Seriously loving Halloween

Donna's costume today.

Been in Philly on and off for 30 years so of course I remember Stella.

The old America, real and retro

• Retro Jukebox featuring Kate Davis: "All About That Bass." A good pop song, which is why it works across genres, but this is MUCH better! Thank you, Alex Trivunovic. I wondered if it's just the singer/bassist's accent — yes, have the girl actually play the bass — or if she really thinks it's "trouble," not "treble." I thought she was foreign, maybe Scandinavian, until I saw her name; turns out it's a blackcent for the song. I know kids stage these performances to be ironic, but it's a glimpse of what a real revival might look like.
• Lora Lee, New York, from Malls of America. Of course the '60s malls (and the '60s shopping centers I remember) have panache (Danish ultramodern cool — space age), but malls were part of that blind faith in "Progress!" that destroyed so much, such as real communities and small downtowns, including shops like Lora Lee. (And Cardinal Spellman's American Catholic Church, now broke.) I thought they were wasteful, such as for conserving the environment, which should be apolitical common sense (and not pseudoscience either, Al Gore); why blow all that money on an unnecessary artificial climate? Hubris. Cf. Dead Malls.
• And then there was Old Towne, a small but formative part of my childhood, part of the same Victorian nostalgia as Farrell's ice-cream parlors. Part mall, part amusement park, pretending to be Main Street with 1890s touches and no anchor stores, just a hippie-ish romanticism about small specialty shops such as artisans. Magical for a kid. Sorry it ultimately didn't work. It was a more expensive version of the bazaars I go to, which are nothing new: Booth's Corner, Columbus (with an even better flea market), Berlin, and the seemingly failing Grand Marketplace (R/C car track all but killed the flea market) in the failed Village Mall, where much of the old Pennsauken Mart ended up; all in New Jersey except the first. Sorry I missed the Bazaar of All Nations; it would have been just a long walk away.
• Ex-Army on stoking black resentment as part of liberal whites' proxy war on conservative whites (and me on Obama's fake blackness) reminded me this year is an anniversary for me. Counting by using election years, I've opted out of mainstream American politics for 10 years, consistently voting Libertarian nationally and for Ron Paul in primaries, with one dropout year nationally, '08.
• American decline is reversing the trend of uprooting young adults. What we need to work on next: parents should stop wasting money on the supposed social necessity of basically sending their newly grown kids off to camp for four years to goof off. Have real college for real degrees such as pre-med, and do the rest (the humanities, great-books programs) with cheap but perfectly good online correspondence courses for credit, or online for FREE for your own edification. The Internet puts the library of Alexandria to shame; it's more than cat videos. And don't look down on vo-tech; you can make great money in a trade and college isn't for everyone. Thing is, for formative social experience (not today's sheltered kids), so young adults can be adults, you need real communities such as extended families, neighborhoods, and towns again, which we largely don't have anymore.
• CDC admits sneeze droplets can spread ebola. Travel ban. Quarantine. Now. By the way, the doctor in New York who caught it on his charity tour of west Africa lied to officials about his whereabouts in town before showing symptoms. Sort of gives the game away: that charity tourism is really selfish, showing off.
• Interesting professional jargon. Don't forget "idiopathic," medical for "I don't know why." I knew "BCGs": as part of the military's programming recruits (yes, brainwashing; here necessary), they deliberately make you wear ugly glasses (but only during training). Cracked is still non-putdown good most of the time, dealing with history and other facts, except for its politically correct (male feminist) sermons.
• Liberal secularism is a comprehensive doctrine in competition with other comprehensive doctrines. Why the name "the Cathedral" fits. It's a Christian heresy, a rival true church.
• Things aren't all sunshine and roses in the real church. Now with The Spectator, Damian Thompson calls them on it: Bishop having affairs was OK; semi-trad parish is screwed over. Conry was ‘one of us’, you see: a member of the Magic Circle of ambitious liberals (life president, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor; honorary press officer, Doctor A. Ivereigh) who had various nuncios wrapped round their little fingers. Meanwhile, what about Catholics who are not ‘one of us’? The libs are dying out slowly; banzai charges like this are to be expected.
• Why the media's Ukraine narrative fell apart. I'm hoping for a Catholic-friendly, authoritarian conservative (part of Slavic culture) Russia Jr., not a Western shill.

