How gay marriage hurts heterosexual marriage

The Purple Heart is a military decoration of venerable age in our still-young republic. It signifies that the wearer has been wounded in the service of his country.
Imagine, if you will, that you are a soldier who has received this decoration, and you are proud to wear it.
One day, a judge decides that it's unfairly discriminatory to award this medal only to those who were actually wounded, and decrees that it must henceforth be distributed to every person who has ever served in a branch of the armed forces, even to those who were discharged dishonorably.
Might you not feel that the distinction awarded to you for your sacrifice was now devalued?
Now imagine that the people react to this judicial decision by formally reconfirming the Purple Heart in its traditional purpose, not once but twice. On both occasions, judges declare this expression of the will of the people unconstitutional.
The next time somebody asks you "How could gay marriage possibly harm heterosexual marriage?" it might help to ask them if they've heard of the Purple Heart.

Casual anti-Pius-XII sneers in everyday life

I'm starting to keep track when I encounter little fragments of casual disdain for the supposed silence of Pope Pius XII during World War II. This pair of quotations are from Herman Wouk's novel War and Remembrance:

The archbishop didn't know all the Pope knew. The Pope had his reasons to remain silent, mainly the protection of Church property and influence in German-held lands; also, the old Christian dogma that the Jews must suffer down through history, to prove that they had guessed wrong on Christ, and must one day acknowledge him. ...
"Europe is a Christian continent, isn't it? Well, what's going on? Where's the Pope? Mind you, there's one Catholic priest right here in Marseilles who's a saint, a one-man underground. ..."

Wouk gives both of these lines to sophisticated characters, insiders in Italy and Vichy France, whom we are meant to regard as experts. No rebuttal is offered at the time these statements are made, nor is a more sympathetic view of Pope Pius conveyed anywhere else in this widely-read novel.
Of course, Wouk was writing in the mid-1970's, when Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy was recent and still riding high as the intellectual's default "understanding" of the subject of Pius' wartime conduct.
And yes, it's "only" a work of fiction. But does that really mean that in creating an imaginary narrative, an author has no responsibility to find out the truth, and tell it? Or at least to avoid character assassination?

Progressivism and the Catholic Church

Well, that's a subject line that would merit book-length treatment. But today, for now, just this:

Why is it that several generations of American Catholic clergy and laity have concluded that the big-government solutions of the Progressive Movement are just dandy expressions of Catholic moral teaching?

Looking back through history, it seems to me that the Church generally has had endless trouble when governments were huge and powerful. First there were the persecutions led by pagan Roman emperors. Then, when the emperors turned Christian, there were the repeated interferences in favor of heresy (e.g., Arianism and the Iconoclastic movement), followed by heavy-handed persecution of heresy (e.g., of Monophysitism in the Eastern Empire, a bone-headed move that helped soften up Christian unity for the first waves of Muslim conquest).

In the West, as the power of regional governments grew, starting in the 9th century, we had the Holy Roman Emperors demanding to appoint their own bishops, and generally interfering with the Church governance. As the national governments of France and England grew in power and stability, they too sought to control the selection of the Church's leadership -- finally including the Papacy itself. The Tudor dynasty in England ended the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses and re-established the kingdom, only to have Henry VIII squander his father's legacy, plunder the Church's property to refill his coffers, then tear his country's Church away from Rome in his mania for siring a male heir.

When the "divine right of kings" gave way to the democratic revolutions of the 1700's and 1800's, the Church suffered again -- once again at the hands of all-powerful states which had undergone a change of masters but not a change in their lust to control every important feature of private life.

And then in the 20th century there came those twins of totalitarianism, Communism and Fascism, and their rich uncle Progressivism. These three huge-government movements have all sought to tame the Church to their purposes, and to persecute it when it dared to be uncooperative.

And now we're into the second year of the Presidency of Barack Obama, and of the overwhelming legislative ascendancy of the radical wing of the Democratic Party. Their hostility to core moral teachings of the Church, soft-pedaled during the campaign, is now clear.

And yet so many Catholics still babble about the importance of promoting "social justice" through bigger and bigger government, through the permanent triumph of the Progressivist cause.

If we Catholics really want to promote "social justice", perhaps we should work on making ourselves extraordinary examples of charity and virtue. When we arrive at our own particular judgments before God, I don't think he's likely to ask us how diligently we voted for socialist programs, so that the poor could be helped through the forcible taking of money from other people. Instead, I think He'll ask: "What did you give, freely and humbly, because your heart was illuminated by My grace?"

Why I am a Catholic, episode 4,932

Because we don't put up stupid clueless billboards like this one:

h/t Failblog

The Tridentine Mass gets a boost

I'm really enjoying RealCatholicTV.com these days. This is their latest, about the irrational opposition still being met from bishops and many lay persons to the Tridentine Mass.

Getting our attention

Christianity, not just Catholicism, has been plagued with a sometimes-effeminate expression of the Gospel -- one that emphasizes forgiveness and complacency, and de-emphasizes anything that smacks of the difficult or demanding.

Men, however, are stirred by sterner demands. I wish that at the end of every good, orthodox homily, we could hear these words, from the conclusion of Jack Aubrey's commission from the Admiralty which he reads to the crew of HMS Surprise at the beginning of Master and Commander:

Hereof nor you nor any of you may fail as you will answer the contrary at your peril.

The child speaks -- and eloquently

Though I've been reading pro-life books, periodicals, and blogs for quite some time, I had never yet encountered this poem by G. K. Chesterton, until I was browsing through a little anthology of his writings on the family that I picked up almost by accident at a used book sale. Which is surprising, since it's a moving and aesthetically appealing rebuttal to the pro-choice arguments that "I don't want to bring a child into this terrible world" and "Think of the abusive / impoverished / etc. conditions this child will be brought up in. He's better off dead."

And it's all the more effective because you only gradually understand, as you read, that the speaker is a child in the womb.

By the Babe Unborn
G. K. Chesterton

If trees were tall and grasses short,
As in some crazy tale,
If here and there a sea were blue
Beyond the breaking pale,

If a fixed fire hung in the air
To warm me one day through,
If deep green hair grew on great hills,
I know what I should do.

In dark I lie: dreaming that there
Are great eyes cold or kind,
And twisted streets and silent doors,
And living men behind.

Let storm-clouds come: better an hour,
And leave to weep and fight,
Than all the ages I have ruled
The empires of the night.

I think that if they gave me leave
Within the world to stand,
I would be good through all the day
I spent in fairyland.

They should not hear a word from me
Of selfishness or scorn,
If only I could find the door,
If only I were born.

"Let them have their cards back!"

One never knows, really, how accurate stories like this one are, but the retort from the Bishop's father is priceless:

In a diocesan magazine column, Bishop Victor Galeone of St. Augustine recounts that a social worker threatened to take away the family’s benefit cards during the Great Depression if his mother-- an Italian immigrant with a third-grade education-- did not abort her fourth child. The future bishop’s father responded, “Let them have their cards back! The Lord will provide.”

Learning how to argue for the unborn

This video is from the Life Training Institute. I've just become aware of the site via Jill Stanek's blog, but if you're looking for guidance about how to defend unborn children effectively through discussion with pro-choice people, this looks like a great place to spend some time.

