

• Mark in Spokane writes: So, when are you going to dump the libertarian angle and just be a conservative? Still a minarchist/right-libertarian/weak libertarian, somewhere between the Burkeans/Kirkians and the hardcore libertarians (who join the lefties in sneering at this holiday: the left loves abstractions such as humanity and diversity but hates family loyalty and patriotism; I guess the Randians love only themselves as individuals). Pretty much said my piece here. I hate most of what the government does, and have a critical revisionist view of its past (we shouldn’t have helped the Soviets win WWII) but God bless America. ‘Conservative’ is a perfectly good moniker but I’m no European reactionary.
• This year’s thought for the Fourth: questioning the ‘Enlightenment’ contract theory of the government. Government only with the consent of the governed? Well-meant but, with fallen human nature to consider, how’s that different from mob rule? What about objective truth all must answer to? Who enforces that? Who watches the watchers? The natural order is hierarchical, which is why the church is. (Past related topics: questioning the American Revolution, or would British America have ended up Burkean or just like the mother country and Canada now? And most of our wars weren’t just. Also, the church and America.)
• Writers Guild: ‘Mad Men’ one of the best TV shows ever. That’s nice. I haven’t consciously followed pop culture since 1998 so I haven’t seen many of the others, not even ‘The Sopranos’ (since it’s not a period piece). What makes the show great is it’s NOT a putdown of the past nor saccharinely nostalgic. Politically incorrect porn for women, which is part of a bigger longing in the culture. As for the few others I know about in their top 10, liberal wanks (‘The West Wing’, ‘M*A*S*H’, ‘All in the Family’). ‘M*A*S*H’: yeah, war’s bad, but this was ‘popular kid does whatever he wants’ and ‘let’s pick on people not exactly like us’; way to stick it to Middle America. Interestingly the real Hawkeye who wrote the book wasn’t a ‘sensitive’ lefty (he was a man from the golden era) and didn’t like the show. ‘All in the Family’ preached but it sort of backfired as Middle America took the main foil character to heart; the heroes come off as dated and naïve now.
• The media gatekeepers. Even with the Web, almost all media comes from the same six sources. That’s consolidated from 50 companies back in 1983.
• Forecast for Anglicanism. Black African conservative Protestant.

Freedom is dying

Pat Buchanan:

The greater antagonist of liberty is not the quest for security, but our insatiable demand and inexorable drive for equality — not equality of rights but equality of results.

Pull the US military, state and intelligence organizations from Europe entirely

The Anti-Gnostic quotes Curt Doolittle: the flip side of Roissy’s ‘Back to Europe’ movement.

I think the answer to this problem for both sides is to pull the US military, state and intelligence organizations from Europe entirely so that European defense, international relations, and the stabilization of commodity prices is left to the management of Europeans. It’s not really necessary for Americans to stabilize the price of oil, or any other commodity, now that we’re close to being energy independent. And our dollar will remain the currency of last resort even more durably if we drop our international intrigues.

That would stop the American cultural necessity for jingoism in order to preserve the cultural will to pay for the necessity that we police the world for largely European convenience. And it would allow us to save three quarters of our military expenditures, and focus our efforts on domestic reality rather than ideological propagation as a means of further discounting the cost of our policing. [It would] be nice to have a domestic government rather than an internationally focused one actually.

Conversely, it would force holier-than-thou Europeans to do all the nonsense that Americans now do and also to pay for it. Which would require the re-nationalization of European propagandism in order to motivate the already heavily taxed population to pay for.

I’m sorry that you don’t like being a client state of Rome dear Athens-after-the-overreach, but without us you’ll be a client state of either German political and economic power and cultural discipline, or Russian resources and military power.

It probably doesn’t occur to silly people on the other side of the pond that it’s because Britain was so bad at containing its self interest, rent seeking, politics and policies that Americans ended up with the entire Empire in our lap, and had to militarize our entire country quite against our naturally isolationist inclination and will.

We look like you 100 years ago. Maybe even better than you did.

As someone who has to deal with UK bureaucracy, laziness and pervasive incompetence on a regular basis I have to say that the sentiment is reciprocated. A nation of fat, ugly, crooked-toothed, self-aggrandizing, talkative alcoholics, dressed in Gap-wear, pontificating morality because they have the convenience of not being responsible for their actions — having outsourced the dirty work across the pond.

It is profoundly naive to think that nations have the degree of nationalism that they want to rather than the level of nationalism that they need to. People are too practical to waste their energy.

Glass houses and all.

RIP the old America

• Pat Buchanan: why the Reagan Democrats departed. Protectionism is against libertarian doctrine but I hear you. A rising tide is supposed to raise all boats, and there is a good kind of internationalism and universal brotherhood (part of Catholicism) that free trade fosters (promoting peace too), but ‘do your own thing’ = every man for himself, and the establishment right is just like the international left in its contempt for white familial and local loyalties (the Tutsis vs. the Hutus again).
• Roissy: back to Europe? This is the stuff of wild fantasy, but if the bottom falls out from under America it’s not at all inconceivable that millions of internally dispossessed Americans will cast an eye to a long-lost brother across the sea, in hopes of beginning anew what was so recklessly and stupidly squandered here.
• Sunshine Mary: mankind is tribal by nature. Tribal like Ukrainian Catholic and Greek Orthodox parishes in America. Please, no fake ‘men’s movement’ run by therapists. I think she’d agree the problem with that is it buys into the same errors as feminism: identity politics and victimology. Something natural like the Sportsmen’s Club bars in the basements of the Uke or Russian Orthodox churches in upstate PA where the WWII and Korea vets used to hang out.
• Traditional Christianity, the ‘Enlightenment’, the old America, and the SSPX. Besides the basics of the faith and the old Mass, the SSPX and I have little in common, a reason why I can live in the official church as reformed by Pope Benedict.