Dumbing down Halloween, making the world the SWPLs' playground, and more

• Three ways overprotective parents are ruining Halloween. Happy vigil of All Saints! I'm with John Zmirak, among others: it's really Catholic folklore; do and love the secular fun stuff but remember what it really means. You don't have to make it all pious, though you CAN have your kids be little saints, priests, and nuns. And some conservative Protestants ironically are re-paganizing it by making it into a fall harvest fest (Samhain!) rather than about witches, ghosts, etc. Of course it is a Northern European harvest fest too. Autumn: there's nothing like a evening with a cold nip and the smell of smoke in the air, with the leaves still on the trees all in warm colors. Add a bright moon and some hoodoo-ey jazz and it's perfection.
• Donna's prize-winning costume this year.
• What that "harassment" video really means. The point the video's makers accidentally (?) make (or is it a dog whistle?), giving themselves away, as some bloggers have pointed out. To such people, "urban renewal" really means clearing out scary minorities to make downtowns into safe playgrounds for themselves, not real communities including working-class whites and minorities. Anti-white is at the top of their hierarchy of truths, but they don't care about real minority people. They care about minorities inasmuch as they're cannon fodder in their war on conservative, less-well-off whites; otherwise they want nothing to do with them and often don't. Roissy and Steve Sailer weigh in.
• Reminds me: stages of the sexual revolution and homosexualism as I remember them playing out. In the beginning it was jolly clear: happy hunting for alpha letches; Christianity with its purity, modesty, respect for women, etc., was for losers who couldn't get any or hypocrites. (Watch the change in tone in reruns of "M*A*S*H": Hawkeye the p*ssy hound while Frank Burns sounded like both the church and political correctness, before Hawkeye started making fashionable sensitive-guy noises.) Then political correctness replaced Christianity as more people got hurt by "the new morality"; ripping off the ethics but dumping Christ, with ridiculous results (pushing girls into roles they're not suited for; preaching male feminism) and STILL happy hunting for alpha psychos. The losers are the nice guys who would have lived happily ever after with nice girls in 1960, and the nice girls who bought into "Sex and the City" (the lie: forget nice guys; go for sexy strangers, and the state and your circle of BFFs will always support you) and Eat, Pray, Love, who end up barren cat ladies ("alpha widows") after their looks hit the wall. Gay Is Good started by desensitizing America, which before didn't talk about this problem in polite society: bringing up homosexuality if only to make fun of it. (Isn't that a Marxist tactic? "Manners? Bourgeois bullsh*t!") Once you've invaded Middle America's consciousness, push acceptance. Now several American states legally pretend the same sex marries; people with mental illnesses are treated like latter-day Martin Luther Kings.
• New Urbanism hijacked for leisure-class contests, and the plague of cars turning suburban streets into one-way roads. Quote: There’s absolutely nothing civic, communal, cohesive, or enriching about these large playground oases in the urban jungle.
• The Obamaverse: small world. Steve Sailer's made that point before: that Obama's parents were non-Communist leftists, a type our government cultivated.
• 52 parishes affected in upcoming Archdiocese of New York closings and mergers. How's that "renewal" working out for youse?
• "You can call me Books." No wonder B. Dalton went out of business. I remember these commercials but don't remember this character being so pudgy and effeminate. They were going for cute but no. Hemingway. Spillane. Chandler. Books are for wusses. Yeah, right.
• From the Anti-Gnostic:
  • The message of modern Christendom is one of endless cession and accommodation to her illiberal enemies. Islam, by contrast, gives its followers certitude and tells them to bide their time. Secularized Christianity is now the Establishment, which is why the desert creed of Islam evangelizes. Political correctness, is Protestantism's spawn, another Christian heresy, the ethics minus the theology.
  • How it all works. This game of economic musical chairs ends when the US can no longer uphold its end of the balance sheet: the US military is no longer able to assure global hegemony; the US populace is no longer adding value; US markets no longer supply or demand products with long, sophisticated production chains. It will end when it ends. And it will end.
  • A day in the life of Michael Brown. In an integral community for Michael Brown, old bulls with similar time preference and T-levels are on hand to channel aggression into socially redemptive pursuits. (Black America has been decimated of its older, steadier males thanks to welfare enabling women to sleep with attractive lotharios, and criminal laws drafted by whites who prefer higher levels of organizational complexity.) Instead, he's in a dysfunctional, matriarchal stew ruled by vestigial public-sector whites hanging on for pensions and seniority, even as their private sector peers slip away to the next county. Going up a number of levels above Mike Brown's world, African Big Men like Robert Mugabe are not actually cynical. Robert Mugabe is as sincere in his principles as Ron Paul is in his: you reward your friends and punish your enemies; you get while the gettin's good; you spread the green around and buy status for your family. The Non-Aggression Principle? Nigga pleaz. This is the problem with good-hearted whites: they think inside everybody is just another classical liberal or social democrat trying to get out. Rich whites' vices (promiscuity fueled by contraception, frivorce, socialism) are disastrous for blacks.

The situation in the Catholic Church summed up, and about Eastern Catholics and Orthodox

• The situation in the Catholic Church summed up, from one of the Anti-Gnostic's commenters:

  Depends on how long we can stave off a schism. The modernists are getting OLD, and they know it. The number of under-35 progressives who actually take the Catholic Church seriously enough to want to staff its institutions is pretty negligible. Of course, the modernists still hold a lot of power — enough to elect a friendly Pope and run the Vatican machinery — and if the cold wind of death prompts them to make a suicidal banzai charge, they could easily detonate most of the institutional Church in Europe, and big chunks of it elsewhere. Their situation is roughly analogous to that of Soviet leadership around 1979 or so — superficially strong, but well aware that their days are numbered, which makes them particularly dangerous.

• The Pope declares there is no conflict between evolution, the Big Bang theory, and Catholicism... in 1951. Never fazed me; the media are ignorant. Still anti-Catholic, plus as they become worse educated with mainstream society, when they hear "Christian," they think "fundamentalist." We CAN believe in a young earth or six-day creation but don't have to! Derek Olsen quotes St. Augustine: It is enough for the Christian to believe that the only cause of all created things, whether heavenly or earthly, whether visible or invisible, is the goodness of the Creator, the one true God. So I've believed since high school and have never looked back. There are different theories of evolution, and they are ONLY theories, such as theistic (the universe has a beginning; a prime mover logically must exist; God intervened and gave man a soul "made in his image") vs. random chaos.
• Ruthenian renaissance. The Ukraine's best-kept secret since it doesn't fit the Western liberal narrative (which wants to turn the Ukraine into secularist Czechia). Greek Catholicism as seen by EWTN via the National Catholic REGISTER. In Catholic Defcon 1 (real persecution, as in Iraq), the Ukraine is our model: a whole 20th-century, partly urban traditional Catholic church went underground. (Is acting Metropolitan Volodymyr being considered for canonization? Maybe he should be.)
• The two sides of Orthodoxy, as heard through Fr. Arsenie (Papacioc) in Romania. "The kinds of temptation" and against ecumenism. In its positive statements, "this ancient and vast tradition is entirely Catholic" as revert Archimandrite Serge (Keleher) wrote, and of course the good elder mirrors our true-church claim. Their hardliners, as I imagine he is (the first clip is from the convert ’zine turned site Death to the World), are wrong about their ecumenists. "Ecumenist" is a fight-picking insult in their church, partly because they hate and fear us so much (they exist as a separate church to hate us, because the sultans, tsars, and Communists wanted it that way). So anybody who adopts the Gregorian calendar, recognizes our sacraments (only speculation to them, never doctrine), and talks to us is suspect. Wrong: I figured this out when I figured out our few quisling "Orthodox in communion with Rome" convert Greek Catholics. The ecumenists do NOT want to come back to us. No, they want to persuade US to dump our doctrine, then ask the Orthodox to receive us economically in our orders. By the way, you've got to love the irony of someone preaching anti-Westernism with Da Vinci's Last Supper in the background.
• Regarding Death to the World, "why don't we traditionalists do something like that?" Because we don't need to (time's on our side; the few remaining practicing Catholic kids are conservative) and it's a gimmick (gotten from evangelicalism, not a bad thing per se) that wouldn't work anyway. The Orthodox convert mini-fad has burned out; Owen White's point a few years ago. I've read all 1,000-plus pages of Not of This World; Fr. Seraphim (Rose) made very good Guénon traditionalist points against modernity, just like our best trads, but everything he said, Chesterton said better 80 years ago, more humorously and without the dangers of schism and what Christian Order warns against (see below). It's Rome or the abyss: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, even if you're conservative and high-church as they are.
• Eastern Orthodoxy unveiled. From Christian Order. Most of us are not prepared to consider that Orthodoxy is something radically different, and even opposed, to Catholicism. A man claiming to be a Catholic apologist sounds like their hardliners. Sed contra, see Fr. Serge above. There are many schools of theology and spirituality in the church, only agreeing on doctrine. The rest is the university, the debating society. We don't want to mirror the Orthodox' worst apologists, who try so hard to deny they're really Catholic they accept anything anti-, so they end up sounding Pelagian about original sin, maybe pantheist as this accuses, universalist (apocatastatist) about purgatory and hell (if you pray for the dead, as they assiduously do, an intermediate state is only logical; anything else would violate free will, but logic's not their strength), and Lutheran about the Eucharist; also, thinking the modern Protestant lies about contraception, divorce, and remarriage are the true patristic faith because they're anti-Roman. (Liberal Orthodoxy: ripoff of French ressourcement Catholics; conservative: ripoff of Thomism.) So this article may well be a screed but it makes me think. At the very least you get a muzzled church harmless to the state and status quo, historically exactly what they were and their real appeal to escapist surrender monkey Rod Dreher. Orthodoxy = Catholicism - 20 IQ points + ethnocentrism/caesaropapism/Erastianism -> in America, ethnic clubs for the elderly.