Today at St. Thomas

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

Lassus, Domine, labia mea aperies
Palestrina, Domine, quando veneris

In contrast to all the other my other earlier posts listing the Choir's selections, I'm now reporting from behind the scenes: I joined the Choir this week! It's a challenge, I have to say, since it's been many years since I've sung Renaissance music and I'm not as familiar with its harmonic patterns as I once was; and I can tell that reading Gregorian Chant is going to take plenty of getting used to. But this first outing was mighty nice, nonetheless.

Quare via impiorum prosperatur?

In the L.A. Archdiocese's newspaper The Tidings appears this column by Nancy Pelosi's bishop, George Niederauer, finally pointing out that, contrary to Ms. Pelosi's assertions on national television, Catholics are actually not free to shield their moral defiance of the Church's teachings behind a bogus claim of "freedom of conscience".

Yet her defiance and her complicity in the grave evil of abortion on demand have been going on for years, and we seem to be no closer to the day when her bishop will say: "Nancy, on peril of your immortal soul, change your ways before it's too late."

h/t the redoubtable Karen Hall.

Update: I've removed the link to Karen's wonderful blog Some Have Hats, since it doesn't appear to be available anymore. Makes me sad.

The Tebow ads

Personally, I was disappointed with the Tim Tebow ads aired during the SuperBowl yesterday. Since their intended anti-abortion message had already become so public, I was dismayed that all we heard from Pam Tebow during the ads themselves was a curious circumlocution about how she "almost lost" her son. Not a whisper of the "A word", or of the dramatic story of the choice for life that she made for her son.

Yes, if you went to Focus on the Family's website and listened to the entire 7-minute video interview with the Tebows, right at the end came some very clear, strong statements, and the direct plea "please don't kill your baby".

But how many of those who watched the ads dug that far to hear that message?

And it was such a simple, straightforward story: they told me to abort my baby because I took some drugs that might have caused severe birth defects. I didn't. Instead of a burden, I -- and the nation -- got an exceptional quarterback and a fine person. That story, told simply and shortly, had the power to change anyone's heart, regardless of their faith or lack of it.

A great opportunity was missed.

And now that an "opinion" ad has been allowed to air during the SuperBowl, look for the pro-abortion lobby to submit their own ads in abundance next year.

Gloria.tv -- Dialogues of the Carmelites

I had often heard of this opera by the 20th-century French composer François Poulenc, but had never seen a performance. This video, from the Catholic-oriented video site Gloria.tv, gives you the final eight minutes of a splendid production. Absolutely gripping. Overwhelming, really.

The person who posted this clip has given an excellent summary of the historical facts on which the opera is based in the comments section beneath the video (where you'll also find a comment of mine, praising it).

Today at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at today's 'Gregorian' Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas:

Heinrich Isaac, Amen dico vobis
Orlandus Lassus, Eripe me
Isaac, Misereris omnium

Texts can be found here.

Just gotta love this... ya know?

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

She might have had a gun

Some random woman, reportedly "deranged", shoved Pope Benedict to the floor of St. Peter's tonight just before Mass. The Pope was unhurt, thank God. But she might have had a gun, and then the Enemy would have landed another haymaker on this Christmas Eve, added to the Senate passage of abortion-funding "health care" legislation.

Let's be thankful for Pope Benedict while we have him. Media vita in morte sumus.

Gotta hand it to ya, Catholics for Obama!

If 54% of my fellow Catholics hadn't voted for Barack Obama, maybe ornaments like this wouldn't be hanging from this year's White House Christmas -- oops, "Holiday" tree.

h/t SHH.

A rather slanted magazine rack

I visited our parish's offices a couple of weeks ago for a meeting, and the staff magazine rack caught my eye. Quite a few publications that tend to be full of dissent from Catholic doctrine: Sojourners, Commonweal, NCR. Some lukewarm ones like U. S. Catholic.

Fortunately also the Knights of Columbus' Columbia mag -- I'm guessing it's there because the Knights are making sure it's there.

But nothing else of substance on the orthodox side: no First Things, no Our Sunday Visitor, no Touchstone.

ClimateGate

The smoking gun of climate change flummery-- if the emails are authenticated.

Send more like this one!

Bishop Tobin: Pro-Abortion Catholic Pols Should Worry About Their Souls, Not Job
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Bishop Thomas Tobin of Rhode Island, who has been involved in an exchange on abortion and communion with pro-abortion Congressman Patrick Kennedy, gave an interview this week to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. On the program, he said pro-abortion Catholic politicians need to be more worried about their souls than their jobs. "The most important commitment we can make is our faith, because that defines our relationship with God. Nothing is more important than that. And if your job, your profession, your vocation gets in the way of that, you have to quit your job and save your soul," Tobin said. Tobin also said on the show that his 2007 decision to ask Kennedy to voluntarily stop receiving communion because of his pro-abortion stance was not a "punishment." "Every Catholic has certain obligations, it means something to say you are a Catholic. No one is forced to be a Catholic," he said. "If you choose freely to be a Catholic it means you do certain things, and you believe certain things, and I think all I'm trying to say to Congressman Kennedy and others who might be involved, say: if you're a Catholic, live up to your faith. Understand what the Church teaches, accept those teachings, and live that faith. If the church, not just the Catholic Church, but the religious community - if we don't bring these values, this spiritual vision to these discussions, who else will do that?"

Oh, good.

Sometime in the next few days, I hope to write a bit about the goings-on described in this article. As soon as I get my teeth to stop gnashing.

A Pope on the rights of Indians, 1537

The anti-Catholic propaganda of Protestantism, which has now morphed into the anti-Catholic propaganda of militant secularism, has long maintained that the Catholic Church did nothing to fight for the natural rights of the native inhabitants of the New World, and actually abetted their cruel treatment at the hands of Spanish and Portuguese explorers.

Well, OK, let's start at the top; let's start with the Pope. What did Pope Paul III write in 1537, just 18 years after Cortez landed in Mexico, and only eight years after Pizarro invaded Peru? "Nice going, guys, those heathens sure deserved to be exploited to the hilt for your enrichment?"

Not exactly.

From the encyclical Sublimus Dei:

... notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

Read the whole thing (it's short) here.

Obama economic advisor Robert Reich does us all a favor:

I will actually give you a speech made up entirely almost at the spur of the moment of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is and a candidate will never say, but what candidates should say if we were in a kind of democracy where citizens were honored.

...

I'm so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on healthcare. Look, we are we have the only healthcare system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. That's true.

...

And by the way, we are going to have to, if you are very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive. So we're going to let you die.


Catholics who voted for Obama should ponder Mr. Reich's words. Is this what you wanted? If not, what are you doing about it? Remember, Reich isn't some unknown kook or talk show host; he's a former governor and Secretary of Labor, and Obama picked him as an advisor.

Listen to the complete audio of this 2007 speech at Berkeley here.

"Is there no virtue among us?"

I believe our Church took a terribly wrong turn when, beginning after Vatican II, it de-emphasized the cultivation of individual virtue (as an expression of the love of Christ) and threw all its attention upon cultivation of the Corporal Works of Mercy (i.e., feeding the hungry, relieving poverty), but in a very peculiar way -- by cultivating the power of the government to coerce from unwilling donors the counterfeit of Christian charity via taxation and redistribution -- that is, socialist solutions to societal problems.

So I guess I'm agreeing with James Madison, who said in 1788:

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government -- can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea...

