While I'm at it

After describing that big musical effort on Palm Sunday in my last post, with all its beautiful sounds from our rich Catholic traditions, I guess I should also mention another, not so agreeable, sound nearly continuously filling St. Thomas's at the same time: that of screaming, fussing infants.

First, let me say that I think it's wonderful that parents want to bring their children to Mass at all. Even though the kids are too small to understand what's going on, we know that they're receiving God's grace just by being there.

However...

When the parents of these very small children doggedly stay in church while the children wail, fuss, shout, bang toys, etc., they're interfering with the ability of everyone around them to participate in the Mass -- or often, even just to hear what is being spoken or sung. For many of the latter people, it's the only hour of the week that they get away from every other demand of life, and give their full attention to God. And I'm sorry, but those parents are taking that hour away from them.

I can imagine the parents protesting, "But it's our only hour, too! And if we take our kids out far enough so they can't be heard, then we can't hear the Mass, either."

I'm sorry for you. We have a daughter, and she was a fussy infant and toddler, too, many years ago. But we always figured that our child was our problem, not everyone else's, too. If she was too noisy -- and we had a pretty low threshold for that -- we went out with her. Completely. Until the storm passed, or it was time to go home. We didn't (effectively) say to everyone else gathered for worship, "You won't mind having to strain to hear what's being said, will you? Or not getting to hear any of the music without trying to mentally filter out all my kid's noise? Of course you wouldn't!"

Parents: what goes around, comes around. If you succeed in making rudeness the norm, then when you're older and your children are grown, you'll come to Mass one Sunday just longing for an hour of peace, beauty and grace amidst some ruinous period of your life, and instead, you'll have your mind flayed with the screams of the next generation's infants. And you'll go home thinking seriously about going somewhere else for Mass next Sunday -- if you overcome the temptation to give up and just not go at all.

If you don't want that future experience for yourself, don't inflict it in the present on others.

Palm Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir on Palm Sunday at St. Thomas Aquinas church:

Morales, Vigilate et orate
Tallis, Sancte Deus
Victoria, O vos omnes

That was in addition to enormous extra quantities of Gregorian chant, including the tract Deus, Deus meus, respice in me before the chanting of the entire St. Matthew passion (in English)!

Maybe not such a good idea

I was watching the well-made documentary Witness to Hope, about John Paul II, on EWTN the other day. One bit of history caught my ear especially: when John Paul held his first audience with the assembled cardinals after his election, he broke with tradition, which would have had him sit while the cardinals, one by one, walked up and knelt before him as an expression of their subordination and obedience.

Instead, he reportedly said "I will receive my brothers standing". And he did.

What could be more gracious? What could be wrong with such a magnanimous gesture?

Nothing -- throughout much of Church history. But in the context of his time, and in retrospect -- perhaps a lot. Because symbols mean a great deal, and traditions are often not just dead habit, but embodied wisdom.

Imagine you're a certain cardinal of a major American diocese who prefers to go his own way, paying no heed to orders coming out from Rome. If you have to go up to the Pope and kneel, wouldn't you think "Wow, I guess this means I have to obey this guy"? But if you get to walk up to him and not kneel, but just stand chatting like equals, wouldn't you think "Great! He's practically saying he's just another bishop! And by the way, brother John Paul -- don't tell me what to do in MY diocese, OK?"

After the chaos and drift of the '70's, we needed a re-establishment of authority. Keeping with tradition might at least have given John Paul higher ground from which to begin that work. Instead, in a gesture coming no doubt straight out of his great and good heart, he stood -- and in a stroke, the Church found itself starting lower than ever in its climb out of that miserable ditch dug by those who distorted Vatican II.

This Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at the noon Mass yesterday at St. Thomas Aquinas:

Ingenieri, O bone Jesu
Des Prez, Christum ducem
Morales, Vigilate et orate

As always, the texts of these motets can be found at the Choir website.

Just true

From the seventh book, Blue Shoes and Happiness, in the delightful No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith, comes some unaccustomed plain speaking about the AIDS epidemic in Africa (and our own multiple STD epidemics). The heroine, Mma Ramotswe ("mma" is an honorific title), and her assistant are talking with a new client:

Mma Ramotswe folded her arms... . "Ever since women allowed men to think they did not need to get married, everything has gone wrong. That is what I think, Mma."

Poppy thought for a moment. "I think you may be right," she said. "Look at the mess. Look at what all this unfaithfulness has done. People are dying because of that, aren't they? Many people are dying."

For a moment the three of them were silent. There was no gainsaying what Poppy had said. It was just true. Just true.

Of course, our betters in the government and academia tell us that it's not true at all, that those three simple women from Botswana have it all wrong. All we have to do, they say, is hand out more condoms, spend a few tens of billions more on an AIDS vaccine, and get those pesky Catholics to shut up about wrong behavior and disordered inclinations, so we can enlarge the sphere of evil things that people can do without fear of consequences. And how's that worked out for us so far, guys?

Even with all the dust, Botswana is looking real good. Some things are just true.

Overconfidence

From now on, every time I hear someone counsel a wait-and-see attitude toward abuses in the Church by cheerily quoting Matthew 16:18 about how "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it", I'm going to suggest they read the last chapter of Belloc's The Great Heresies. Especially the chilling part where he considers the two futures immediately ahead of us:

The modern attack on the Faith (the latest and most formidable of all) has advanced so far that we can already affirm one all-important point quite clearly: of two things one must happen, one of two results must become definite throughout the modern world. Either the Catholic Church (now rapidly becoming the only place wherein the traditions of civilization are understood and defended) will be reduced by her modern enemies to political impotence, to numerical insignificance, and, so far as public appreciation goes, to silence; or the Catholic Church will, in this case as throughout the past, react more strongly against her enemies than her enemies have been able to react against her; she will recover and extend her authority, and will rise once more to the leadership of civilization which she made, and thus recover and restore the world.

The first alternative future is the one I think the soothing "gates of hell" folks ought to give some serious thought to. Yes, it's still a future in which the Church has not disappeared. But it's likely to be a terrible, vicious, incomparably cruel future, poisoned by the prime catastrophe of ignorance of and disbelief in Christ. The gates of hell may not prevail, but they can get mighty close. And if they do, the heat's going to make global warming seem like a very, very small issue.

Belloc had it right

Now my reading has taken me onward to The Great Heresies by the Anglo-French convert Hilaire Belloc. What an astonishingly clear writer! And not afraid to call things by their right names and characters. Here's a sample from the last chapter, in which he considers what he calls "The Modern Attack", of which Social Darwinist capitalism, Communism, Fascism, and our current bane, pseudo-scientific materialism, are the chief exemplars:

The last category of fruits by which we may judge the character of
the Modern Attack consists in the fruit it bears in the field of the
intelligence -- what it does to human reason.

When the Modern Attack was gathering, a couple of lifetimes ago,
while it was still confined to a small number of academic men, the first
assault upon reason began. It seemed to make but little progress outside a
restricted circle. The plain man and his common-sense (which are the
strongholds of reason) were not affected. Today they are.

But reason today is everywhere decried. The ancient process of
conviction by argument and proof is replaced by reiterated affirmation;
and almost all the terms which were the glory of reason carry with them
now an atmosphere of contempt.

See what has happened for instance to the word "logic," to the
word "controversy"; note such popular phrases as "No one yet was ever
convinced by argument," or again, "Anything may be proved," or "That may
be all right in logic, but in practice it is very different." The speech
of men is becoming saturated with expressions which everywhere connote
contempt for the use of the intelligence.

Belloc was writing in 1938, seventy years ago, but he has our present world nailed. If you'd like to read it online, EWTN has an electronic version linked here.

This Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at the noon Mass today at St. Thomas Aquinas in Palo Alto:

Francisco Rosselli, Adoramus Te, Christe
Josquin des Prez, Tu solus qui facis mirabilia

A good attitude

Having taken Eric Metaxas' writing style to task, I'm going to perhaps make up for it a little by pointing out some terrific things I've learned from Amazing Grace about William Wilberforce's career as an antislavery crusader.

Here's Wilberforce's reaction to the umpteenth bump in the road -- Britain's failure to demand an immediate end to the French slave trade when Napoleon had abdicated the first time in 1814:

My spirits are quite lowered by it, yet let us do what we can and trust to God's blessing on our labours.