Is Pope Francis literally crazy?

• Is Pope Francis of sound mind? The dementia hypothesis. On one hand, I just go where the old catechism's upheld; the Pope might as well be a crash-test dummy as he's only supposed to be a caretaker. And the Soviets used to use stuff like this against their dissidents. On the other, maybe?
• Fr. Hunwicke speaks.
• J.P. Sears on how to be ultra spiritual. Sanctimony the new American way.
• The Francis of veeps opens his mouth again. Good old Bad Catholic Joe Biden. They'd never let a conservative get away with saying that. Also: The fact is, liberalism is no more than a shopworn and shabby euphemism for communism, an economic and political "philosophy" under which, in the 20th century alone, a little over 200 million individual human beings were deliberately and systematically murdered by their own governments.
• Ralph Nader respects Ron Paul and thinks Rand's a sellout.
• Anglicans and Oriental Orthodox (Monophysites) have official agreement on Christology. With the Catholic Church of course this would mean something. Anyway we see the OOs as Orthodox, estranged Catholics (meeting the three criteria for valid bishops: very basic orthodoxy, succession, and belief in a complete change at the Eucharist). The scholarly near-consensus now is that it was all a big misunderstanding; Greeks vs. non-Greek Easterners. The bromance the Orthodox have with the OOs is new and historically ironic. All the ancient churches, before the "Reformation," have taught they're the true one; the ancient heresies such as the Arians thought they were the Catholics (the Gnostic ones didn't). The other Lesser Eastern church, the Nestorians (in Iraq, outsized by their Chaldean Catholic daughter), used to, until Anglican influence; their official church, whose patriarch is now based in Illinois, no longer does but there's a small, obscure "True" Church of the East that still does. Anyway, does it mean anything or, as some conservative Anglicans suspect, is this just more Latitudinarianism, "Anglican fudge"? After all, in their system, apostasy is possible, only a synod/convention vote away. (The late Catholic-turned-Orthodox-turned-Catholic Archimandrite Serge: What's next, the Mohammedans being "pre-Nicene Orthodox"?)
• Golden-era TV clip. "Please Please Me": the Bee Gees in '63. Who else thinks it's weirdly inappropriate for two little boys to be singing this really racy song? Anyway, cute, complete with corny choreography. Barry Gibb looks great here; the Mancunian-bred by-way-of-Australia trio sound like Aussie chipmunks, before they found their niche with sweet ballads, even before their brief reign as disco kings. No questioning their professionalism; Sir George Martin remembers they were perfectionists in the studio, with their close harmonies. Here, on Aussie TV, miming like on "American Bandstand."

Photos: more vintage in New Jersey

TV's "Green Hornet": This looks like the laziest idea for a superhero. He's just me with a Lone Ranger eye mask! I know this show was Bruce Lee's big break (he was Kato, the "Robin" sidekick). The theme music sounded like a ripoff of "Flight of the Bumblebee."

In the '80s, there was a pretty good show called "The Equalizer" that was about an old guy who just knew things and was brave and made himself into a kind of private eye/superhero to help get people out of bad trouble. I thought it was awesome because he was, basically, just someone who didn't put up with the crap and used his ordinary human abilities and knowledge. It was like being brave and wanting to help people was his superpower.

Yes, starring Edward Woodward from The Wicker Man. Loved that show. It was serious, not camp; a superior detective show. "The Mentalist" is similar.

Theory about rap, plus the sexes and the faith

• How to kill a community: lessons from mediocre rappers. Interesting ideas. Rebuttal: maybe the answer's not to blame capitalism or whitey the way the white left does. I don't hate rap per se. It's not music, which has a tune; the best of it is street poetry.
• The secret dual lives of people living with mental illness.
• Quoted by Sunshine Mary: Women want to enter male spaces and make the space feminine, as a power play, not out of any interest in the things of value in that male space, which they inevitably destroy. This is a key issue in gamergate, where feminists demand that the games should be no fun and no one should play them. Women want to rule, even though it makes them unhappy — it is a fitness test. They are looking for men that can defeat them, master them, and put them in their proper place. Bob Wallace denies there are sh*t tests but this makes sense.
• Quoted by Roissy: Nor does the sexual promiscuity of Brave New World seem so very distant. There are already certain American cities in which the number of divorces is equal to the number of marriages. In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time. As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate. — Aldous Huxley, 1947
• The separated brethren: the Queen gives approval for women bishops. Gone: a certain image of England. Elizabeth II has a lot of admirable qualities but she's not necessarily conservative. Or chances are she's bound by the unwritten "constitution," long-standing custom: she rubber-stamps what the government approves.
• Apparently in the Church of England, "traditional Anglo-Catholic" now only means "doesn't like women, nudge, wink," so such have no real problem with their leader doing this: Bishop Jonathan Baker gets OK to divorce and remarry... with the divorced wife of a priest. The same church whose mainstream (the Archbishop of Canterbury) as recently as 1936 refused to marry the King to Mrs. Simpson. Does anybody else see a Forward in Faith/Affirming Catholic merger on the horizon? (The gays don't like the girls, but the girls back the gays, so the gays owe them one.) Baker was also, until becoming a bishop, a Freemason. This thing isn't Catholic; the congregationalism won't work in the long run. But if you grew up in that "Catholic" setting, that takes a while to figure out.
• The traditional Mass cannot be stage-managed. This is the heart of the opposition to it among bishops, especially in Europe. It is Tradition itself that manages the Mass of the Ages, and whoever celebrates this Mass, cardinal, bishop or priest, must submit himself to the Mass, must submit himself to the Sacrifice that he is offering, and in that submission realizes his ministry as a priest of God. — Fr. Richard G. Cipolla, D.Phil.
• SS. Simon and Jude.