Had the Church concentrated on its immemorial task, bringing individuals to a love of Christ which would express itself in sacrificial love of neighbor, we would have a much healthier nation now, and ironically, the conditions of social justice which are so often prayed for would be far closer to realization -- through the virtue of sacred Charity in millions of ordinary people.

"Streets" smarts

Lately, we've been enjoying reruns of the early '70's TV series The Streets of San Francisco, and something from a recently-aired show seemed worth noting.

In this episode, a young woman called Barbara (played by Kitty Winn, of The Exorcist and The Panic in Needle Park fame) chooses to have her out-of-wedlock baby at a home for unwed mothers, against the wishes of her hyper-feminist mother, who wants her to get an abortion. But it turns out that the home is in cahoots with a doctor who lost his license for doing abortions back in the '50's, and who has a nice scam going. When one of these mothers is ready to deliver, the doc over-anesthetizes her and then tells her, when she awakes, that the baby was stillborn. He then sells the baby on the illegal-adoption market.

Barbara doesn't buy that story, though, and goes hunting for the child. In the final confrontation scene, her mother tells her she isn't being reasonable. She rounds on her mother and says:

What's your idea of "reasonable", Mother? Pill in the morning? Sex at night? Abortion at the end of a careless month? That's not my idea of "reason". I know what it is to have life inside of me -- growing, through me. You never taught me that. You never taught me that life and love are the same. You didn't want me to have my baby. Nobody does. Nobody.

This episode aired in 1973, shortly after Roe v. Wade. You probably couldn't get such an intelligent and forthright challenge to abortion on the air today, but back then, the issue was still new and raw enough, maybe, to allow for a wider range of expression.

ObamaCare vs. ChristCare

Quite apart from the issue of providing abortion funding either by specific inclusion or by a lack of well-defined exclusion (as has been proposed and repeatedly rejected by House Democrats), there is the larger question of whether the Catholic Church should be cheering this enormous extension of government control over the lives of Americans, funded by the coercive power of taxation. I don't think it should.

Our Church is about saving souls, first and foremost. Yes, our cooperation in that process will naturally lead us to care for the material needs of the poor and unfortunate. But it profits us nothing to provide that care through government, since that simply forces someone else to pay for it. Forcing someone else to give their money is not a virtue. Only if that care is enabled through our own direct, intentional, sacrificial giving, does it form a part of the change of heart that our Savior is asking of us.

If it's common now to refer to the president's proposals as ObamaCare, I would say that we Catholics should be focusing on ChristCare: an organized voluntary taking up of other people's healthcare burdens through the voluntary, sacrificial giving of ordinary Catholics.

What else went wrong

At a local book sale recently I picked up a book with the intriguing title The Catholic Heritage, by one Lawrence S. Cunningham. I'm always interested in learning more about the contributions that Catholics have made over the span of the Church's history. Given the book's title, it seemed reasonable to expect that I might find out some new things along that line.

I stopped reading at the following:

It is no longer possible to think of Catholic theology; there are a number of theologies which work within the larger tradition which we call the "Catholic tradition".

And what are some of those "theologies"? Liberation theology. Feminist theology, including the execrable work of Mary Daly.

It's not so much that I think Mr. Cunningham was wrong when he was writing back in 1983. The big problem is that he was probably right. And that's another thing that went wrong after Vatican II: knowledge of and respect for the theological heritage of the Church took a back seat to the feelings of us Boomers, who were by then thoroughly accustomed to having our demands for "relevance" and "meaningfulness" catered to.

It was the beginning of a Church of teenagers, not a Church of adults. Maybe -- just maybe -- the generation of young Catholics we see today is actually willing to grow up, at an age when my generation was not.

The "mass" I left behind me

The recent nauseating "Mass" depicted in this video is a perfect example of what drove me away from attendance at Sunday Mass back in the 1970's. The irony is that the "reformers" thought that this kind of thing was going to be the key to keeping my generation in the Church. Think again, guys. And, another thing: ask God to forgive you for dragging His Church down into this relativistic, self-indulgent, politicized, ugly muck.

"The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" claims another fine old church

Catholic Culture noted the closing of 170-year-old St. John the Baptist church in Schenectady, NY, by the Diocese of Albany, which is boldly spreading the Faith by closing 33 parishes in the next three years. Bishop Howard Hubbard has presided over the collapse of Catholicism in his diocese since 1977, closing 36 parishes previously.

With considerable irony, the date of SJB's closing was June 24, the feast of -- as the lone commenter (a priest) pointed out on the Albany Business Review's story -- you guessed it, St. John the Baptist.

The parish still has a forlorn little website up. You can see the stained glass windows here. The altar had long ago undergone the mandatory wreckovation, though most of the basic architecture was still to be seen. Behind the altar is a huge wooden carving depicting St. John (I guess) being engulfed by a tidal wave on the Jordan or possibly consumed by a large carnivorous plant. The last worship schedule listed a single Sunday Mass, a "folk Mass" at 10:00 AM.

"Folk Mass"?? When did "aggiornamento" get defined as "keeping the Church tied to the pop culture of 1964"?

At least it won't be torn down. It's going to become the new performing home of Schenectady Light Opera. Maybe they'll treat St. John better than the diocese did.

Some things don't change

It seems to me that, in a sense, the Cross of Calvary was no anomaly, no betrayal of Christ unique to its place in time, or the people who actually took part in it. The Cross is always what happens to Jesus, to the Word Made Flesh, whenever He appears in this world we chose in place of the one He made; either in His full form in Jesus of Nazareth, the Second Person of the Trinity; or in His partial form, in His followers who, now and then, trust Him with their lives. Jesus could have dropped in anytime in human history and our charming species would have done Him in just the same.

More than that: if God's plan of salvation had been different, and Jesus had re-entered time every year somewhere on January 1, every generation would still have found a reason and a way to get Him to someplace like Calvary by 11:59PM on December 31. And probably much sooner: it was a quick five days from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, after all.

Progress without Pause

From an article by Gilbert Meilaender in the February 2009 First Things:

"What does it profit a man," Kierkegaard writes, "if he goes further and further and it must be said of him: he never stops going further; when it must also be said of him: was there nothing that made him pause?"

Meilaender is writing in the context of recent reports of a successful human cloning in, of course, California. It used to be that a sensible fear of science overreaching itself was a staple of the common culture, expressed in the standard "mad scientist" character. Now, it seems, scientists who are inclined to indulge their lust for experimentation without moral boundaries are permanently excused from any scrutiny, as long as they clothe their work in the mantle of a search for knowledge.

Could the "reform of the reform" finally be starting?

This article from the CatholicCulture.org website mentions unconfirmed reports (unconfirmed by the Vatican, that is) that there may finally be some progress toward the much-needed "reform of the reform" in Catholic liturgy, to convey more of a sense of the sacred. Ideas that have been suggested by the Congregation for Divine Worship include (gasp!) an end to the practice of receiving communion in the hand, and (double gasp!) a return to the celebration of the Mass ad orientem. That is, with the priest facing God and leading us to Him, not facing us to tell us what terrific people we are.

It can't come too soon.

Missions? Really?

Yesterday, most of the homily time at St. Thomas Aquinas was taken up by an appeal on behalf of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur -- specifically their missions program in third world countries. Our priest called it the best mission-oriented message he had heard.

Yet I noticed something that left me very uneasy. The nun who spoke described quite a few charitable efforts going on at Notre Dame missions: teaching their African students to raise their own food, for example, so they wouldn't have to sit through their classes hungry.

