V for Victory!

January 28th: St. Thomas Aquinas, O.P. (New Calendar)

2012-01-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

Today is the Memorial of Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, on the new calendar. His feast on the pre-conciliar calendar is March 7th.

I never had a particular devotion to the Angelical growing up. But since I entered the Third Order of St. Dominic, I have had reason to believe that he, of whom I had thought so little throughout my life, loves me and has cared for me in a special and particular way that I do not fully comprehend, and probably never will in this life. Such is the Communion of Saints: in the wild excesses of God's charity and mercy, it is not enough for Him to surround us with His own infinite love: He must also surround us with the love of His friends in heaven.

Herewith the Litany of St. Thomas of Aquin, published in 1913 in The Dominican Manual: A Selection of Prayers and Devotions.

O THOU, the Most High, have mercy on us.

Mighty One of Jacob, have mercy on us.

Divine Spirit, have mercy on us.

Great Triune God, have mercy on us.

Glorious Mother of the King of kings, pray for us.
Saint Thomas of Aquin, pray for us.
Worthy child of the Queen of Virgins...
Aquinas most chaste...
Aquinas most patient...
Prodigy of science...
Silently eloquent...
Reproach of the ambitious...
Lover of that life which is hidden with Christ in God...
Fragrant flower in the parterre of St. Dominic...
Glory of Friars Preachers...
Illlumined from on high...
Angel of the Schools...
Oracle of the Church...
Incomparable scribe of the Man-God...
Satiated with the odour of His perfumes...
Perfect in the school of His Cross...
Intoxicated with the strong wine of His charity...
Glittering gem in the cabinet of the Lord...
Model of perfect obedience...
Endowed with the true spirit of holy poverty...

Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world: grant us peace.

Ant.— Oh, how beautiful is the chaste generation with glory, for the memory thereof is immortal, because it is known with God and man, and it triumpheth crowned for ever.
V. Oh! what have I in heaven, or what do I desire on earth?
R. Thou art the God of my heart, and my portion for ever.

Prayer:

O God, who hast ordained that blessed Thomas should enlighten Thy Church, grant that through his prayers we may practise what he taught, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

This Is Why Mary Gave Us the Fatima Prayer

2012-01-26T10:13:00.001-07:00

O my Jesus, forgive us our sins. Save us from the fires of hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy.

Stephanie at Digital Hair Shirt took this picture of a pro-abortion protester who was demonstrating outside the Basilica after Mass on the day of the March for Life in D.C. Her behavior showed that she was deeply disturbed, yet she claimed that the abortion she had 26 years ago was the best thing she had ever done. The woman apparently worked hard to make this convincing -- especially to herself. But her eyes tell a different story. She looks like a damned soul experiencing its first few seconds in hell.

There is a certain amount of disagreement within the pro-life movement about the propriety of using gruesome images of aborted babies to convince people of the evils of abortion. I myself am undecided on the issue. But the more I look at this image of a haunted woman, the more I think maybe we should use it instead.

This Is War

2012-01-22T20:37:00.001-07:00

A week or so ago, I was asked to consider responding to an article by the purblind Doug Kmiec arguing that the Obama administration is not, in fact, at war with the Catholic Church. At this point, I don't see the need. As reported in the Washington Times, the administration itself has provided a decisive refutation of Kmiec's little delusion in the form of the new Health and Human Services mandate giving church-affiliated institutions one year to comply with the Obamacare requirement to provide free contraceptive coverage to employees.

What is the purpose of this HHS mandate? To force employers to provide free contraceptives (including sterilization and the chemical abortion known as the "morning after" pill) to employees. What is the one institution on earth that is known and ridiculed, even from within, for its consistent and unswerving opposition to contraceptives? The Catholic Church. How, then, can this blatantly unconstitutional mandate be understood except as a frontal assault on the Catholic Church? We can only regard the lawless administration from which this outrage emanates as an implacable foe of the Church.

Once again, we see how Orwellian is the name "liberal" as applied to the pragmatic utilitarians to whom we have handed over our national affairs. Tolerance and diversity are the last things "liberals" are for. Once liberals achieve power, they ruthlessly persecute anyone who disagrees with them. It is not enough for liberals that persons be free to harbor some vice; society must also tolerate it. Then it will not be enough that society tolerate the vice; it must go on to accept it as a normal and perfectly viable alternative to traditional moral values. Then it will not be enough that society accept the vice as normal; it must go on to condone it, promote it, and reject and deride the opposing virtue. Then even this will not be enough, as long as the vice is not compulsory, and one single shred of opposition to it remains.

It does not end even here. Having gotten the country to swallow the bar-bell-sized poison pill of one vice, the liberals proceed to force-feed another, and then another, and then another, each one more horrendous than the last. This is all not only possible but inevitable in a world where Catholics are ignorant of their Faith, lead disordered lives and buy into the spirit of the age. For the last half-century, we have been doing just that. We have been lamps under bushel-baskets, and flavorless salt that is good for nothing except to be thrown down and trampled underfoot. More than half the Catholics in the United States voted for a man who is probably the most pro-death, anti-Catholic President in the history of this nation. Plenty of fallen Catholics -- including the one who heads the Department responsible for the abominable regulation in question -- have accepted accolades and high posts in his administration. It is no wonder that this administration thinks itself secure enough to enter into open hostilities against the Church.

We need to take up our faith and start living it again if we are not to be engulfed. The Washington Times reports that "the new regulation does not require coverage of abortions." Under the Obama administration, that is a sentence that should end in the word "yet."

When the Abortion Lobby Tells the Truth

2012-01-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

Warning: Graphic and disturbing descriptions

"I will give no deadly medicine to any one ifasked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not giveto a woman a pessary to produce abortion."

-- The Hippocratic Oath, classical version (excised from the modern version)

Mostof you know what it means to see 100 corpses lying together, or 500, or1000. To have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from exceptionscaused by weakness - to have remained decent fellows, that is what hasmade us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has neverbeen written and shall never be written...

--Excerpt of speech by Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler justifying theextermination of the Jews, spoken to senior SS officers in Poznan,Poland, October 4, 1943

It is morally and ethically wrong to do abortions without acknowledging what it means to do them. I performed abortions, I have had an abortion and I am in favor of women having abortions when we choose to do so. But we should never disregard the fact that being pregnant means there is a baby growing inside of a woman, a baby whose life is ended. We ought not to pretend this is not happening."

-- Judith Arcana, abortion activist, at a London seminar, October 1999

"I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound. . . I think brain death would occur because the suctioning to remove contents is only two or three seconds, so somewhere in that period of time, obviously not when you penetrate the skull, because people get shot in the head and they don't die immediately from that, if they are going to die at all, so that probably is not sufficient to kill the fetus, but I think removing the brain contents eventually will. . . My intent in every abortion I have ever done is to kill the fetus and terminate the pregnancy."

-- Leroy Carhart, testifying under oath in 1997 about what he does to commit abortion, Asheville Tribune

"[T]he abortion patient has a right not only to be rid of the growth, called a fetus, in her body, but also has a right to a dead fetus. . . [I] never have any intention of trying to protect the fetus, if it can be saved. . . as a general principle [t]here should not be a live fetus."

-- Robert Crist, abortion doctor, testifying in federal court in 1980

" 'Forceps, please,' Mr. Smith slaps into his hand what look like oversized ice-cube tongs. Holtzman pushes it into the vagina and tugs. He pulls out something, which he slaps on the instrument table. 'There,' he says, 'A leg. You can always tell fetal size best by the extremities. Fifteen weeks is right in this case.' I turn to Mr. Smith. 'What did he say?' 'He pulled a leg off,' Mr. Smith says. 'Right here.' He points to the instrument table, where there is a perfectly formed, slightly bent leg, about three inches long. It consists of a ripped thigh, a knee, a lower leg, a foot, and five toes. I start to shake very badly, but otherwise I feel nothing. Total shock is painless. 'I have the rib cage now,' Holtzman says, as he slams down another piece of the fetus. 'That's one thing you don't want to leave behind because it acts like a ball valve and infects everything.... There, I've got the head now. Also a piece of the placenta.' I look at the instrument table where next to the leg, and next to a mess he calls the rib cage but that I cannot recognize, there lies a head. It is the smallest human head I have ever seen, but it is unmistakably part of a person."