Vintage in New Jersey

Dream car: '60 Pontiac Star Chief, Haddon Farmers Market (formerly the Black Horse Pike Drive-In), on the outskirts of Camden.

Space age: Mass at St. Vincent Pallotti, Haddonfield, a recently merged parish with St. Aloysius, St. Joseph the Worker (how's that "renewal" working out for youse?): 1963 building, extreme angles and four confessionals, a few not used; ultra-modern but built for the old religion, a thriving church that self-destructed just a few years later. Still lots of Catholics in South Jersey, though; very Italian. But what's interesting is the slow turnaround is under way. Benedict the Great's reformed text means we've won, only the guitar and Eucharistic-minister brigade, in evidence at this parish, doesn't know it yet. You've got '70s guitar stuff AND reform of the reform, duking it out in the same place. Charismatics do the orans position at the Our Father; welcome! Priest wears a fiddleback and uses a burse and chalice veil, and there was a beautiful organ postlude just like at my parish.

I think the only way people could understand the former English paraphrase of the Novus Ordo in a Catholic way was if you knew the old Mass and/or the new one in Latin. Most older Catholics just ignored the paraphrase since they “knew” the Mass isn’t really in English; that’s why Catholics aren’t attached to English translations/paraphrases. The young were clueless until the conservative turnaround started around 25 years ago.

Benedict was “the Great” because he fixed the new Mass in English so the English now matches the Latin. No heresy, no conscience problem; we won. I came back to the church three weeks after he did it (long time in the making but circumstances allowed it, right then). I can go to Mass anywhere in the country even if I don’t like the ceremonial (that’s on them, not me).

By the way, Eucharistic Prayer II, the express-line canon, reminds me of the Lutheran liturgy with only the Verba for the consecration.

You wouldn't know it, but as my friend Karl says, St. Anthony was the Billy Graham of his day.

The Pop Shop, Collingswood, NJ: pretty good retro made up of real things rescued from other places, with a modern gourmet burger menu. Best times to go are outside the lunch and dinner rushes, which are when it becomes a loud kiddieland.

Dig It, Collingswood.

Nigra sum sed formosa: S. Maria Sacratissimi Tindaris.
"I am black but comely," Song of Solomon 1:5, part of an antiphon in the office for the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The Memorare in Italian:

Orazione di San Bernardo
Ricordatevi, o piisima Vergine Immacolata Maria, non essersi mai udito che sia stato abbandonato chi ha ricorso a voi, implorato il vostro aiuto chiesto il vostro soccorso.

Io animato di tale confidenza o Madre Vergine delle Vergini a voi ricorro a voi vengo. Innanzi a voi peccatore contrite mi prostro: non vogliate o Madre dei Verbo, sdegnare le mie preghiere, ma ascoltatemi propizia ed esauditemi cosi sia.

Chewsdy

• You can't understand ISIS if you don't know the history of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia.
• "Do you miss the Orthodox liturgy?" Of course Gabriel's no BS. Don't compare Byzantine and Novus Ordo; compare Byzantine and Tridentine.
• Women's besetting sin is pride. Interesting how women's temptations are at heart more cerebral and spiritual and men's more carnal. (Counterpoint: women's sexuality unhinged is even more chaotic and amoral; men often are romantics pining for "the one and only," even after she's frivorced you and is taking up with sexy strangers.) We're attracted to looks, first and foremost: make strong babies. Women's instincts want to build strong babies too, but they're attracted to men's power more than looks in order to accomplish that.
• Episcopalianism's "credal orthodoxy." David Mills answers me. Good point about the reductionism of the concept "credal orthodoxy." But I never said "basically okay." I'm not an Episcopalian anymore for a reason. Just trying to be fair, not like the hardline Orthodox whose narrow ecclesiology almost denies that we Catholics are Christian (so they don't recognize our baptism), nor the ignorant, outdated assumption of conservative Catholics that Episcopalians are still like James Pike and John Spong, basically unbelievers. No, they realize that a church about nothing has no appeal, so they're now into a back-to-basics movement paralleling our "reform of the reform" under Pope Benedict the Great. Also, high-church Anglicans have always thought credal orthodoxy, church history, and liturgical minutiae and garb (birettas, etc.) are fun. They're not like Catholic liberals. But, although the Episcopalians market themselves now as "Catholics with a difference" (historical, high, but open-minded), they're really Protestants. Like the evangelicals they hate, they'd say Jesus is God and an authority, but the "authority" they're following is really themselves. If's it's between the Church Historic and "self-evident" modern "truths" about sex and the sexes, it would be adiós, church. Because they have Articles XIX and XXI: fallible church.

Blaming ex-Catholics for the demise of the old Episcopalianism

Dale wrote under this post:

John, the demise of Nashotah House is perhaps systematic of what happened throughout the whole of the old Episcopal Church. Often not mentioned is that often those who plotted the liturgical and theological implosion of the Episcopal Church were converts from Roman Catholicism; both James Pike as well as Ms Katharine Jefferts Schori were former Catholics. Unfortunately, the older, more tolerant Episcopal Church and its members had no defense against such individuals, and there were many of them. Anglicans of a former time had always embraced toleration, but within limits that accepted boundaries; former Catholics did not understand these boundaries, and felt that since there was neither Pope or Magisterium, the sky was the limit; and behaved accordingly.

Interesting theory. I disagree.

Some family history: my late dad was one of those ex-Catholics but, God love him, not at all radical (he and my mom resisted the Sixties culturally and politically; he was a civilian Cold Warrior in aerospace; they were for Goldwater). Growing up, he had his personality clashes with priests and nuns; he married a nice WASP and wanted to assimilate. He came back to the church in the end. Unlike me, he liked Vatican II. Meanwhile, my mother was from a parish where Bishop Pike was rector before becoming a bishop, before he was famous, and she said he was off his nut. There were two Episcopal parishes in her home town; her family belonged to the "regular" low-church one were Mr. Pike was. The Anglo-Catholic one is now in the Continuum and has kept its building.

But Pike got started in Episcopalianism at the very Catholic-like St. Mary of the Angels in Hollywood (in the Continuum, still only a wafer's thickness away from the church as far as I know) and, given the more conservative, more orthodox mainstream culture (the golden era, the Fifties), he got started in his media career (the "Dean Pike" TV show in New York) teaching orthodox stuff (rather like the late Fr. Louis Tarsitano, one of the few ex-Catholic Anglicans I respect), of course anti-Catholic but not at all screwball.