Laudable, yes. But I kept waiting for any mention of the main thing that I thought missions were supposed to be for: bringing the Catholic Faith to those who don't have it. I waited. And I waited. And then the speech was over.

I have no doubt the Notre Dame sisters do many charitable things in foreign countries. But really, how is this different from what many secular groups do, like the Peace Corps? And frankly, often do better?

Why don't they want to emphasize -- or even mention -- the one thing that Catholic religious orders have always been proudest to do -- tell the world about Christ and His Church?

A teachable moment

After the recent Beer Summit, the White House published this photo of the three men leaving the Rose Garden. Pretty unremarkable at first glance. But then you notice something...

Self-described victim of racial profiling Henry Gates, who walks with a cane, is being helped down the steps by the supposedly racist officer who arrested him. President Obama, in the meantime, strides ahead, appearing unconcerned now that most of the political advantage to be gained from Mr. Gates' arrest has been harvested.

On to health care! And when all the political advantage has been wrung out of that "emergency", it'll be on to something else. But you'll have to depend on someone else to show you some actual kindness.

Quite a "teachable moment", indeed.

Logan's Run: the starting line

Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt, the novelist, just recently passed away. I understand he was a very warm and charming individual in person, and people tell me they've really enjoyed his books. But I have to say that I wish he hadn't dropped so many snarky comments about the Church in the course of his celebrity. Our enemies will be quoting him for years.

Why can't people who leave the Church just let it alone?

Conscience clause, c. 1535

Re-reading R. W. Chambers' classic biography of Thomas More, I was struck by this quotation from Judge Rastell's contemporary notes on Parliamentary debate over the infamous Act of Succession, which required all subjects of Henry VIII to swear an oath acknowledging him as Supreme Head of the Church in England:

Note diligently here that the bill was earnestly withstood, and could not be suffered to pass, unless the rigour of it were qualified with this word maliciously; and so not every speaking against the Supremacy to be treason, but only maliciously speaking. And so for more plain declaration thereof, the word maliciously was twice put into the Act.

And yet afterwards, in putting the Act in execution against Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas More, the Carthusians, and others, the word maliciously, plainly expressed in the Act, was adjudged by the King's Commissioners, before whom they were arraigned, to be void. [emphasis added]

If anyone is inclined to accept the current assurances emanating from Washington that this or that new legislation compelling doctors and pharmacists to collaborate in providing abortions will be equipped with a "robust conscience clause" excusing those who decline on moral (for our purposes, Catholic) grounds -- well, just be aware that that particular joke is almost five hundred years old. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...

Let a hero's work be noted!

In a post about the assault-with-a-deadly-weapon attack on a pro-life demonstrator in Chico, California, the estimable Suzy B blog said this:

Considering that Mr. Cantfield [the demonstrator] was simply showing pictures of what abortionist George Tiller did day after day, how can anyone be angered? Tiller was portrayed as a hero for women; why not show his “heroic” actions?

Why not, indeed?

Here we go again...

While reading the entry on "English Confessors and Martyrs (1534-1729)" at the online Catholic Encyclopedia, I came across this:

The tyranny they had to withstand was, as a rule, not the sudden violence of a tyrant, but the continuous oppression of laws sanctioned by the people in Parliament, passed on the specious plea of political and national necessity, and operating for centuries with an almost irresistible force which the law acquires when acting for generations in conservative and law-abiding counties.


It seems to me that this is the type of oppression against Catholics that we can expect sometime in the next decade or two in our own country. The persecution won't come with the "sudden violence of a tyrant" -- there'll be no big roundups or concentration camps (needlessly bad PR, after all) -- but with the same kind of "continuous oppression" of laws piled upon laws that slowly strangled the Catholic faith in England.

And not only there. How did the Catholic populations of the Near East and North Africa dwindle away after the Islamic conquest of the 600's and 700's A.D.? Yes, sometimes by slaughter and direct coercion, especially at first. But Islamic rulers quickly found a far more cost-effective method: impose second-class citizenship, special legal burdens and a tax on being something other than Muslim; then just let that work on human nature over time. In every generation, after all, there are bound to be lukewarm Christians. Some of them will give up and "move on", taking up the favored religion for the creature comforts it brings.

And we Americans are, despite the fashionable defiance of authority we often put on when it's safe, are basically a "conservative and law-abiding" society. As laws change, we grumble, but we usually end up complying.

So look out for the gradual pressure that will be brought to bear on our Catholic teachings during this and later administrations. Not, to be sure, on Catholic positions that can be made to bend to leftist aims, such as government aid for the poor (which, strangely, never manages to reduce the number of the poor) and "immigration reform". But on the real "life" issues -- abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, cloning, and others -- there will be decreasing toleration of Church teachings. And on other teachings as well -- gay marriage, for instance, where we can soon expect a soft censorship on preaching and catechesis based on severe, yet vague and malleable, "hate speech" laws.

Add to this legal pressure from outside the pressure of the Kmiecs, McBriens, Chittisters et al., who from inside the Church will be only too happy to side with the government against authentic Catholic teaching. They held the Church's Magisterium in slight regard already; but since January 20, 2009, they have also gained a powerful external White House ally with filibuster-proof majorities in Congress. They will help bring on the oppression of faithful Catholics, and provide pseudo-Catholic cover on CNN for the secularists whenever there are complaints. And it will all be done under "the specious plea of political and national necessity".

So, faithful Catholics, I'd say: brush up your bio for the Catholic Encyclopedia's future entry on "American Confessors and Martyrs (2009-present)". If our entry names half the number of names that the English one does, we'll have done well.

Wisdom from a box top

Someone just told me about the epiphany he experienced in his Christian life when, looking idly down at the top of a Cheerios box while getting breakfast, his attention was suddenly seized by these simple words:

Must be present to win.

It seems to me that that is the simple thing that God asks of us: be present to Me. Pray, and when you do, trust Me enough not to dwell on the past or worry about what might happen tomorrow. Just be here with Me now.

It's baaaaack...

This banner first went up above the main entrance to St. Thomas Aquinas back in the middle of last year. There was a bit of argument about it when it was proposed by our three-church parish's Human Concerns Committee; I was among those who objected that putting up a banner about torture exclusively would send a message that this was the main moral issue for the Catholic Church right now (and send an unmistakable political message in an election year in which waterboarding was already a live campaign issue for one party). After the one month of visibility that this banner was said to be limited to, I suggested that we should follow up with a series of similar banners on other and more important moral issues: "abortion is wrong", "embryonic stem cell research is wrong", "euthanasia is wrong", and so forth.

One response I received from someone associated with the HCC (I won't name the person because the email was private communication) was "... if the issue were to be "euthanasia", "embryonic cell research" or even "death penalty", it would be so controversial that the parish may never come to a consensus to declare one way or another."

This spoke volumes to me about the degree to which 60's-style dissidence has soaked into Catholic life here in Palo Alto. Catechesis and apologetics have apparently been so poor for so long that simply stating the Church's longstanding, unequivocal positions about euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research would be hopelessly controversial. The Church regards both these acts as intrinsically evil, and thus never permissible. (The morality of the death penalty remains a prudential judgment about which Catholics may disagree and still remain faithful sons and daughters of the Church; the other two are not prudential judgments, but settled doctrine which command our obedience).

