Cafeteria Catholicism of the right?

• Fr. Longenecker on conservative criticism of Pope Francis. I'm no Novus Ordo neocon ('80s: "Problem? What problem? Give up your artsy old-fashioned stuff and become a charismatic; be open to the Spirit!"), which Fr. L reminds me of, but a lot of online traddie rhetoric on this is over the top and tiresome. I understand the teachings of the church so I don't need to go in for "Mr. Bergoglio," etc. Funny how the left has flipflopped, from "Nazi Ratzi" to putting Francis on the cover of Rolling Stone (for the wrong reasons: wishful thinking). Actually they're consistent: they think the Pope is the church because they don't believe in the church; they think he can make the changes they want. That's right: they're super-ultramontanists but real Catholics, traditional Catholics, aren't. I'm not about to give up on American liberty and the market, which to the left and some trads makes me part of the problem, but with trads and the church I'll agree that liberty is a means, not an end. "Do your own thing" = "every man for himself" = "just die already," not the gospel.
• Dreher: All I can say in response is: Yeah, right, Rod. Nothing says "One True Church" like "weird," "obscure," "exotic," "hothouse," and "minuscule." Especially "minuscule." I'm not on a jihad against the man, such as writing a whole blog to attack him, except for what someone has pointed out to me, that his defeatism in the public square might be a false-flag fake conservatism; dangerous. He's conceited; so what? I appreciate the "crunchy" point and how Byzantium can fit that, but in his case, schism is part of his real religion, which is himself. 'Cuz if it's not "weird," "obscure," "exotic," "hothouse," and "minuscule," it just isn't cool.
• "Let's not be uncritical about what our Anglican friends are up to, how they betrayed their own word where the Catholic Church is concerned, and how they have blithely gone ahead constructing a further and very formidable obstacle to unity." That's just it. I'm not angry at the Anglicans anymore, but I remember. They jerked Anglo-Catholics and the Catholics around, acting like they wanted to come back to the church, even Novus Ordo-fying their classic English services to sound more like the church (but that was probably more to try to create a new liberal church out of both, as I now realize), then reneging with women's ordination and now gay marriage.
• News-cycle non-story that backhandedly proves Roissy right again: Sexual harassment at Comic Con? Please. My guess: lazy girls who want Daddy/the authorities to fight their battles for them (feminism: helpless damsels when it suits them; childish) rather than learn and use social skills to handle unwanted betas hitting on them. (Like most girls, they don't like betas, yet they're at Comic Con. Sometimes in sexy costumes.) Do I really think that they think some mildly autistic millennial boys dressed up as superheroes are going to rape them? Right, and Spider-Man's real.
• On my Bonito Motel artwork, classic cars in the movies, and pop-culture changes. A forum about Wildwood.

Burke, Eliot, and more

• From Fr. Michael Gollop: Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites... When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. - Edmund Burke
• From Free Canuckistan: The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide. - T.S. Eliot
• From antiwar.com: American hypocrisy about the Ukraine.
• Space-age flourishes at Heathrow.
• Dreher: Feta-cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Take traditional Catholicism, shave 20 IQ points so you identify only certain cultures and rites with the church, and in America declare yourself an open city in the culture wars, selling out on contraception and keeping quiet on abortion; surrender the public square, all while not actually declaring heretical doctrine. Shut up and do what the sultan, tsar, or Comrade First Secretary says. That seems his historical Orthodox game plan. False-flag conservative?
• St. Clement's, Philadelphia, no longer identifies with the Catholic Church. The link's from the parish's Facebook posts. Sad to me but I have no hard feelings against Canon Reid; he is an Episcopal priest.
• Convert demography and the Mormons.

Bleu et noir, development of doctrine, and pop-music trivia

• St. Vincent and development of doctrine. The East has never dogmatized anything un-Catholic. Take "always, everywhere, and by all" (the ancient churches' consensus) and the Chalcedonian Orthodox' seven councils and you more or less get Catholicism, amazingly.
• Orthodoxy's good points: grassroots traditionalism (the church is best when it's the Church Local), unreformed liturgy, and the church is fine as a loose communion run by custom; this Catholic adds, IF it is part of the Church Universal, which includes the West, which includes the Pope. Same essentials (Trinity, hypostatic union, Mother of God, apostolic bishops, images, Real Presence, irreformable doctrine); different rites (not idolizing one rite). My Tridentine Mass, like the Nestorian and Armenian rites, is the Divine Liturgy without the iconostasis (icons are great but optional).
• Anglicanism's, as such, not just Anglo-Catholicism: services in English, the office for everyman, and a musical tradition.
• Ten things to remember if you hate ecumenism. We hate indifferentism, not you-come-in-ism. Talks are to teach. Theology of return? You better believe it.
• Derb on the red-pill blues.
• Israelolatry. We owe them nothing. Before 3 p.m. Good Friday the head of the church on earth was Caiaphas; afterwards it was St. Peter. Besides, Zionism was secular.
• Ad-sales drop cuts NYT profits by 54%.
• I liked the Electric Light Orchestra. When it had the orchestra, strings; back then it knew how to rock too! At least how to do power-pop. It lost that when it lost the strings and chorus. Lots of songs with a Latin or Italian flavor; unusual for a band from Birmingham. Didn't know until recently that the name was nothing to do with electric lights; it was the Electric Light Orchestra. Similarly, which I knew, "Rockaria!" is "Rock Aria!" (Great music; bad '70s fashion.) Very European, very English; a nod to tradition in their way. (Like how the big bands would swing the classics.) Always wondered what the opera bit was saying and in which language. The Internet is such a great resource. Jeff Lynne has said it fits the song's storyline (opera singer hears rock and vice versa, and the rockers find that the opera can teach them a thing or two); it's saying, "Far far away the music is playing." I can be forgiven for assuming it was Italian; it's slightly messed-up German: From: Werner Bednarzik Jr. On record the opera voice is sung by real opera singer Mary Thomas. (RIP.) What she sings is a misspelled German phrase, namely: "Weit, weit in die Ferne, man hört, man hört die Musik." What correctly would be: "Weit, weit in der Ferne..." One article should be masculine, not feminine. Danke.
• Bleu et noir. Or the blue period as a blues period. Crude Photoshopping. The Bonito Motel is a real place; all three photos I used to make this are mine.

More on the sexes, and on the church

• Roissy reminds me why I never watch trash like "The Bachelorette." I guess he’s OK with this television-cum-real life whore f*cking another man at the same time he was courting her? He's right that the man shouldn't have handled the breakup that way (because, beta or not, psychologically it was a breakup) and about women's condescension to betas at least when women are being semi-civilized. (Don't listen to what women say. Watch what they do. Mainstream relationship advice is lies.) More to the point, he never should have signed up to be on that immoral show; maybe he didn't know he couldn't handle it. Yeah, "walk like a man, talk like a man," but people aren't made for those situations. Just think, in the not-too-distant sexual market of the past when contraceptive cop-outs were rare and beta males were tougher men than they are now, this princess would have had to think twice before happily stumbling onto a vacation c*ck carousel. Right, reality. Why you need and want civilization. It takes all kinds, and civilization actually favored betas. Average men and women loved and needed each other. Also, isn't the show just a speeded-up version of modern dating? Makes you see why some conservative Christians condemn that and are trying to revive courtship (it's about uniting families, the girl's father's approval, etc.).
• From Takimag:
  • Women against feminism. Maybe old news but worth a look.
  • Poor little rich girl. Lena Dunham and her parlor-pink parentage.
  • Who controls the language of discourse?
• "Reform the papacy; reunite the church." Sounds like stale ecumenical talk from 50 years ago. Long thread. So, would I leave the church if my least favorite Pope in 100 years is beatified? (Politically motivated canonization as a posthumous promotion for Popes is a big mistake.) Of course not. Just like with the last two canonized Popes, I have no devotion to the man, but some affection for John XXIII; I don't blame him for what happened, even though calling the council was a mistake. Paul VI wasn't a heretic and, pushed against the wall, held the line against contraception and took the hit for it. The church is indefectible. The Pope's office is Christendom's last man standing. Men who deserve canonization and veneration: Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitans Andrew (Sheptytsky), the patron of Catholics called to the East, and Volodymyr (Sterniuk), who surprised the world when Communism started to fall. Josyp Terelya was right: the Ukrainian Catholic Church still existed in the Ukraine; Volodymyr ran it in secret. By the way, we traditionalists are papal minimalists; "the Pope is the church" is a conservative Catholic misconception dating from after the council. Rather, a loose communion run by tradition that includes the West, which includes the Pope.