(Once somebody asked a late, sound Anglo-Catholic rector here what Pike might have experienced dying in the Judean desert, and he said he hoped to ask him that.)

Episcopalians have long tried to snag American Catholics, and with the same bait ("we're open-minded; we're for thinking men; you don't have to check your brain in at the door; Rome's tyrannical and unreasonable — spiritual bullying; become American"). They managed to get a few improbable Italian converts (St. Rocco's and St. Anthony's) and the Polish National Catholics as their junior varsity for a long while, as they do "Hispanic outreach" today. But then and now, ex-Catholics among them are relatively very few! (As is the case with American Orthodox.) Of those, lots of divorced and remarried (actually recent in Episcopalianism) with a few marriage-convert priests, a few convert women priests, and a few gays.

I've said for some time that, except for the Hispanic false-flag operation, we really don't compete. Their real rivals are other Calvinist-bred English Protestants or apostates: the United Church of Christ (the Pilgrims today) and the Unitarians. If you're a WASP, an anglophile, and think credal orthodoxy, history, and liturgical high culture, including the trappings of traditional Catholicism, are fun, then Episcopalianism's for you.

If I thought I could invent a church that both pleased me and I thought would please the most people (and if I didn't know that male feminism actually turns off most women), the Episcopal Church would come pretty close.

These days they seem to try to market themselves as "Catholics with a difference" (conservative in a cool, cultured way but also "open-minded" and "relevant"), rather than as Protestants (associating that term with evangelicals and fundamentalists, whom of course they oppose), all without trying to alienate the few really low churchmen they still have, but with most ex-Catholics and mainstream society, no deal.

As the famous lapsed-Catholic quotation says, "I left the true church; why should I bother with yours?" Deep down, our people have known there's only one church as they were taught. They are more likely to drop out than buy Episcopalianism.

Also why historically, ex-Catholics almost never became Anglo-Catholic or similarly high-church (the big exception being the false-flag operation for the Italian converts: the Foreign Rites Canon). Knowing the real thing, they thought homegrown A-Cs were laboring under a delusion. After Vatican II, when Catholic parishes turned low-church mainline while congregationalist A-Cs remained conservative, even Tridentine (a phenomenon that produced me, essentially), that seemed murky. Also, mainstream Episcopal parishes have high-churched since the Sixties, continuing a fashion that started in the '30s, because of ecumenism (we were considered cool for a bit, before Humanae Vitae and Roe v. Wade) and "diversity"/exoticism.

So I don't think ex-Catholics were a big factor in the old Episcopalianism's demise. Rather, its internal contradictions, its own nature, and the Sixties did that.

Bishop Schori isn't a conscious ex-Catholic as you know; her parents left the church when she was a little girl. So it's not fair to lump her in with Pike and the others. Yet Mrs. Ryan remained religiously conservative, opposing women's ordination and becoming Orthodox, and being dissed in death by her daughter.

By the way, I think you know what I'm referring to regarding American Orthodox jurisdictions' experiments with konvertzy. The Metropolia did it in the '20s, roughly around the time it got a few zealous ex-Episcopal priest converts (Bishop Ignatius Nichols, for example); it set up Archbishop Aftimios as the head of his own jurisdiction but lost interest in it and him, mired in its own problems after the Russian Revolution. So he got married and skedaddled. Similarly, I've read some vagante group or two claim online (largely Internet churches) that they're descended from a similar affiliate experiment started (then dropped, quietly?) by ROCOR in the early '50s (such as that New Age convert they made a bishop, then fired).

Thinking about it today, konvertzy outliers would have gone to vagante-land back then but are more likely to just jurisdiction-shop and hop now: ROCOR (such as the cult of Fr. Seraphim Rose) and the Old Calendarist Greeks as destinations for people craving order in Orthodoxy's chaos. (Rod Dreher joined ROCOR simply for a practical reason: it has lower requirements to set up a mission church than his entry jurisdiction, the OCA.)

Another school shooting, and church matters

• Another high school shot up. My theory: No kidding; high school stinks for many kids. But 50 years ago lots of boys had hunting guns and this didn't happen. As society gets meaner (do your own thing, man = every man for himself -> just die already), watch school become more so (kids who should be starting to learn how to be civilized; they're not) and see more cases of kids pushed too far and going on killing sprees.
• Maybe Nashotah House isn't "Catholic" anymore. Time was, Anglo-Catholics were sincere born Anglicans, or free churchmen who became Anglicans, who weren't trying to snag Catholics; some were trying to BE Catholics. Now I read the Episcopalians' leading high-church seminary, relatively conservative, has as its new dean an ex-Catholic priest and ex-monk "who left the church in 1994, joined a body whose orders even the Episcopalians don't recognize, got married, and years later has his Catholic orders accepted. Not to mention that suspicious leaving monastic life to go straight into Congregationalist pastoring" for 15 years. Not my problem but I feel for the few conservative high churchmen left in their semi-autonomous parish system. It doesn't work in the long run.
• In the church, liberals, conservatives, traditionalists, divisions.
• Non-ethnic Orthodoxy (pan-Orthodox) has been a long, half-hearted experiment in America; both the Metropolia/OCA ('20s) and even ROCOR ('40s-'50s) tried it but lost interest in it. It's probably here to stay, especially with the Antiochians, but will always be a small minority in a minority faith. Leave the Orthodox alone to sort out their own mess. We have our own issues to deal with. We'll be at more peace. At a time when left-wing ferals get their way, I'd be jumping for joy when a young adult says he or she is a Christian and goes to church every Sunday. I am; just a passing observation while talking online with a convert who goes to a multi-/non-ethnic OCA church on our West Coast, not America's ethnic Eastern European stronghold back East.