The banner first went up, as I said, back in the middle of last year -- June, I think, so it had to be taken down each time there was a wedding at STA, brides being understandably sensitive about having the torture issue shoved in their faces on their special day. At month's end the banner went away, and I pretty much let the incident slide into the past.

And then, walking down Waverley Street toward the church on Corpus Christi last Sunday, I looked up and there it was again -- this time hung crookedly across one of windows as you see above, secured to two big screw eyes driven into the 108-year-old redwood siding.

I'll keep you posted on developments.

Unfathomable on so many levels

From CWN:

Commenting on the early years of the clerical abuse scandal, retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee writes in his forthcoming memoir, “We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature.” The archbishop says he instead “accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it.’”

Had no understanding of its criminal nature? Out of any 1,000 American men at the time, how many would not know that child sexual abuse was a crime? And "the common view"?? On what planet was that view "common"?

I don't like a lot of what SNAP does, but the following comment is right on target:

Peter Isely, Midwest director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, commented, “It's beyond belief. He's either lying or he's so self-deceived that he's inventing fanciful stories.”

My question is: how did such a licentious, deluded priest ever make it into the episcopate?

It's perhaps no surprise that another story on this perverted man discloses this not-exactly-bombshell:

In an interview with The New York Times, retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland admitted relationships with several men while he served as Archbishop of Milwaukee and questioned Catholic teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts.

Sick of "Social Justice"

I've officially had my fill of the slobbering love affair so many Catholics have carried on with "social justice" over the past decades. Especially since this has usually been expressed in a cozying up to socialism as its best implementation.

Outside St. Thomas last Sunday there was a table where we were invited to write letters urging the Federal government to be sure to continue spending large amounts of money to "help the poor".

Now, if more of the money we're already spending was going for programs that actually succeeded in teaching people how to get out of poverty, that would be worth saving. But I can remember when today's enormous social programs got their start in Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty". What great social changes we were promised back then! All those hundreds of billions spent, only to have poverty grow greater in scope, amid a deepening degradation in the culture in which the poor occupy the lowest and most vulnerable layer.

I may have missed something in catechism class, but why is it in the interest of the Catholic church for alms given voluntarily as an expression of personal charity to be replaced with welfare checks funded by state coercion (via taxation)? Especially when that means more and more power being concentrated in the hands of a central government?

Full and active participation, 1954-style

Every now and then I pick up the shirt-pocket-size My Sunday Missal by Fr. Stedman, ca. 1954, that I grew up with, and re-read some part at random. Here's something that might interest anyone who thinks the pre-Vatican II church expected the faithful just to sit dumbly in their pews. Of even more interest is the way that that contemporary shibboleth, "full and active participation", was thought of back then.

How to "participate actively"

You "will be filled with this [true Christian] spirit only in proportion" as you "actively participate" in the Mass, says Pope Pius X. How do you actively participate? As a lay person you actively participate: first, by offering the Divine Victim to the Eternal Father in union with the priest, your official representative; second, by offering yourself to the Eternal Father in union with the Divine Victim. To be a co-offerer with the priest, you must have a sacrificial will, so as to make this twofold oblation of Christ and yourself. ... the Mass is not the private prayer of the priest at the altar, but the collective prayer of all present both in the pews as well as at the altar.

No tambourine, no bass guitar, no hand-holding, no clapping, no liturgical dance. Just quiet, total interior union with the sacrifice of the Mass.

Good thing we dumped all that claptrap in the sixties, huh?

Anger management

Back in February, I alluded to a conversation I had with a St. Ann Choir member after a Mass at St. Thomas, and promised to blog about it. Time to make good on that.

The conversation came after most of the choir had figured out that I was The Dover Beachcomber who had been blogging so enthusiastically about the choir's work at STA. The comment that struck me was something like "I was surprised it was you, because I didn't know there was so much anger in you." Or something close to that. They weren't criticizing, just noting. Anyway, the key thing was that the anger that underlay some of my posts had made an impression.

Going back over my blogging history, I had to admit that this person was right. I certainly have sounded angry at times, occasionally very angry. And that got me to thinking about why that was so.

My wife supplied a suggestion that I think is right on the money. She said that she had read that anger isn't a primary emotion, i.e., it's not what happens first. Before anger, there is usually a sense of hurt, and anger is a response to the hurt.

Thinking about that, I realized that my sense of personal hurt over what has happened to the Catholic Church in my lifetime is indeed enormous. At the very moment its old solidity and confidence might have saved the whole world -- and me -- much grief and sin, those things vanished into a welter of self-doubt, blandness, and timidity. And that change didn't just happen; it was pushed, and continues to be pushed even today, by Catholics who chose their own judgment, and the judgment of secular society, over the teaching authority of the Church, and over what Chesterton calls "the democracy of the dead" (i.e., the accumulated wisdom of the men and women who came before us).

That, I realize, is where the hurt comes from. I could do a better job of resisting the reaction of anger, I suppose. But on the other hand, perhaps sometimes it has its uses.

One more thing...

If some are wondering why I chose to include the "Catholic Left" specifically in the title of that post below containing the Andrew Klavan video, it's because I've heard "Oh, that's not in keeping with the spirit of Vatican II" one time too many. One time too many to ignore the unspoken tag line: "And so, shut up."

Andrew Klavan explains the [Catholic] Left

H/T Little Miss Attila via American Digest

Something good out of Canada

Canadian comic Steven Crowder braves the wrath of The Religion of Peace:



If God will just keep on using people like Crowder to make Islam look as ridiculous as it really is, everything should be just fine someday.

h/t Five Feet of Fury

Try to be charming

Last Friday we attended a performance of Bach harpsichord toccatas by the young Iranian phenom Mahan Isfahani. In a break between pieces, he told us that Gustav Leonhardt had once said to him after a performance which hadn't gone just right, "When there are a lot of wrong notes, try to be charming."

This Sunday at St. Thomas

I'm afraid I can't give you the usual list of Renaissance motets the choir sang today, because I forgot to consult the motet booklet for titles before I left church. I'm pretty sure one of them was Pierre de la Rue's gorgeous little setting of Aquinas' O salutaris hostia, which I've praised in previous posts.

A brave kid speaks up

Twelve-year-old Lia sums it all up in five minutes.

After 403 comments, many of them quite vile, her parents closed the combox on this video with this note:

We apologize for turning off the commenting functionality. This was not to stop genuine discussion or debate on the issue but was, rather, a response to the cowardly who used it as an opportunity to throw insults and threats at a young girl that they hated without reason. Thank-you to everyone who, whether in agreement or not, has responded in a respectful manner.

Beautifully put.

This Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir yesterday at the noon Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas church in Palo Alto, CA:

Josquin des Prez, De Profundis
William Byrd, Siderum Rector

At least those were the pieces corresponding to the numbers on the old hymn board; sometimes, I think, there are last-minute changes, so this might not be correct. You can read the Latin and English texts by going here, then clicking on the "Motet texts and translations" link in the sidebar.

Terrific homily by Fr. Nahoe, too.

But actually the most interesting thing was a conversation I had with a couple of choir members afterwards. More about that next time, when I'm not in a hurry.

A little remodeling advice from NLM

Over at the New Liturgical Movement, Jeffrey Tucker has a great essay about the only real antidote to the horrible acoustic effects of a certain kind of floor covering that plagues many Catholic sanctuaries. Appropriately, it's called Rip Up Those Carpets!