Two different takes on religion

• From Daniel Nichols: Ancient universe, old earth, young humanity, infant church? By the way, evolution is an issue I've never felt I had to get worked up about as a Catholic. Our doctrine works whether the earth is round or flat, whether our system is helio- or geocentric, or whether creation is young-earth or old-earth. Only God's eternal; he started it all, and at some point intervened, making man with a soul like him and not like other animals. And man sinned. In other words, the church is fine with theistic evolution; you can believe in a six-day creation but you don't have to.
• From Alternative Right: Finding God through your anus. No, it's not sacrilegious. It's about modern man's lame substitutes for God, from fad diets to colonic irrigation. Indeed, our society has killed God only to leave these people searching for him in their rectums.

Fisking "Fishwrap": on the 40th anniversary of Episcopal women priests

I think I can write fairly about this, since although I appreciate Episcopal semi-congregationalism enabling "high" parishes to resist the spirit of Vatican II, giving me some good instruction growing up (one of the first places where I fell in love with the church was a Tridentine Anglo-Catholic parish, now closed, when I was 17), that's not what the Episcopalians are about and I have no business being mad at them for not being what I wanted them to be. Fr. Z links to NCR's ("Fishwrap") paean. ("You get NCR?" "I don't have a puppy.") He's predictable conservative Catholic vitriol, basically shouting "Fake!" because of Apostolicae Curae; I believe with him and the church that they're not the church but I'm not an ingrate either. This is good, though:

But let’s admit it: lots of Catholics are confused about priesthood and ministry. It seems to me that these women - catholic priest-wannabes too – want to be ordained to the CLERGY, rather than to the PRIESTHOOD. They don’t really want to be ordained to the priesthood, properly understood, because – say it with me – priests are principally for … SACRIFICE. A priest who rejects sacrifice is like a potter who condemns clay, a butcher who nixes knives, a fireman who flees fires. Priesthood detached from sacrifice is an absurdity.

Church liberals are the biggest clericalists. As Fr. Rutler says, we are sacerdotalists. Put another way, how many of the few wannabe women priests love Catholic teaching on the Mass? I didn't think so.

Anyway, Fishwrap sounds exactly like naive Catholic liberals 40 years ago, when the Episcopalians had clout: liberalize like them in order to "arrive" in American society. And you thought I lived in the past! Um, you realize their membership has cratered and they're no longer influential in society, right?

NCR doesn't become Episcopalians, though they have no theological reason not to, because they hate high church, which the Episcopalians still have in common with me. No, they want to turn the church into a mainline denomination. Getting back to the mainline cratering: simply in human terms, how would turning mainline help the church? How would it turn around our sagging numbers? Looking at egalitarianism, like in the secular workplace, how would making half the clergy women make better clergy? Better Catholic priests? Same answer, I guess, as the secular politically correct: "Well... because, OK?"

Christianity necessarily requires continuity and respect for its own history, Heyward told NCR, but it "needs to always be empowering us to do what is just and compassionate and promotes human dignity and the well-being of creation. So one of the places of discontinuity that I believe we have to take seriously and work on today is the domination - the violent domination - of creation by human beings. ... This is right now in our face all the time. Another area of discontinuity is the ongoingness of patriarchal assumptions about God and the world." The idea that men were born to "run the world," she said, "needs to be challenged nonviolently but very firmly."

"Domination of creation by human beings" is civilization, which men built, and of which women are beneficiaries. As Bob Wallace says, take away men and Heyward and her sisters wouldn't last a week. Reminds me of those people who oppose hunting but buy meat from the market because "no animals were harmed."

Heyward praises much of the tone and approach Pope Francis has set. But when it comes to women's issues, she said, "he does not seem to be all that - I don't know what word to use but I'm going to use the word - aware that there really are significant problems in Christian tradition and especially in Catholic tradition when it comes to the role and place of women."

Confirms what I've read from other Catholics: he is not interested in the attempted ordination of women. Nor are most Catholics. During John Paul II's and Benedict XVI's reigns, the magisterium confirmed that it's impossible: we can't change the matter of the sacraments.

As Jefferts Schori looks toward the possibility of Catholic female priests, she has concluded, "I don't think it's going to happen in my lifetime. The Orthodox may get there before the Romans do."

Here Bishop Schori has brought up the only ecumenism that really matters to us: our own estranged people, the "Catholics" of the East. Traditional ones at that. By God's grace, the Orthodox have never dogmatized anything un-Catholic. (Soloviev's point.) But, because they're separated, this is possible, though very unlikely.

There are pro-women's ordination Orthodox but they're very much outliers living in liberal Western countries.

How this would go down: like they sound Pelagian about original sin and Lutheran about the Eucharist, they would bend so far to be anti-Roman that they would fall for this. The St. Vlad's liberals (their academic intelligentsia, like Fr. Bob Taft on our turf and not like most of their own people) would spin it as the true version of the church fathers, unlike those old-fashioned Orthodox who were corrupted by Western legalism ("the Western captivity of the church").

Ha ha. "The Romans." Meaning "we're Catholic too" as well as "you're foreign." Civis Romanus sum, I guess.

"Join me in spreading the Gospel."

The Mormons, the death peddlers, and questioning giving women the vote

The Nazis were progressives, and fallen human nature doesn't change.

