Have We?

From an Evangelical blogger:

Of course, we in the church have been given the responsibility to judge one another, and the privilege of stirring each other in community to act in love and do good works. 

Hmmm.
Not disagreeing, just wondering.

Oh, that silly St. John Fisher......

Bishop, you simply don't understand "the need to avoid judgments which do not take into account the complexity of various situations."

Time for the Monthly Tribal Council of Dutiful Sons of Either Sex and Other Righteous Persons

Over at Catholic Exchange:

Coming onto Those Interwebs one Thursday, I read a woman on Catholic Exchange complain to her readers about the conversation of some women who had been in church with her. I cringed for those women who had no idea that someone was talking negatively about them. Gossip and detraction are not from God. How sad that this writer had just emerged from the place where heaven meets earth—the Holy Eucharist—and rather than praising God, she was judging the people in the pews.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have read such a display: not only about the things people say, but the clothes people wear, the way they pray, the way they sing, the way they parent their children, and more. The Enemy wants to distract us from the true purpose of Mass, and here is one way he succeeds.

Except, of course that's not really what she wrote.

As for me, I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast not made me like other bloggers....

Here's the thing - this seems to be the season for, I dunno... running out of spiritual matters to write about? Christmas almost over*, Lent not yet here, lousy weather, Pope's not travelling.

I know! I'll write a column/blog judging people who are too judgey!

Is it my imagination?
As an acknowledged member of the Tribe of the Dutiful Son, (that snotty Prodigal's better behaved elder brother,) I think I recognize a fellow Righteous Person when I see her.
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*Yeah. You heard me.

Ooh, wasn't that Dante guy a judgey sort?

In all honesty, I had never thought until now, it never occurred to me when reading Dante in school how antithetical the inferno of  the Comedìa is to the Catholic concept of hell, at least as it is expressed nowadays, when we never claim to be able to know who might be there.
It was a public high school, so the catholicity of its theology wasn't really on the radar.

In the middle ages did people so presume?

De Sanctis Nil Nisi Bonum?

I believe Oscar Romero is a saint and was martyred for his faith, in upholding Church teaching about the rights and dignity of each human person, in a society where these were denied the poor, quite aside from political considerations.
Just to get that out of the way....
But is everyone who speaks against a saint's cause presumed to be acting in bad faith?
Don't you imagine there were people who hadn't had any contact with St Augustine after his youth, and when they heard his hagiographers thought, "Gus? [or maybe, Augie,] that dog??!?!? that drunken whoremonger?????

Go back further, don't you think there were probably Christians who died thinking of St Paul as "that son of a *****"? (And I don't just mean St Stephen.....)

We know that Pope Francis thinks gossip is the worst of all possible sins, and I suppose he knows some of the actual parties involved, but isn't it possible that Romero's "own brothers in the priesthood and the episcopate," weren't attacking him even after his death by "the hardest stone that exists in the world: the tongue" but giving their honest opinions?

Surely in the causes of the Martyrs of the Spanish Civil War there were also voices on both sides of the question, and sincere voices at that -- because someone thinks fascism a greater danger than communism, or vice versa, and sees matters from a different POV than that of those whose views prevail is no reason to calumniate them.

The Holy Father seems very comfortable in assigning malevolent motives to members of the episcopate who disagree with him, e.g. "closed hearts which frequently hide behind the Church’s teachings", people who "sit in the chair of Moses and judge" displaying "superiority and superficiality," those who express themselves "not in entirely well-meaning ways."

The automatic assumption that those who oppose you are acting in bad faith is destroying the civic fabric of the US, I think we need to guard against it in the Church.

Is discriminating against activities discriminating against persons?

Is a willingness to bake a birthday cake for an individual not evidence that reluctance on the part of the pastry chef to bake another cake for a social gathering to celebrate an event or activity one finds morally reprehensible for that same individual is not discrimination against that person?

I seem to recall a bit of a dust-up after the assassination of Osama Bin Laden because a Catholic parishioner somewhere, expressing the Christian ethos of love for ones enemies, wanted to have a Mass said for the repose of Bin Laden's soul.

If the guy had wanted to hold a wake, or a funeral luncheon, would the proprietors of his local Tap or diner have been within their rights to refuse his custom? regardless of the "rights," would it have been right?  

I have no answers to these hypotheticals.