-- Magda Denes, abortion advocate, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, In Necessity and Sorrow; Life and Death Inside an Abortion Clinic, 1978

"When you're a doctor who does these abortions and the leaders of your movement appear before Congress and go on network news and say these procedures are done in only the most tragic of circumstances, how do you think that makes you feel? You know they're primarily done on healthy women and healthy fetuses, and it makes you feel like a dirty little abortionist with a dirty little secret. I think we should tell them the truth, let them vote and move on. In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along. The abortion-rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it, and so, probably, does everyone else."

-- Ron Fitzsimmons, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, in "An Abortion Rights Advocate Says He Lied About Procedure", New York Times (February 26, 1997)

"Is birth control an abortion? Definitely not; an abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun."

-- Planned Parenthood pamphlet (August 1963)

"The pro-life groups were right about one thing, the location of the baby inside or outside the womb cannot make much of a moral difference. We cannot coherently hold it is alright to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive. The solution, however, is not to accept the pro-life view that the fetus is a human being with the same moral status as yours or mine. The solution is the very opposite, to abandon the idea that all human life is of equal worth."

-- Peter Singer, Princeton "ethicist" and death enthusiast, Practical Ethics, pp. 185-8, 1993

"It was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the 'right' to abortion out of legal thin air. But Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffey never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, 'Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn't have been possible.' Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes."

-- Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade, testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights (January 21, 1998)

"We have some experience with late terminations; about 10,000 patients between 24 and 36 weeks and something like 800 fetal anomalies between 26 and 36 weeks in the past 5 years."

-- the late George Tiller, declaring his pro-abortion credentials in a speech to the National Abortion Federation, April 2-4, 1995, New Orleans, LA

"I do think abortion is murder—of a very special and necessary sort. What else would one call the deliberate stilling of a life? And no physician involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that...legalistic distinctions among 'homicide,' 'justified homicide,' 'self-defense,' and 'murder' appear to me a semantic game. What difference does it make what we call it? Those who do it and those who witness its doing know that abortion is the stilling of a life."

-- Magda Denes, abortion advocate, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, "Performing Abortions," Commentary Magazine (October, 1976)

January 17, 1994: The Northridge Earthquake

2012-01-17T18:25:00.000-07:00

Typical scene in the San Fernando Valley on January 17, 1994: a collapsed apartment building.

January 17, 1994 was a pivotal day for those of us who lived through the Northridge Earthquake, whose epicenter, by the way, was really in Reseda. It was not a day that any of us are likely to forget. "General devastation" is probably the most accurate description of the aftermath of those 20 dreadful seconds, the longest 20 seconds of my life. For many months afterward, I woke up every single morning at 4:30.

Yet my family were among the lucky ones. Although many personal possessions were destroyed, the house did not suffer any serious structural damage, and nobody in the family was hurt. We were without gas for a week -- we shut off the gas right after the earthquake, and the gas company couldn't spare a man to come out right away and check for leaks and turn it back on. So, we did a lot of barbecuing: all that meat in the freezer came in very handy. We had water, but no hot water until the gas could be turned back on; and we had power restored that same evening. I still remember the sound of transformers blowing when the juice started running back through them.

As for the stuff in the house, even after everything was picked up, it was a long time before we could find anything again. You remembered where things were before the earthquake; you would always reach for things in their former locations, and be unable to remember where they were afterward. During the earthquake itself, things got thrown into the oddest places. My grandmother's old (and quite heavy) meat grinder, which was stored in a cupboard over the refrigerator, ended up clear in the dining room. And then there was all the broken glass. For the longest time, slivers of broken glass kept turning up, like a deeply embedded splinter that eventually works its way to the surface of the skin.

One humorous thing about the earthquake. It was only then that I learned that the San Fernando Valley, where I was born and raised, is the porn capital of the whole universe. How did I learn this? Because the porn people came out and announced to the media that this earthquake was not in fact divine retribution on their filthy industry.

As if they would know.

"Easy" Street

2012-01-16T16:14:00.000-07:00

America has now reached the point where our debt equals our GDP. But we can't say we weren't warned. From 63 years ago:

H/T Dr. Sanity.

Purification

2012-01-04T23:47:00.000-07:00

The clergy sex abuse scandal seems always ready to vomit forth fresh headlines. Today we have the news that Bishop Gabino Zavala, auxiliary of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, has resigned, a month after admitting to having fathered two children. Bishop Zavala is known for espousing liberal-leftist causes and presiding over liturgical travesties. The Church is once again humiliated, but the good news is that an unfaithful shepherd has been dismissed from service.

Pope Benedict is on record as saying that the Church needs purification, and that it must be attained by penance and suffering. Not unconnected with the Holy Father's thoughts on this subject is a passage from St. John Eudes' 17th-century work published under the title The Priest, His Dignity and Obligations. A part of this passage appeared in this space eleven months ago:

The most evident mark of God's anger and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world are manifested when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clergy who are priests more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds. Instead of nourishing those committed to their care, they rend and devour them brutally. Instead of leading their people to God, they drag Christian souls into hell in their train. Instead of being the salt of the earth and the light of the world, they are its innocuous poison and its murky darkness....

When God permits such things, it is a very positive proof that He is thoroughly angry with His people, and is visiting His most dreadful anger upon them. That is why He cries unceasingly to Christians, "Return, O ye revolting children...and I will give you pastors according to my own heart" (Jer. 3:14-15). Thus, irregularities in the lives of priests constitute a scourge visited upon the people in consequence of sin.

We have certainly suffered this scourge of bad shepherds, and all the shame and degradation that comes with them. The tide is turning, but we still have a long way to go. If we want good and faithful shepherds, then we ourselves need to straighten up and fly right.

Hall Monitor Nation

2012-01-02T18:05:00.002-07:00

LEX NON ORITUR EX INJURIA: The law does not arise from a mere injury.

LEX NON FAVET DELICATORUM VOTIS: The law does not favor the wishes of the dainty.

LEX NON CURAT DE MINIMIS: The law does not care about trifles.

-- Ancient legal maxims

Many people -- even those who do not associate the Gem State exclusively with toothless, mulletted rednecks in pickup trucks with bird dogs and gun racks, nutty militiamen out in the back woods, and white supremacists -- think of Idaho as a "red" state. Idaho certainly has a fairly reliable record of voting Republican, at least during the course of my lifetime. It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that the capital of this reputedly conservative state -- whose city council members once passed a resolution supporting Obamacare -- aspires to compete with places like New York and San Francisco in the Nanny State Playoffs. And it is well on its way there.

Exhibit A: the Boise City Smoke-Free Air Ordinance, which took effect on New Year's. It is now illegal, in the city of Boise, to smoke, among other places:

-- In any enclosed public place, including privately owned bars and restaurants;

-- In common areas in apartment buildings, condos and trailer parks (!);

-- In private clubs;

-- In sports arenas;

-- In any common use area;

-- At bus stops;

-- Outside city buildings;

-- At sidewalk cafes;

-- In outdoor service lines (i.e., people lining up outside to acquire some service);

-- Within Grove Plaza downtown, and on 8th Street downtown, between Main and Bannock;

which leaves smokers with about 2 square inches within the city of Boise. This ordinance even reaches into private residences that serve as child or adult day care centers, health care facilities, or private businesses accessible to at least one employee. It makes it illegal to permit smoking in "public places" as defined in the ordinance, even though the public place is privately owned. It also specifically gives private persons the right to press charges against offenders.