There it is, nice and simple and short: the same reaction that we always should have when Right suffers a setback.

I should add that he then mounted a wildly successful petition campaign, presented a million signatures to Parliament, played a very smart political game and got his measure to amend the peace treaty with France passed by large margins in both Houses, and won the day. That's a good example to follow, too.

Amazing Grace (the book)

It's definitely been William Wilberforce week! In addition to seeing the new movie on the British reformer, I've been reading Eric Metaxas' new biography, also called Amazing Grace.

I wish I could recommend it strongly, but I really can't. I see that Mr. Metaxas has been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, and other prestigious places, and Amazing Grace has made the NYT Bestseller list. That's a great deal more success than I'm likely ever to have. And it isn't that he doesn't marshall his facts well. But in this book, his style often just drives me crazy! He'll be going along fine, and then suddenly he's writing like a bright high school sophomore who has just been been given a reference book of standard metaphors and hackneyed phrases. For instance:

Wilberforce may have been crazy like a fox, but [Whig politician Charles James] Fox himself was so often drunk as the proverbial skunk that Wilberforce wisely decided to forego badgering him about becoming involved. Even if Fox had initially assented to lend his name to the cause, it seems likely that he may have eventually weaseled out of any real commitment anyway, and it is always possible that, given his affection for dissolute living, he may even have become a mole for the opposition.

If this paragraph was an isolated incident in the book, it would be just a momentary irritation, and might even be a refreshing bit of humor, but it isn't; there's a parade of such passages every few pages. I've had to put the book down several times because the cutesy artifice was so grating. What is the stylistic purpose of such stuff? Sure beats me.

Why take an author to task when I'm so much on his side? Exactly because I am on his side. I care about how these topics are presented to a skeptical, secular, religion-suspicious public. When an author (or a speaker or blogger or anyone else) goes off the rails and writes or speaks poorly, it reflects badly on the topic and the point of view. Makes me crazy.

But not like a fox.

Amazing Grace (the movie)

Saw the new movie Amazing Grace over the weekend. Some fine performances, a workmanlike recreation of the period, and a surprising clear concise job of explaining British politics of the day. Not a great film by any means, but worth seeing once.

This Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at St. Thomas Aquinas church in Palo Alto:

Orlandus Lassus, Domine, convertere
Pedro Guerrero, Domine meus
Lassus, Audi benigne conditor

The more things change...

Apropos the continued American snooze over the threat of radical Islam, I'm reminded of these words:

I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet.

Substitute "nation" for "island" and you've pretty much nailed our national psyche (and the dominant Catholic psyche in America, too).

The "island" in the original was England, and the author was Winston Churchill. The year was 1936, four short years before England would face utter defeat and subjugation. She would be rescued, in part, through under-the-table help from this country.

But who will rescue us? No one, that's who.

Like I was saying...

From Catholic World News' always-trenchant Diogenes:

Just about 10 years after the Bishop of Dallas agreed to step down quietly in the aftermath of a horrendous sex-abuse scandal,... ...and 7 years after the Vatican appointed a coadjutor to succeed him,... ...and 4 years after the coadjutor-- tired of waiting, frustrated by his isolation--- requested and received a transfer to a diocese where he could actually do something,... ... and 7 months after the bishop finally submitted his resignation, as required by canon law, upon reaching his 75th birthday,.... The Pope has accepted the resignation of Bishop Charles Grahmann. Which just goes to show: a bishop can't resist pressure from the Vatican forever. For a decade, maybe. But not forever.

So, as I keep asking quietly over here in my corner: why do these things take so ^&@##$* long?

Suppose you heard about an executive who winked at rampant cheating of customers, and then was kept on by his company in that same job for ten years, just so he could retire without embarrassment. Would you think that company well-run? Would you do business with them? Would you want to work for them?

Most of us would say No to all those questions. We'd want to do business with and work for a firm that held its employees to high standards, and that moved swiftly to remove employees who had violated those standards -- all the more swiftly when the employees were highly placed and enjoying a greater degree of trust.

The Church has to confront the reality of that expectation, and move at the speed the world expects on such occasions, if it wants to start recovering its horribly tattered reputation. I don't say that Bishop Grahmann should have been tossed onto the streets, but might there not have been an opening somewhere in the hierarchy where he could have been shunted off to, in such a way to send a message? Didn't Lesotho, Nepal, or Kiritimati need a papal nuncio, for instance?

Something else that's needed

In the vestibule of every Catholic Church, I'd like to see a brief, well-written pamphlet, prominently displayed, titled Why Should I Still be Catholic after the Abuse Scandal? If anyone thinks that question isn't being asked constantly by Catholics, and often answered the wrong way, they need to think again.

The Tridentine in Santa Clara

I was excited when I saw the news at California Catholic Daily (via Gerald) that an indult had been granted by Bishop McGrath of San Jose for the celebration of the Tridentine Mass in nearby Santa Clara, under the supervision of the Institute of Christ the King. It took me a while to get down there, but I finally attended Mass at the little chapel of Our Mother of Perpetual Help last Sunday, March 4.

Like most cradle Catholics my age, I hadn't heard a Tridentine Mass for forty years or more. I've been looking forward to hearing one again for years, and I was prepared to love it. But I wasn't so excited by the time Mass was over that day. What I experienced struck me as, in many ways, illustrative of how NOT to re-introduce the Tridentine to the majority of Catholics, who have never seen one celebrated.

There were some problems within the Mass itself:

• The Latin was delivered too fast, often slurred. The poor priest was doing his best, I'm sure, but he was 85 if he was a day, and was so short of breath that he would simply not be able to pronounce the end of some sentences. His homily started out well enough, but he had to give up after a minute or two. Even in the tiny chapel (which I'll comment on later), he was often inaudible or unintelligible in places where he should have been heard. I lost my place several times, though fairly skilled at Latin.
  
• Along the same lines, in the responsory sections, the priest and servers were stepping on each others' words constantly. The overall impression given was of hurry, that they simply wanted to get it over with as fast as they could. I should add that this was a defect that was fairly common, and all too frequently noted, when I served Mass back in my boyhood. I'm sure it's not what they intended, but that's how it sounded.
  
• There was an awkward moment at Communion, when the priest loudly rebuked a boy for not putting out his tongue far enough.

Of course it needs to be considered that this priest might have been summoned to substitute at the last moment, may well have been in pain, and so on. He certainly looked uncomfortable and was obviously very frail. We always need to remember that priests are people, too, and have just as many reasons as any of us to be having a bad day.

With that said, I have to return to considering this experience with the question in mind: how do we make the Tridentine popular?

• Surround the Mass with traditional beauty. Sadly, this very tiny chapel (capacity 49, though I doubt the pews would hold more than 30) wasn't up to the task. It was probably a former Protestant church from the look of it, without stained glass or even Stations of the Cross. Pews and fixtures were dilapidated and shabby. Someone had done a very nice job with equipping the altar with traditional statuary and other decorations, and of course that's where the focus has to be first -- but the rest of the environment was downright unpleasant.
• Show off the splendor of the Church's tradition of Gregorian chant, if not the full richness of its later musical gems. There was no music at all, at this Mass. A very Low Mass indeed.
  
• Have someone come out before Mass and welcome the congregation, especially newcomers who have never heard a Tridentine. People need to be thanked for their interest in making the effort. Yes, I know that should be unnecessary. But in today's world, it must be done.
• Speak the Latin at a moderate, understandable pace, all the more so in these early years of revival when people are still rediscovering the tradition.
  
• If possible, train the congregation to speak the servers' lines, too. This was the so-called "dialogue Mass" pattern that was being encouraged in the 40's and 50's. If one of the complaints about the Old Mass is that the new ways are more "participative", this is the antidote. And if 9-year-old boys could learn the responses in the past, I don't see why we all can't learn them today, unless we really have grown that hopelessly lazy and stupid.

I'm convinced that the Latin Mass, in some form, is the way forward for the Catholic Church. The effort in Santa Clara is a start for this area, full of promise, but if it's ever going to be anything other than a curiosity attended by a few, lessons need to be learned, and quickly. No, the Mass isn't a product needing marketing... but yes, it is. This is one place where aggiornamento in attitude would do a deal of good.

Why can't Lent just be Lent?

