My JFK thoughts

I thought I'd wait until most of the noise surrounding the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination had dissipated, before adding my own reflections.

Most reminiscences from us Boomers start with where we were when we heard the news. But I don't have many strong memories of that day; just a bewildering announcement on our car's radio. What I do remember much more vividly are two incidents from the autumn of 1960, during the campaign.

The first memory is a conversation with a couple of neighbor boys I was playing with. They solemnly informed me that their public school teacher had told them that if Kennedy were to be elected, all Americans would be forced to convert to Catholicism. Despite the grudging respect that the Church had earned in 20th-century America by raising up great men like Fulton Sheen, that's the kind of casual Protestant anti-Catholicism that Kennedy, and all of us, still had to live with.

The second memory is being allowed to accompany my mom to a Kennedy campaign rally in Long Beach, California. I don't remember anything about his speech — not surprising, I guess, for a 10-year-old —but I do recall how tanned his face was, and how broad and sincere his smile looked. Our seats were only about 50 yards away from him. Closer than the sniper in Dallas.

I think he set a bad precedent in his famous apologia (to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association) for being a Catholic candidate, seeming to banish the Faith from the public square. This attitude of the Kennedy Democrats, after all, morphed into that of the Cuomo Democrats not long after, when Roe v. Wade was handed down: personally opposed to grave evil, but unwilling to "impose our morality" on others. At MercatorNet.com, Sheila Liaugminas quotes both Peggy Noonan and George Weigel at length about this; these will give you better background than I could.

Despite the many sins that drag down his legacy, he left behind many great statements that will always buoy it up. I'll just imitate Sheila, and close with this:

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. 

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

Pope Francis on Life, for real

Our liberal friends in the Catholic Church thought they heard a major policy change in Pope Francis' widely-quoted off-the-cuff remarks back in September, when he seemed to downplay the importance of the issue of abortion. Too bad they weren't paying attention the very next day, when, speaking with carefully-chosen words to a gathering of Catholic OB/GYNs, he said:

The third aspect is a mandate: be witnesses and speakers of this "culture of life" . Your being Catholic entails a greater responsibility: first of all to yourself, to be committed to being consistent with the Christian vocation; and then to contemporary culture, to contribute to recognising the transcendent dimension in human life, the imprint of the creative work of God, from the very first moment of conception. This is a commitment to the new evangelization that often requires going against the current, at a cost to the person. The Lord counts on you to spread the "Gospel of life."

Read the rest: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/popes-strong-words-in-defense-of-the-unborn#ixzz2laPjneTF

It bears repeating that even in the earlier casual statement, the Pope was simply reminding Catholics that preaching Christ must always come first, before we try to advance any social issue.

"Without Me, you can do nothing," Our Lord said, and Francis was just reminding us that He meant it.

Empowerment?

A pundit with whom I usually agree recently asserted that Christ "empowered" his disciples, in the sense of accomplishing great works, and even miracles. While this is true, it deserves a little reflection to understand rightly.

I can't think of an instance when Christ performed a miracle without giving thanks to the Father first. I can't think of an instance when Christ accepted Satan's dare to show power in some prideful way; that's the lesson of the temptations at the end of the 40 days' fast in the desert. Turn the stones into bread? No. Leap off the top of the temple so that He could summon a host of angels to save him from the law of gravity? No. And at the end, save Himself from the unbearable agony of the cross? No, not even that, though I think we can all agree that the very human temptation to do so must have been enormous.

Always, He lifts His eyes to Heaven and gives thanks to His Father. There in the Father's hands, He taught us, is where real power comes from, the kind that doesn't just tinker, but transforms.

Pope Francis puts one over the fence

I've often criticized Pope Francis' careless statements in recent months, but this time I have to say he hit one out of the park:

During his homily at Mass on November 18, Pope Francis called the first chapter of the First Book of Maccabees “one of the saddest pages in the Bible” because “a great part of the people of God withdraw from the Lord in favor of worldly proposals.”

Well, that sure sounds like it could have been ripped from today's headlines.

He continues:

“We would do well to think about what happened in the Book of Maccabees, he continued, about what happened step by step, before we decide to follow an ‘adolescent progressivism’ and go along with what everyone is doing,” the L’Osservatore Romano report added. “We would also do well, he said, to ponder the consequences of their infidelity, to think about the ‘death sentences, the human sacrifices’ which followed thereafter. He then asked those present: ‘Do you think there are no human sacrifices today? There are many, many of them. And there are laws that protect them.’” 

The rest can be found here. H/t CatholicCulture.org.

The Catholic Brand

Why is it that non-Catholics know what constitutes the outward signs of Catholic culture, but Catholics often don't?

