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.