Blog Blather

Am I the only one who finds the knickers-in-a-knot squealing at Whispers in the Loggia over the imminent replacement of his episcopal bete noir unseemly?
I like his writing, I like his blog, but sometimes it's difficult to read the words through the slaver and spittle all over his page.
(I realize this post is the equivalent of a nit commenting upon a gorilla...)

Lincoln's Lesson for Liturgists

A marvelous humility.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Likewise, the Church? She's been around a while. She's not something new. She's not "ours." Our fathers and mothers in the Faith have a lot more claim to being Her founders than anyone of us and they didn't have the hubris to think She was their creation, nor dedicated to them and their wishes.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The Liturgy the Church has received from Her Head? She can't improve it, she can't make it more "meaningful." All She, in the persons of her many members, can do is to strive to have greater comprehension of its meaning inherent and unchanging and unchangeable, the meaning already contained therein, to more completely fulfill what has been prescribed.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us

As it is for us to be formed by the Mass, not to try to form it; to be the missionaries we are sent to be - missa est.

-- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And the gates of hell shall not prevail against Her.

New Worry

"Sometimes, Mrs. Crummles... sometimes I fear we are not immortal"

Throwing darts at presbyteral headshots to make episcopal appointments

I was reading the Vatican News Service, and noticed in the past week there have been about twenty appointments, some curial, but most bishops in strange and exotic places of which I've never heard (Gallup, f'rinstance ;oP)

Is that a pretty normal rate?

And if so, how in the H*** can people alternately whinge about how slow the Pope is to fill their own diocese's vacancies by trying to discern the will of the Holy Spirit in choosing from among the names of several people half way around the world whom he has never met --- and whingeing about inadequately vetted choices?
Huh?
And does the great mass of complainers beiing pretty evenly divided between the two camps mean that a pretty good middle course is actually being steered in the appointments business?

R i P, Eluana Englaro

Eluana Englaro was starved to death and died yesterday.

In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.

Mother Theresa vs. Yoda

I'm with my brother, or, as a member of a mega-family I should say, I am with one of my brothers.
He likes to scold people who have not given him as definitive an answer as he has sought, in a voice and rhythm he learned from Star Wars, "Is no try; is only do or not do."

But Blessed Mother Theresa said, "God has not called me to be successful. He has called me to be faithful."

The title of the post looks like an episode of Celebrity Death Match, doesn't it?

So, always interested in "..... Superman or mighty Mouse?" type arguments, (Welcome to the Louds! Why have a discussion when you can have an argument?) I hereby voice my opinion:

Mother Theresa in a knock-out!

Innocence

O God,
to show us where innocence leads,
you made the soul of your virgin Saint Scholastica soar to heaven
like a dove in flight.
Grant through her merits and her prayers
that we may so live in innocence
as to attain to joys everlasting.
This we ask through our Lord.

AMEN

If only she'd had the decency to kill some of them...

A friend insists that if only the mother of the octoplets + 6 had told the world that she had tried or even considered aborting some of them she would now be feted rather than pilloried.

I cannot think of an argument, some evidence that no, the World is not that ugly.

Saints and Sinners and Copyright

Jeffrey Tucker does the Church a great service by continuing the pressure on TPTB to come to a fair resolution of the injustices of the way the copyrights on the English translations of the sacred texts of the Catholic Liturgy are administered.
But I am puzzled.
It seems to be taken as a given that greedy ICEL demands its pound of flesh to use the real words of the Mass, and so the freedom-fighter* composer or publisher is forced to use some paraphrase rather than bow to ICEL's mercenary demands.
So it always seems to be framed.

Certainly the problem has ended up encouraging massive abuse of Mass texts by musicians who don't want to pay the ICEL tax. The most widely used Mass setting in the United States carefully adjusts the official text so that ICEL doesn't have to be paid. Thus do we sing, "Jesus, Lamb of God," instead of "Lamb of God." [emphasis added]

Oh, all these illicit, (arrogant, I say,) texts are because someone resents ICEL's greedy attempts to profit by the use of the text?
Not because the composer or publisher wants to hold and profit by a copyright of texts themselves?