So much for the "land of the free and the home of the brave." Now we are a nation of hall monitors.

Fortunately, there are some business owners who are gearing up to file a lawsuit against the city to challenge this idiotic ordinance, to the extent it reaches into the affairs of private property owners. But the dismaying thing is that a lot of people seem to like this sort of government overreaching. After all, they say, we don't smoke; why should we be subjected to other people's smoke?

But the popularity of cigarette smoke is beside the point. A bigger question for the pro-smoking-ban bunch is: why should you be allowed to harness the coercive police powers of the state for the purpose of sparing yourselves a mere inconvenience? Why should scarce police resources be diverted to protecting your delicate sensibilities? Why should you be allowed to deprive the owners of private property of the right to decide whether to allow smoking on their premises? Why should you deprive other, tax-paying citizens of the full enjoyment of public property, especially outdoor public property, just because they smoke? Do they somehow pay less taxes than you do? I myself have never smoked, and do not care for the smell of cigarette smoke. But the solution to my problem is very simple: I just don't patronize businesses that allow smoking on their premises. No muss, no fuss! And if somebody near me is smoking out in the open air, so what? Within a second or two, the smoke will blow away.

And by the way, this ordinance is bound to strike where least expected. As bad as an assault on private property rights is, this smoking ban is a lot more than that. Consider the following provision, which defines "smoking" (emphases added):

“Smoking” means inhaling, exhaling, burning, carrying, or possessing any combusting (heated, lit, or smoldering) tobacco or any other substance, whether contained in a cigar, cigarette, or pipe, or any other object. Smoking does not include possession of an unlit or unheated cigar, cigarette, or pipe. Smoking does not include use of an e-cigarette which creates only a vapor without any smoke.

Notice that this definition of "smoking" is broad enough to cover other burning substances besides tobacco, such as incense. The only religious exemption to the smoking ban is American Indian ceremonies. The anti-incense crowd already exerts a disproportionate influence at local churches. How long will it be before somebody calls the cops on the Catholic Church for incense at Mass, or in a Eucharistic procession? Worse yet (and heaven forfend): how many parishes will buckle and cut out incense altogether for fear of prosecution? Would this not be unconstitutional prior restraint? Have the enemies of the Church not got enough bludgeons to beat her down with?

Don't think it can't happen. Look at what already has happened.

January 1st: Solemnity of the Mother of God

2012-01-01T21:21:00.000-07:00

15th-century Byzantine icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, in the care of the Redemptorist Fathers. Notice how everything about her -- the inclination of her head, her hands, even the lines of her garments -- points to her divine Son.

According to the pre-conciliar calendar, today is the Octave of Christmas, wherein the Church honors the Circumcision of the Lord, the Holy Name of Jesus which He received at His Circumcision, and the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin. This feast celebrates obedience: the submission of Christ to the Mosaic Law, even though it did not apply to Him, so that He might fulfill it down to the last detail. It also commemorates the first shedding of Christ's innocent Blood for sinful man. The Collect of the Mass in the Extraordinary Form is the same as that in the Ordinary Form -- a fact not at all obvious in the English-speaking world until we got the new English translation at the beginning of Advent.

According to the post-conciliar calendar, the Feast of the Mother of God celebrates the fact that, though a creature, Mary is nevertheless truly the Mother of her Creator. This was defined in A.D. 431 at the Council of Ephesus, when the Church condemned the errors of Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople. Nestorius held that Jesus is really two Persons: the human Jesus and the divine Jesus. Thus, Mary is not really the Mother of God, but only the Mother of Christ. In his Third Letter to Nestorius, which the Council approved, St. Cyril carefully explains that Jesus is one Person with two natures, human and divine, hypostatically united. He then discusses the implications for the motherhood of Mary:

Therefore, because the Holy Virgin bore in the flesh God who was united hypostatically with the flesh, for that reason we call her Mother of God, not as though the nature of the Word had the beginning of Its existence from the flesh (for "the Word was in the beginning and the Word was God and the Word was with God", and He made the ages and is co-eternal with the Father and craftsman of all things), but because, as we have said, He united to Himself hypostatically the human and underwent a birth according to the flesh from her womb. This was not as though He needed necessarily or for His own nature a birth in time and in the last times of this age, but in order that He might bless the beginning of our existence, in order that seeing that it was a woman that had given birth to Him united to the flesh, the curse against the whole race should thereafter cease which was consigning all our earthy bodies to death, and in order that the removal through Him of the curse, "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children", should demonstrate the truth of the words of the prophet: "Strong death swallowed them up", and again, "God has wiped every tear away from all face". It is for this cause that we say that in His economy He blessed marriage and, when invited, went down to Cana in Galilee with His holy Apostles.

The Council confessed the following in regard to the Hypostatic Union and the Mother of God:

We confess, then, our Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God perfect God and perfect man of a rational soul and a body, begotten before all ages from the Father in His godhead, the same in the last days, for us and for our salvation, born of Mary the Virgin, according to His humanity, one and the same consubstantial with the Father in godhead and consubstantial with us in humanity, for a union of two natures took place. Therefore we confess one Christ, one Son, one Lord. According to this understanding of the unconfused union, we confess the Holy Virgin to be the Mother of God because God the Word took flesh and became man and from His very conception united to Himself the temple he took from her. As to the evangelical and apostolic expressions about the Lord, we know that theologians treat some in common as of one person and distinguish others as of two natures, and interpret the God-befitting ones in connection with the godhead of Christ and the lowly ones with His humanity.

We can see in the story of Nestorius and the Council of Ephesus the justice of honoring Mary as the Destroyer of Heresies. Nestorius rejected the title "Mother of God," and instead called Mary the "Mother of Christ." This appears reasonable on its face: Jesus after all is the Christ, and Mary is His Mother; hence, she is the Mother of Christ. But this is precisely the danger of heresy, which often contains a kernel of truth that lends plausibility. Although the title "Mother of Christ" is true as far as it goes, it was nevertheless wrong in the mouth and from the pen of Nestorius and his followers, because it was based on a wrong understanding of the two natures of Jesus. The Church, on the contrary, and with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, upheld the title "Mother of God" as justified in view of the fact that Jesus is one Person with two natures, human and divine. From this we can see that if we are wrong about Mary, we will be wrong about Jesus. If, on the other hand, we get it right about Mary, we get it right about Jesus. The truth about Mary dispels heresies and leads surely to the truth about her Son.

That is definitely worth celebrating.

Good Heavens: 2011

2011-12-31T00:00:00.760-07:00

As usual, thanks to Wikipedia for refreshing my recollection on important events of 2011. I trust my readers overseas forgive and indulge my concentration on what is of interest primarily in the United States and to me personally.

January

1: A bomb explodes outside a Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt, killing 21 and wounding 97 and igniting hostilities between Muslims and Christians.

5: Murder spree, Omaha, Nebraska: a 17-year-old high school student murders an assistant principal and then turns the gun on himself. Also: John Boehner succeeds Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

8: Murder spree, Tuscon, Arizona: a shooter sprays bullets at a crowd attending a political event at a Safeway parking lot held by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing six (including a 9-year-old girl and a federal judge) and wounding 14 others, including Giffords. The shooter is later taken into custody and declared incompetent to stand trial.

10: Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay receives a three-year sentence for money laundering.

11: Three-quarters of Queensland, Australia is declared a disaster area due to massive floods.

15: The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham is erected for English members of the Anglican Church who seek reunion with Rome. Three former Anglican bishops are ordained Catholic priests; one of them, Fr. Keith Newton, is appointed Ordinary.