Take this little bit from Stieg Larsson's bestseller The Girl Who Played with Fire:

...Bublanski felt an urge to talk to God about the case, but instead of going to the synagogue he went to the Catholic church on Folkungagatan. He sat in one of the pews at the back and did not move for over an hour. As a Jew he had no business being in a church, but it was a peaceful place that he regularly visited when he felt the need to sort out his thoughts, and he knew that God would not mind. There was a difference, besides, between Catholicism and Judaism. He went to the synagogue when he needed company and fellowship with other people. Catholics went to church to seek peace in the presence of God. The church invited silence, and visitors would always be left to themselves. (pp. 376-377 of the Vintage paperback edition)

Catholics seek peace in the presence of God. Yes, that's exactly the atmosphere that ought to imbue every Catholic church building, both when nothing is going on, and when Mass is being offered. But in most American parishes, Catholic worship no longer invites silence; it treats silence as an enemy. If no one is doing anything or saying anything or singing anything, it means that people aren't actively participating. Oh, the humanity!

But why did Larsson, a thoroughly non-Catholic author, understand that silence is a part of the Catholic "brand" but most Catholics don't?

Coming to a girls' restroom near you: boys!

Here in California, Assembly Bill 1266 has been signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. On January 1, students in this state who self-identify as transgendered are free to "use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil's records." Thanks, Jerry.

To see the trouble we're about to enjoy, look to Colorado, fast becoming the California of the Mountain Time Zone.

Parents in Colorado are pushing back against a public high school's decision to allow a boy who sometimes identifies as a girl to use the girls' restrooms. Of course, they're being vilified by LBGTQ advocates as hateful and ignorant. Nothing untoward would ever happen if such a policy became widespread. Nope. Nothing to see here. Move along, hater.

And yet... whatever happened to the indignation over being pushed around by a tiny but powerful minority — all that "We are the 99%" stuff —during Occupy Wall Street? Back then, I thought we were being told that the perceived welfare and will of the 99% trumped the right of the wealthiest 1% to keep their wealth. 'Occupy' was much praised in media and academia, so this principle must be right. [For the humor-impaired, this is sarcasm].

But see what happens when a different 99% insists that its welfare and will should hold sway on a subject that the Left doesn't like? That's different. You're trampling on a minority's rights, they say, and that cannot stand. How is it different, you ask? It just is, you'll be told.

Nothing is ever about logic or consistent principles with such people. It's all about power. And they're very close to putting a lock on that.

Tone. Deaf.

Watch this video of a variety show in St. Peter's square last week, attended by Pope Francis and a raft of clergy. Then please tell me why some Vatican event planner thought that an entertainment featuring several bare-torsoed young men would make good PR for an institution that had a certain amount of recent unpleasantness involving priests and young men?

Since they asked

I attended a parish function the other day on the subject of the legacy of the Second Vatican Council. At one point, we were invited to fill out a little blue paper with this question:

I am grateful for the work of Vatican II because ________________.

I thought for a while, without success. Then Joni Mitchell came to my rescue:

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone

Real hope for real change

“Christian hope is not a matter of optimism; it is not the expectation of steady progress through democracy and science; it is the anticipation of everlasting life with God, his angels, and all his saints. Only such an unchanging good could serve as the foundation for hope.” (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi)

Excerpt From: “Rebuilding Catholic Culture - Ryan N. S. Topping.” iBooks. 

This material may be protected by copyright.

Vatican Insider trips over its own criticisms

After lauding the way that immediate access via the internet to Pope Francis' statements means that they are no longer subject to distortion from unreliable "intermediaries," you'd think that Vatican Insider would take care to get their own reporting exactly right. Yet on the day after that assertion, we see an article titled "Francis' Message to Catechists: 'An Injured Church is Better than a Closed Church.'" But what did the Pope really say? Quoted in the same article is the answer:

Sometimes, being in a Church community “is like being in a closed room. You get sick sooner or later. Of course, when you go out into the street accidents can happen, but I would far rather have an injured Church than a sick Church.”

Is it "closed" or "sick" that the Pope really said? Does it make a difference? I think so. Is it too much to ask that a headline copy-writer at La Stampa, which runs Vatican Insider, report the Pope's actual words?

Pope Francis' "rivers of words"

From Vatican Insider, how to miss the point about Pope Francis' torrent of words:

Even the upper echelons of the Vatican hierarchy have been aware for a while now that, since Francis rose to the papal throne, his river of words has been reaching people through all sorts of channels and without any intermediaries. So the Pope’s direct way of addressing his audience is ensuring that the media do not go into a spinning frenzy regarding the figure and actions of the Bishop of Rome.