• From Hilary:
  • Donny Osmond, with his whole family, represented something more than just silly teeny-bopper pop songs. They were sold as the “clean” pop act of their time, happy, innocent and cheerful. They made their name not only as a talented family act, but as one dedicated to the old-fashioned religious-based virtues that had been hugely popular since the end of World War II. They were, in fact, the living embodiment of an innocent enjoyment of youth and, yes, I’ll say it, romantic love, that itself turned to “industry poison” at exactly that historical moment. Well put. The Mormons were really radical non-Christians (the SAT word is "henotheists") but they normalized outwardly, identifying with '50s America so much that when society went to hell, it turned on them too with a vengeance. (I understand the FBI recruits Mormons for agents like it used to recruit Irish Catholic cops, when OUR culture embodied that wholesomeness in many ways.) Why when the Osmonds were popular, I just assumed the Mormons were another conservative Protestant church. I think they market themselves that way. (Easy: unlike the Muslims, they come from our culture, so when they do Jesus talk, people just assume they're one of us.) Explains the mainstream's hostility to Mitt Romney in '12, even though like the Bushes he's really a Rockefeller Republican (like his dad) almost as liberal as the mainstream. ("Almost" doesn't cut it; the heresy trial will begin shortly.) Also, I don't think anybody converts to Mormonism intellectually like Newman; it's because they want that wholesome culture. Used to know a lapsed born Mormon. Mormons are kept busy with missions, etc., so they don't notice the theology doesn't add up; it's all about being in their web of community. (The theology: Joseph Smith was smart enough to write a ripoff of the King James Bible good enough to start a sex cult benefiting the men who ran it.) By the way, who else remembers Tony DeFranco? Sweet, close-knit family from Hilary's Canada; similar act as the Osmonds.
  • The death-peddlers. From a pretty blonde Anglican priest (her rap, essentially a Nazi position, reminds me of Flannery O'Connor's take on "compassion") to Lord Carey to former Anglo-Catholic "St." Desmond Tutu, but not Archbishop Welby. That good hospice care is still a ...lottery ...should shame us, rather than not having an answer to Dignitas. - Bishop Nazir-Ali. A semi-Brit herself, Hilary gets it: The Brits are suffering from 200 years of philosophical and moral corruption that was visited on their culture by the secularist instinct that grew up like a cancer in the 18th century after the compromises and logical contradictions of the English Reformation failed to hold.
  • Novus Ordo culture isn't Catholicism. As opposed to the letter of Pope Benedict's Novus, in which he solved all the real problems, so I won't leave the church for a cult with its trappings, just because of bad ceremonial. Christians - traditional liturgical ones - are literally dying in Iraq. Would YOU die for THIS faith?
• A Hitler parallel that's not Godwin's law, a cheap shot at a debating opponent. A case against women's suffrage. Not an endorsement. How Obama adoration resembled Hitler worship. I know Bob Wallace doesn't agree (a respectable manosphere critic not driven by spite) but chicks dig jerks, plus they vote for the handsome candidate who seems like he'll take care of them. On average they're like children; they don't like responsibility or consequences, so they love socialism. The state as daddy or husband. (Their [anti-]reproductive life is none of my business but all of my financial responsibility. And they don't have to have sex with icky betas anymore.) And, looking back on female support for Hitler: ...eviscerates popular notions that females are nonviolent little buttercups. See above on the Rev. Rosie Harper's compassion vs. a "paternalistic God." Smart men don't put women on a pedestal. By the way, limiting the vote again to men with property sounds good.

The Sixties: the Great Unraveling

Why the pushback failed.

If you really look at the LBJ thing, it is more likely that Gerald Ford was involved if LBJ was. FWIW, I don't think there was a broader conspiracy. Oswald was the lone gunman. A very lucky nut.

What of the grassy knoll? My guess from watching Zapruder is there was a second gunman. First shot got President Kennedy in the throat in front; second blew the back of his head off. Legend has it new presidents are shown uncensored Zapruder by the deep state. "Any questions? Good."

Audio analysis shows that there was no shot from the grassy knoll. I think we have to go with the evidence we have. As for the ejecta from the head-shot, I have worked on cases dealing with head-shots where there is an explosion out the entry wound, not the exit wound. Brains are funny, and when they get hit like that, they liquify and can come squirting out in weird places (ears, nose, mouth, etc.), not just the exit wound. There are simpler and more plausible explanations for everything. No need to go Dennis Hopper here.

OK. So, you say, lone Commie nut. Nothing to do with then-conservative Dallas. Maybe the lone Commie nut wanted to make conservative Dallas look bad. So, you say, this goofball was a wannabe Gavrilo Princip but he didn't start a revolution or world war. Unless you blame the Sixties on him, which I think is a stretch.

Of course I'm interested in how we could have prevented the Sixties. There was plenty of pushback from Middle America, the hardhats, Archie Bunker. So why'd we lose? I remember Middle America's change. The style change you see during "The Brady Bunch," which I remember first-run. I remember Ed Sullivan and harmless stuff like "Petticoat Junction," then the networks got rid of all that and rammed Norman Lear down our throats.

I say, lone nut, ideology irrelevant (usually is with nuts), but is is a pro-Castro nut. Not responsible for the '60s, although the assassination of JFK really marks the start of The Sixties as a cultural moment.

But 1967 still looked like me. The change wasn't complete until about 1972.

No, the change started earlier. Communist infiltration of American institutions post Henry Wallace. Emphasis on big-government and conformity over individualism (Ike saw this coming, in the form of the military-industrial complex). Cultural Marxism takes hold in the universities.

Right; space-age "progressivism."

Didn't affect POPULAR culture yet but it planted the seed.

Went off like a bomb in the church.

Like what happened with the Church, the rot was already there, already working, already preparing for its moment. Big government launched on steroids with the Great Society, almost all the weird sh*t in our culture (feminism, etc.) gets a hold then. The courts go nuts (Griswold v. Conn., leads straight to Roe v. Wade).

Right.

Family wage is destroyed by the '68 Civil Rights Act.

The left loves Hugh Hefner because he was a cultural pioneer for the sh*t.

Divorce takes off, becomes culturally okay in enough of the country. Reagan signs radical pro-abortion law in California (!!!!!!!!).

When the LEFT gets nostalgic for my era, I get suspicious. Like their show about Masters and Johnson. I was wary of "Mad Men" for that reason, but they don't misrepresent the era (they raised the standard for depicting it), and I think that "we know better now," while there, is a cover. The show is transgressive porn for yuppie women. They pretend to cheer for Peggy but fantasize about Don.

Hef is the toast of the town.

I didn't forget that about Reagan.

Exactly. The Left knows what was happening then - they where there. Cronkite turns on the military after Tet. Goldwater goes off the rails too - Reagan at least was grounded enough to pull back from the brink in the '70s.

Classic Goldwater - Brent Bozell ghostwriting - would have been a fine prez.

So, what you see very quickly is a Great Unraveling. But that unraveling has been very carefully prepped for a long time.

Like Bugnini did to the church.

'70s and '80s Goldwater was a sellout.

Yes, not just Bozell but Russell Kirk and Harry Jaffa. Jaffa wrote most of the '64 nomination acceptance speech. Yes, exactly. Hippie Goldwater went hard cultural left, and eventually supported big govt. boondoggle spending too, so long as it also meant increases in the military budget. He was about as libertarian as he was conservative by 1975, which means not at all. He turned on Reagan too - a mix of ideological disagreement and massive jealousy. Disgusting.

The Unraveling was abbetted by a combination of big business and big govt., both with their own agendas, but agendas that worked in sync with each other.

I respect Nixon to this day. He made bad mistakes - affirmative action, pure fiat money - but he was non-ideological. He did what he felt was right. Listened to the people, literally meeting the protesters, and did what they wanted, pulling out of Nam (I remember), which the Dems started.

BTW, you are seeing exactly the same thing happening now re: gay rights. It is now 1970 as far as the gay rights movement goes, to draw the analogy.

My family was loyal to Nixon (supported Goldwater too) and very hurt by Watergate. My mom met Pat Nixon.

I very much admire Nixon too, although my family hated him. I grew up in a family of union Democrats, church-going cultural conservatives but they absolutely hated, hated, hated Republicans. Voted for every goddamn Democrat who ever came down the pike.

Very Catholic of them. American Catholic. The unions, machine politics, patronage: the community, la famiglia, looking out for each other. So they voted D.

Yes, very American Catholic, Pelosi style. Sick.

Before Pat Buchanan had Nixon reach out to them after the Sixties f*cked them (Archie Bunker)... the future Reagan Democrats and, in Philly, Rizzocrats.