18: Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, former dictator of Haiti, is arrested by Haitian police on corruption charges.

25: A "popular" anti-government revolution begins in Egypt. It is part of a series of similar uprisings throughout the Muslim world that will lead to months of violence and political instability.
31: A winter storm of epic proportions begins to sweep over the entire American Midwest and into Canada. Global warming is suspected.

Deaths: Charlie Callas (comic actor); Jack LaLanne; Sargent Shriver; Susannah York; David Nelson (actor, older son of Ozzie and Harriet and brother of Ricky); John Dye (the Angel of Death in Touched by an Angel); Gerry Rafferty (musician).

February

2: NASA announces the discovery of six planets orbiting the star Kepler-11.
3: The immense 2011 Groundhog Day Blizzard dissipates, leaving ice, snow, power outages, airport shutdowns, tornadoes, billions of dollars in damage and at least 36 deaths in its wake.
11: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigns after more than two weeks of allegedly popular protests and calls by the U.S. government for his resignation. The military now rules Egypt.
15: Civil war begins in Libya.
22: A 6.3 magnitude earthquake strikes the Canterbury district of New Zealand's South Island. Also: Rahm Emanuel is elected mayor of Chicago.
27: The 83rd Academy Awards is held in Hollywood, California. I could care less.

Deaths: Jane Russell; Frank Buckles (last surviving American veteran of World War I); James A. McClure (former congressman and Senator from Idaho); Bernard Nathanson (former abortionist turned pro-life activist and Catholic convert); T.P. McKenna (Irish actor); Betty Garrett (Irene Lorenzo in All in the Family); Kenneth Mars; J. Paul Getty III.

March

2: A Muslim gunman opens fire on a busload of U.S. Air Force personnel at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, killing two and wounding two others before being taken into custody. Also: Shabazz Bhatti, Pakistan's only Catholic cabinet minister and opponent of Pakistan's anti-apostasy laws, is assassinated.
8: 21 Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia are suspended in connection with allegations of child sexual abuse.
11: Japan is stricken by the triple disaster of earthquake (magnitude 9.1, among the worst ever recorded), tsunami and nuclear meltdown, resulting in thousands of deaths and billions in damage.
19: Operation Odyssey Dawn begins: the United States intervenes militarily against Libya's Moammar Qaddafi. Also: Knut the polar bear dies at the Berlin Zoo in the presence of hundreds of visitors. Also: the Moon reaches its closest point in its orbit to the earth since 1993, appearing 14% brighter and 30% larger than usual.

Deaths: David Broder (Washington Post columnist); Elizabeth Taylor; Michael Gough (English character actor); Farley Granger; Harry Coover (inventor of Super Glue); Geraldine Ferraro; Warren Christopher.

April

1: A six-foot hole opens up at 34,000' in the fuselage of Southwest Flight 812 from Phoenix to Sacramento, resulting in depressurization of the cabin and an emergency landing in Yuma, Arizona. 80 of Southwest's planes are afterwards grounded.
4: An outbreak of tornadoes is reported throughout the American south.
13: Idaho's governor signs into law a bill banning abortions beyond 20 weeks.
14-16: 155 tornadoes sweep the southern United States, resulting in 43 deaths.
19: A plane carrying Michelle Obama has a near-miss incident with another plane.
25-28: Another outbreak of tornadoes in the American south leaves more than 300 dead.
29: The royal wedding of Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Kate Middleton takes place at Westminster Abbey.

Deaths: William A. Rusher (publisher, National Review); Sidney Lumet; Trevor Bannister (Mr. Lucas in Are You Being Served?); Gil Robbins (the Highwaymen); Phoebe Snow.

May

1: Ven. John Paul II is beatified in Rome. Also: The White House announces the death of Osama bin Laden.
4: In the wake of severe storms, the Mississippi River spills over its banks, causing catastrophic flooding from Minnesota to Louisiana.
5: Claude Choules, the last combat veteran of World War I, the last seaman of World War I, and the last veteran of both world wars, dies at the age of 110 in Perth, Australia.
12: John Demjanjuk is convicted in a German court of the murder of over 28,000 Jews at Sobibor during the Holocaust, and then released on the grounds of his old age, as well as the time he has already spent incarcerated.
13: The pontifical commission Ecclesia Dei releases Universae ecclesiae, an instruction to clarify and strengthen the motu proprio Summorum pontificum, which took the Tridentine Mass out of the deep freeze.
14: Dominique Strauss-Khan, head of the International Monetary Fund, is arrested in New York City on charges relating to the alleged sexual assault of a hotel maid. Although Strauss-Khan admitted having sex with the maid, the criminal charges were later dismissed on the grounds that the maid lacked credibility.
15: Louisiana opens the Morganza Spillway on the Mississippi River for the first time in 37 years, in an attempt to save Baton Rouge and New Orleans by flooding 3,000 acres of rural land.
16: America's Most Wanted is cancelled after a 23-year run. It will later be brought back on another network. Also: Spaceshuttle Endeavor successfully launches on its last mission.
17: Oprah Winfrey records her last show, leaving American society with one less pernicious cultural influence. Also: Ming Ming, the world's oldest panda, dies in China at the age of 34. Also: Former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger admits to fathering a child on a member of his household staff. His wife, Maria Shriver, will soon file for divorce.
18: A tornado strikes Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
19: Barack Obama makes a speech in support of the Arab uprisings and declares that Israel must return to her pre-1967 borders. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells Obama, in essence, to sit and rotate.
20: My father celebrates his [CENSORED]th birthday.
21: Contrary to the predictions of Protestant talk radio host Harold Camping, the faithful are not raptured up on this date. Also: A tornado rips through the town of Reading, Kansas. Also: another Icelandic volcano, Grimsvotn, erupts, sending up an enormous plume of ash and touching off dozens of earthquakes.
22: The ridiculous hat worn by Princess Beatrice of York to the Big Royal Wedding is sold on Ebay for U.S. $123,325.00. Also: the city of Joplin, Missouri suffers major damage in a savage tornado strike. It is the worst tornado since 1947.
24: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint session of Congress, declaring that he is willing to make far-reaching compromises for peace, but will not agree to a return to Israel's 1967 borders. Meanwhile, President Obama is out of the country.
25: Jared Lee Loughner, the shooter who murdered a federal judge, a 9-year-old girl and several others, and wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, is found incompetent to stand trial.
29: Beginning of the Wallow Fire, an immense wildfire that will burn hundreds of square miles in eastern Arizona.

Deaths: Jackie Cooper; Sada Thompson; Randy "Macho Man" Savage; Edward Hardwicke (played Dr. Watson to Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes); Barbara Stuart; Clarice Taylor; Jeff Conaway.

June

2: Murder spree, Yuma County, Arizona: a 73-year-old on a county-wide shooting rampage kills five and wounds one before turning the gun on himself.
3: John Edwards is indicted on charges of conspiracy and violating campaign finance laws in connection with his affair with the woman who bore him a child while his wife was dying of cancer.
6: Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) admits sending a picture of his junk to a college student via Twitter. The revelations will lead to his resignation on June 16th.
17: Three months into an investigation of alleged offenses against his religious vows, Fr. John Corapi, SOLT, announces that he is abandoning his priestly ministry.
19: More than 300 dissident priests in Austria launch a "Call to Disobedience," effectively entering into schism and inviting others to do the same.
25: Same-sex "marriage" becomes legal in the State of New York.
27: The odd-looking, impeached former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is convicted of 17 counts of criminal corruption charges.

Deaths: Lawrence Eagleburger; James Arness; Jack Kevorkian; Geronimo Pratt; Roy Skelton (voice of the Daleks); Margaret Tyzack (Claudius' mother Antonia in I, Claudius); Peter Falk; Yelena Bonner (widow of Andrei Sakharov); Clarence Clemons; Fr. Stefano Gobbi.