On the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, my parish church handed out copies of something called The Little Black Book: Six-Minute Meditations on the Passion according to Matthew. Great, I thought, I could really use some structure to my Lent, and started reading it regularly. Things went along well for a few days, and then I began noticing kind of a progressive-political angle creeping into some of the meditations, along with some curious slants on discussions of important topics. So I looked at the thing a bit more carefully, and found that, lo and behold, the texts are based on writings of the late bishop of Saginaw, Ken Untener.

I remembered vaguely that there had been some controversy about Bishop Untener, so I dug a little more, and found out about his links to Call to Action and left-wing politics, and the suspicions about programs at seminaries he was responsible for prior to his elevation to the episcopacy. I also found many compliments about the vigor of his preaching, his simplicity of life, and the positive impact he apparently had on many.

My point is not to rehash the controversies, or to decide whether he was a good man or not. I'm sure he had a mix of virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, insights and blind spots, just like the rest of us. I just have to say, however, that I am really, really tired of having left-leaning priests and bishops tucking political messages into their preaching and writing. And yes, it does seem to me that this is a particular failing of those of the leftist persuasion.

A little sadly, I've put The Little Black Book away, and am looking for something else to read. Something that just lets Lent be Lent.

The crucial importance of time, again

I was reading Ralph McInerny's What Went Wrong with Vatican II (Sophia Institute Press, 1998) and came to his narrative about the publication of and response to Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical in which Pope Paul VI recommitted the Catholic Church to its traditional teachings against contraception. Fittingly, the chapter is called "The Year the Church Fell Apart." A little while back I wrote on how crucially important time can be in human activity, notably in warfare and in the collisions of Christianity with secular society, and how Christians can succumb to a peculiar form of overconfidence and complacence. In the story of Humanae Vitae we see another disastrous example of good intentions getting completely overwhelmed by the sometimes-fatal results of delay.

Oral contraceptives were becoming widely available in the U.S. and parts of Europe in the early-to-mid-1960's, as Vatican II was taking place. Pope John XXIII knew that the Church would have to grapple with the issues raised by this new technology, but he didn't allow the question to come before the assembled Council. Instead, he reserved it for his own study, in which he would be aided by a commission of scholars. A papal pronouncement would follow when the work was done.

But John XXIII died during the Council, long before he could finish. Paul VI expanded the advisory group and took up the work. Not to come down on poor Pope Paul too hard, but this was when things got out of hand. Months went by after the Council disbanded, then a year, then two, and there was no pronouncement. Some Catholic theologians were weighing in, invited and uninvited, on the side of dropping the longstanding opposition to artificial birth control, and the longer they did so without contradiction from the Vatican, the more it seemed that major changes were, indeed, in the works. Otherwise, why would things be taking so long? Rank-and-file married Catholics were getting conflicting advice from their parish priests, and some priests were getting ambiguous signals from their bishops. Theologians who had argued for a loosening of the traditional opposition felt confident that their voices had been decisive, and looked forward to greeting their anticipated victory over the traditionalists with the easy grace of good sportsmen.

Then Humanae Vitae was published, and it became clear that there were going to be no changes, after all.

The you-know-what really hit the fan then. Some theologians and academics rose in open revolt; some Catholic universities declared that the encyclical wasn't binding upon them. Some of those rank-and-file Catholics who had started using contraception in anticipation of change just quietly gave up on following their Church's teachings. It was the harbinger of much of a similar nature that was to come.

Two things were at work there, which both Popes should have taken into account in gauging the amount of time they had to make a decision.

First, in the case of the academics, it was the natural tendency to assume that the years of study and deliberation could be necessary only if a major change was being defined, and to relish the triumph they anticipated; and the boomerang of bitter disappointment when those confident hopes were dashed.

Second, in the case of ordinary Catholics, it was the natural tendency to hope that their lives would somehow get easier and more "normal" when compared with their non-Catholic neighbors. Sexual mores were in flux, societal props to traditional behavior were falling apart, and temptation was all around them.

Both these tendencies, if we generalize them a little, aren't exclusive to the Catholic Church; they're ordinary things that happen in every human organization. They're known to every executive in every successful corporation.

The simple lesson is that as soon as people know that change to a law or regulation is under active consideration, a clock starts ticking. I don't care that it's the Catholic Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, against which the gates of Hell will not prevail, etc., etc. Leaders don't have an unlimited time to decide what to do. At some point, whose identification is part of the art of leadership, people are going to start drawing their own conclusions and acting on their own. If you, as a leader, delay beyond that point, you begin to lose control of the situation, and of your organization.

It's bad enough when that results in a failed product or lost jobs. It's much worse when souls are at stake.

What if Humanae Vitae, with its forthright, eminently logical rededication of the Church to its constant teaching, had come out in 1965, and nipped all that doubt and uncertainty and pride in the bud? We'll never know.

Contraception. In vitro fertilization. Sexual misconduct by priests. All of these challenges have been handled badly by the Church because those in charge of making decisions wanted a few more years to study the problem (or, in the latter case, sometimes to move the problem to another parish). And all of them have been disasters. If there has been a benefit to this pattern of delay that outweighs the terrible price it has exacted on the Body of Christ, I sure can't see it.

Orcs in California

The rage for all things Tolkien has faded a good deal since the last movie hit the DVD remainder bins, but I still frequently pick up my tattered 1-volume copy of LOTR because it's so incredibly rich. Despite reading the whole thing through more times than I can remember, little passages continue to surprise me as if they hadn't ever been there before. This one's from one of the appendices:

But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering. Much of the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigor, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.

I thought of this one because, as my wife and I were stopped in traffic in Santa Rosa yesterday while driving home from a great couple of days on the Mendocino coast, I suddenly became aware of the driver in the PG&E truck next to me talking plenty loud enough to hear across the space between our vehicles. She was a perfectly normal looking young woman, having a friendly gab with her co-worker. All I caught was: "F***, really? Nah, you're s***in' me! If that mother-f***er thinks I'm gonna put with that s***... ". Then traffic started moving again.

Dreary and repetitive... check. Without love of words or things... check. To whom only the squalid sounds strong... check. Yep, confirmed Orc sighting. But nothing worth remarking on, really. You can hear the same thing on any California elementary-school playground, where the orc-tribes are constantly recruiting new members.

This Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at St. Thomas Aquinas church at the noon Mass today:

Palestrina, Super flumina Babylonis
Anon. 14c. Italian, Ave verum corpus
Orlando di Lasso, Miserere mei

You can read the complete texts of the these motets at the St. Ann Choir website. Click on the sidebar link there for Motet Texts and Translations.

A prayer

Grant to me keenness of mind,
Capacity to remember,
Skill in learning, subtlety to interpret,
And eloquence of speech.
May you guide the beginning of my work,
Direct its progress,
And bring it to completion.

from a prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas, Ante Studium ("Before Study")
quoted in Kevin Vost's Memorize the Faith

Not a bad prayer for Catholic bloggers, either!

Klingons, meet the Elizabethans

If you're a Star Trek fan (I was, since my daughter was and there was therefore no way to avoid it), you may remember that every now and then a couple of Klingons would find themselves in a tight spot, and then would grin and say to each other "It is a good day to die." If there was a death with honor facing them, they were ready for it.

I always liked that attitude. Seemed to me it was also the Christian attitude, not a desire for death but a lighthearted acceptance of it, if that's what you had to do to keep following Christ. Glad did I live and gladly die / And I laid me down with a will.

We just got home from a concert featuring music of the Elizabethan/Jacobean composer John Dowland, in which the final line of one of the songs was another echo of the same sentiment:

He never happie liv'd that cannot love to die.

Not morbid at all, I think; sublimely free and humane.

Our very own 'victory disease'

In addition to my other vices, I like to read military history. One of my favorite authors is H.P. Willmott, a Briton with some very interesting takes on World War II, especially the early days of the Pacific war.

One of Willmott's themes is the frequent failure of nations to appreciate the crucial importance of time. Especially in war, those in charge often think they've got plenty of time when they really don't, and the result of such complacency is usually a catastrophe. There's a lesson for Catholics in this. But the history first, please, if you'll indulge me.

For one example, Willmott points out how the U.S. thought there was plenty of time to get ready for an attack by Japan, and planned to have the Philippines, where the first blows were expected to fall, fully reinforced by April 1942. As we all know, the Japanese declined to oblige us by accommodating our leisurely timetable, and by April 1942, American soldiers were staggering into captivity in the Bataan Death March.