Why is ICEL the villain in this scenario and the purveyors of the ersatz sacred texts get a pass?

Why are the motives of the one vilified, and the other's escape criticism?

I'm not convinced, I'd buy the noble freedom-fighter characterization.... if the silly refrains and awkward phrases of the Celebration series, for instance, weren't themselves copyrighted.
If they had been placed in the public domain, (I am speaking of the texts, only.)
And if some owners didn't insist that one needed a license to reproduce even public domain texts if one intended them to be sung to a copyrighted tune, or even a copyrighted accompaniment to a public domain tune.
I see no evidence that the impetus is more to avoid paying ICEL than to create the opportunity to exact their own pound of flesh.

Look how often a familiar (need I add, public domain?,) harmonization of a classic hymn is given minute, and often as not clumsy, changes simply to enable someone in the Liturgical-Industrial complex to copyright for himself Love Divine, or Amazing Grace.

No, I am not buying it.

(*I am certainly not suggesting the Bow-tied One characterizes theses people this way.)

A Raccolta of Self-Indulgences?

Now that, some of the degressives could probably get behind.

The NewYork Times as an article on the revival of interest in, (as a result of a revival of catechesis about... duh,) indulgences.

I am one of those who grew up more or less utterly ignorant of the practice as anything that existed in the modern world, though I did know what they were, yes, partly from history class (high school? not hardly.... middle,) but also from asking the Mom and the Dad what various .... offers? on the back of the scads of holy cards in their missals and hymnals meant.

Any way, thank you, Old Grey Lady, for the balanced, accurate (so far as a know,) and even respectful treatment of the subject.
The only disrespect comes from the sadly predictable Frs. McBrien and Reese.

The good news is we’re not selling them anymore, (it seems to go without saying, then, that the speaker finds any revival of the practice to be essentially "bad news.")

“Personally, I think we’re beyond the time when indulgences mean very much,” said the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame who supports the ordination of women and the right of priests to marry. “It’s like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube of original thought. Most Catholics in this country, if you tell them they can get a plenary indulgence, will shrug their shoulders.”

I do find it laudable that in identifying exactly what kind of priest Fr McBrien is, the Times makes it clear what his thinking is. It would have been nice if they had also noted how infrequently his thinking is one the Church's, but you can't have everything, and if you did, where would you put it?
And they probably don't need to spell it out to those of their readers genuinely interested in the Faith.

Confession.
Of sins.
That one has personally committed.
To ask the Almighty to forgive them.
In the certain knowledge that He is All-Merciful.

What a concept!

Why didn't Catholics think of this BEFORE??!??!?#??$???

The World, the Church, and "Larger" Families

As a member of such a family, I heard all this growing up, (although a reporter in a respectable paper would not have been so ugly and biased -- smaller families are "more precious"? really?) and of course articles about this interest me.

But what really is flooring me, absolutely flooring me is the utter lack of irony with which our do-whatever-you-want culture, although they have the innate sense of decency to have been shocked enough by the crazed "Mother of Six [who] Gives Birth to Octuplets" to question the morality of the situation, it's all on a basis questioning how she can afford it (would it have been okay if she were super wealthy?,) or how she'll manage child-care, (would it have been okay if she were part of a free-love common law polygamist group?,) or what are the results to the babies' long-term health, (had we discovered away to bring large groups of multiple birth babies to full term would that have made it better?), or how many is "too" many, (if there weren't already six at home would that have satisfied people?)

No one seems to get that a deal was made with the devil, by denigrating the natural family unit, (by declaring it on an even plain with any other living or relationship or sexual arrangement,) and by putting the stamp of societal approval on the reproductive technologies employed -- to divorce procreation from the marital act.
No one seems to get that this situation which the World is clucking its tongues over sanctimoniously is the natural end of the path we've been following, and about which the World cooed its approval.
All the little evils the World celebrates blend together into this fine kettle of fish that has the arbiters of the World's thoughts and mores and trends wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth.
The World has only itself to blame.
The World told this woman that children were a purchasable commodity, and a permanently committed to each other mother and father of a family were suprefluous, and that no one should tell a woman what she could or could not do with her body...