I remember as a teenager, when I learned about abortion, being absolutely revolted at my family's support for the Democrats. If we really believed the Catholic stuff, how could we vote for monsters who support the killing of children? Well, guess what? Out of all my cousins, I'm the only one who practices my faith. The rest of them figured out what the True Family God was, and it wasn't Jesus Christ.

Bet that story's legion. Peer-pressure liberals with a family TRADITION of voting D. The part of the Cathedral who has ethnic Euro last names. Yuppie Catholics. That was Villanova 25 years ago.

Right. Love, love, love PJB. Man is a prophet, being preaching the good word since 1968 - and he was dead right in 1992 about what NAFTA and the rest of the New World Order BS was going to do to the country. We live in the world he told us would result. But of course, he's a racist nut who hates gays, so he should be shunned.

Voted for him in the '96 primary and proud of it.

Yeah, I don't think my family is all that unique in American Catholicism. I voted for PBJ in '92 and '96, almost pulled the lever for him in 2000 but voted for W. Read most of his books. If the country had listened to him back in the day, what a much better place it would be now.

I voted Libertarian my first time in '92.

But again, big govt. & big business didn't want PBJ's vision for the country. They want us to be India or Mexico. Right, they have no loyalty to America or its citizens.

I have Right From the Beginning. Read some of it.

Ugh, I don't vote libertarian. Wasted vote. Every vote libertarian is only a vote to help the Democrats. Spoiler party. I tend to view it as a false flag operation, designed to help Democrat. When you poll libertarians, they are almost all dopers, sex perverts or autistic omegas. Much more likely to vote Democrat than Republican.

Read his books on the economy and foreign policy. You won't be libertarian afterward.

Big business and big government couldn't care less about this country. Davos, UN, NAFTA, etc. Mexicanize the population and rule from the top.

I actually don't read libertarian sites these days. They opened my eyes but they're really tiresome anti-authority lefties.

Yes. Libertarianism is a mental disorder.

My layoff: broke British company outsourcing to India and the Philippines to make crap for a quick buck.

Gary Johnson stood head and shoulders over Obama and Romney so I stand by my vote. A real pol who deserved a chance.

Libertarianism makes some good points, but ultimately it is just nuts.

Yes, that's all they want, a quick buck. No allegiance to place or people, no appreciation for a way of life, for the dignity of work and the idea of an independent citizenry. Make the quick buck and make sure that the middle class is evaporated, leaving a pliant and captive serf class (mostly brown with some broken-down trailer-park whites thrown in) and a ruling SWPL upper class (lily-white with some token "diversity" to cover up the whiteness).

Johnson = pro-abortion doper. No thanks. The economic liberty always takes a back seat to the fucking and baby-killing and the dope-smoking. Libertarianism isn't about economic liberty. It says it is, but it ain't. Libertarianism is about, as Russell Kirk put it so well "sexual pathetics."

Pretty much the paleo and hardcore trad argument: the rot set in BEFORE the '50s. I still won't write off American liberty but I'm listening.

P.S. Eugene McCarthy was a Catholic gentleman nothing to do with his hippie following. Kennedy was a crook who didn't really stand for anything.

Russell Kirk was friends with McCarthy and tended to see him as a conservative, although one of the Left (a Left-conservative, along the lines of Christopher Lasch, for example).

I respect Jerry Brown for being non-ideological too.

P.P.S. The Beatles were an instrument of evil.

Living with the past: Roebling and Flemington, NJ

Roebling, NJ, a 19th-century company town that built the Brooklyn Bridge and others. A German, Johann Roebling, founded the company. The factory's now a museum. Town used to be very Catholic and Slavic. Reminds me of similar industrial towns in Pennsylvania. Lots of worker rowhouses and small ethnic churches including St. Nicholas Greek Catholic.

The only difficulty with the bishop that I know of was a language barrier when the immigrants, with limited English, tried to tell him they needed a parish.

Wasyl Panasenko clocks in. World War II displaced person.

The Alligator landing craft the factory in Roebling built during World War II.

This car has an interesting story. She's really a '56 Ford Fairlane but the chrome and the badge are customized for Canada so she's a Meteor Rideau. The owner told me most of these Canadian Fords haven't survived - rough winters. But this one's from the Pacific Coast, barn-stored by the first owners and restored by the second, in B.C. Beauty, eh?

The National Cathedral

It is America's imitation of Westminster Abbey, though not a replica. Since we are, after all, a branch of the same people. It's meant to have the same place in the life of the nation: civic religion. Been to both. It's bigger. Much better than the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception - tacky monument to American immigration as Thomas Day says, made worse of course by the Novus Ordo, but worth seeing to get a handle on American Catholicism, warts and all. (Its lower church would be perfect for high church.) The National Cathedral left me cold though - lots of Catholic potential, but its tradition is brass-and-class high-church, Protestant, not Catholic. Fits the "civic religion" intended use - more like military drill, like Arlington Cemetery, than Catholic ceremonial. I've never been to a service at St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue (but have been in the building) but I think it is close to this churchmanship if you have something approaching the right religion too, or at least it was until recently. Sort of no-frills Anglo-Catholicism fitting into the culture of old-school Episcopalianism. Like the ethos of the Continuum: Fr. Bob Hart and his friends.

Hooray for the Baath Party, and on well-meant, slightly off conservative Catholic efforts

• The rightful defenders of Iraqi Christians is the Baath Party, co-founded by a (lapsed? apostate?) Christian and the country's rightful government (remember legitimism?) before George W. Bush led America's fool's errand there.
• Why she doesn't use contraception. Quite good. But as retired blogger Sunshine Mary, a born Catholic turned sexy evangelical wife (I don't know or remember her view on contraception, but I know that modern evos are fine with it; heck, before the '70s or even 1980 they thought being anti-abortion was "Catholic"), would, I detect a whiff of feminism, which does make inroads into conservative churches. "You can still have it all in spite of following the church." I much prefer the manosphere on this, when it's talking about first things and not the common hack of abusing social skills for quick or temporary sex (thing is, pickup skills use a lot of home truths); realistic on human nature, it's profoundly conservative: women are simply happier when fulfilling their prime directive, being under a strong (not abusive, but lots of women accept this) man and being a mother. They hate the rat race so they drop out, the real reason for the average pay gap. The mainstream hates Sarah Palin because its women envy her. A career (she was in over her head but anyway), a strong husband of many years, being a mom and grandma, AND men still want her. By the way, I think the church does NOT teach, "Have as many children as you physically can."
• The Catholic "man crisis." True: A lot of Catholic "men" have been exposed to "Catholic" "education" which is dominated by dwindling man-hating nuns, "liberated" women and effeminates. But this site, which reminds me of the McKays' The Art of Manliness, seems verbose, ironically like a church lady; naive about "off the books" Catholic culture. For example, in Italy and Spanish countries, men have often not been expected to participate in church. A feminist takeover worsens that, rather than causing it. There can be no New Evangelization unless there is a New Emangelization. Gay. The Church, including its bishops, priests and lay men, (must) begin to take notice and make the evangelization of Catholic men a priority. In a sense true: ditch the guitars and Eucharistic ministers and stop condescending; bring back the clergy as knights of the altar (Catholic life is in part "spiritual combat"; the sanctuary is a space for men, made of stone, for sacrifice; Jesus is the ultimate man, sacrificing himself), Thomism (a man's philosophy, for logic-choppers, not touchy-feely stuff), Latin (same precision as Thomism), and chant (it engages the mind, is very singable, and is not too girly); teach a lot of the same truths as the manosphere (simply being a good provider doesn't cut it anymore) and evangelicals about being strong husbands and fathers (including, I dare say, headship: women crave it) - "honey" and Dad as king and priest of the domestic church. Hierarchy and patriarchy. But from the tone here I sense that official attempts to market to men would be fake - condescending in a different way - and would flop because of it. Wrote about this here. Like marketing cars, women will go to a man's church; men WON'T go to "womenchurch."
• Smart manosphere critic Bob Wallace: If women are hypergamous, then how at the same time do they like ne'er-do-well bad boys? Because with women, the hypergamy is about biology, not real status or logic. Same reason men like women with the right measurements, for example. But for them, attitude trumps looks.
• From LRC: The case for LBJ having JFK killed. He was ruthless and they hated each other.