But this delusion knows no national boundaries. The Japanese, elated by the ease with which their early conquests had come to them, thought they had plenty of time to consolidate their empire. Then came the embarrassment of the Doolittle Raid, then rebuff in the Coral Sea, then disaster at Midway only six months after Pearl Harbor. By then, skeptical Japanese had already coined a phrase for that fatal delusion of unlimited time and assured triumph: 'victory disease.'

I was reminded of all this while listening recently to a fine interview on EWTN's The World Over, featuring the remarkable Dr. Thomas Hilgers of the Pope Paul VI Institute, and Fr. Thomas Euteneuer of Human Life International. The subject of in vitro fertilization came up, and the host remarked on the lengthy interval that seemed to elapse between the first application of IVF technology in 1979 and the Church's response. Fr. Euteneuer replied that the first definitive Vatican declaration against IVF came in 1987, and that after all, in Vatican terms, that was almost instantaneous. Or words to that effect.

Eight years? Instantaneous?? Perhaps in heaven, where a thousand years is as a day, but not here on earth. In those eight years, everyone got used to IVF being a neutral part of the moral landscape, so that the Church's opposition, when it eventually firmed up, seemed to come out of left field. And then there was the little matter of the tens of thousands of human embryos made for IVF during those years, with the "extras" getting frozen so they could become a giant temptation for the embryonic stem cell folks. All this, while the Vatican carefully, carefully, carefully decided what to think.

The Catholic Church at the upper levels is much afflicted with its own special version of 'victory disease.' Lulled, it seems, by the assurance that Christ has won the final triumph already, they act as if nothing really bad could ever happen to His flock no matter how long they dither and discuss. Besides, they say, the Church has always thought in terms of centuries...

Gentlemen of the hierarchy: stop it. We are still living on earth, not in heaven. And this is the 21st century, not the 9th. You will never again be able to take all the time you want to respond to evil, without courting disaster. The Enemy is moving too quickly now. Shake off your 'victory disease' and get cracking. It's way, way later than you think.

'Dagger John', we need you!

This man is 'Dagger John' Hughes, the Irish-born first Archbishop of New York. Karen Hall's blistering post, [Update: sadly, Karen Hall's wonderful blog, Some Have Hats, disappeared a couple of years after I wrote this] about the way Bill Donohue of the Catholic League has been nearly alone among prominent Catholics condemning the vile remarks of John Edwards' blogger staffers, brought him to mind. Besides other small achievements, like leading a moral and cultural rebirth among his city's Irish immigrants and getting the parochial school system off the ground in the U.S., he didn't take guff from any Catholic-hater. He earned his sobriquet not only from the cross he wrote after every signature (resembling the printers' symbol known as a dagger), but also from the devastating writings and speeches by which he countered the hysterical anti-Catholicism of his own day. Here's a snippet from a long but well-written article about him:

In 1829, for instance, outraged by an editorial in a Protestant religious newspaper about “traitorous popery,” he fired off a missive to its editorial board of Protestant ministers, calling them “the clerical scum of the Country.” During the 1834 cholera epidemic in Philadelphia, which nativists blamed on Irish immigrants, Hughes worked tirelessly among the sick and dying, while many Protestant ministers fled the city to escape infection. After the disease subsided, Hughes wrote the U.S. Gazette that Protestant ministers were “remarkable for their pastoral solicitude, so long as the flock is healthy, the pastures pleasant, and the fleece lubricant, abandoning their post when disease begins to spread dissolution in the fold.” He pointed to the work of the Catholic Sisters of Charity, who had cared for cholera victims without regard for their own safety, and wondered where all the people who spoke about perversion in the convents had gone during the epidemic.

Wow. Now that's how a bishop should strike back to defend his Faith and his flock!

So, Dagger John, pray for us, and ask Our Lord to send us another one like you. Really, really soon.

Just imagine...

I encountered this story about Alec Guinness a few years ago in some magazine, and then lost track of it. Found it again yesterday at thecatholic.org.

The late actor Sir Alec Guiness once related that, before his conversion to the Catholic Faith, he had been very anti-clerical: “I would shudder if I passed a priest or nun”, he said. But the day was to come in the 1950’s when he would go to a Catholic priest and ask him if he might be received into the Church. One incident in particular had helped him overcome his anti-clerical sentiments, he later recalled. The actor had been working on a film based on one of G.K. Chesterton’s famous Father Brown mysteries; he was playing the title role.

One night after a day’s shooting on a location about a mile outside the village where he was staying, he had walked home without changing his clerical costume for lay attire. “It was absolutely dark”, he related. Suddenly I heard some little footsteps running after me. My hand was taken by a small boy who walked with me all the way to the village. He chattered all the way, but I didn’t utter a word, for fear of frightening him. Eventually he said farewell and disappeared. Afterwards, I thought how marvellous it was that a child in a dark lane would run and take your hand just because he thought you were a priest. It totally changed my attitude.”

Turns out this experience was one of many that apparently influenced Guinness to convert to Catholicism. What a wonderful little vignette! A memento of a day we won't soon see again, when most of the world saw the priesthood as a trusted and revered calling. It was a reputation earned by generation upon generation of good, faithful priests whose names we'll never know. Ironically, we now know only too well the names of the priests and bishops who threw it all away.

Yes, most priests still deserve that trust and reverence, but now they all have to struggle with suspicion and derision, because a few bad ones weren't stopped when the problems first began coming to light. I suppose some might argue that this unjust mental and emotional suffering mirrors the sufferings of Christ and is somehow good for priests, and would quote from this Sunday's Gospel reading ("woe to you when men speak well of you..."), but you won't convince me. There are plenty of instances when priests have to suffer unjustly, without piling this on them, too.

Remember that the event Guinness related happened back in the 1950's, when the Church was just so woefully out of date that it had to be fixed. Everyone back then would have seen that tiny episode of parish life as an example of childhood innocence placing its trust exactly where that trust had been very richly deserved. Today, many people would see that same episode with... well, another reaction entirely.

This Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at St. Thomas Aquinas church today:

Tomas Luis de Victoria, Ave Maria
Claudio Monteverdi, O bone Jesu

Clarification

It occurs to me that someone might read my previous post and misunderstand something. When I approved of religious freedom and the inevitable competition that pushes churches to make themselves attractive to converts, I so didn't mean to endorse the last wave of trendy innovations in Catholic liturgy, architecture, and music that began in the late 60's and is only now dying out.

The people behind those innovations claimed that they were trying to make the church more attractive to contemporary Catholics and the world at large, as if they were just humbly responding to some groundswell of popular demand. In reality, the changes they concocted were frequently forced through over the anguished and confused complaints of rank-and-file Catholics, and attracted few if any converts. I know, because I was in my teens and 20's then, and paying attention. These people were really only concerned with making it more attractive to themselves. Big difference.

In the long run, the only thing that gives any Christian church a lasting appeal to converts, not to mention its own members, is the person of Christ. In the short run, I don't know what will work best for other churches, but the best way for the Catholic Church to make itself an appealing place for Christ to be found is to (1) dump the dalliance with "Barney" Masses, fourth-rate pop ballads, sterile modernist architecture, and all the ugly rubble of the last forty years of experimentation, (2) rebuild its connection with its briefly rejected but still esthetically radiant traditions, and (3) preach Christ without giving a you-know-what about what will offend people.

Orthodoxy and freedom

I'm increasingly convinced that the best combination of circumstances for growth of the Catholic Church is orthodoxy and religious freedom.

Religious freedom in society does two good things: it forces the Church to compete with other religions being offered, and it allows the Church to enjoy such rewards of that competition as it may earn. That is, the Church has to make itself appealing, and if it does so and thereby attracts converts, those converts aren't risking life and limb.

Latin America gives us an example of what happens when the Church is given more or less a religious monopoly. The church there never had to struggle to make its message attractive, and so very few people who self-identify as Catholics actually attend Mass or pay much attention to the Church's positions on issues. Latin American men are particularly turned off by the Church, and it's been that way for generations. No great wonder: the Church never had to explain why the Christian life is actually more heroic, and therefore more attractively masculine, than the superficial bravado of machismo.