The World got it wrong.

Only the Church got it right.

Poor Cassandra.... I mean, Paul VI.

--------------
Small correction -- I was not part of a "larger family," on closer reading I see that we are a "mega-family."

Cause and Effect

So, after all the denials, and leaks, and contradictions, even the Old Grey Lady says it is so, Richard Williamson is no longer rector of the SSPX seminary.
Does anyone truly believe the SSPX would have seen fit to distance itself from even the whiff of racism and hatred, (and I do NOT accept the nonsensical stance that to question the magnitude of the slaughter or the measures employed by the Nazi's in their attempted extermination of Jews, -- as well Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs, of course, -- constitutes either "holocaust-denial" or "anti-semitism,) had the Holy Father not bravely and without care for the beating he would take in the regard of men, lifted the excommunications?

Whatever the confusion, hurt or finger-pointing expressed by various curial voices, I have no doubt whatsoever that this all played out as Benedict pretty much knew it would, and knew it must, and knew it would have regardless of any prior attempts at spin, PR or damage control.

Those who would use any stick to thrash the Body of Christ and its Vicar would have done so in any case, and by allowing the news of the lifting of the excommunications to be released with virtually no explanation it allowed them to "... scream and shout, wave the arms and run about," and, their tantrum having exhausted them, the grown-ups were able to continue the converstion.

Last week’s statement by the Secretariat of State seemed to repair relations with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, which plans to continue its dialogue with the Vatican, said its director general, Oded Wiener. The body had asked to postpone a March meeting with the Vatican in protest.

All in a day's work

A tip of the hat to Sir Monocle for this charming story:

A first grade girl handed in this drawing for a homework assignment. After it was graded and the child brought it home, she returned to school the next day with the following note:

Dear Ms. Davis, I want to be very clear on my child's illustration. It is NOT of me on a dance pole on a stage in a strip joint. I work at Home Depot and had commented to my daughter how much money we made in the recent snowstorm. This photo is of me selling a shovel
Mrs. Harrington

"At some point there has to be peace"

It is not up to me, I understand how it would be presumptuous.
But the man quoted here ?

He has some standing. At some point, if humanity is to survive there has to be forgiveness, and acknowledgement of our mutual failings, and mutual love.

The paper next to the courtroom door announced the charge for the day’s hearing in tiny type that hardly seemed equal to its gravity. “Mord,” it read in German. Murder.

The accused waited with his lawyer, standing unsteadily, gripping a crutch with one arm. Josef Scheungraber, 90, is charged in the deaths of 14 Italian civilians in June 1944, when he was a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht. He is an accused war criminal, called to account more than six decades later.

The crimes against humanity committed under the Nazi regime remain the issue that refuses to go away here, and every time it seems to be sinking out of view it breaks through the surface again. I had just driven from the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where I was researching an article about Dr. Aribert Heim, a Nazi doctor who allegedly murdered hundreds of people, most of them Jews, through poison injections directly to the heart and surgery that would better be described as butchery.

My colleagues and I found that Dr. Heim’s flight from justice ended with his death in 1992 in Cairo, where he had lived, hidden from Nazi hunters, as a Muslim convert. He would never face his accusers in court, as Mr. Scheungraber now must.

According to prosecutors, Mr. Scheungraber ordered the shooting of three Italian men and a 74-year-old woman, then ordered that 11 more civilians be forced into a barn, which was blown up. Ten of the 11 died. Mr. Scheungraber has been convicted in absentia in Italy but has testified here that he was rebuilding a nearby bridge when the civilians were killed, and that he had nothing to do with the order to kill civilians as revenge for an attack by Italian partisans.