'Tis a puzzlement

This post is going to be about Latin in the Mass. I promise.

Each year, my wife and I attend a few events in the Lively Arts concert series at nearby Stanford University. It's quite an eclectic mix, and once we've chosen the presentations we're pretty sure we'll like, we always pick one or two that could be kind of a stretch. And so we found ourselves last week at a concert by the Malian rock / folk singer Rokia Traoré.

It was a bit loud (OK, way too loud) for me, and way too repetitive, but for me that's true of most rock. What struck me is this: Ms. Traoré sang entirely in French and Bambara and other languages that, it's safe to say, the great majority of the nearly sold-out crowd did not understand. There were no lyrics printed in the lavish program, and although it said she would announce the program from the stage, she usually didn't. It's safe to say that the meaning of what she was singing was basically lost on almost everyone in the audience, except for the people who had memorized the songs on her CDs.

She was rewarded with a standing ovation.

So here's what bugs me. Fellow Catholics of a certain age (mine) often complain to me that they want nothing to do with Latin in the Mass or sacraments, because they can't understand what's being said. This, despite the constant presence of side-by-side English translations in the missalettes that are provided. It's the same complaint as forty years ago, when it was oh-so-important that we dump Latin. When for a few bucks you could buy a missal that would tell you, word for word, what every darned Latin prayer meant througout the entire year's Sunday liturgies.

So how come a rock singer from Mali, performing a program that couldn't be understood except by those ardent fans who had memorized her songs' lyrics, gets complete acceptance -- when millions of Catholics tell their Church they just can't abide going to Mass unless everything is translated for them? That it's just too hard to understand things if they're in some foreign language?

Feet of clay

The news has apparently been confirmed that the founder of the Legionairies of Christ, Fr. Marcial Maciel, led a double life -- he had a mistress, fathered a child, and may even have molested seminarians. I watched an interview on EWTN this morning on Raymond Arroyo's program with two young LC priests who were obviously taking the news very hard.

They correctly said that the only leader that any order should concentrate on is Christ. But they also said that Fr. Maciel's picture was being removed from many LC locations where it had been placed, and that the entire body of his writings was now under scrutiny.

I suppose that's a normal and healthy reaction: revulsion and suspicion. But it would be a shame if the final result was the wholesale tossing out of Fr. Maciel's work and writings.

Honestly, do we do this with other moral teachers? When it came out that Martin Luther King had an adulterous affair, did we take down all his pictures? Did we throw his "I have a dream" speech out of our schools? Did we stop publishing "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"?

No. We recognized that every human being, even the apparently most inspiring, have feet of clay, and we continue to value their good works even as we shake our heads at their bad works. And that's the same way Fr. Maciel, and his life's work, should be judged.

The Christian way.

Snubbed

Not one Catholic priest or bishop was invited to give any prayer or invocation at Mr. Obama's inauguration.

Hey, you 53% of American Catholics who voted for him: how do you like your reward?

And so it goes

Catholic Culture's news summary notes a New York Times story that more than 2,000 Catholic schools have closed since 1990.

Well, since so many Catholic schools ceased being distinctively Catholic years ago, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Why go to a Catholic school when it has reallybecome just a public school named after a saint? When the salt has lost its savor, it is good for nothing but to be thrown out and trodden underfoot.

The mainstream Catholic misinterpretations of Vatican II continue to wash the Church in America into bland irrelevance. Why should the secularists bother persecuting it? It's slowly killing itself anyway.

The violent bear it away

So Joe Biden, newly-minted VP, self-described faithful Catholic, and staunch defender of a woman's right to murder her child (as long as he/she hasn't been born yet) in open defiance of clear Catholic teaching, gets a nice standing ovation and Holy Communion, to boot, at Washington's Holy Trinity Church shortly before the inauguration. Bishop Wuerl: silent as the non-existent graves of the 2,500 American children who were aborted today.

The AP story also mentioned that it was also at Holy Trinity that John Kennedy heard Mass just before his inauguration in 1961. Very appropriate, though not for the sentimental reason the writer probably meant. Appropriate because Kennedy pioneered the abandonment of Catholic moral teaching to achieve high public office.

"Read nothing before Vatican II"

From the online Our Sunday Visitor recently:

Q. My husband is in the process of making his confirmation, and I am accompanying him to his classes each Sunday. We are disturbed about some of the teachings taking place. For instance, today we were told that confession does not need to be done frequently and we do not need to confess in order to receive Communion.

We were also told that we should not be reading anything before Vatican II because it is no longer the teaching of the Church. Can you please clarify what the correct teaching of the Church is?

OSV's answer was forthright and correct: esentially that what they were being told was a crock. Read the whole answer here. If the link doesn't work, look on the OSV site for the "Question of the Day" feature for January 7.

What lies are peddled in some RCIA classes now!

Richard John Neuhaus, R.I.P.

Father Richard John Neuhaus has died. I had no idea he was even ill.

In a season full of blows to the prospects of the cultural and religious renewal I've hoped for, now this comes.

First Things magazine was a big part of what got me headed back to the Catholic Church in the 1990's. Joe Bottum will do a good job as editor, but he won't be Fr. Neuhaus. No one will be.

He was quite a champion. I met him once, at the 1998 C. S. Lewis Foundation's conference in Cambridge, England. Just asked him a question after his talk, about how to nudge the big Protestant church I was then attending toward a pro-life position. He was every bit as gracious and witty in person, extempore to a perfect stranger, as he was in print to the public at large.

Go with God, Fr. Neuhaus. Everything is ready now.

Exactly right!

It's so refreshing to have a high official of our Church actually defend its teachings!

To reach young, church must explain core beliefs, official says

By John Thavis
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- If the church wants to reach young people today, it must avoid the temptation to "fudge" on core Catholic beliefs in an effort to make them more agreeable to contemporary tastes, a Vatican official said.

Instead, it should confront with courage the major barriers in modern evangelization, including cultural resistance to the proclamation of Christ as the unique savior, said Dominican Father Augustine DiNoia, undersecretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

"No one in his or her right mind will be interested in a faith about which its exponents seem too embarrassed to communicate forthrightly," Father DiNoia said.

No exam needed

Bishop Kieran Conry of Arundel and Brighton (UK) makes some revealing statements to the press. Surprise, surprise: he's a dissident. Humanae Vitae? Just someone's opinion. Regular confession? Bad idea. The extraordinary form of the Mass? "Over the top." Talking to young people about salvation? Hopeless — they'd rather hear about saving the planet.

And a revealing turn of phrase: "it comes down to your view of Church." There's usually trouble afoot when you hear someone omit the definite article between those last two words. And this statement, he seems to expect, will disarm any opponents: "Do you accept the reforms of the Vatican Council or not?"

Which, translated from the British, means: "Do you accept the distorted, self-serving version of the reforms of the Vatican Council that I and a generation of bishops have foisted on the faithful?"

Question for the Vatican: Do you guys ever ask the men put forward as candidates for the episcopacy whether they actually believe and will teach and will enforce what the Church teaches???

Some things don't change

The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists.