It is simply not true that Pope Francis' speeches and homilies are "reaching people through all sorts of channels without any intermediaries." I'd argue that it's usually through intermediaries that Catholics are encountering the Pope's words. And not faithful Catholic intermediaries, either, but through their daily newspapers, if they still read any, or more likely through some popular online aggregator like Google News or the Huffington Post, which generally dismiss the mission or teachings of the Church, and have a tacit alliance with those within the Church who strive to turn it into a social services agency.

The last man who clearly explained the liberating reach of Francis’ direct style of preaching was the Assessor for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State Peter Brian Wells. ... Wells said that online access to the Pope’s homilies and speeches has freed individuals, families and communities from a reliance on media coverage that may be manipulative or biased.

This is utterly unrealistic. Perhaps Mr. Wells and his co-workers can spend the time necessary to find and then carefully read the Pope's extensive comments, homilies, and speeches, but I'd bet the farm that fewer than one in a thousand American Catholics do that. They get their Church news from the same sources they get their secular news, with the dangers already mentioned.

The problem with Francis' torrent of statements is that it is a torrent. Fewer statements that were more carefully worded, more cautiously guarded from misinterpretation, and unembellished with asides, would serve the faithful much better.

"An exciting ride"

If Francis really is in the line of Cardinals Martini and Bernardin, as Russell Shaw remarks, we are indeed in for "an exciting ride" in the Catholic Church. Exciting, that is, in the sense that skidding your car into a freeway guardrail is exciting. And to claim that the Church has been too confrontational over the past forty years is to ignore the shabby record of silence of most American and European bishops on any subject that might get them bad press, or even a few scowls from the more dissident members of their flocks. If Shaw is right, Francis' path isn't new; what's new is that we now have papal validation of the worthless habits of thought that have led to so much decline.

For eight precious years of the pontificate of a certain Emeritus Pope, it looked like the "long, melancholy, withdrawing roar" of this blog's namesake poem had finally fallen silent, and that the Sea of Faith was poised for a new flood tide. But with each passing month of Francis' reign, that hope seems to have been, at best, premature.

I posted a portion of these remarks first in the combox of the Alateia website, where the article appeared.

Poets who came home

This enjoyable article at National Catholic Register tells of five notable poets of the 20th century who converted to the Catholic faith: Wallace Stevens, Claude McKay, Oscar Wilde, Sally Read, and Roy Campbell. Very much worth a look.

In the combox there, one trollish reader condemned all tales of deathbed conversions to Catholicism (e.g., Stevens's and Wilde's) as propaganda, because the supposed convert is dead, and we can no longer ask him or her to verify the story. The trouble with this line of reasoning is that if we followed it uniformly, we would believe almost nothing about the past. Before photography and audio recording became widespread, there was simply no other source of knowledge about a distant or past event than the testimony of someone who was there — a witness. Since this may be obvious even to the aforesaid reader, I suspect that the rule is to apply only to events which might be dangerously pro-Catholic.

Another bishop gone bad

Here's another delightful example of a Bishop who doesn't have a good grasp of the Church's teachings, and even if he did, he wouldn't be likely to think it his duty to support them.


The Bishop conflates two separate issues which the Church's moral teaching depends upon keeping separate: a inclination to sin, which involves no guilt; and giving in to that inclination, which does.

I can't help but think of the many defenses offered after Pope Francis' ill-considered remarks on the plane coming back from Rio's WYD, the infamous "Who am I to judge?" statement. Notice that the secular reporter prefaces his question with a reference to that very statement.

So here's the thing. The laity is constantly reminded that the Bishops are successors of the Apostles. At that point, the conversation is usually headed for some variant of "And so don't criticize your Bishops when they fail to uphold clear and firmly held teachings." That would sit better if the Bishops were subject to ANY discipline. In secular corporate terms, we have something like a team of regional Vice Presidents who are autonomous and above correction or removal if they start to go off the rails. Oh, you might be transferred to another Diocese, perhaps a less prestigious one, but that's the extent of it. I know, I know, the Church isn't a secular corporation. But is that really a good reason why it should be run with less accountability than a secular corporation?

Can someone explain to me why Bishops are allowed to wallow in error for years, while the laity in their dioceses are told to shut up because their Bishops will eventually reach mandatory retirement age after doing just a few more years — or decades — of damage to souls? (Roger Mahony comes to mind). If the Apostle your bishop chooses to model himself after is Judas, is there no recourse?

What I wish I could tell Mark Ruffalo

It seems that actor and renowned deep thinker Mark Ruffalo is proud of his mother for aborting one of her children, i.e., a brother or sister of his. He pads out his defense of the indefensible with the same hackneyed nonsense slogans that pro-abortion people have used for forty years.