The trial has played out quietly, largely out of the glare. A war-crimes trial evokes images of packed benches and the strobe of flashbulbs, but on this recent morning fewer than 15 people waited to watch the proceedings. I went not because it was a news story but because I wanted to hear what Germans thought about the continuing process, at a point when some of the accused criminals from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, like Slobodan Milosevic, have already passed away from natural causes.

“We have to remember,” said Manfred Wenzel, 71, resolutely, before wavering and adding, “although I’m not sure these people should be pursued anymore.” He sighed and concluded, “At some point there has to be peace.”

Mr. Wenzel seemed much happier describing a story in keeping with the European Union’s recent reign of open borders, rather than dwelling on the continent’s darkest years. “The son of one of the Italian witnesses actually married a German and they coincidentally live right here in Munich,” Mr. Wenzel said. “He showed no resentment at all.”

I first moved to Germany as a student in 1995, and was amazed to find a country so ready not only to embrace its guilt for long-ago crimes, but to discuss it, research it and commemorate it with unusual diligence. But lately I have noticed a shift. When the Nazi era comes up in interviews, people plead to me with their eyes to let it drop. There are fewer discussions and more awkward silences.

Increasingly, I get the sense that many Germans would like to move on. Not forget, but move on.

I remember hearing a homily in Detroit from a Catholic priest who had recently returned from a trip to Ireland.
What began as a paean to the faith of the Irish people in the face of adversity became a diatribe against a man he obviously hated.
HATED.
Personally.

Oliver Cromwell.

And yet this priest was certainly less than four hundred years old.

I don't feel Cromwell's descendants, corporate or genetic, owe me. Neither do the Turks. Or the Danes. Or the Russian people.

Do I owe someone for something that happened before I was born, a hundred, two hundred years ago?

Pots, Kettles and Consistency

Fr Hunwicke derides, albeit charitably, far more concisely and eloquently than I could manage, the lack of irony with which the "chattering elite" who decry the threat of excommunication held over those who support the right to privately murder unborn children, have nonetheless clucked their tongues over the lifting of the SSPX excommunications.

Well, what do the POLLS say is the right thing to do?

Because shouldn't all we do and say be guided by what other people might think of it, isn't that how the morality of an action is decided? kind of the Family Feud approach to Theology and Ethics and All That Good Stuff?

Yet Père Georges David Byers, Chapelain des Sanctuaires Notre-Dame de Lourdes seems to think otherwise.

[T]here is one thing that we hate more than anything else: not being consulted. We would rather marginalize someone, kill them off, rather than not be consulted. Even if there is nothing to discuss, such as the love of Christ being manifested to us, we go berzerk. Of course we would reject His love and truth and goodness and kindness. That’s what we do without His grace. He knows that. So, he didn’t consult us about His coming. He sent His angel Gabriel to announce things to Mary, of necessity, and we have all the prophets, but there is no discussion about this. The Lord is the Lord of History. And that’s the whole of it. And we hate that. It means that without our consultation we’re going to have His love and truth and goodness and kindness, and that is going to require us to stop being such jerks, such schmucks. We hate that. “CONSULT ME FIRST!” we scream. If we want to cooperate with His grace, finally, we can get over that, thank God.
Now, take the case of our Holy Father, Pope Benedict, governing with fatherly solicitude, making bold efforts for the sake of unity in the Church, unity in the body of Christ. He knows that this love in truth, that this goodness and kindness will be hated, hated, hated, even by those closest to him, and that they will scream their screams of “CONSULT ME FIRST!” just to stop the love in truth, to stop the goodness and kindness. They will claim all sorts of rubbish about combining this thing with another thing which has nothing to do with the other thing (something which really makes them guilty, does it not, of what they themselves are projecting unto the Holy Father?). The Holy Father knew all this, but decided not to let such people stop him in his efforts for unity. The Holy Father knows that the Successor of Peter is the sign of unity, not underlings in the Roman Curia!
Look at the fall out: ecclesiastics, politicians, and even policy-of-playing-stupid-always journalists are showing themselves for who they are: politically correct projectors of their own rubbish. When it’s out, vomited all over the Holy Father, maybe they can see what they themselves have done in not taking the real issues seriously, but only making them worse. Maybe then they can take a step back, wipe the spittle from their mouths, and, in awe, say, “Truly this is the successor of Peter, governing with fatherly solicitude, gathering the flock into one fold!”