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

A Brother responds to a pacifist

In his Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose relates the aftermath of World War II for many of the men of Easy Company. One was Cpl. Walter Gordon, who, after parachuting into Holland near the town of Eindhoven in the infamous "bridge too far" Operation Market Garden, had been shot and paralyzed in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (he eventually made a full recovery). A incident the book describes, from long after the war's end, made me chuckle:

In December, 1991, Gordon saw a story in the Gulfport Sun Herald. It related that mayor Jan Ritsema of Eindhoven, Holland, had refused to meet General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, because the commander of the UN forces in the Gulf War had "too much blood on his hands." Ritsema said of Schwarzkopf, "He is the person who devised the most efficient way to kill as many people as possible."

Gordon wrote to Mayor Ritsema: "On September 17, 1944, I participated in the large airborne operation which was conducted to liberate your country. As a member of company E, 506th PIR, I landed near the small town of Son. The following day we moved south and liberated Eindhoven. While carrying out our assignment, we suffered casualties. That is war talk for bleeding. ... In spite of the adverse conditions, we held the ground we had fought so hard to capture.

"The citizens of Holland at that time did not share your aversion to bloodshed when the blood being shed was that of the German occupiers of your city. How soon we forget. History has proven more than once that Holland could again be conquered if your neighbors, the Germans, are having a dull weekend and the golf links are crowded.

"Please don't allow your country to be swallowed up by Liechtenstein or the Vatican, as I don't plan to return. As of now, you are on your own."

Armistice Day

From Glenn Gray's The Warriors:

How does danger break down the barriers of the self and give man an experience of community? [It is] the power of union with our fellows. In moments [of danger] many have a vague awareness of how isolated and separate their lives have hitherto been and how much they have missed... . With the boundaries of the self expanded, they sense a kinship never known before.

This Sunday at St. Thomas

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

Jean Mouton, Ave Maria
Josquin des Prez, Tu solus qui facis mirabilia

I'm back... and mad

My blogging had taken what they call in music a "grand pause", a fermata of undetermined duration. I wasn't sure if I'd ever start up again. It's darned time-consuming, and I don't have the gift of just banging out acres of lovely and fiery English prose like, say, Karen Hall.

But I've experienced something so infuriating here in the diocese of San Jose that I'm back at this blog now, and I don't think I'm going away again.

Stay tuned.

'Catholic' education teaches yet another student what's really important

The Palo Alto Weekly runs a little feature, appropriately called Streetwise, in which they pose a question of current interest to people on the street. The issue in today's paper was: "What was particularly memorable about your high school graduation?"

Among the five people interviewed was Caitlin McCarthy, a classmate of my daughter at Woodside Priory School through middle school and high school, whose mission statement says it is "an independent, Catholic, preparatory school in the Benedictine tradition. [The school was founded by Hungarian Benedictines who fled to the west after the anti-Soviet rising of 1956, but few if any monks remain on the faculty.] Our mission is to assist students of promise in becoming lifelong learners who will productively serve a world in need of their gifts."

Sounds nice, right? Well, get a load of what Ms. McCarthy told the Weekly's reporter:

The survivor from the plane crash in the Andes was going to speak at our graduation, but instead we got a monk who basically talked about how abortion was bad. I was pissed that we were supposed to have this cool guy and got a crappy one.

Good job, Priory! In seven years, you really imbued that young woman with a profound understanding of what matters, didn't you? After all, focusing on something that has killed an average of a million American children a year is so boring compared with a rollicking good story of escape from an airline crash. I mean, after all, what would St. Benedict choose?

Christ the Hero

Recently, President Bush awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously to Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor. Monsoor, 25, died in in a firefight in Ramadi, Iraq when he threw himself on a grenade to save the other men in his unit. He was a practicing Catholic.

One of the most telling bits to be published in the reporting of the very emotional medal presentation was from his chaplain, Fr. Paul Halladay:

"So when it came to laying down his life for his friends, his faith life allowed him to do that without a moment's hesitation."

There's nothing more Christlike than this sacrifice of one's own life to save the lives of others. Our Lord is not the "gentle Jesus", passive and effeminate, that he has often been portrayed to be in recent centuries. He was a warrior -- a spiritual warrior, that is -- the greatest that has ever lived, or will ever live. He threw himself on the grenade of our race's guilt and well-earned punishment, and took the blast Himself. That's a hero, the kind any man -- and I say "man" advisedly -- could follow proudly.

The Church desperately needs to draw real men back to itself. Men follow heroes. Christ is and will always be the Hero who never disappoints, who looked a horrifying death in the eye and walked right into it to save us all. That's the Christ whose face we should recognize more often, whose desperate but calm expression we might also have seen in Michael Monsoor as he made his decision in that moment in Ramadi.

The Earth Day guilt merchants

At a local middle school here in Palo Alto today, in observance of Earth Day, students who arrived at school on foot or on bicycles were shunted over to a table where they were given a treat. But those students who had been driven to school were "greeted" by a parent volunteer holding a large black balloon, who harangued each disembarking kid with the news that this balloon represented the volume of carbon they had just shamefully dumped into the air during their drive, and why didn't they walk or bicycle like they had been encouraged to do?

What a nice way to start a kid's day.

It's another example of environmentalism gone nuts. Obviously, if a kid's parents say they're going to drive the kid to school, does Balloon Lady really expect the kid to stamp his feet and scream until mom agrees to let him walk? And she has probably also not considered that a lot of students at this particular school were coming from Los Alto Hills, and walking or biking just isn't safe from the distance they'd have to come, and across the crowded, fast-moving expressways they'd have to cross. Nope, the only thing on Balloon Lady's mind is the these kids' heinous offense against the fashionable Earth-worship that has displaced ordinary religion for a lot of the good citizens of this burgh.

Freakishly good news from South Bend

Diogenes published this photo today which should be very very encouraging to anyone who has despaired of the Catholic future in this country. Not only are those two young men spontaneously kneeling as a Eucharistic Procession went by -- they're doing it at Notre Dame!

What I'd like to know is: where did these guys get so well catechized that they knew to kneel as the monstrance passed them?

Uncle Di also makes this observation:

Devotion acquired in counter-cultural circumstances is more likely to thrive than devotion acquired as an act of conformity, and it is less likely to weaken in the face of hostility or contempt.

Wise words indeed. And if devotion has weakened in the last forty years, is it not because our Church has been taken in a direction of cultural conformity? We dropped almost everything externally distinctive about ourselves -- from chant, to fish on Fridays, to priests in cassocks -- and tried to look and sound as much like the culture around us as we could. And then we reinterpreted ourselves to de-emphasize Catholic truth, in the name of ecumenism. And we highlighted every social teaching of the Church that could seem to conform to the leftist political culture -- often in the universities we were attending or teaching at -- that so many of us wanted to fit in with. And with JFK, we declared that if Catholic doctrine clashed with the growing insistence to a secular public square, we would be good secularists first, and then see if there were any irrelevant nooks and crannies where our Catholicism could still be accommodated.

Truth is, Catholicism rightly understood will always be countercultural. The better we remember that and play it up, the more often we'll see young men kneeling in public as Our Lord passes by.

Last Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at St. Thomas Aquinas last Sunday (4/20):

Byrd, O quam suavis est
Victoria, Quam pulchri sunt gressus tui

The Nationals Stadium Mass

Just finished watching EWTN's coverage of the papal Mass at Nationals Stadium. I have to say I agree with Fr. Neuhaus about the mishmash of musical selections, which I recall him describing as "preening" and "self-indulgent." Pretty clearly, the extreme variety of music was meant to mirror the multiculturalism of the United States, which in influential circles is seen as something extraordinarily virtuous.