Only human beings can be saints, and more

• Saints are the only fully human beings out there. The rest of us are striving for it, following this plan or that plan with faddish delight, or gym-bunny urgency, or lackadaisical lack of energy becoming a teenager wearing too much black to move this week. Gay people can't be saints. Neither can straight people. Black people can't be saints. Neither can white people. Women can't be saints. Neither can men. Only human beings can be saints. Galatians 3:28. Good but male and female is an essential difference; why only one is the matter for the sacrament of holy orders.
• Shook my head yesterday about all the pundits ranting about arming the Ukraine... Have we learned NOTHING about dumping weapons in these areas? They almost always end up being used against us. I'll be darned if my tax dollars should go to give someone a gun I'm forbidden from owning by the same government that is stealing my money to give it to them... Tax money that is not used in furtherance of the enumerated powers of the federal government as defined by the US constitution is stolen money... Russia and the Ukraine aren't Communist anymore and unlike Europe we don't trade with them so they're not our problem.
• Bill Tighe reminded me that the Greek and other non-Slavic Orthodox (well, some Slavs were under the Greeks then) broke with Rome, because of the Turkish takeover, in 1484. I know it's complicated (bearing witness to our belief that sacramentally we're the same church and they're just estranged, intercommunion continued on Venetian-owned Greek islands until the 1700s) but you can say "Orthodoxy" as we know it is only 530 years old. Next time you see an "online Orthodox" wish him a happy anniversary all next month, like the Lutherans celebrating "Reformation" Day on Halloween, and tell him Uncle Serge sent you. (That name was simply my first online handle 20 years ago, because my birthday is on St. Sergius' Gregorian-date feast day and I didn't want AOL to name me jbeeler1234-something.)

The great chain of CultMarx and more

Learn game, young man. And get a haircut.

• Derb: Sorry, ladies: the great chain of CultMarx.
• Bob Wallace: If you want men to Man Up then women should start being feminine again, stop blaming their problems on men, and stop thinking they are victims when they are nothing of the sort. For his sake I'd change the caption from "game" to "social skills" but it works better as is. Feminine millennial toxic leadership.
• Four things people get wrong on the Internet.
• Fisher-More College.
• What is "traditional Christianity," anyway? It boils down to two contenders: Catholicism or what some "reformer" thought the Bible really says. (See Fr. Ted on heresy.) Which one more closely resembles secular humanism? "Arg of next column: we’re living thru trad Xianity’s transformation from majority to minority status." You will not be surprised to learn that I agree with Damon here. A call to surrender from a false-flag operator? Orthodoxy: rolling over and doing what the overlord says "since 1054" and definitely since 1484 (not 1472; a synod of Constantinople formally rejected the decisions of Florence). The overlord doesn't care if you're credally sound or high-church, like Henry VIII's Anglicans and the Communist Chinese puppet church. By the way, an old online nemesis who dedicated his life to labor unions once said that the steel-mill owners loved the Chornock schism because unlike Catholic social teaching, it told its faithful to obey their bosses no matter what.

On latinizations

A note on latinizations, in which Opus Publicum nails the psychology of online, that is, convert Greek Catholicism, a feeder for online Orthodoxy.

The church says not to latinize the Eastern rites but often, before Vatican II, Eastern Rite Catholics latinized themselves. I'm a moderate: don't introduce latinization but don't suppress it if it's old and doesn't overpower the rite. That is, I like it when it's pre-Vatican II and doesn't take over. For example, in the Byzantine Rite it's "the Divine Liturgy," but I've met plenty of Slavic Byzantine Catholics who called it Mass. There's a kind of haughty convert to the Eastern churches who looks down on us traditionalists, and often anti-Westernizes himself out of the church, so he has a chip on his shoulder about things like that, exactly what Opus Publicum is describing here.

Some of them are Catholic but thumb their noses at the magisterium, even though in many ways they're conservative, but don't become Orthodox. They think they know better than either, which says there is no church or that they are the magisterium.

The truth here is not either/or, just like the church isn't all one rite. The church has, as it should, both the unlatinized and the old latinized options.

Put another way, there's never latinizing, which the church has in mind for the Orthodox, there's pastorally sensitive de-latinization out of love for the Christian East, the positivity of the almost all convert Russian Catholics, and of the Byzantine Catholic priests I've met who were actually trained in Rome, for example, and then there's de-latinization that's done clearly to be anti-Catholic. Catholic liberals' exoticizing cousin: I've seen that weird strain in "Byzantium" on both sides of the schism (arguing for women deacons, for example).

The Maronite Church that St. Sharbel belonged to shows another, regrettable aspect in Eastern Catholicism, self-Novus Ordoization. Because, since they latinized themselves, they lost most of their own tradition, before the council. I understand Iraq's biggest church, the Chaldeans (bigger than the Nestorians they came from, unique in Eastern Catholicism) is rather similar that way, though not as extreme. The answer, again, is moderation and pastoral sensitivity.

Glad to say I've never seen Novus-like liturgical abuses at a Byzantine Catholic Liturgy. But the Ruthenians for example have a relatively weak ethnic identity plus an inferiority complex in America, being outnumbered by Roman Riters. So I've heard a story of a Cleveland area priest who, after the council, did Liturgy facing the people for a while because he thought that's what he was supposed to do, which of course it wasn't.

I've never seen Eastern altar girls but have seen pictures of them at Chaldean and even some Byzantine Rite services. Same idea as that nice priest in the story above. But it reminds me of the kind of Eastern snob who pushes for women deacons, a world away from Yiayia and the real Orthodox, thank God.

"First Things," own up to your role in destroying the church in Iraq

• Opus Publicum: American Catholic neocons owe the Christians of Iraq a big apology.
• Anglican orders.
• From MCJ: Granted, I understand that "Thomas the Tank Engine" is full of the message of being "useful" subjects of the British Empire, because that was the moral of the books, but: If you play any given version of a British "Thomas" episode backward, do you know what you’ll hear? Campaign commercials for the UK Independence Party (play an American version backward and you’ll hear a whole lot of people explaining why Barack Obama is the single worst president in the history of the United States of America). Get help, Tracy. In other news, Roger Daltrey likes being English.