There is a type of person who unable to find legitimate, logical grounds on which to object to someone else's words or actions without betraying his own unrighteous agenda resorts to sanctimoniously rhetoricizing, what kind of MESSAGE does that send??!?#?$??%?

I mean, how is modern society supposed to deal with someone whose main concern doesn't seem to be how his actions look to ME?!??#?$?%??

They never stop to wonder if perhaps that is the message....

(By the way, go to the good Father's blog to add your blossoms to the spiritual bouquet for the Holy Fathe,)

St. Bernardus Prior 8

My brother, loudly opinionated but always right one, has introduced me to a new beer, a Belgian beverage, compliments of the Trappists, I think: St. Bernardus Prior 8

Rich and dark and a little sweet, and as satisfying and comforting as a perfect bowl oatmeal.

Mmmmm....

The IN-form of the Reform

This is not, by any means, what this article concerning a talk by Fr. (is that the correct title?) Robert Taft about the great Alexander Schmemann about, but a wonderful use of words, struck me, and I think i want to adopt the usage: Remembering Fr. Alexander as protagonist for the discipline of liturgical theology, Fr. Taft honored him as an "informer," not a "reformer," and as a "'kerygmatic theologian'... who was able to bring out of the liturgy its true meaning and make it live for people as a joyous event, which is the life in Christ."

YES!!!!!

Both the Liturgy and those who are meant to be shaped by the Liturgy, (and perhaps even more importantly, those who foolishly try to shape the Liturgy,) are in need not of reform but a higher degree of INformation.

A correcting of misinformation would eliminate many of the DEformations that have plagued the Body of Christ in recent decades, and an ever deeper investigation into what and Who is already contained therein would accomplish far greater things than of which arrogant creativity could ever dream.

The Apostles gathered Around Peter Is the Primary Symbol of Catholic Unity

This piece from an Australian Jesuit run site makes the clear case for proper context when considering both the recent lifting of SPPX excommunications and their imposition in the first place.

Of course Australians have an interesting ecclesial context of their own, in addition to the universal one, for looking at the question.

Pope Benedict's decision to lift the excommunication of four dissident Bishops has caused controversy. It has largely focused on the anti-Semitic statements made by of one of the four Bishops, Richard Williamson (pictured). Church authorities on all sides have since scrambled to disown Williamson's attitudes.

But the Pope's decision also raises wider questions about the unity of the Catholic Church. These bear on a current conflict within the Catholic Church in Brisbane...

The disciplines that Archbishop Lefebvre ignored and the excommunication of the bishops were designed to safeguard the unity of the church in its faith and life. The decision of the Pope to lift the excommunication reflects a desire to restore unity. From his perspective it is a generous initiative, a circuit breaker, to heal division.

The gesture does not re-establish the unity in faith and in life between the Catholic Church and the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre. That was damaged before the 1988 ordinations. But it opens the way for conversation about what restoration of unity might involve. ...

The opposing claims of unity, identity and local autonomy in churches, as in societies, always need to be negotiated. The negotiation is always delicate, because in any dispute what each side prizes is precious. Pope Benedict's generous gesture, together with the projected acceptance of dissident Anglican congregations, has put into play the understanding of what unity entails.

(emphasis supplied)

It is very hard, as a Robertson Davies character might need to learn, that one is only "fifth business," but those wailing and gnashing their teeth over someone so evil and mis-guided as to impugn Julie Andrews being a part of the family may need such a lesson.

.... Thanks be t'.... HUH?

Today our deacon entertained us with a combo dismissal and ornithological commentary.