In practice, multiculturalism means that every event has to be culturally pot-luck, because we wouldn't want to say we actually prefer one over the other. Whatever the benefits may be of having everyone contribute something of their own, we've all been to pot-lucks that were gastronomic disasters. Musically, this Mass was like sitting down to a dinner of dimsum, pemmican, doughnuts and creamed corn. At such a dinner, it's true that each diner might find something to his liking, but if you have to eat it all -- well, pass the Alka-Seltzer.

Given Benedict's well-known preference for Gregorian Chant, Renaissance polyphony and classical settings of sacred texts, it would have been more polite to let him offer a Mass with music that made him feel comfortable. That's what we do with guests, isn't it? Make them feel comfortable? Instead, the powers that be made him preside over a Mass that made them feel comfortable.

On the other hand, it shouldn't have come as a surprise, I suppose. Those same powers have been shoving their style at us for forty years now, and insisting that we better like it.

Last Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at St. Thomas Aquinas last Sunday:

Josquin des Prez, Tu pauperum refugium
Heinrich Isaac, Ego sum pastor bonus
Pierre de la Rue, O salutaris hostia

Good news from Minneapolis

I was surprised and happy to see the following in a newspaper article quoted over at The Cafeteria is Closed:

But similar changes are taking place across the [Minneapolis] archdiocese, which is getting new, conservative leadership from Co-adjutor Archbishop John Nienstedt, who will shortly succeed Archbishop Harry Flynn.

I'm hoping this will be good news for Fr. Robert Altier. Flynn removed Altier, a popular young orthodox priest, from St. Agnes' parish a couple of years ago, silenced him, and stuck him away as the assistant chaplain at a retirement home. Altier had been too effective, and too pointed, at exposing the flaws of the new sex-education program which Flynn was implementing at diocesan Catholic schools. (More details here). Flynn even demanded that the parishioners who had painstakingly recorded and transcribed Altier's homilies remove the transcripts from an independent website, no matter the subject; obediently, they did so, not without protest.

Flynn tolerated, meanwhile, some really interesting liturgical abuses at several parishes, appearing to take action against them only after Nienstedt was appointed.

Maybe priorities are finally getting straightened out in Minneapolis.

In California, your kids are the state's

An appellate court in Los Angeles has ordered a California couple to stop homeschooling two of their children and send them to public school. While I don't yet know much about the particulars of the case, some of the language in the court's decision should alarm anyone:

We agree [with the California legislature]… 'the educational program of the State of California was designed to promote the general welfare of all the people and was not designed to accommodate the personal ideas of any individual in the field of education.'

So, if you have ideas about how your child should be educated that don't agree with the current views of the state, shut up. Just send your kid and your tax money, and shut up.

Then there is this:

The appeals ruling said California law requires "persons between the ages of six and 18" to be in school, "the public full-time day school," with exemptions being allowed for those in a "private full-time day school" or those "instructed by a tutor who holds a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught."

The credential requirement sounds great, doesn't it? Sounds like it ensures that the child's teacher will really know the subject, and be able to confer that knowledge to the child.

Until you understand that much of the California credential program isn't about ensuring subject-matter proficiency; it's about ensuring that teachers toe the Department of Education line (well to the left of even California's average) about sexual values. My wife recently waded through this morass to get her single-subject credential, so I've heard about it from someone who has seen it firsthand, and recently. The propositions you must buy into -- and I know she only told me about a fraction of the things she heard -- showed me that I could never be a credentialed teacher here. I simply couldn't keep my mouth shut for the length of time it takes to get through the program. If you have any sort of traditional value system -- like, say, the values of the Roman Catholic Church (are you listening, bishops?) -- you simply have to stay quiet. Your work concerning these topics must parrot the official line. Dissent is simply not tolerated.

Catholics in California will doubtless greet this news, if they even hear it at all, with a yawn. After all, it's homeschooling that's being targeted, not private schooling. It'll never come to any sort of censorship on the teaching of Catholic morality in Catholic schools.

Just you wait, folks.

In a few brief years, California's radical education establishment has gone from allowing public schools to take independent action to teach the homosexual agenda, to requiring it. Now it's homeschooling that they're angling to influence, if not eradicate. How long do you think it'll be before they find a judge who's willing to say that Catholic schools must teach nothing that casts doubt on the views that that establishment wants firmly planted in every California child?

Warm up the baptismal pool again

CWN tells us that the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has weighed in on that radical-feminist-inspired variation in the baptismal rite that's so popular in some dioceses: "In the name of the Creator, and of the Redeemer, and of the Sanctifier." (Instead of that horribly patriarchal, male-chauvinist "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit").

Not valid, says the CDF.

Were you "baptized" with that renegade formula, which Fr. Cool and Bishop Trendy insisted on? Then get baptized "again" -- because you weren't actually baptized the first time.

This is an amazing display of backbone on Rome's part. And it's all the more delicious because they've checkmated the opposition by going right back to the words of the Gospel of St. Matthew: Jesus himself, they point out, is the one who told us to baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

The dissidents are always telling us how we ought to return to the practices of the early Church. Well, dissidents, it seems that a straightforward reading of Matthew tells us that "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" was the practice of the early Church, at least if you assume that the disciples did what Jesus told them. And since that formula was OK for two thousand years, it looks like they did. It was fine with every generation of Catholics until you and Gloria Steinem came along.

So warm up the jacuzzi again.

And this time use the right words.

It's the history, stupid

It was probably 20 years ago that I first encountered this statement by Pope Pius XI, on the masthead of The Wanderer:

No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist. (Quad. Anno, 1931)

It wasn't until I'd gotten a couple of chapters into the new book above that I really understood why Pius was so adamant about it. Every Catholic needs to know about the ugly depths where Progressivism -- the current fashionable name for American socialism -- came from, and why its claims are ultimately so hostile to Christianity. Because the confusion that Pius was trying to dispel 75 years ago is very much with us Catholics again in this election season.

That "seamless garment" line we've been fed by Catholic libs for decades? Made of the same material as a certain emperor's new clothes.

Today at St. Thomas

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

Palestrina, Commissa mea pavesco
Victoria, Domine, non sum dignus
Lassus, Aude benigne conditor

Window: Jesus with Martha and Mary

From the chapel at Sacred Heart School, Menlo Park, CA

Even better Sundays at St. Thomas

Sung on the past two Sundays at the noon Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas:

Lassus, Miserere mei
Hassler, Christe, qui lux es et dies
Morales, Inter vestibulum et altare
Lassus, Ne reminiscaris
Lassus, Audi benigne conditor
des Prez, Tu solus qui facis mirabilia
Palestrina, Domine quando veneris
Lassus, Domine, convertere

I'm also delighted to note that our noon Mass is now a full Latin Novus Ordo, with the vernacular only where it is supposed to occur in that rite. I can hardly believe, sometimes, that this is happening in my otherwise felt-banner, immersion-baptism, gather-us-in Palo Alto. When I ask myself how this could have come to be, at last, I'm inclined to think that it must be God's reward to us who are blessed to be here now for the faithful way in which a dedicated few maintained the beauty of Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony here for the past four decades.

I came very late to this vineyard, but I'm really grateful to take my denarius with the rest.

Quid pro quo

The Catholic faithful are basically still willing to be the sheep of the fold, but they think it's reasonable to expect that their shepherds won't fleece them and then turn them over to the wolves.