The LifeNews article about this incident mentions what is, to my mind, a polite but too-mild response from Students for Life America's Kristan Hawkins. Here's what I'd like to say to Ruffalo:

Your mom killed a brother or sister of yours, and you're proud of it. She was tired of seeing herself as a mere possession, so she fixed that by treating another person as a mere possession. You say her abortion experience, apparently pre-Roe, was dirty, dangerous, and demeaning. You might ask some of Kermit Gosnell's victims if things have changed much after forty years of legalized child-killing. That's because although the legalities have changed, the kind of doctor who would kill children is still the same. The kind of man who would applaud the murder of his brother hasn't changed, either.

'via Blog this'

Game of Thrones v. Lord of the Rings

George R. R. Martin's brutal, ugly tales of his imaginary world of Westeros are making piles of money for him and many others.

This post from MercatorNet gives us a glimpse into the vastly different worldviews of Martin and J. R. R. Tolkien, and why, a century from now, Tolkien will still be an honored genius, and Martin will be a footnote in a forgotten Wikipedia article.

More on this later, I hope.

USAID Rep Shuts Down Workshop on Abortion Complications

Remember that pesky, outmoded First Amendment? What a drag, if you're into a woman's right to choose! It's such a relief that the current administration has found intrepid people willing to advance abortion women's health by muzzling unwelcome speech, even in the context of scientific presentations by physicians.

Via C-FAM.

E for Effort

In the wake of Pope Francis' ill-considered off-the-cuff remarks ("... who am I to judge?) to the press on his way home from Rio, the popular blogging Deacon, Greg Kandra, has the right idea about expressing the Church's teaching about homosexuality more clearly. But in the CNS video I link to here, even his version seems to wander a bit.

Unless I'm reading my Catechism of the Catholic Church wrongly, it all comes down to these bullet points:

1. One kind of sexual relations is pleasing to God: the kind that happens between one man and one woman in the context of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Nothing else.
2. Any other kind of sexual relations — heterosexual, homosexual, or what-have-you-sexual — displeases Him. Not because He wants to spoil all our fun, but because He knows how those things trap us in distortions of our true human nature, which He understands far more profoundly than we do.
3. So, since we have a duty to God to resist any inclination to displease Him, we have a duty to resist any inclination to have some other kind of sex, no matter what it is, who (or what) it's with, or how good it feels.

Now, one may not agree with those teachings. Many Americans don't. Heck, even a lot of baptized Catholics certainly behave as if they don't. But, when put briefly and clearly like this, at least we're clear about what we're defending, and what we're not.

Conan O'Brien dips a toe in the cesspool

The Catholic League has correctly identified yet another example of people enjoying the last broadly permissible bigotry, this time via Conan O'Brien:

It was the one-liner subtitle about children being molested by priests that was a low blow: “Kids can opt out of fondling by texting #nothanks to the Vatican.”

Religious profiling—portraying all priests as molesters—is not out-of-bounds with late-night hosts. Now if Conan had said, “Kids can opt out of fondling by texting #nothanks to gay priests,” he may have been fired. But just smearing all priests is considered perfectly acceptable. These are the rules in liberal land.

Pro-abortion mob in Chile vandalizes cathedral during Mass

Via LifeSiteNews (but also available via the Washington Post, for those who might be skeptical of a Catholic news source): "Mob of pro-abortion protesters storm, vandalize Cathedral in Santiago de Chile during homily."

According to the cited story, the mob numbered about 300. Now, I admit that seeing 300 weirdos stream into my church in the middle of Mass would have taken me aback, too. But I'd like to think that after those initial moments of stunned immobility, my first impulse would have been to leave my pew to help throw them out physically.

The thing that puzzles me is that this was allowed to happen in a Latin American country, where men are supposedly so proud, even "macho." How many men were present in the congregation? I mean, real MEN? Yes, I understand that some formed a protective cordon around the main altar, and thereby prevented even worse abuse from happening. Good start. But what was the rest of the congregation doing, while the confessional was being tipped over, and while an altar was being defaced, while pews were being ripped out and carted into the street? I can understand being surprised for a moment, but then... well, the proper response of Godly men to goons like these was recorded 2,000 years ago in I Maccabees 3: "...be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar."

And ladies, I mean no disrespect to you by speaking of men, above; it's just that it's our job as men to sacrifice our lives for you, our families, and our Church. When we've all gone down fighting, it'll be your turn. Just let us have the first crack at 'em.

Such things are coming to your town and to your parish church, too. It's only a matter of time. We need to be in readiness. We've been warned.