ALS breakthrough, more ebola, and what's right about beta males

• This sounds huge. Cause of ALS is found, Northwestern team says. Lou Gehrig's disease, part of the group of diseases the British know as motor neurone disease. The society editor since around 1962 at my last newspaper was married to an artist who died of this 20 or 30 years ago.
• Ebola's now in New York, thanks to a Doctors Without Borders doctor. Again, don't believe anything the government's saying about our safety. As for the victim, the road to hell and all that. Come on. Raise the drawbridge for both my and the common good. Travel restrictions, NOW!
• The red pill is wrong: becoming a better beta. Sunshine Mary's sort of back, solely reblogging others' posts. Here's a smart manosphere alternative, along with Bob Wallace, that doesn't sound mainstream sappy (the problem with Brett and Kate McKay's site, plus they look down on the golden era they illustrate with: kitsch), just like Mary never did, nor abusive to women and otherwise sociopathic (the Dark Triad). Bob says much the same: don't lose your soul by imitating the jerks; rather, like the Army slogan, "be all that you can be," ἀρέτη (areté). Roissy at his less bombastic agrees: most men are betas (nice guys who can both lead AND follow, not psychopaths), which shouldn't be a putdown like "gamma" or "omega," because you need betas for civilization. Unsurprisingly, civilization, such as America 50 years ago, was better to them: an average nice guy could find an average nice girl, so civilization was passed on. Now you have a collapse of civilization (I saw that start, from 1968 to 1972), a return to the jungle. Plus: Bob says in nature there really are no alpha wolves, just fathers. Patriarchs!
• Liberal diversity: all four "View" hosts bash the Catholic Church. Conservative self-pity pieces are a dime a dozen but there's so much that needs to be said about this. What strikes me is the common thread of American Protestant culture. 75-150 years ago it was naturally ethnocentric, loyal to one's one kind and home: preserve WASPness and keep the Irish and Italians out. Men were men, etc. Now, lefty leapfrogging loyalty (exoticism, fetishizing the Other in a war with your own kind: "diversity," really pawns and a helot class... also, showing off by going to Africa and then bringing ebola home) and feminism (the suffragettes gone amok: girls are envious of what they think are men's privileges but of course can't handle men's responsibilities, and end up making themselves miserable by trying to go against nature) rule, but these thoroughly modern women and the historical WASP society ladies and KKK auxiliary agree: no popery. Just like a Thomas Nast cartoon. Plus ça change plus c'est la même. "The Catholic Church needs to change." Backhanded tribute: you only get mad at things you care about. Nobody cares that Norse religion isn't true, as Chesterton said.
• Becoming a committed Catholic man. The trick is how to do this without being or seeming contrived or gay. Also, read the link above about the destruction of men's support. Men's non-participation in church is an unwritten rule/tacitly approved in so many cultures including Catholic (Italian and Spanish) ones. No gimmicks. Follow the rules and the grace will come. Go to Mass when the church says, confess and commune once a year, say some prayer every day (it doesn't have to be showy and probably shouldn't be), don't sleep around, and support your wife and kids (easier said than done in our lousy system and economy, but a man doesn't back down).
• Is Bill Cosby a rapist? Unlikely. This piece seems to hate him for his admirable curmudgeonliness to other Negroes: golden-era social conservatism based on common sense. I've long known he's not the cute characters he often plays. The story I've read is that a man with his power (which attracts women like pretty and shapely attracts men) of course has lots of women throwing themselves at him so he's arrogant, expecting, even demanding it; he's rude if the girl says no. Still, if someone shoots him down, there's plenty more where that came from. So if he's healthy, albeit unpleasant, he doesn't "need" to roofie or force himself on women. But he could be a sadistic psycho. Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. He may not be a gentleman but that's not necessarily a crime. By the way, I didn't like "The Cosby Show," not because they were black but I thought his and the wife characters were insufferable snobs.
• Roissy notes that SWPLs are the biggest prudes, just like their white Anglo-Saxon cousins, the evangelicals they love to hate. Maybe face-value idiocy such as "yes means yes" rules for sex (taken literally as a nice guy might, of course the girl is turned off: "Why do you keep asking permission like a little boy? Take me!") is just classic face-saving for such, commonly called playing hard to get: write, pass, and give lip service to a dumb rule to save face ("I'm not a slut"), but enforce it and watch the boredom set in.
• Sparring with Episcopal Fr. Mitchican:
  • Confession.
  • Schismatic. "We are all schismatics" means "there is no church." In the Anglican version, the church, its history, its ideas (sure, orthodoxy's cool), and its garb are fun, but ultimately not necessary if Articles XIX and XXI are true. So the English don't go to church anymore.
• Like the golden era it came from, Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" was ambivalent about religion. Sparky Schulz was a devout Protestant to begin with but the Sixties turned him into, in his own words, "a secular humanist." You had resident intellectual Linus quoting Luke's gospel in the Christmas show, then the cartoon sort of ridiculing faith (again, Linus) in the strip and in the Halloween show the next year (saw it this year and of course liked it). "Peanuts" hit its stride around '65: an intellectual cartoon for grownups. In the '70s it became one for children and to sell Hallmark merch. By the way, Vince Guaraldi's great piano jazz in the shows was Lee Mendelson's idea; Schulz wasn't a fan. RIP Charlie Brown.
• Ten minutes of Vince Guaraldi. Now that's music.

Quick bites

• Who you gonna call? There's just something about the Catholic Church.
• Why I don't read libertarian links much anymore: a quote from Ann Sterzinger at Takimag. "Trite and predictable complaints about the U.S. being trite and predictable." It's just lefty snobbery and leapfrogging loyalties ("anything but American") from people who sort of understand economics.
• Oppression juicing. #firstworldproblems. As Owen White has said, echoing the Soviet view, gay rights is a bourgeois cause. The silliness of girls at schools such as Wellesley pretending to be men (so why are they allowed to stay at Wellesley?), majoring not in business, engineering, or physics but "gender studies" and complaining about not being "emotionally safe." Yeah, right. Very manly. (Wise prediction from the Takimag combox: when boys pretending to be girls want to go to Wellesley, watch Wellesley resist.) Also, regarding college RAs as lefty social engineers: I didn't have that happen but did in high school: "Madison Plan," a form of liberal indoctrination in the form of little discussion groups. Sort of a soft psychobabble Sixties-'70s version of the Young Pioneers. I smelled a rat even back then and resisted this with all my might, ditching meetings. Maybe I wasn't so clueless as a kid after all.
• "Why do people leave the Catholic Church and what stops people from becoming Catholic?" As I like to say, the flashpoint of all heresy is God's creation, particularly the material (though it began with the fallen angels), rebelling against him; this has three battles: who Jesus is, the Eucharist, and sex. Implicitly, it's about the church: God meeting man through the church or man saying "I will not serve." For moderns it's all about sex. The imposter churches (from Orthodox contraception and divorce & remarriage to Protestant women clergy and same-sex marriage) and the secular world tell you what you want to hear about illicit sex, including with plausible hard cases (discarded wives deserving a second chance, etc.). The devil's not stupid; he knows how to argue. Sin is always aimed towards an apparent good.
• Gay men: they're not really like women. Face to Face has noticed that too.
• "Believe you are saved by faith; act like you are saved by works." I think Cardinal Pole said that. Great man.
• "What needs to change in the church?" Mother Teresa: "You and me."