But the freedom to compete isn't enough by itself. To attract people to the Faith and keep them, the Church also has to remain true to its own teachings, that is, it must remain orthodox, and it must be seen to take effective action to enforce -- yes, enforce -- orthodoxy within its own ranks.

To see that principle in action, we can look at our own country. While the Church remained orthodox and disciplined in its teachings and the guiding of its clergy and lay people, its influence in American society grew and grew. As American culture was stumbling into the 60's, the Catholic Church was well positioned to help it keep its feet. But at that moment, many influential Catholics, especially among the hierarchy and in Catholic universities, abandoned orthodoxy for the trendy ideas of the times. And when they dared the Church to enforce its teachings, the Church blew the now-familiar uncertain trumpet that inspires no one, backed down, and started mumbling about taking a 'pastoral' approach.

That's exactly when the Catholic Church in the United States started losing its influence in American culture and politics, the influence that had taken two centuries of patient effort to earn. The effective abandonment first of tradition, then of orthodoxy, led from carelessness in small things to carelessness in bigger things. Ultimately, it led to the terrible pederasty scandal in the priesthood. Time and again, the tale was told of priests who went bad and -- what was much worse -- of bishops who looked the other way.

It was said in defense of this that we were about forgiveness now, not sin. We were a Resurrection People, yada yada yada. But what we were really about was nothing so special. We were simply about not caring how badly our members behaved. Organizations that do that simply rot from within. The people inside such organizations who care about keeping to the rules see that those who don't are simply allowed to get away with it, or are even preferred for promotion. The people who care are the ones that any organization needs to keep. Instead, we lost them. To Evangelical Protestantism, to non-denominational churches, even to Islam. A few stayed and fought, and some are coming back, and these now embody our hope for the future.

The Church had a spectacular opportunity at the opening of the 1960's and fumbled it. It probably won't get another in my lifetime. Maybe in yours. Given the rising animus against religion in general in influential parts of American culture and politics, the next one may not play out in such circumstances of religious freedom as presented themselves in 1960. That part of the equation is not so much under our control as the other part: orthodoxy. Let's see if we as a Church can get that back and keep it, so we're ready when that next big chance is given to us.

The God of things as they are

The little gem of a chapel in the photo above is located, of all places, in a cemetery in Los Angeles. Known as the Church of the Recessional, it was built as a replica of the English parish church in the village where Rudyard Kipling grew up. Some interior changes were necessary to suit its funerary role, but they did a fine job of retaining all the authenticity they could. The lovely stained glass is American, from about 1940. Many of the windows tastefully weave themes and words of Kipling's into their otherwise conventional Christian design. Here's a sample.



The scroll that the angel's holding reads, "Colour fulfils where music hath no power," a quotation from Kipling's 1925 poem Chartres Windows. Definitely a sentiment any lover of stained glass would like, though music-lovers might demur.

Outside, there's a stone wall with the inscription below, another poem by Kipling. I liked it because it celebrates both art and our God, Who built us a rational universe whose truth and beauty we could discover and partly comprehend with the intellect and intuition He gave us, and Who can therefore claim the title of "the God of things as they are."

When Earth's last picture is painted,
And the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colors have faded,
And the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and faith! we shall need it --
Lie down for an aeon or two --
'Till the Master of all good workmen
Shall put us to work anew.

And those that were good shall be happy,
They'll sit in a golden chair,
They'll splash at a ten league canvas
With brushes of comet's hair.
They'll find real saints to draw from:
Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They'll work for an age at a sitting
And never be tired at all!

And only the Master shall praise us,
And only the Master shall blame;
And no one will work for money,
And no one will work for fame.
But each for the joy of the working,
And each, in his separate star,
Will draw the thing as he sees it,
For the God of things as they are!

They say that we've largely lost a sense of what Heaven will be like, and therefore much of our longing for it. But for anyone involved in the arts in any way, Kipling's vision is a good reminder that "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him." (1 Cor. 2:9)

Anti-Catholic billboards? No problem, says CBS

The Catholic League has published an article and photos of two billboards in Indiana owned by CBS Outdoor, a division of CBS. Both have obvious anti-Catholic messages -- I hope that no one would deny that claiming that the Pope was the Antichrist is anti-Catholic -- paid for by something that calls itself the Eternal Gospel Church, one of the 10,000-plus tiny Protestant sects that pepper the American religious landscape. Both billboards have been the targets of complaints from Catholics. Both are staying up, at least for now, says CBS.

The article claims that CBS Outdoor has previously rejected content from PETA that it deemed offensive, so it appears that there's precedent for denial of this content, too. Well, it would be precedent -- if CBS saw anything offensive about grossly insulting the leadership of the Catholic Church, which may explain the difference in treatment of the two cases.

Now, I think the Catholic League took the wrong approach in their main counter-move to date. After CBS Outdoor refused to take down the billboards, they say they asked CBS to put up a billboard, paid for by the League, stating "CBS sponsors anti-Catholicism." They were refused, on the grounds that CBS would not publish sentiments that were defamatory to itself.

I sure understand the fury at this effrontery that may fuel the League's efforts. But I really don't know what other response they could have expected to that proposal. I suppose one could argue that CBS Outdoor ought to be forced to do it, but that's a side issue, to me.

Instead, why not take up the question raised by the offending billboards, which is whether God intended that Christians celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday or Sunday? It's not like the Catholic Church decided on the Sabbath day by closing its eyes and poking a finger at the calendar. We've got reasons, and good ones, dating from very early in Christian practice.

So why not put up a billboard saying "Why Catholics really celebrate Sunday, and why you should, too." Give a toll-free number to call to hear a short recorded message. Give the URL of a web page with a concise but complete explanation, links to source documents, a podcast, and a YouTube video. A small, knowledgeable group of people with inexpensive equipment and modest web skills could knock that out in days -- hours if the coffee was strong enough. (Yes, I did work in IT for a long time).

To me, an educational approach like this that respects the intelligence of the seeker would be a much better use of the opportunity than continuing a war of insults. We don't have to scream back at people who scream at us; we have the truth, so let's calm down and teach it to people. (Though a part of me really just wants to let fly against anti-Catholic bigots such as the EGC). And the resource it would put in place could go on spreading the truth for years to come, with minor tweaks as technology advances.

At the risk of sounding heartless...

A few days ago, a small story appeared in our local rag concerning an estimate that there were about 744,000 homeless people in the U.S. in 2005. The canvass was done by a homeless advocacy group, so one can expect that any error would be on the high side.

The article was, as I said, a small one, and I turned the page and read on for a few minutes. But you know how some small part of your mind sometimes keeps on working on a problem in the background while your main attention moves on? That's what happened in this case. It suddenly came to me: that's less than 1 percent of the population of the country!

Actually, it's about a quarter of one percent, if you assume a total population of 300 million, which was also in the news recently. At the state level, Nevada had the highest proportion to population, at 0.68 percent. So, no state has even one one-hundredth of its residents living without a roof over their heads.

Now, poverty and mental illness and bad fortune and all the other causes of homelessness are forms of suffering that we as Christians are expected to work hard to alleviate (and we do). Don't get me wrong here. I'm not advocating letting anyone starve or freeze to death on the streets, or jamming the poor into Dickensian workhouses.

What I am asking for is some perspective. Homelessness, by even a favorable estimate, afflicts just a tiny fraction of Americans. Yet often, it seems the only social issue that anyone talks about. When my daughter was in middle school and high school, it seemed that Community Service projects were almost invariably directed at collecting food for the homeless, serving food to the homeless, building Habitat for Humanity homes for the homeless, raising funds for the homeless, and so on and on for the homeless. It was as if no other societal problem had any importance. To give another example: at Sunday Mass, we're led to pray every week for an end to homelessness, but only once a year for an end to abortion on demand (impact: about a million lives lost annually -- not made miserable or uncomfortable or humiliating, but snuffed out).

Yes indeed, it's bad that we have even 0.25 percent of our population living without housing, and we ought to do what we can to reduce that number. But there are other fields in which we're called to labor and give of our treasure, too. And if we're all getting in each other's way trying to "help the homeless", it means that a lot of other worthy causes aren't getting their share of our attention.

Baltimore Catechism

I was recalling the old Baltimore Catechism No. 2 from my elementary school days, googled, and found the entire text attractively presented here.