July

1: Leon Panetta succeeds Robert Gates as the Unites States Secretary of Defense. Also: Dominique Strauss-Khan is released from house arrest after it emerges that the maid who accused him of sexual assault made false statements. Also: the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a Michigan law banning sex and race preferences in college admissions, government hiring and government contracting. Also: Venezuelan president and windbag Hugo Chavez makes his first public speech since returning from cancer treatment in Cuba. As of the date this post is published, the speech is probably still going on.
5: An immense dust storm engulfs Phoenix, Arizona, grounding flights and cutting electricity to thousands. Also: Casey Anthony is acquitted of murdering her daughter Caylee, and is only convicted on a few misdemeanor counts.
7: Denver, Colorado suffers an immense storm that results in flooding and mass power outages. Also: Murder spree, Grand Rapids, Michigan: a shooter murders seven (including his estranged wife and daughter) and wounds two before turning the gun on himself.
10: Britain's News of the World, in circulation since 1843, prints its last issue amidst a firestorm of phone hacking accusations.
14: The government of Ireland proposes to pass a law purporting to require Catholic priests to violate the seal of the confessional by turning in anyone who confesses to a crime against children, on pain of imprisonment.
18: A second giant dust storm engulfs Phoenix, Arizona.
19: Pope Benedict appoints Denver Bishop Charles Chaput, OFM.Cap. to head the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
21: With the landing of the space shuttle Atlantis at Kennedy Space Center, the Space Shuttle Program comes to an end. Also: A proposal similar to the one in Ireland is launched in Australia to require Catholic priests to turn in penitents who confess to child molestation.
22: On the same day that explosions damage government buildings in Oslow, Norway, a shooter goes on a mass murder spree at a youth camp on the island of Utøya, leaving 84 dead. The shooter is a Norwegian and a Freemason.
23: Murder spree, Grand Prairie, Texas: a shooter kills five and wounds four at a child's birthday party at a roller rink before turning the gun on himself.
31: First recorded case in a deadly listeriosis outbreak resulting from contaminated cantaloupes.

Deaths: Nguyen Cao Ky (former Prime Minister of South Vietnam); Amy Winehouse; Roberts Blossom ("Doc" in Escape from Alcatraz); Betty Ford; Otto von Habsburg (heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire); Anna Massey (British actress).

August

2: A Syrian Catholic Church is bombed in Kirkuk, Iraq, wounding 15.
6-10: Rioters rampage through several districts of London and several other English cities, killing five and doing hundreds of millions in property damage.
12: The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down Obamacare's health insurance mandate.
22: University of Idaho professor Ernesto Bustamante murders Katy Benoit, a graduate student, then turns the gun on himself. It will emerge that the two had had a sexual relationship, that Bustamante had a history of exhibiting bizarre conduct in the classroom, and that Benoit had complained to the university about his threatening behavior, resulting in his termination days earlier.
24: Steve Jobs resigns as CEO of Apple, Inc.
25: Scientists at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, announce the discovery of an extrasolar planet, possibly composed entirely of diamond, orbiting a pulsar 4,000 light years away in the constellation Serpens.
27: The deadly Hurricane Irene, ultimately responsible for 56 deaths and billions of dollars in damage, makes landfall on the east coast of the United States.

Deaths: Nicholas Ashford (Ashford & Simpson); Jerry Leiber (songwriter: "Jailhouse Rock," "Hound Dog," "Stand By Me," etc.); John Wood (English actor).

September

4: The most destructive wildfire in Texas history breaks out in Bastrop County, Texas. It will not be declared extinguished until October 10th.
6: Murder spree, Carson City, Nevada: a gunman murders four and wounds six at an International House of Pancakes restaurant, before turning the gun on himself.
8: A Boise, Idaho lay Dominican blogger and lawyer celebrates her [CENSORED]st birthday.
15: "Indeterminate" is now an option for listing sex on Australian passports.
16: A P51-D Mustang crashes into the crowd at the annual air races in Reno, Nevada, killing five and wounding 50.
17: Beginning of the Occupy Wall Street crybaby demonstrations.
20: The U.S. military's policy of "don't ask, don't tell" officially ends.
22: Pope Benedict XVI begins his state visit to his native Germany.

Deaths: Dolores Hope (widow of Bob Hope); Tom Wilson, Sr. (cartoonist, creator of Ziggy); Cliff Robertson.

October

3: Amanda Knox, an American convicted in Italy of sexual assault and murder and sentenced to 26 years in prison, is freed by an appellate court.
5: Murder spree, Cupertino, California: an employee at a cement plant opens fire on co-workers, killing three and wounding seven. He is later shot by police after brandishing a weapon and refusing to surrender.
12: Murder spree, Seal Beach, California: a shooter opened fire in the beauty salon where his ex-wife worked, murdering eight and wounding one. He was apprehended by police.
20: Ousted Libyan dictator Muammar Qadaffi is killed in the city of Sirte.
21: Obama announces that all U.S. forces will be out of Iraq by year's end.
22: Saudi crown prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud dies.
28: Britain's laws of royal succession are changed to end the precedence of male heirs to the throne over female heirs, and to permit persons in the line of succession to marry Catholics without forfeiting their place in the line.

Deaths: Muammar Qadaffi; Saudi crown prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud; George Baker (Tiberius in I, Claudius); Steve Jobs.

November

2: Lindsay Lohan gets 30 days for blowing off the terms of her probation, but is soon released from jail due to overcrowding.
6: The state of Oklahoma experiences a 5.6-magnitude earthquake, the strongest in its history.
7: Dr. Conrad Murray is found guilty of the involuntary manslaughter of Michael Jackson.
8: An asteroid 1300 feet in diameter passes closer to Earth than the Moon.
9: Penn State University president Graham Spanier and head football coach Joe Paterno are fired for allegedly covering up the sexual abuse of boys by assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.
12: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigns.
13-15: The Flea Party occupiers are shut down in Portland, Oregon; Oakland, California; and Zuccotti Park in New York City.
17: Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez of Idaho Falls, Idaho is charged with attempting to assassinate the President after bullets are found embedded in the White House.
18: The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reopens the investigation into the 1981 drowning death of Natalie Wood.

29: Dr. Conrad Murray is sentenced to four years' imprisonment for the involuntary manslaughter of Michael Jackson.

Deaths: Bill Keane (cartoonist, creator of The Family Circus); "Smokin'" Joe Frazier; Andy Rooney; Leonid Borodin (Soviet dissident); Svetlana Alliluyeva (only daughter of Joseph Stalin).

December

1: Murder spree, Bay City, Texas: a shooter murders four children, ages five and under, and wounds their mother -- his wife -- before turning the gun on himself.
3: Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain announces the suspension of his 2012 election campaign.
4: Iran captures an American Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unarmed aircraft. The U.S. response is to politely ask for the return of the Drone. It doesn't work. Also: Koblenz, Germany: after evacuating 45,000 people, bomb squads defuse World War II bombs hidden under the Rhine.
7: The 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and the last to be marked by the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, which officially disbands this month due to the extreme old age and infirmity of its few remaining members.
8: A shooter kills a police officer at Virginia Tech University and is later found dead.
10: The last total eclipse of 2011 occurs, visible in Asia, Australia and North America.
15: A French court sentences infamous terrorist Carlos "The Jackal" to life for carrying out four deadly bombings in 1982-83.
16: Tropical Storm Washi, the deadliest tropical cyclone of the year, makes landfall in the Philippines, where it will kill hundreds.
25: Boko Haram, an Islamist group, bombs several Christian Churches in Nigeria, killing 39. Also: Murder spree, Grapevine, Texas: a shooter dressed in a Santa suit murders six members of his family, then turns the gun on himself. The murders turn out to be Muslim "honor killings."
28: Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic priests engaged in a turf battle duke it out with brooms in the Church of the Nativity while preparing for Orthodox Christmas celebrations.
29: Kim Jong Un succeeds his father, Kim Jong Il, as tyrant of North Korea.