A smart pro-Pope Francis article, and being Catholic in the '80s

• An intelligent pro-Pope Francis article from Ireland. I don't need to make excuses for him but I hope it's true. Simply putting morals in perspective, emphasizing God's love.
• My Catholic bio in short, thank God.
• The church-emptying "renewal" under way in the '80s, from talking down to kids to teaching outright heresy: the living-room table pizza-party Mass and a year later "Catholic" college.
• There is no question there were lots of confusion, disillusion and broken hearts during the early post-VatII years. Again, look at the statistics - the drastic fall in the number of priests, religious...etc...whole seminaries, convents & schools were closed. Meanwhile, everyone was being told (lies) that all of this was for the good of the Church. Part of my formation as a Catholic was when I hopped parish boundaries to go one town over, to a parish pastored by a priest who'd gone to seminary in the '50s. In the confessional and in the bulletins he taught right out of the old manuals and catechisms. Gave me my moral theology; how to examine my conscience to make a good confession. But this was 30 years ago in America, so the liturgy was standard Novus Ordo, Eucharistic ministers and all, because that's what the priest was told to do.
• Meanwhile in southern England, a Catholic could find high church IF he was looking for it. The Brompton Oratory doing high Novus all along; the Ronald Knox Society at Oxford - bare Blackfriars was fine for them, and you had St. Aloysius too; Opus Dei at Grandpont House like something out of Brideshead Revisited. (Opus here was just standard low church.) My best Bible and my statue of Our Lady are from all that.
• The charismatics: the other American Catholics who still go to Mass.
• Especially if you're taking the Greek Catholic option, non-communing attendance outside of Sundays with the Orthodox is great. Definitely in the spirit of the almost all Western convert Russian Catholics, who aren't self-haters but all positive, in love with the East: "We have bishops! They just happen not to be Catholic right now." Understandably the Ukrainian Catholic exiles who were the first Eastern Christians I knew well and the first traditional Catholics I knew in person - took me to my first traditional Catholic liturgy, in New Jersey 30 years ago - didn't feel that way.
• My wingman but not my Pope: libertarianism. Evictionism is the "stuff" I refer to.
• Ecumenism. Played out.
• "The main focus of modern Roman Catholicism on an official papal and episcopal level seems to be endless vague statements about social justice, universal brotherhood and ecumenical dialogue."

The mark of the Nazarene

Aleteia: An event in support of Christians in Iraq was held in Paris, just behind the French Assemblée Nationale. 100 people lined up, all holding the Arabic letter nun, or "N," which the Islamic State painted on the homes of Christians in Mosul. The rally was held to urge French legislators to take action. Photo by: Paul Malo.

A demonstration I can believe in, like I've done against both abortion and the war in Iraq (I dare say, the true Catholic seamless garment, both and neither left nor right), but I'm refraining from using this symbol because, frankly, I'm not worthy. It's too easy, like liberal "raising awareness" (preening). How many of us have the courage to let the Muslims kill us for our faith?

The mother country: conflicted

A public-relations dream come true for the royals. Prince William's got his mother's looks. Love match with a beautiful commoner wife (no inbreeding with cousins anymore) and a cute baby, and bye bye, Aussie republicanism. Too bad British countries are more liberal and less religious than here. I know: I was there. But in 1776 I would have been a Loyalist.

George III was wrongly blamed. His being Anglican wasn't a problem for us. We weren't under English religious law as colonies, and besides, because the Anglicans' structure - king and bishops - obviously still resembled the church's, more than the "Enlightenment" worldview, some Catholics hoped they'd come back. But Calvinism and the "Enlightenment" rotted Anglicanism from within. The rebels didn't have a leg to stand on. God save the King.

Why I'm happy for Canada's armed forces getting their "Royal" identities back. Bring back the Red Ensign.

But would British America have been a Burkean high-Anglican (yet, not being Britain, hospitable to Catholics?) quasi-utopia or just have been Canada? In other words, would it have "evolved," its opportunistic, Erastian Protestantism gutted by the "Enlightenment," just like Britain did?

By the way, we would have sounded the same as now. Our common starting point was when English settlers came here, in the 1600s, the reconstructed, rhotic Shakespearean Original Pronunciation; we sound different because English was different then. The colonies that sound Britishy were settled about 200 years or more later. We would have used British spelling (as Canada does, modified: tire centre) because Noah Webster created American spelling after independence, out of spite; the conservative South kept colour, centre, etc. until losing the Civil War.

Gay go up and gay go down,
To ring the bells of London town.
Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement's.
Bull's eyes and targets,
Say the bells of St. Margaret's.
Brickbats and tiles,
Say the bells of St. Giles'.
Halfpence and farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin's.
Pancakes and fritters,
Say the bells of St. Peter's.
Two sticks and an apple,
Say the bells of Whitechapel.
Pokers and tongs,
Say the bells of St. John's.
Kettles and pans,
Say the bells of St. Ann's.
Old Father Baldpate,
Say the slow bells of Aldgate.
You owe me ten shillings,
Say the bells of St. Helen's.
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.
When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.
Pray when will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.
I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
Chop chop chop chop
The last man's dead!

– Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (c. 1744). Thanks, Christian Campbell.

’Ello. (Not his real accent by the way, which, never strong, he lost early on. He auditioned to play Hogan!)
Anyway, it would have made sense for the mother country, so steeped in folk tradition, to remain close to the church: maybe at heart the cheeky chappie, Andy Capp at his pub, was still a villager and it wouldn't be hard for him to find his way home. The common folk were driven out of the church by force (orate pro nobis: been to St. John Southworth's tomb and St. Margaret Clitherow's house), but many really remained Catholic through the 1580s. (Recusancy was an option only for the rich: they could pay the fines, pay off the cops, etc.) By 1600, says Christopher Haigh, most were "parish anglicans," accepting the new church (surplice, scarf, weekly Matins, and quarterly Communion) because they had no choice (ironically, since religious liberty is a liberal idea) but treating it with the same reverence they did the real one 100 years earlier. The Puritans, "Reformation" zealots, true-believing Protestants, were outliers. (And they weren't very puritanical: they wore colorful clothes, drank beer like other English people, which made sense since the water wasn't clean, and loved married sex.) The English Civil War, the "Enlightenment," and the Industrial Revolution (literally forcing people into the cities and the dark satanic mills) put paid to all that. A friend has observed that underneath their wry humor there's something sad in the English character, coming from this loss. (Loss: we love the royals more than they do.)

Snob anglophilia's a different animal from this Catholic nostalgia. Paul Fussell explained it: it's trying to say, and sometimes it's true, "My family's been powerful since back when Britain was, which is how we picked up this culture."

The upper class, Prince William and his beautiful family notwithstanding, are creepy in a couple of ways. Anti-Catholic to the core. (Andy Capp's "no popery" is probably ignorance.) With their top educations, they know what the names of their old colleges mean (Corpus Christi, etc.) and say to it all, "I will not serve." Creepily self-aware that way. I understand Prince Philip is the country's ranking Freemason. (Trouble is here, as there, essentially the Masons won, long ago.)

Interesting blog post: The first Protestants were the Taliban of their day and place.

P.S. The church ≠ the Irish cause.

The American religion vs. Tolkien's long defeat

• A recent history of American heresy and some American heresies. By Orthodox or Nicene Christian standards America has not just recently become heretical but was conceived and trained in heretical ideas of the 18th Century Enlightenment, individualism, deism and Unitarianism. Douthat sees America as moving away from some form of traditional Protestant Christianity, but Orthodox Catholics might see America as simply continuing on the path on which it started from the beginning as a nation when its adherence to Nicene Christianity was tenuous at best.
• Tolkien's long defeat. I will not walk with your progressive apes, erect and sapient. Before them gapes the dark abyss to which their progress tends, if, by God's mercy, progress ever ends, and does not ceaselessly revolve the same unfruitful course with changing of a name. "Mythopoeia" by J.R.R. Tolkien (for C.S. Lewis) - from Bill Tighe. 180º from the space-age progressivism (beautiful as long as the old values are kept - the '50s) the bishops swallowed at Vatican II.
• Good, but what about modern Orthodoxy and contraception? (I asked Fr. Peter Gillquist this to his face and he evaded.) This is a Protestant country, Calvinism being most of its government-promoted foundation myth (the cavalier Anglicans of Jamestown are ignored; "America began at Plymouth Rock") and the starting point of the elite's religion. Today's American secular liberalism is a knockoff of it, as Marxism is a Western Christian heresy. Islam is Eastern Christianity's bastard, its Mormonism. Remember, Orthodoxy exists because of Tsars and Sultans. Its entire reason for being is to hate the West. Sad. The Council of Florence solved the Schism. Orthodoxy really only dates from after that point. Once the Schism was healed, the petty princes and the Ottoman sultans got to work. Once Byzantium fell, the tsars realized the benefits of a non-papal church they could control. And thus, Orthodoxy is born and nurtured. Other than that, besides what they retain from us (Vincentian canon = seven councils = more or less Catholicism), do they really have a worldview?