It's so marvelously clear and unambiguous, you wonder why it was ever abandoned. Unless maybe because it was too clear and unambiguous. Gotta have wiggle room if you want to make everyone happy regardless of what they believe.

Why I so seldom go to the movies

Barb Nicolosi, who knows the movie industry from the inside, expresses the reason that I just don't go to the movies much anymore: because they too often take me where I don't need or want to go.

So, if you look at the culture today, there are many infections out there that I would rather not contract. Radical cynicism, sexual degradation, horrific cruelty -- these are kinds of disturbing evils that most people would never encounter, except that they are shoveled at them on the screen. Maybe they aren’t ready to have these images imprinted on their spirits. Maybe their life would never have taken them to the kinds of hells that filmmakers routinely put into their movies – just to get the kudos of the industry which mistakes outrageousness too often for courage. My question to the filmmakers who want to sneer at and debunk everything beautiful is, just because you have lost your hope and faith, does that mean you have to be busy about trashing mine? Just because you have lost your own innocence, does that mean it is a socially responsible thing to destroy mine?

Many films today offer some small goods of insight to the audience. But, the insights are cloaked in so much depraved barbarity that the teeny good of the content is not worth the sliming journey of its method. I am someone who actually believes that there is a place for decorum and graciousness in human society. Many of the movies out there today are just way to full of things that fall into the realm of what St. Paul meant when he said, “There are some things that should never be mentioned among you.” In my mind, there are some shameful things which should be the fodder for prayer and sacrifice, but should never be served up with popcorn as entertainment. Beyond just perversions like bestiality, which is getting a few screenings at Sundance this year, this means things that are just crass and purely voyeuristic and degrading.

Movies like this are “Little Children” and “Little Miss Sunshine.” They have something good to say, but they violate your innocence and defile you so much on the way that it just isn’t worth it. It is like if you told me you have a headache, and I said, “Oh, well I know where there is an aspirin for you! You just have to walk through a putrid sewer for a few miles to get it.” So, on the way to curing your headache, you pick up diptheria and typhoid. Peachy. Thanks for that.

A piper

A twelfth-century piper from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, which I photographed on a visit last year. Unlike most museums, this one cheerfully allows photos unless you make a pest of yourself.

700 years and counting

These three panels started out in France in the late 1200's, but are now making up part of the ceiling of the late William Randolph Hearst's bedroom at Hearst Castle in central California.

Amazingly, other than a professional cleaning according to current conservation practices, the panels have not been restored at all. The colors are clear and vibrant; when you see them "in person" the characters look like they're ready to step right out into the room.

Chalk up another accomplishment for those poor benighted medieval folks. Their knowledge of the chemistry of their paints was rudimentary, but they knew what lasted and what didn't. When an ordinary medieval artist painted something, it stayed painted. (Interesting that Leonardo, by modern acclaim an incomparable genius, botched the technical side of his Last Supper fresco so badly it started to fall apart within a few decades).

I wonder how much of the "art" that hangs in today's galleries will still be around in 100 years, let alone 700. Or how much of that anyone would think of hanging in their bedroom.

Join up!

Over across the pond, Fr. John Boyle (Ashford, Kent, GB) has added a resolution to the LiveSimply website, but not the PC sort that they appear to be used to.

I will promise to pray every day for an end to abortion so that all who have begun to live may have the chance to "follow after us" and "enjoy the fruits of (God's) creation" but I want 10 other people to join me.

Lest you think the last bit is strange, the request for others to join in is common to the LiveSimply site, which emphasizes group action and cooperation.

It took only a few hours for the required ten (I think I was #9) to sign up.

Wouldn't it say a lot to the world if this was one of the most heavily-subscribed projects ever offered at LiveSimply? Can you spend a few minutes a day joining Fr. Boyle in praying that the daily slaughter of thousands of children will cease? No? What were you planning to do with that little smidgin of time, instead? OK, I knew you'd come round. Go here and sign up, and let the man know he's not alone.

Right!

From the 1955 encyclical Musicae Sacrae:

It is the duty of all those to whom Christ the Lord has entrusted the task of guarding and dispensing the Church's riches to preserve this precious treasure of Gregorian chant diligently and to impart it generously to the Christian people…. And if in Catholic churches throughout the entire world Gregorian chant sounds forth without corruption or diminution, the chant itself, like the sacred Roman liturgy, will have a characteristic of universality, so that the faithful, wherever they may be, will hear music that is familiar to them and a part of their own home. In this way they may experience, with much spiritual consolation, the wonderful unity of the Church. This is one of the most important reasons why the Church so greatly desires that the Gregorian chant traditionally associated with the Latin words of the sacred liturgy be used.

Quoted, appropriately enough, at the Church Music Association of America's site Musica Sacra. They have a link to the text of the entire encyclical.

A new lion

Fr. Erik Richtsteig over at Orthometer has posted his homily for the recent anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

One of my favorite things about being a Catholic is that we have saints. Not only do they pray for us, but their lives give us examples of how to follow Our Lord in very concrete situations. There are saints for every situation and every state of life.

Roger that. By comparison, the lack of attention to saints always struck me as a huge hole in Protestantism during the years I wandered there. The big Presbyterian church I worked at for several years hardly ever said a thing even about John Knox, their founder.

Each year as this weekend approaches, I turn in prayer and thought to one of my favorite of the new saints, actually a blessed, Clemens August Graf von Galen. (Isn’t that a wonderful, German name?) Blessed Clemens was the Bishop of Munster in Germany during the time of Hitler. He had the nickname of “The Lion of Munster”. What do lions do? They roar. Blessed Clemens roared against the injustices perpetrated by the government of his own, beloved country. He was a patriot, but this did not stop him from denouncing the evils of the Nazi regime; against the Jews, against the handicapped, and against the sick. He did not shrink from doing so even though by doing so he took his own life in his hands. I pray that I will have the courage to be like Blessed Clemens.

So should we all, if only to get things changed before we have to face what Clemens faced. We don't have to fear being hauled off to a concentration camp -- yet. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer that things never get that way here. But the only way to see to that is to turn things around now, not years or decades from now.

What then are we to do? First, we need to pray and do penance both in reparation for the sins of our country regarding innocent human life and also for the conversion of those who are pro-abortion. Conversions are possible. Conversions have been remarkable. Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe, worked many years in abortion clinics. Yet, through the prayerful witness of Christians and other people of good will, she is now a pro-life, believing Catholic. Second, every Catholic need to learn what the Church teaches about the sanctity of innocent human life and why She teaches it. We need to learn this so we can speak intelligently on this issue at home, work, school, or even socially. We need to learn this so we are not silent in the face of so much pro-abortion propaganda. Lastly, we need to work politically to change our country’s policy. It has been through politics that we have been stuck with this abomination and it is partially through politics that it will be changed. Like it or not, it is through political means that things happen in our country; by elections; by voting for candidates and politically parties who support our position on the sanctity of innocent human life. Unfortunately, there are some candidate and some parties that are directly opposed to the Church’s infallible and certain teaching on this issue. We cannot vote for these people regardless of their stand on other issues. Nothing is more important than the right to life, not the economy, not national defense, nothing! If you are dead, nothing else matters.

Habemus leonem!

Our pride and joy has a website

I didn't know until recently that the St. Ann Choir, which provides us with Gregorian chant and Renaissance motets every Sunday and major feast day here at St. Thomas Aquinas, has a website. If you're ever curious about the words of the motets I report about more or less weekly, go there and click on Motet Texts and Translations.

Keys of the Kingdom

A detail from St. Peter's window at my home parish of St. Thomas Aquinas.

This Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir today at St. Thomas Aquinas church:

Martin de Rivaflecha (d. 1528), Anima mea liquefacta est
Antoine Brumel (d. 1515), Ecce panis angelorum

Today was the feast day of our parish's patron, St. Thomas Aquinas. The motets were nicely chosen: the first is a text from the Song of Songs, which Aquinas reportedly asked to have read to him on his deathbed (instead of being badgered by his students, who wanted him to dictate the conclusions to various unfinished passages in the Summa Theologica); the second is a text of one of Thomas' own hymns.

Anyone for taking back Catholic schools?

The California Catholic Daily is turning into a wonderful resource -- sort of a localized Catholic World News.

In their story today about Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of Nancy Pelosi and maker of a new (and reportedly rather hostile) documentary about Evangelicals, she talks about the wonderful way the teachers at her Catholic schools faithfully passed on the Catholic moral tradition to her back in the 80's. Not.