Deaths: Bill McKinney (character actor); Harry Morgan (Col. Potter on M*A*S*H); Václav Havel; Kim Jong Il; Christopher Hitchens; Cheeta the chimp; Kaye Stevens.

May 2012 be an improvement over 2011.

December 28th: Feast of the Holy Innocents

2011-12-28T13:22:00.000-07:00

Salvete Flores Martyrum, Haydn.Thanks to Msgr. Charles Pope for the following transcription and translation of this hymn, and also for his Dangerous Reflection on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (via Fr. Philip Neri Powell):

Salvete flores martyrum, – Hail Martyr Flowers
quos lucis ipso in limine – On the very threshold of the dawn (of life)
Christi insecutor sustulit – Christ’s persecutor destroyed (you)
ceu turbo nascentes rosas. – like the whirlwind does the budding roses.

Vos prima Christi victima, – You, Christ’s first fruits
grex immolatorum tener, – A flock of tender sacrificial victims
aram sub ipsam simplices – right up by the very altar
palma et coronis luditis. – now play with your palms and crowns.

Iesu, tibi sit gloria, – Jesus to you be glory
qui natus es de Virgine, – who were born of the Virgin
cum Patre et almo Spiritu, – with the Father and loving Spirit
in sempiterna saecula. Amen. – unto to eternal ages. Amen.

Tempus Fugit

2011-12-28T02:36:00.001-07:00

As the old year winds down to its conclusion, it's only natural to meditate on the passage of time, our ever more distant youth, the death to which every day we are one day closer. Our souls, of course, do not age, but our bodies do, and the world is not the same as it was when we were kids.

One thing that tells me I'm getting old -- besides the increasing sensitivity of my old injuries to changes in the weather, and the new gray hairs I keep finding all over my scalp -- is that my cultural referents are becoming obsolete. My similes, metaphors and witticisms are intelligible to a more and more tightly circumscribed pool of listeners. A generation has now grown into adulthood that has to Google things my generation took for granted. More and more adults today cannot remember the following:

-- Cassette Tapes. These were things we used to record songs off the radio -- something the newest generation of adults has probably never done. Bonus points to you 20-somethings if you can identify an 8-track cassette.

-- Vinyl records. Vinyl records are played on a revolving turntable. A needle on a mechanical arm is inserted gently onto the record disk and transmits the recording from grooves in the disk to the speakers. An LP (long-playing) record is 12 inches in diameter; in the '70s and '80s, we all had thousands of them. There were also cassette versions of records, and we had thousands of those, too.

-- Televisions without Remote Controls. In my house, I had to be the remote control.

-- Pong. A video tennis game, played with a console plugged into a television set, consisting of two lines that moved up and down and a bouncing square. This was state of the art and highly popular. Seriously.

-- Playing Outside. Although mine was the first generation to play video games at home, we still played outside. I used to roller skate and ride my bike all around the block, even in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The general rule was that when the street lights came on, you came home.

-- Paul McCartney and Wings. In 1980, it was a revelation to us kids to learn that before Wings, Paul McCartney had been in the Beatles. We all knew the Beatles, we just didn't know realize that Paul McCartney was one of them. 31 years later, it is a revelation to learn that there was such a thing as Wings. I don't want to think about whether the existence of the Beatles is a revelation.

-- Rotary Telephones. Yes, there was a time when a telephone actually had a dial where you stuck your finger into a hole in a wheel corresponding to a number (or letters, back in the days of telephone name exchanges), pulled the wheel back, and waited for the wheel to return to the start position before you dialed the next number. I don't remember exactly when we got our first touch-tone phone, but it had to be the late '80s. Mobile phones were a rarity, and structurally no different than an average touch-tone phone with a cord. No cameras, no video games, no texting, no sexting, no 30-year-old adolescent co-worker taking pictures of his junk and messaging it to your phone.

-- "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran." Also in 1980, we had the Iran Hostage Crisis. This song, a parody of "Barbara Ann" by the Beach Boys (another cultural institution probably unknown to today's adults), was a reaction to the crisis. "We're gonna rock your Ayatollah/sock your Ayatollah/bomb Iran." In the far less politically correct climate of three decades ago, this ditty was quite popular and frequently played on the radio.

-- The Impending Ice Age. Yes, during the 1970s, we were expecting a new Ice Age. Any minute now.

-- Looney Tunes Cartoons. Despite watching the unexpurgated version of these cartoons, we did not grow up to become racists.

-- All in the Family. This show was so huge in the '70s that it is especially depressing to have to explain it to people today. It is about the Bunkers and the Stivics, who start off all living in the same house: Archie Bunker, the loud-mouthed, bigoted, right-wing longshoreman and veteran of World War II who talks in malapropisms; Edith Bunker, his wife with the high-pitched voice, ding-batty yet wise in her own way (though inconsistently so, due to the producer's efforts to make her friendly to leftist ideology); their daughter, Gloria Stivic, who works to put her husband through school; and Mike "Meathead" Stivic, the hippie-leftist husband, diametrically opposed to Archie's politics. The show made history with its immense viewership and its controversial subject matter. Archie Bunker, played by the very-left-wing though gifted actor Carroll O'Connor, was basically Norman Lear's tool for making fun of conservatives. Still, Archie is anything but one-dimensional. He also got the last laugh in many ways: except for the bigoted blather, he turned out to be right about a lot of things, and even prophetic (e.g., predicting that Ronald Reagan would one day be president, years before the fact).

-- Mainframe Computers. The average pocket calculator today is probably more powerful than the average mainframe, which ran on hole-punch cards and occupied an entire room.

-- Old Movies and Old Movie Stars. We did not see the black and white films from Hollywood's Golden Age in theaters, but we did grow up watching them on television. As a result, we could all recognize John Wayne, Cary Grant, Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Peter Lorre, Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Jimmy Stewart and the rest. Today, I have to explain who these stars were, and it still doesn't ring a bell.

-- No Altar Girls. When I was a kid, we only had altar boys. I cannot recall that any of us girls ever lobbied to become altar girls, or were ever discontent about not being able to serve at the altar in this age before the feminists came along and told girls they needed to be offended about being "left out." In fact, in an era when daily Mass was offered quite early in the morning, it was a relief not to be called upon to get up before the sun.

-- The Cold War and the Collapse of the Berlin Wall. About a year or so ago, I was somewhat stunned to realize that many adults are too young to remember the Cold War or even the end of the Cold War; and a new generation just now reaching adulthood was not even born during the Cold War. When I was a kid, we still had civil defense drills, complete with civil defense sirens. We kids were actually concerned about what was happening between the United States and the Soviet Union. After the death of Leonid Brezhnev, the parade of short-lived Soviet premiers, and the idiotic explanations given for their lengthy disappearances from public view, was a popular topic of conversation amongst us junior high kids. No one who was not alive and in possession of reason during the Cold War can appreciate how all-pervasive and all-shaping it was. No one not old enough to remember as far back as the Reagan Administration can understand just how sudden and miraculous were the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the fall of East Germany. The Tienanmen Square Massacre in China had taken place only a few months before. In October, 1989, my German professor -- a lady of no mean understanding, who had family in East Germany -- gave it as her opinion that the Berlin Wall would never come down, and Germany would never reunify. Less than a month later, to her joy, the Wall came down. Less than a year after that, Germany reunified. Less than a year after that, the Soviet Union itself followed East Germany onto the ash heap of history.