I'm not the only one gettin' all judgy.....

Tut, tut, that reactionary Ross Douthat is waxing nostalgic for the deserving poor, and their monogamy, fidelity, sobriety and thrift.

Alfred Doolittle would not approve.

I mean, that sort of talk, by implication, criticizes the Differently Behaved.
Or do I mean those with Non-Conforming Values?
Or would the PC term be "those with Alternative Morals"?

Why should I go to the theater for sex and violence, when I can get that at home?

Odd article in the New York Times about the problem of sexual harassment in the theater.
It is slanted slightly in the direction of The Actor's Union Doesn't Do Enough About It And Needs New Rules.
And it rightly notes that stage managers, (besides one they referenced as hitting on a complainant himself,) are members of Equity yet also a part of management, and that the main objective is almost always going to be letting the Show Go On, so maybe not the best person address a problem reported by a young(er) less connected victim?
Well, yeah.

But how could a journalist tackle this subject and not even mention, perhaps, not even know about, the existence of The Deputy? AEA always has a deputy or two in every union production.
Confidential, usually experienced in and knowledgeable about, and often actually IN, the vulnerable performer's very condition, and required to represent the POV of no one but the performers and their union.

So for all the interviews he may have conducted, I don't think Patrick Healey really researched his subject with much care.

But I am more bothered that the story that opens the article is... well, it doesn't really illustrate the problem they're trying to present, at least to this reader.
A woman slaps her boyfriend.
The man later slaps her.
She goes to rehearsal with a black eye and finds out that he is more valuable to the production than she is.
As someone who's gotten my share of black eyes, and given and received unfortunate stage bruises, (including mistimed hits that really connected,) I have never known a slap to cause a black eye.
And in the article, indeed, it seems not to have been the slap per se that had visible results, but that his slap had sufficient force to knock her down.
At the end of the anecdote, what I take away is that the woman did not feel that what had happened rose to the level of meriting the attention of law enforcement.
She did seem to feel the incident was worth the man losing his job over, or something....
You see, she didn't want to leave the production, but she didn't want to be forced to be around him, and well... he was in the production, they were portraying lovers. So, absent a serious re-thinking of Shakespeare's intent, and a re-staging, I guess she wanted him fired.

But she also, apparently, in a Things That Make You Go Huh????? detail, didn't even think the blow and the injury was sufficient to cause a break-up, at least not for a while, since several months later, the production is changing venues, by which I mean GOING TO ANOTHER COUNTRY, and their relationship is "all but over."
"All but over?"

It is gravely wrong for a man to strike a woman, I'm not defending that. From the details given I think the shmuck should have at least spent the night in a cell. But it does not seem that he intended to do any more damage to her than she had intended to do to him. So I'm not certain the woman shouldn't have spent some time in the hoosegow a few nights earlier.
And I'm damned sure, unless she is emotionally or mentally damaged in some way that precludes her being let out without a keeper, she should have left his sorry carcass with a little more dispatch.

Like, that night.

Is she not capable of caring for herself? of making rational life decision?
It seems she is.
So why... Omiwerd, i can't believe I am about to stick up for a producer!!!!!.... why, in her mind, is it up to the producer to do for her in her professional life, what she did not even bother to do in her private life?
Man up, woman!

And I know I shouldn't extrapolate overarching sociological principles and predictions from one situation, ("the plural of anecdote is not 'data',") but I fear these sorts of problems are going to become more and more common and more and more unsolvable as the notions of license and privacy and consent and restraint become ever more tangled in our society's collective mind and psyche.

Look at the idiotic notion of teaching children in sex education about consent, that an elementary schoolchild should say "no" to "unwanted touch." (so if the kid's okay with it, full speed ahead?)
Or the main-streaming of violent, deviant practices masquerading as romance?
Or the granting of adult autonomy, (with concomitant money and opportunity,)  to people who are simultaneously encouraged to prolong their adolescence.
People, young people especially, are consistently told that all is acceptable, all is permitted, everything is morally neutral, and nothing is anyone elses concern - and they are shamed, (or even prosecuted,) if they disagree. And yet time after time, consequences seem to give evidence that all that old-fashioned conventional wisdom and morality was, uhm.... right?
A link on the front page of the Times tells us that a college is "trying to balance student safety with open-mindedness after 12 were hospitalized last month," from overdoses.
How's that working out for ya?