Pelosi, a graduate of San Francisco’s upscale Convent of the Sacred Heart High School and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said what she was taught in these Catholic schools differed dramatically from what she learned from the Evangelicals. “We were taught just to accept people, that was just a given,” she told the Jan. 17 San Francisco Chronicle. “I don't ever remember being told at Convent of the Sacred Heart that gay was wrong. They never even told us there was anything wrong with abortion. They were just choices.

This just really annoys me. Add these institutions to the list of Catholic schools and colleges that solicit donations from the Catholic faithful, and then turn right around and deliver a moral education that differs in no significant way from secular schools. Ms. Pelosi has just given us a couple of additional examples of how the aggiornamento called for by John XXIII so quickly got translated to "throw out every teaching that doesn't conform to the editorial positions of The New York Times."

Perhaps her teachers might respond that if they had tried to convince their students of the rightness of the Church's teachings on abortion and homosexuality, the students would simply have tuned out. If so, it's very interesting what Ms. Pelosi then says about the impact of spending even the few weeks of research she did for her film with some really dedicated Evangelical Protestants who weren't afraid of what she would think.

Talking of her experiences to the New York Times of Jan. 11, Pelosi said, “I believe in the culture war. And you know what? If I have to take a side in the culture war, I’ll take their [Christian conservative] side. Because if you give me the choice of Paris Hilton or Jesus, I’ll take Jesus.”

So maybe if her teachers back at Sacred Heart, and her professors at Loyola Marymount, had simply laid out the case for the teachings of the Church that employed them...

Couldn't stand it

Well, I decided that the redone "Scribe" layout on New Blogger was just too ugly, so I'm trying this look instead. Not as elegant, but at least not actively offensive.

It seems to have worked, but...

Updating to one of New Blogger's rewritten templates seems to have worked fine, I guess, but I can't say I'm entranced by some of the typographical changes -- the underlined post title, the lack of space between the title and the post body, the variable line spacings in older posts. Ah, well.

Updating template

I'm going to try updating to one of the New Blogger templates. Pray for success.

Explain this one

As you've probably read (here, for instance), California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, a Democrat from Mountain View (which is the next town down the Peninsula from us), wants to ban the spanking of children under the age of four.

OK, so she's getting a lot of derision and it looks like the measure is going nowhere for now. But isn't there something just a little bizarre about this?

This woman is an ardent proponent of abortion rights. So basically, she's saying simultaneously:

1. Spank your kid after she's born, and you go to jail.
2. Kill your kid before she's born, and you're just exercising your rights.

Explain it if you can. I can't.

Counting heads is not that hard

California Catholic Daily reports that there are wildly differing opinions about the size of the crowd at the West Coast Walk for Life this past Saturday:

Sponsors said between 20,000 and 25,000 people turned out, but a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department told California Catholic Daily just hours after the event that officers at the scene estimated only about 2,500 marchers. The spokesman was asked to repeat the number to ensure there was no confusion, and confirmed the 2,500 estimate. In a followup phone call to the police operations center shortly before 10 p.m., a dispatcher said, "It could even have been less."

"Whoever told you that was not there," said Stan Devereux, a spokesman for LifeWalk. He said the march stretched more than a mile along the San Francisco waterfront. "You can say 20,000 to 25,000. That's what we were told."

I'm inclined to believe the larger numbers, since some of wider-angle photos posted here seem to take in only a part of the march, yet show a number that must be close to the lower estimate. But it's so darned simple to establish this these days that I'm at a loss to think why some very simple steps weren't taken by the organizers to avoid the inevitable bickering about crowd size. After all, they must know that officialdom in San Francisco is going to do everything they can to downplay the magnitude of participation.

All that's needed is to post someone with an ordinary camcorder at any point along the march that allows the camera to take in perhaps thirty or forty yards of the column as it passes bay. Then you just let the thing run until the march ends. You bring the footage home, cue up to the first batch of marchers as they pass, pause the playback at that frame, then count the heads in that scene. You then fast-forward to the frame in which the last marchers you counted in the first frame are just leaving the field of view, you pause again, and you count heads. And so on to the end of the march. Might be a good idea to capture each "counting" frame as a still, so you could post them as proof of the process' validity.

A small group or even a single person could do the count this way in no more than a few hours, and produce documented results that would be beyond dispute.

So why are we still playing these stupid games with hostile secular authorities and media?

Things are seldom what they seem...

I'm a Gilbert & Sullivan fan, as as any such fan can tell you, there's a G&S quotation suitable for expressing almost every worthwhile sentiment under the sun. And once again, it's so. Take this little couplet from H.M.S. Pinafore:

Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream...

Remember how, a few days ago, a New York Times story revealed the shocking news that fewer than 50% of American women were living with a husband? Remember how everyone rushed to draw dire conclusions from this "fact"?

Now go read Michael Medved's blistering piece that debunks the story and reveals the agenda of the writer. Excerpts below:

On Tuesday, January 16th, 2007, the American people awoke to startling and disturbing news: for the first time ever, the majority of women in the country were living without a husband.

...

With all the debate and pontification about the new minority status of married women, it’s just too bad that no significant media outlet (beyond this writer, on my nationally syndicated radio show) made the single most important and salient observation about the big news--

That is, it’s not true.

The entire story (based on the work of one ax-grinding, irresponsible, agenda-driven journalist for the New York Times) has been cooked up from willful, blatant and shameful distortions. Amazingly enough, none of the most respected and purportedly responsible media authorities have taken the trouble to call him on it.

First, the truth—a truth that is easily accessible from the United States Census Bureau.

According to the most recent available figures (from 2005), a clear majority (56%) of all women over the age of 20 are currently married.

Moreover, nearly all women in this country will get married at one time or another. Among those above the age of 50 (a group that includes the celebrated Baby Boomers of the famously revolutionary ‘60’s generation), an astonishing 94% have been married at one time or another and some 79% are either currently married or widowed.

Even including the younger, supposedly “post-marriage” generation, and considering all women above the age of 30, some 61% are currently married and another 12% are widowed. In other words, nearly three-fourths (73%, a crushing majority) of all women who have reached the tender age of 30 now occupy a traditional female role as either current wives or widows – avoiding the supposedly trendy status of divorced, separated, co-habiting or single.

So how did the writer get the numbers to support his conclusions?

It’s all based on a fundamentally dishonest decision that Roberts never acknowledges in the entire course of his lengthy article. It turns out that in his analysis he chose to count some 10,154,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 as “women.” It should come as no surprise that this vast group of teenagers (yes, teenagers, most of whom live at home) are officially classified as “single.” In fact, 97% of the 15 to 19 year olds identify themselves as “never married.” The Census Bureau, by the way, doesn’t call these youngsters “women” – it labels them “females” (a far more appropriate designation).

Yet even the ridiculous inclusion of his ten million unmarried teenagers couldn’t give Sam Roberts the story he wanted to report – that most American “women” are now unmarried. As a matter of fact, the Census Bureau shows that among all females above 15 the majority (51%!) are still classified as “married.”

So the New York Times required yet another sneaky distortion to shave off that last 2% from the married majority, though this bit of statistical sleight-of-hand Sam Roberts had the decency to acknowledge. “In a relatively small number of cases, the living arrangement is temporary, because the husbands are working out of town, are in the military, or are institutionalized,” he writes. In other words, in his brave new majority of “women” without spouses, he includes all those thousands upon thousands of wives and mothers who are waiting and praying at home for the return of their husbands from Iraq or Afghanistan. By arbitrarily removing this 2% of all females (2,400,000 individuals) who are classified as “married/spouse absent” from the ranks of the married, and then designating as “unmarried” his millions of middle school and high school girls who are living with their parents, together with some 9 million elderly widows who have devoted much of their lives to marriage and husbands (42% of all women over 65 are widows), Roberts can finally arrive at his desired but meaningless conclusion that “most women” now “are living without a husband.” Eureka!

But hey, it's just a newspaper story, right? No big deal, right? Think again.

The endlessly repeated lies – that married people are now a minority, that most women don’t have husbands, that half of all first marriages end in divorce – exert a real world influence on young people trying to make decisions about their own intimate arrangements. The relentless media portrayal of matrimony as a wounded, collapsing, outmoded, dysfunctional institution discourages prospective husbands and wives from making the lifelong commitments on which societal health and effective childrearing depend.