Yes, generations before us have died out, and become mere footnotes in history; we shall not escape the same fate, nor shall those who come after us. But the reflections inspired by the closing days of 2011 should not end there. Although our time here is short, and the things and people that were once familiar pass away, we should still resolve, first, to use the time we have to save our own souls; second, to help as many as possible of our fellow men to save their souls; and third, to do what we can to leave this world a better place than we found it, even if we ourselves are forgotten.

December 26th: St. Stephen, Protomartyr

2011-12-26T11:35:00.001-07:00

The birth of the Prince of Peace was marked by violence: Herod, fearing for his throne, had the male infants of Bethlehem massacred, in the hope that one of the victims would be the Christ Child. Today the birth of the Prince of Peace is still marked by violence: yesterday, Nigerian Islamists bombed several churches, including the packed St. Theresa's Catholic Church in Madala, where at least 35 died.

So it is appropriate that the feast of St. Stephen, the first to die for publicly proclaiming the Christian faith, should immediately follow Christmas.

Christmas 2011

2011-12-25T00:00:00.003-07:00

Adoration of the Shepherds (1622), by Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656)

First, a visual meditation. This is one of my favorite pictures of the Nativity. There are the rough, weather-beaten faces of the shepherds with their childlike simplicity and joy: one can well believe that these were worthy to be the first to receive news about the birth of the Savior. There is the Virgin Mother, looking like the teenager she is believed to have been at this time, still retaining the slight plumpness of childhood. Best of all is the smiling St. Joseph, so lost in contentment he seems hardly to realize that he is using a cow's head as a hand rest.

Now, some verbal meditations on the Birth of Christ for the Octave of Christmas from The Incarnation, Birth and Infancy of Jesus Christ by St. Alphonsus Liguori:

Behold the Lamb of God, Who came to sacrifice Himself, to obtain for us the divine favor, and to become our deliver, our life, our light and even our food in the Most Holy Sacrament!

St. Maximus says that for this reason, amongst others, Christ chose to be laid in the manger where the animals were fed, to make us understand that He has become man also to make Himself our food: "In the manger, where the food of animals is placed, He allowed His limbs to be laid, thereby showing that His own Body would be the eternal food of men." Besides this, He is born every day in the Sacrament by means of the priests and the words of consecration; the altar is the crib, and there we go to feed ourselves on His Flesh.

* * *

Adam came into the world at a full age; but the Eternal Word chose to appear as an infant -- a child is born to us -- that He might thus attract our hearts to Himself with greater force: "so would Who willed to be loved." He came not into the world to inspire terror, but to be loved; and for this reason He preferred to show Himself, at His first appearance, as a tender, weak infant.

* * *

Jesus is born in the stable at Bethlehem. His poor Mother has neither wool nor down to make a bed for the tender Infant. What does she do, then? She gathers together a small handful of straw into the manger, and puts it there for Him to lie on: and she laid Him in the manger. [Luke 2:7.] But, O my God, how hard and painful is this bed for an infant just born; the limbs of a babe are so delicate, and especially the limbs of Jesus, which were formed by the Holy Spirit with a special delicacy, in order that they might be the more sensible to suffering: A body Thou hast fitted to Me. [Heb. 10:5.]

Wherefore the hardness of such a bed must have caused him excessive pain -- pain and shame; for what child, even of the lowest of the people, is ever laid on straw as soon as he is born? Straw is only a fit bed for beasts; and yet the Son of God had none other on earth than a bed of miserable straw!...

But why did Mary, who had so earnestly desired the birth of this Son -- why did she, who loved Him so much, allow Him to lie and suffer on this hard bed, instead of keeping Him in her arms? This is a mystery....This great mystery has been explained by many in different ways, but the most pleasing explanation to me is that of St. Peter Damian: Jesus wished as soon as He was born to be placed on the straw, in order to teach us the mortification of our senses: "He laid down the law of martyrdom." The world had been lost by sensual pleasures; through them had Adam and multitudes of his descendants till then been lost. The Eternal Word came from heaven to teach us the love of suffering; and He began as a child to teach it to us by choosing for Himself the most acute sufferings that an infant can endure. It was, therefore, He Himself Who inspired His Mother to cease from holding Him in her tender arms, and to replace Him on the hard bed, that He might feel the more the cold of the cave and the pricking of this rough straw.

Needed: Translators without Agendas

2011-12-23T23:38:00.000-07:00

After reading the news that Hildegard of Bingen is to be raised to the altar and declared a Doctor of the Church, I ordered a copy of an English translation of her mystical work Scivias. I have a CD with some of her musical compositions -- which are very beautiful -- but I had never read any of her works.

And after cracking this translation of Scivias, I fear I still haven't read any of her works.

I ordered this book with some trepidation, as all the English translations I could find date back to within the last 30 years. When it comes to spiritual reading, I generally look for what one might describe as "antediluvian": works or translations of works that predate the flood of arrant nonsense and outright heresy that swept over the earth in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The particular volume I ended up selecting -- the Bruce Hozeski translation from the Critical Latin Edition published by Bear & Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1986 -- looked the most innocuous, so I paid the three dollars and change plus shipping and waited.

And soon discovered it was three dollars and change plus shipping too much. Not that I have any complaints with the merchant I bought the book from: indeed, it was sent very promptly and arrived a lot more quickly than I expected. But when I saw that it contained a forward by Matthew Fox, the ex-Dominican-priest-turned-Episcopalian-synchretist who was expelled from the Order of Preachers, my heart sank. This forward certainly represents the absolute zero in human goofiness: Fox tries to shoe-horn Hildegard's thought into his own kooky ideology, all while reducing her mystical experiences to the physiological effects of migraines brought on by being stuck in the impossible situation of having to fight against a sexist, male-dominated Church. But the content of the book, purportedly by Hildegard herself -- in which I must confess to not having found myself able to plow very far -- did nothing to lift the heart out of its Foxian doldrums.

The Editor's Note at the beginning is full of dire portent. It makes clear that the editors cut out anything that they considered "irrelevant or difficult to comprehend today." They adopted a particular chopping methodology -- getting rid of whole sections rather than parts of sections -- ostensibly to "avoid distortion as much as possible," apparently oblivious to the fact that they were distorting the work precisely by filtering it through their lenses of relevance and difficulty. Besides which: who were these editors to save me from deciding for myself what is irrelevant or too difficult? Given some of the people associated with this project, and the era of its provenance, I can't help thinking the "irrelevant" or "difficult" stuff must be anything that fails to support some particular brand of heterodoxy.

Then there was the deliberate decision to edit out Hildegard's citations to authority:

Hildegard was an astonishingly brilliant woman during an age when such talent and sensitivity were suppressed. Many Hildegard admirers, myself included, feel that Hildegard expressed herself very powerfully and individually, and then attempted to justify her thought by presenting supportive ideas from other sources -- such as the Gospels, patriarchs, and prophets, or by citing the Church opinion of her day. We found the elimination of much of this supportive and repetitive text caused a clearer and more visionary text to emerge.

In other words, Hildegard shrank from putting herself forward as her own authority, so We, the Great and Wise Editors, are going to do it for her. It is just not on for a prophet to set forth her prophecies within the framework of Authority, even though it is the Authority of Christ Himself through His Church. Thus are English readers of Scivias to be deprived of Hildegard's insights into Scripture and the Fathers and the Magisterium. Thus also do the editors suppress the evidence of Hildegard's great scholarship and intellect in their quest for "a clearer and more visionary text."