The other "Old Catholics": the English ones

Coming from the same culture as the old high churchmen, even quietly (?) dissident like the Non-Jurors, you had the English "Old Catholics" who hung in there through the penal times, not to be confused with the schismatic Old Catholic Church in continental Europe a couple of centuries later, now really Episcopalians. Recusancy was an option for the very rich such as the Tichbornes: pay the fines for non-attendance at the Anglican church, have no say in the government (before Catholic emancipation), and be left alone in your castle or manor to have Mass while the cops looked the other way. Discreet, low-profile, both by necessity and very English. I admit I don't know much about it. I understand it was swamped by immigrant Irish Catholicism in the 1800s, the exuberant, newly liberated church that ex-Anglican converts like Cardinal Manning led in Britain. (There was a huge religious revival in Ireland, led by now-maligned local clergy and nuns, the pious Irishness exported to America with Ireland's excess people, becoming the dutiful, devout but streetwise Irish of American legend and fact, from cardinals to politicians to cops to bar owners. The Irish back home have lapsed again.) These "Old Catholics" resented it and all but disappeared, at least from the national consciousness.

Same happened in America: some of these low-key "Old Catholics" came here (Maryland, for example) in colonial times (looking for relief from the Anglicans, ironically like the extremely anti-Catholic Puritans were), were swamped by Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholicism brought here in the 1800s-early 1900s (that plus Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are what Americans think of as Catholic, from St. Patrick's Day to The Godfather), and resented it. There's German Catholicism here too; has been for a long time, as exuberantly baroque and liturgical in pure form as Polish, but it seems to have blended in over here, plus some Midwestern liberals came from that. There used to be German-language national parishes here in Philadelphia, from the 1800s; long closed or turned Puerto Rican. The Matt family of The Wanderer and The Remnant are from the old German-American Catholicism. (The Wanderer was originally a then-mainstream Catholic paper in German.)

There's a snotty Anglican expression, at once anti-Catholic and asserting branch theorists' and Anglo-Catholics' claims to be THE church of the rrrrrealm, like "the Rrrrrrroman Church," "the Rrrrrromans," etc., a distortion of the Catholic claim to be the true church: "the Italian Mission to the Irish." I understand now in England it's to the Polish. There were Episcopalians who seriously believed that too, even Bishop Charles Grafton: THEY were the lawful bishops in America; the papists were interlopers.

Canada's heroes, and more

RIP Cpl. Nathan Cirillo

• Don't underestimate the Canadians, as retired Mountie and Parliament Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers showed courage under fire in the best British tradition. The country's more liberal and less religious than the U.S., arguably more Protestant (Catholic immigration came here), so SWPLs love the idea of it, but I like to think stories like these, much of which is history I didn't know (the SS usually fought to the death but surrendered to Canadians), are the true spirit of the place. In related news, another crazy convert to Islam. Oh, and bring back the Red Ensign.
• Battling Newman's ghost. Someone the Anglicans still have to reckon with.
• What happens when there are no more churches? Somebody else who grew up conservative Episcopal (yes, that used to be a thing) in the midst of the yucky '70s and is thankful. On the demise of the St. Clement's, Philadelphia we knew; if this had happened as recently as 10 years ago I would have felt similarly. But Benedict the Great fixed English Novus Ordo, giving Catholics roughly the same baseline we had with the 1928 Prayer Book; better in fact if not artistically. So no despair here. The Episcopalians got control of their building back and we got another traditional Mass in Philadelphia. Sort of like the U.S. and Canada both claiming to have won the War of 1812.
• A new religion? [M]ore than half the bishops present at [the Extraordinary Synod on the Family] ... have already switched religion. Not really news and no, the church wasn't compromised. Traditionalists already knew that the bench of bishops is rife with dissent. Given that we live in an unserious age with unserious people committed to their unserious religion, I have a hard time imagining a forceful schism arising out of anything the bishops do or say. The neo-Catholic apologists will be on hand to whitewash over the obvious while an increasing number of traditionalists find themselves pondering sedevacantism. Meanwhile, the liberals will rejoice for a time as they preside over a dying remnant of what used to be the Holy Catholic Church. The church, of course, will continue, but perhaps not in the way we suspect.
• Adultery is adultery, except when we decide to ignore it. #thingsjesusneversaid. How I hate dissembling screeds such as this! Again, underneath the traditional liturgy and the ethnic folklore, they have the creed and little else. Which was a friend's correct verdict on Kallistos (Ware) after reading The Orthodox Church.
• A tour of the ballistic missile submarine Redoutable (photos).

The war in English Catholicism in 1866

Reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's line in Brideshead Revisited about the 1920s English Catholic Church being four factions trying to blackguard each other. From R.A. on Facebook.

For myself, hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. …The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now, as it was twenty years ago. Though I hold, as you know, a process of development in Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them.

— John Henry Newman, Letter to Pusey (1866)

I see much danger of an English Catholicism, of which Newman is the highest type. It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church. It takes the line of deprecating exaggerations, foreign devotions, Ultramontanism, anti-national sympathies. In one word, it is worldly Catholicism, and it will have the worldly on its side, and will deceive many.

— Henry Edward Manning to George Chetwynd Talbot, 25 February 1866

Each side has its good and bad points; both were orthodox.

Newman was a great man, smart so he was misunderstood ("too Catholic for the Anglicans; too liberal for the Catholics"): logic and orthodoxy made him a Catholic; making him a cardinal showed he was a man of the church and St. Pius X later defended him.

Although Newman was originally an Evangelical Anglican (as I believe Fr. Frederick William Faber of the second faction was), and the Tractarians had their differences with the old high churchmen (the old ones thought the Tractarians were wrong for not putting their movement under their bishops' control), here he sounds like a continuation of the old high churchmen. High churchmanship including Anglo-Catholicism was originally about a Catholic-like high view of the church's origins and authority, not exactly the sacraments (high for Protestants but still Protestant: no to transubstantiation, per the Articles of Religion), nor ceremonial nor devotions. As Episcopal Fr. Mitchican explains, its branch theory was more a triangle with Protestant Anglicanism at the top, with all the pluses of the ancient churches (Catholicism and Orthodoxy) but the best because it was "reformed." The realization that Anglicanism was man-made, not the continuation of the medieval church, of course led Newman, Manning, and others into the church. Anglo-Catholicism started in 1833 as a defense of Protestant Anglicanism's Catholic claims, set off by an effect of Catholic emancipation (the government wanted to close four Anglican dioceses in Catholic Ireland; Keble objected in his sermon "National Apostasy"), so it was against the Catholic Church. Then after Newman's conversion in 1845 (been to his home in Littlemore where Blessed Dominic Barberi brought him into the church), the generation or two after the Tractarians became what their Anglican enemies thought, would-be Catholics (Anglo-Papalism, which really got going by the 1890s?) imitating the things Faber and Manning liked: "aping" the church.