It's the same sort of thing I posted on a few weeks ago: when a petty official's hamhanded insistence that the singing of Christmas carols be stopped, the act was repudiated soon afterward by her superiors, yet the deed was done; the music was stopped, and a moment that might have been, but was not, graced by a tiny sliver of the Christmas message will never come again.

And in journalism, even when apologies are made and stories are retracted (always on an obscure inside page, of course), the lie is out there, ready to deceive and demoralize for decades to come.

Visit Italy (while there are still Italians)

Catholic World News reports:

Rome, Jan. 17, 2007 (CWNews.com) - The latest demographic statistics for 2005 show only 1.33 children being born to the average woman in Italy over the course of her childbearing years (15-49).

That figure remains one of the lowest in Europe, and well below the “replacement level” needed to maintain a constant population, but somewhat higher than the all-time low of 1.19 recorded in Italy in 1995.

In recent decades Italy has consistently ranked among Europe’s least fertile countries in terms of population, with the number of children born to the average woman falling regularly below the replacement level, except for a brief “baby-boom” in the early 1960s that brought the average childbearing figure up to 2.7.

I'm reminded of the oft-quoted Proverbs 14:12 : "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death." And not just the death of one man, but of an entire nation, it now appears.

Clearly, part of this Italian "way" -- one being followed in most other Western countries, too -- is the devaluation of having and raising children, and the widespread use of contraception and abortion. Maybe Italy is nominally still a Catholic country, but obviously the teachings of the Church on these subjects long ago ceased to guide the way Italians behave. They're now far too sophisticated to obey their Church.

The reward of their sophistication will very likely be the disappearance of the Italian people as an ethnic group. Or, more accurately, the disappearance of all those Italians who follow their own, very sophisticated way.

The sad history of the human race tells many a tale of the extermination of ethnic groups by others. But the suicide of ethnic groups -- now that's an innovation that will surely rank as one of the distinctives of our own very, very sophisticated age.

Give me that old-time religion!

Gerald has posted on the non-response of D.C's Archbishop Wuerl to Nancy Pelosi's ardent and public opposition to the church's teachings on matters of abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, and so on. The comments are well worth reading, too, particularly those that urge us to respect the Archbishop's decision to forego any public criticism of Ms. Pelosi in favor of a more "pastoral" approach.

Me, I think that the "pastoral" approach -- that is, doing nothing publicly (and probably nothing privately, either) -- has been given far too much time already. About twenty years' too much. It's time for Ms. Pelosi to be confronted publicly, given a short deadline for public repentance and admission of error, and then publicly excommunicated and denied the sacraments. Some people will think me heartless for suggesting this, but I ask them: what about the 4,000 children killed in the U.S. every day through the abortion rights on which Ms. Pelosi has built her career? Do they count for nothing? What about the 4,000 who will be killed tomorrow? and the day after that? and the day after that? If Ms. Pelosi were to have a change of heart because her church finally spoke honestly to her about the spiritual consequences she has already brought upon herself, might some future day's 4,000 live, not die? Isn't such a goal worth a little strong language?

And what about Ms. Pelosi's immortal soul? If twenty years of pastoral (in)action has made no change in her public behavior, which by canon law has already separated her from the Church by latae sententiae, turning every reception of Holy Communion by her into sacrilege, isn't it kinder to point out her peril to her in a way that she can no longer ignore?

A while ago I posted on the chilling scene in the 1964 movie Becket in which the title character, Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury, excommunicates a baron who has publicly stepped over the line (by standing by approvingly while his men murdered a priest). Here are the words he uses:

In that Lord Gilbert has rendered no act of contrition or repentance ... we do here and now separate him from the precious Body and Blood of Christ, and from the society of all Christians. We exclude him from Holy Mother Church and from all her sacraments, in heaven or on earth. We declare him excommunicate and anathema. We cast him into the outer darkness. We judge him damned with the Devil and his fallen angels and all the reprobate to eternal fire and everlasting pain.

Does this old-time religion seem outdated? Does this strong warning seem too strong? It doesn't to me. Archbishop Wuerl and all the other bishops with pro-abortion Catholic politicians in their dioceses should take a page from Becket's book. It may be the only way to save Ms. Pelosi, not to mention tomorrow's 4,000. And tomorrow's. And tomorrow's.

Epiphany at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at St. Thomas Aquinas on Epiphany Sunday (yesterday):

• Ludwig Senfl, Missa Nisi Dominus
• Tomas Luis de Victoria, Magi viderunt stellam

Not intended, but very apt

I was listening to a CD I'd never paid much attention to after the first quick listening, and came upon a song set to these lines by the English poet Edmund Blunden (1896-1974):

Is not this enough for moan
To see this babe all motherless --
A babe beloved -- thrust out alone
Upon death's wilderness?
Out tears, fall, fall, fall -- I would weep
My blood away to make her warm,
Who never went on earth one step,
Nor heard the breath of the storm.
How shall you go, my little child,
Alone on that most wintry wild?

It's called To Joy, which sounds like sheer bitterness until you know that "Joy" was the name of one of Blunden's daughters, who died when only forty days old. It's his lament for a child who was very beloved indeed, and motherless only in the sense that death had made her so.

But I also read it a different way: as Christ's lament for the millions of unborn children who have died in America by the abortionist's arts.

Read it again, with that perspective in mind. How much more true even than its original meaning is it to call those children "motherless": rejected and abandoned by the one person on whom they should be able to rely, when all others reject and abandon them? How true it rings to note the deathly winter chill of a world where so many mothers cast their babies out upon "that most wintry wild."

And how true it rings that Christ would weep His blood away to keep the warm breath of life in them -- if the Father had left that task to him.

But he didn't. He left it to us.

Hope in the waiting room

I took my daughter's car in to the dealership today to get a couple of recall things taken care of while she's on vacation.

The bad news is that the TV in the waiting room was tuned to CNN's coverage of opening day of the new Congress, and I had to take pains not to have to listen to all the fawning over Nancy Pelosi's ascent to the Speaker's role.

The good news is that among the waiting room's cross-section of citizenry in this hyper-liberal part of California, no one else was listening to it, either.

There's hope for the country yet.

Get the candles ready...

I'm sure we all have certain scenes from certain movies that have stuck with us throughout our lives. One of mine is from the 1964 movie version of Jean Anouilh's play Becket.

In it, the clergy of Canterbury have gathered to perform the ceremony by which the excommunication of King Henry II, ordered by Archbishop Thomas Becket, will be proclaimed. Each man carries a heavy candlestick with a lighted candle. As Becket (formidably played by Richard Burton) declaims the final terrible words, casting Henry out of communion with all Christians, each man turns his candlestick over so that the flame is lowermost, jams the candle into the floor to snuff it out, then thrusts it away from him in an echoing clatter.

It gives me shivers, even now, to describe it.

I don't know if such a ceremony ever existed, but whether as a revival or an innovation, I want to see it done for incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she stops at Catholic churches in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. on her "celebration tour."

For ages, this... person has blithely claimed to be Catholic and received communion, all the while using her political office to push an extreme anti-Catholic position on abortion, and abetting the hideous destruction of more than forty million American children over the past decades. And during all her many terms in Congress, no bishop of San Francisco has ever said a public word against it.

I can't travel to the East coast to take part, but I sure would like to see a few pro-life Catholic lay people get together to give her the Becket treatment on the steps of the churches she's visiting. If anyone's brave enough to take me seriously, I'll just offer some practical advice. I wouldn't spend a lot on the candlesticks; make 'em out of 2x2 lumber, maybe three feet tall; drill a hole for the candle and make sure it won't fall out when you turn it over, spoiling the effect. Make sure you've checked local ordinances to find out if you need a demonstration or parade permit. Let the local TV stations know you're up to something unusually interesting, and show up in time to get in front of the cameras. Get someone with a Richard-Burton-size voice to read out the pertinent section of canon law that demonstrates that Ms. Pelosi has already excommunicated herself a zillion times over. Then over go the candles.

And if the bishops of those dioceses are silent or prevaricating? Then sorry, gentlemen. We'd far prefer it if you would lead, but if you won't, laymen will step forward. Vexilla regis prodeunt.