Religion in America

• How Americans feel about religious groups. We're more religious than the mother country, thanks in part to past Catholic immigration.
• The hypocrisy of granola women and chemical birth control.

The British ordinariate: the door's always open

Of course Msgr. Newton's leaving the light on for you.

They will get more clergy, but will they get more laity? This will be the issue for the Ordinariates going forward.

It's always been an issue. First, just because "Farver" was "Catholic" didn't necessarily mean the congregation of his Church of England parish, which is geographical like a Catholic parish, was. Second, people are attached to pretty buildings, etc., more than to the idea and teachings of the true church. So often the priest converts but the congregation doesn't. In America, at St. Clement's, Philadelphia, it was the opposite. The priest was liberal; the leading laymen sincere would-be Catholics, so they left the priest and building behind and came into the church.

Earlier I said: Everybody who was going to come into the church has. Those who are left are really liberal high church, a kind of Protestant, even if they pretend they're not.

To be fair, there are situations where sincere conservative high-church Anglicans including would-be Catholics are outside the church: congregationalism of the former or circumstances not the latter's fault (such as continued resistance from Catholic liberals), neither anything to do with homosexuality and the latter nothing to do with a love of Episcopalianism. But I think they're exceptions.

Weeds amongst the wheat, Orthodoxy in the West is self-limiting, and more

• The Vatican II generation: weeds amongst the wheat.
• Patricius: Your proposal for British Orthodoxy makes sense given your premise. But it wouldn't work because after three generations in Britain or America the ethnics assimilate and leave Orthodoxy anyway. Services in English and the Gregorian calendar don't stop that. A British or American Orthodoxy never really gets started. Lest you think I'm being triumphalistic, the same thing happens to the Uniates.
• From Bob Wallace:
  • What a mess may be coming. K vs. r selection.
  • Conservatism and monsters.
  • How to get women to have more babies.

Man on the moon

Yesterday.
An expensive liberal government propaganda stunt, understandable given the Red threat, but also the golden era's last hurrah, and just plain amazing. USA!

I slept through it. It was, what, late at night our time?

In a sense you could say we're still paying for it. According to Jerry Pournelle, the Space Shuttle program was basically designed to keep everyone who worked on the Apollo program employed. And by focusing on the Space Shuttle we abandoned traditional spacecraft, which is why now that the Shuttle has been retired, we have to send our astronauts up on Russian rockets.

That's not good, even though they're not our enemies anymore. We should be self-sufficient like in 1945 with our industry.

When is weird too weird? And more

• From Face to Face:
  • How weird is too weird?
  • Taylor Swift believed a sham gay boyfriend could truly fall in love with her, and a speculation about Promise Rings.
• From Jeff Culbreath: Common sense on illegal immigration. Neither the sickle nor the swastika: the Catholic way. Not the well-meant open borders of the Catholic bishops, nor the race-baiting from corners of the right, nor the left's attempted proxy war on/replacement of conservative whites, nor the establishment right's treason against its fellow citizens by undermining them with cheap labor, exploiting the illegals under the mask of "diversity" charity.
• From Takimag: Catfight! Gavin McInnes takes apart feminism.

Comic-book indoctrination

Comic books are apparently a SWPL (swipple) pastime now, and they're being rewritten to fit their doctrine. I understand Captain America's being turned black, Thor (the manliest of the Norse gods) into a woman (dyke?), and golden-era all-American Archie in some forecast storyline is martyred for... homosexualism. Get them when they're young, I guess, if kids still read them as opposed to yuppie nerds. By the way, who else remembers the Christian Archie comics? (Preaching evangelical Protestantism with some hippie Jesus freaks mixed in with golden-era main characters.) Got one by accident as a kid. Story is someone who worked at Archie Comics decades ago got religion and asked his boss's permission to use the Archie characters. The company's Jewish owner at the time thought religion generally was a good thing (at least for utilitarian reasons) so he not only let him make the Christian Archies but let him do it for free (while I guess the real Archies didn't preach). That was the America we've lost.

The Greek Catholic option

An honorable option for conservative Catholics in America but probably a sinking ship.

A conversation:

What I liked about the movie Doubt is it got the sides right. Conservative nun trying to protect kids from Father-hip-and-with-it who used clerical privilege and liberal ideology to get want he wanted: sweet young boy.

I don't trust priests and have a very low opinion of the hierarchy. The closer and deeper you get into the institutional Church, the uglier and dirtier it is.

Yeah. People think we worship our priests but that's not our teaching plus familiarity breeds contempt. Italians are mildly anticlerical that way.

Yeah, don't get close to the priests. Always a mistake. Be friendly but not too close. Yeah, I am mildly anticlerical myself. Not in an ideological way; I just think most of them are queer, omega-betas, or (small minority) very evil. Better to keep distance from those folks.

The Orthodox priests never came onto me but they have their own, theological problems.

Well, in my experience (very limited) most Orthodox parish clergy have a wife or have been widowed. Yes, they have theological problems, and they have a lavender mafia problem too, but at the parish level, I don't think the problem is as bad. But I could be wrong. I've only met one celibate Orthodox parish priest, and that was because he was a monk. He was a very happy celibate - he very obviously has that gift. Nothing gay about him at all, a very normal guy. Celibacy for him was not a way of hiding or escaping, but a way of being. But that's just one. All others were married.

Most Orthodox parish priests are. My old pro-Catholic priest was a monk. Their monasticism never took off in America. I'm all for married priests based on their model. Eastern Catholic churches here were treated badly - caused two schisms for no good reason.

Yes, I think a married clergy on the Eastern model would be a good thing on the whole. And I agree completely that the Eastern Rite Catholics here in the States were treated terribly. The Irish couldn't stand them. And the Germans and Italians were apathetic towards them.

As a son of the 1930s schism has explained, their Slovak neighbors back home understood them; American Catholics didn't. Now his church is a lost cause for no good reason. In schism and having drunk the Orthodox Kool-Aid, idolizing their culture: "we have returned to the true faith," blah blah.

Yes, sad. Many suffer in the Church from the Church; others are driven from the Church by sinful and ambitious men. God understands and gives them grace.

I agree. True of the good-hearted people who were driven out; all they wanted was their neighborhood parish where they could pray in peace. Some of those Easterners, and Italians who started neighborhood churches and were turned down by the bishop. In Philly there was one where the bishop accepted the new parish; in Hackensack he said no so they became Episcopal. Yikes.

Ick. Episcopal? Not good. Fakey fake. You go from a legitimate desire for a neighborhood parish to sodomy and witchcraft in the sanctuary. Yow.

As with native Anglo-Catholicism you have the irony though that their congregationalism enabled them to resist Vatican II pretty well but at what cost? The Episcopal flag in that place creeps me out.

They're conservative - under a less liberal "flying bishop." But he ordains women so what's the point? And no, women priests aren't at St. Anthony's, but still.