Ritualism had an earlier, mid- to late-1800s Gothic phase; the Gothic Revival in architecture from the early 1800s (the Catholic convert Pugin), part of the Romantic reaction to the Industrial Revolution that Anglo-Catholicism partly was, so you had Directorium Anglicanum (the Book of Common Prayer with Sarum ceremonial per the BCP's Ornaments Rubric).

Old high church was wonderfully conservative; Newman's theory (still only a theory) of the development of doctrine (I believe it) was trying to persuade them. They really thought the Pope was a dangerous innovator, like John Spong, General Synod, or General Convention now. Orthodoxy (underneath the traditional liturgy and ethnic folklore, Anglicanish credal correctness and little else) including its Western Rite experiment appeals to them now, but Orthodoxy has sold out on contraception, unthinkable to the original high churchmen and Tractarians.

There was a class difference. High and dry appealed to intellectuals (converts from Oxford); Italian ultramontane devotions to the masses, which most Catholics in England were, so the church and its upper-class lefty, social-justice Anglican imitators (the ritualist slum priests) used them, the ritualists first trying to bring a "national Catholicism" to the masses alienated from God by the "Enlightenment" and Industrial Revolution (and, we'd say, the "Reformation," which was evil), then frankly wanting to be Catholics but to be received in their orders.

No can do, rightly said Leo XIII in Apostolicae Curae: in the mid-1500s doctrine and practice were broken, showing Protestant intent, so an Anglican claim of apostolic succession since is belief in magic. Also no to the Old Catholic Dutch touch: ordinations in Anglican contexts are Anglican, not Catholic, and anyway, the participating schismatic Catholic bishops weren't using the Roman ordinal. (New ELCA bishops have that line of succession from the Episcopalians; of course we don't recognize them.)

The Episcopalians now? Liberal high church, another mutation of the old high churchmanship, still identifying first with Anglicanism. The anti-Romanism led to an early identification with Modernism, so liberal high church has been around for at least 100 years, alongside Anglo-Papalism. Some conservative Protestant Anglicans blame Newman and the other Tractarians for opening a Pandora's box of disobeying not only their bishops but the Book of Common Prayer including the Articles of Religion, just like the "Enlightenment" and liberal Protestants started doing to the Bible, so liberal high church is only logical based on that. The Episcopalians high-churched from the '30s to the '60s for fashion's sake, then Sixties ecumenism (Vatican II) and Sixties anti-WASPness (exoticism and turning on the old America) accelerated that. It's not Catholic liberalism: it's as credally orthodox, as sacramentally high, and almost as liturgically conservative as we traditionalists are; ecclesiologically they're Protestants: fallible church per Articles XIX and XXI. Unlike Catholic liberalism, the trappings of the church, including Manning's Italianate style, birettas and all, are fun, but ultimately the church comes second to private judgment, "self-evident" modern truths about "gender" and sexuality.

American Anglo-Catholics, not the "fashion" high churchmen, were a different mix: old high church theologically and Prayer Bookish but in Manning's Catholic garb. Whence the Continuum.

These two Catholic factions don't seem to line up with rival Catholic churchmanships now, Vatican II having muddled things. Maybe in another historical irony, traditionalists, the people who favored Manning and Faber, now sound more like Newman, while today's ultramontanists (note: ultramontanism isn't all of Catholicism, just a school of thought in it; as Fr. Hunwicke writes, Vatican I actually put a lid on them, as "define" means "to limit") are the long low-church Novus Ordo neocons (EWTN) including the "Evangelicals," the now-waning charismatics. (Reminds me of Fr. Andrew Phillips, an Englishman in ROCOR, about well-meaning people in his church: if you're trying to eat the same thing for breakfast as your clergy, you're doing it wrong.)

After years of going along with Catholic liberals on liturgy in the name of obedience, telling trads to give up their practice and become charismatics, the neocons have been slowly high-churching since the end of the '80s; the New Liturgical Movement, the Reform of the Reform, something more Manning-like.

Me? Some from both. Mass-and-office and high and dry about the papacy from Newman; old-school Italian church garb through Manning and Faber, but devotions, etc., a little toned down and in their proper theological place à la Newman's school. The Pope's office shares in the church's charism of infallibility; it was never about his person, about whom ordinary Catholics rightly cared little.

Color film clip: the Mass aboard a warship in 1945, and more

• The Mass, aboard the USS LST-782 off the coast of Iwo Jima a week before the famous battle.
• Praise be! 85-year-old Bob Davey defies death threats from Satanists to spend 22 years returning 1,000-year-old derelict church to its former glory. St. Mary's, Houghton-on-the-Hill, wrecked in the Blitz.
• The memory of this brave soldier has lived on for generations to honor. Hubert Rochereau was a second lieutenant for the French army during World War I, who died on April 26, 1918, from wounds he incurred while fighting in Belgium, according to The Guardian. His parents, who left his room untouched since the day the soldier left for war, sold the house in 1936, and included a clause in the deed that the room should be preserved that way for 500 years, according to The Telegraph. It's been almost a century since Rochereau died, and his room has stayed exactly the same as he had left it. A useless, immoral war. What a waste. RIP.
• Wrecks of U-576 and SS Bluefields, the ship it sank, found off North Carolina. Hmm, a type VIIC, the standard Battle of the Atlantic submarine, right off our coast. I thought it would be a Type IX, like the U-505 I've been aboard, a larger, long-range one more the size of our Pacific-war boats (below; also a workhorse of our Cold War Navy — the so-called fleet submarine, designed with an obsolete idea of operating with the surface fleet, accidentally ideal for a long-range commerce-raiding war across the Pacific against Japan).

Paul VI being a hypocrite

If Paul VI really loved the Orthodox he wouldn't have signed off on the Novus Ordo. No, "the spirit of Vatican II" was about working with Protestants to create a new church for a new, progressive space age, a church no longer Catholic. (Not the letter of the council.) That had nothing to do with the East; Catholic liberals don't care about the East. Some Orthodox opportunistically used the liberal version of the council ("You longer teach you're the true church? Great!") to promote their own claim ("dump some other doctrine, hand over the Uniates, and we'll receive you into the one, holy, Byzantine, and apostolic church in your orders, economically"). Understandable of them. Ecumenism's dead. Everybody knows the churches won't get back together/the Orthodox and the Protestants aren't coming back to the church. The Orthodox easily can but won't. Picture: Meeting Patriarch Athenagoras in Jerusalem 50 years ago.