Sad. Yeah, Episcopalianism is battery acid. Destroys the mind and the soul. Perverse all the way down.

Theologically St. Anthony's is a dead end like the Polish National Catholic Church. Similar circumstances to sympathize about, but unlike them and the Orthodox, the Nats' founder was a troublemaking LIBERAL. They're people who don't realize their church makes no sense, and priests from Poland who switched to get married. The thing that kept them sane is conservative Polish culture.

Yes, the PNCC is a sad case. I do feel bad for them but they don't have a future. Unfortunately, I think they are a harbinger of what's up for the SSPX.

Right, they, the Slavic Orthodox here, AND the Slavic Greek Catholics here are dying out.

Right. No future for the splinters. Nor should there be. Rites are not ethnic, they are geographic. The West is for the Latin Rite. The people who come should adopt it eventually. That is the natural course. That doesn't mean the Eastern Rites should be suppressed; they shouldn't. But the natural flow is for the Latin Rite to be dominant and for the other rites here to disappear over time.

Yes! The Eastern rites do fine in their homelands. Like the reverse would happen too. Latins moving to Slavic Galicia would become Byzantine in a few generations. Overlapping rites in one country is unnatural and novel, and it came to tears in America.

Me, I wouldn't mind if the dominant Catholicism here were Byzantine; I could and would live in that rite again - perfectly Catholic and traditional, beating the Novus Ordo. But here it ain't gonna happen.

Right. If I moved to the Ukraine the dominant rite would be Byzantine, and as a Catholic I would go to the dominant Catholic rite. But here the natural rite is the Latin one. Even putting settlement patterns aside, the Americas are within the ambit of the Latin Rite. That doesn't mean the Latin Rite is superior; it just means that it is the rite here by nature. So, it is natural that the other rites fade over time.

Which is exactly what's happened and not by design.

Third- and fourth-generation Ukrainian-Americans are Latin, Protestant, or nothing, not Greek Catholic.

Some Catholics are called to move to the East. I think Metropolitan Andrew (Sheptytsky) should be their patron saint. (Catherine de Hueck Doherty makes a good candidate for Catholics going in the other direction. Ex-Orthodox who remain Byzantine, as they automatically do, have St. Josaphat and Leonid Feodorov.) But what we're describing is still happening.

Right. The natural course. What should have happened is that the Irish should have been more accommodating to the Easterners and just let time and nature take its course.

The Orthodox lose people like crazy too, because when you make your culture your religion, your idol, even if your culture is good, the kids leave when they become American.

Plus people who are really spiritual see through that. They understand that the ethnicity is an idol and that that's not what the Gospel says.

Right, so you're left with the dumb and parochial, like the PNCC, and bigoted (anti-Western). THAT'S American Orthodoxy, plus the messed-up, self-hating Western converts.

The church is best as the Church Local, ONLY when it is also part of the Church Universal.

An unchurched or nominal Protestant being ignorant buying that the Orthodox are the church, I can see, plus being turned off by the Novus Ordo. But do a LITTLE homework - hell, watch old movies - and you'll see Catholicism in all its truth and beauty.

Right. Remember, Orthodoxy exists because of Tsars and Sultans. Its entire reason for being is to hate the West. Sad. The Council of Florence solved the Schism. Orthodoxy really only dates from after that point. Once the Schism was healed, the petty princes and the Ottoman sultans got to work. Once Byzantium fell, the tsars realized the benefits of a non-papal church they could control. And thus, Orthodoxy is born and nurtured. The "Real Easterners" are the "Uniates."

I wouldn't go as far as saying the "real Easterners" are the Uniates. And when you're Catholic you don't have to believe the Uniates are perfect.

Right. Just like the Latin Rite isn't perfect.

I'm a moderate: I love both the pure Byzantine Rite and the old latinized version the online snobs turn up their noses at. BOTH exist in the church! As they should.

There is a kind of Eastern snob online, almost never an ethnic, who would rather hobnob with mainliners and academics and blather about mystaliciousness and women deacons than have a bunch of embarrassing conservative Catholics take refuge from Vatican II at an Eastern Catholic parish. Orthodox anti-Westernism's cousin. Reason I am Roman Rite. That and it's my home, and I don't like the way they treat my home.

Agreed. I have no problem with the various rites and their uses. I would like to see a restoration of the older sub-rites within the Latin Rite, for example, and I am a fan of the Dominican use for the Latin Mass.

Sure. Sarum re-enactments are fine too even though they have no future. The real Sarum Use was in Latin (historical fact; traditionalism is not about Latin) and under Rome.

When it comes to Catholic rites, there's the Gamaliel principle: if it is meant by God to prosper here, it will. If not, it will fade away.

How to manufacture pop music and other art

The golden era was honest about this. Record producers and a stable of office workers in a place such as the Brill Building churned out product, much like I do as a writer. (I've written content for around a couple thousand commercial websites so far, including in Spanish, my father's language.) Peter, Paul, and Mary were formed by a casting call to cash in on the hootenanny fad. As were the Monkees regarding the Beatles. (The show is much better than Beatles movies, though not the music, which has its moments: because it was funny; the Monkees were mostly actors - Peter Tork and Davy Jones - who wanted to be there. The other two were real musicians who felt boxed in. The Beatles, real musicians, didn't want to do light comedy, and a lot of the material stunk anyway.) Before the hippie-ish image of the pop star as romantic virtuoso singer-songwriter overtook that. (Brill songwriters Neil Diamond and Carole King made the transition beautifully.) But it's all still really the same. Human nature is, of course. Often the results are good; other times they're clearly by rote. "How Do You Do It?" is formulaic but the formula, with an enthusiastic performance by Gerry and the Pacemakers, works. Rap, by the way, is not music. Music has a melody. Rap is street poetry, which does require talent and intelligence.





Neil Sedaka literally studied chart hits and applied his musical training to manufacture this song.




The chord progression of Pachelbel's Canon: a staple.
You'd be amazed how much of our art follows a strict, proven formula, even being pre-fab. Because, as I think the classical Greeks and Catholic doctrine say, there are objective, universal standards of truth, and, the ancients said, beauty. The romance of the artist who doesn't follow any rules is at best exaggerated. The ones who creatively break the rules first master them. Learned from Cracked that the adorable classic Disney and Warner Bros. animated characters (great because they weren't mainly for kids) were "drawn from a standard, 'fill in the blanks' template of characters" telling artists what proportions to use to maximize cuteness, for example.

I've been a copy editor: can you spot the mistake?
Admen manipulate these images all the time. My job is to drive business to my company's clients so I think I get it.

Of course sex sells too: Katy Perry's popularity, for example, even though she seems marketed to other girls. The music's disposable. Looks have worked to snag girl fans too, even though girls respond less to looks than boys. (Both for reasons that reproductively make sense: healthy women + powerful men = strong babies.) For example, Fabian, who was still handsome when I saw him years ago, and still couldn't sing a note.



Obviously Fabian's handlers were trying to cash in on Elvis Presley, a very talented singer who would have been much better if somebody had taught him how to sing; on some songs he just belched out the notes as legendary producer Sir George Martin ("the fifth Beatle" yet the personification of English class and calmness) says.

P.S. Unlike earlier pop acts, the Beatles were destructive to the culture; I don't know how that happened. (Walter Cronkite gave them their world break. Wanting to cheer up America after President Kennedy's assassination, he read a story on TV about a British pop craze.) Their early stuff was just good golden-era pop. They were good at what they did, of course. I've stood 20 feet from Sir Paul McCartney performing.