I can't say I feel sure what a "visionary text" is exactly, as these guys mean it. But I do have a fair idea what constitutes a "clearer text," and it is obvious that this was not what we got when the editors of this translation decided to use "inclusive language." As a woman, I find "inclusive language" as patronizing and insulting as it is annoying; as a serious reader, I suspect it really excludes not only all things male but also the true sense of the original text. "Inclusive language" also proves that its proponents have no sense of humor, since they do not perceive the hopelessly idiotic grammatical contortions to which their stubborn refusal to use masculine pronouns drives them. Witness the following choice example from page 14:

But Lucifer, who had been cast down from heavenly glory because of pride, at first stood special and great because Lucifer did not yet know of Lucifer's weakness in grace and strength. Indeed, when Lucifer thought about grace and the power of self-strength, Lucifer became proud. This caused Lucifer to expect that Lucifer might attempt whatever Lucifer wished, because Lucifer had previously been able to finish whatever Lucifer started. Seeing a place where Lucifer thought that a stand could be made, and wishing to show grace and self-strength there, Lucifer said to God: "I wish to shine here in that manner and there in that manner." Every idea of Lucifer's agreed with this, and Lucifer said: whatever you wish, we also wish this too. And when Lucifer was puffed up with pride and wanted to do what Lucifer had just thought about, the zeal of God -- extending itself -- threw Lucifer and the entire company into the burning blackness, so that they seethed against the brightness and clearness which they had had and they were blackened.

I almost feel as though I am looking at this paragraph with a set of compound eyes that sees not one Lucifer, but thousands. It is the literary-mystical equivalent of Larry, his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl: Lucifer, his brother Lucifer, and his other brother Lucifer, and his other brother Lucifer, ad nauseam. The true sense of the original is obscured behind this wretchedly composed paragraph, like a magnificent landscape behind a filthy, grimy window. What a stupid and unnecessary distraction.

From the howling desert of the mid-'80s, the heyday of modernist theologians of the Matthew Fox vintage, we seem to have crawled into the edge of an oasis. The sandstorm that has lashed us for decades is beginning to give way; the heritage that we had lost for so many years is back in sight, still dim, yet unmistakable. Among other signs of the restoration, the new English translation of the Mass, faithful to the original Latin text, is now in use, and the translators' next project is said to be the Liturgy of the Hours. Since this seems to be the era of dumping lousy translations, I hereby nominate the 1986 Hozeski inclusive-language translation of Scivias for inclusion in the ash-heap of history. And since Hildegard of Bingen is to be a new saint and Doctor of the Church, I hope some intrepid and gifted translator feels called upon to give the English-speaking world a complete, faithful and artistically rendered translation of her works.

P.S. I wish somebody would get on the stick and also translate some more of St. Albert the Great's writings into English.

December 21, 2011: Winter Solstice

2011-12-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

Source.

As the year progresses, the sun appears not only to move from east to west, but also to trace a path farther north or south in the sky. This northerly or southerly travel continues until the solstice, when the sun appears to stand still and begin to reverse course. Today is the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, which, for us, means the shortest day and the longest night of the year. After this, the hours of daylight will increase, and the darkness will decrease.

In an amazing twist of fate, our celebration of the feast of Christmas coincides roughly with the winter solstice, and the beginning of ever-increasing daylight. It appears that according to the Julian calendar, in use at the time of Christ, the winter solstice was regarded as occurring on -- December 25th. I am not versed in the vagaries of calendars; still, it seems noteworthy that we continue to celebrate Christmas on December 25th, and that December 25 falls at a moment of the year when the hours of daylight are just beginning to lengthen.

Coincidence? We know from Scripture that nature reflects God's glory. Is it just possible, then, that (a) Christ really was born on December 25th, and (b) He deliberately timed His coming this way, so that we who walk in the most profound darkness of the year would see a Great Light?

UPDATED Special Prayer Request: Friars Up for Solemn Vow Vote

2011-12-19T23:30:00.002-07:00

Reason no. 4,287 to join the Order of Preachers: we do the coolest backyard conflagrations. (Lay Dominicans are by no means slouches on this front, either.)

Please stop right now and say, devoutly, a Hail Mary apiece for Br. Corwin Low, O.P. and Br. Peter Hanna, O.P. of the Western Province of the Holy Name. December 20th is the day their community votes on whether to admit them to solemn vows.

Might not hurt also to invoke on their behalf St. Antoninus of Florence. The local prior told Antoninus he could not take the habit of St. Dominic unless he memorized the entire Gratian decretal (i.e., the entire body of canon law as it existed in his day). Which, of course, he did.

UPDATE, 12/21/2011 at 07:34: Brs. Corwin and Peter are approved for solemn vows! They will be locked in for life on April 28, 2012 at St. Dominic's in San Francisco.

Br. Corwin (left) and Br. Peter (right). Could these be the future founding fathers of Boise's first Dominican priory? We can certainly hope so!

Why Books Cannot Be Squirrels, However Much You Might Want Them to Be

2011-12-19T21:05:00.000-07:00

For the same reason you are not King of the World, however much you might want to be.

For the same reason you do not have a trillion dollars in the bank, however much you might want to.

For the same reason an intrinsic evil cannot be good, however much you might desire such a result.

If you would learn more, see Fr. Philip Neri Powell's excellent and timely post on the subject.

New Saint and Doctor of the Church: The Sybil of the Rhine

2011-12-16T13:29:00.002-07:00

Hildegard of Bingen receives a vision from heaven and dictates it to her secretary, the monk Volmar, in this illumination from the Liber Scivias.

In August, Pope Benedict declared that St. John of Avila will be the 34th Doctor of the Church. It is now being reported that next October, he will canonize Bl. Hildegard of Bingen, and declare her the 35th Doctor of the Church.

Bl. Hildegard (1098-1179) was dedicated by her parents to the Church at birth. A lifelong mystic, she was three years old when she first began to receive visions. At the age of eight, she was given to the care of an anchoress. At 38, she was elected head of the convent that had grown up around the anchorage. At the age of 42, she received the gift of instant understanding of religious texts, as well as a divine mandate to commit her visions to writing. She sought and received ecclesiastical approval to carry out this mandate. In the last year of her life, her convent was placed under interdict on account of her refusal to exhume from the cemetery the body of a man who had been excommunicated: the man had received the last sacraments and was therefore presumed reconciled. She succeeded in having the interdict lifted and died in the odor of sanctity.

Although her formal education was very rudimentary, Hildegard of Bingen was a great and learned writer, producing works on theology, natural history, and medicine. Men of affairs in the Church and in secular life sought her advice. Under the influence of the Benedictine services to which she was exposed as a child, she was also a composer of music which is still performed and recorded down to this day. Hildegard of Bingen was, in a word, a feminine counterpart of Albertus Magnus, the great Dominican Doctor of the Church, polymath and teacher of Aquinas, of whom it may be accurate to say that he knew everything there was to know in his day. In fact, if she is simultaneously canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church, that will be another parallel with St. Albertus Magnus, who was both canonized and declared Doctor in 1931.

Hildegard of Bingen might be a good saint to invoke in aid of the restoration of the liturgy to its former beauty. Perhaps that is precisely what the Holy Father has in mind.

Potuit, Decuit, ergo Fecit: Why the Immaculate Conception Must Be True

2011-12-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

I will shew thee all good, and I will proclaim in the name of the Lord before thee: and I will have mercy on whom I will, and I will be merciful to whom it shall please me.

Exodus 33:19

Once in a while, a comment comes along that deserves a post-length response. Here, from a self-professed ex-Catholic turned non-denominational, is one that just came in on my post about the appalling song "Mary, Did You Know?":

Mary had to have sinned. She called Jesus "my Savior" and what is Jesus the Savior for? Sinners. She had sinned. And there is no biblical evidence for her having no sin.

Sigh.

Those of you with a kick against the Immaculate Conception always want to set limitations on God. You generally have no problem acknowledging in theory that God is infinitely good, infinitely holy, infinitely perfect, infinitely merciful and infinitely powerful; but in practice, what you really want is a sort of bite-sized God, One that we can wrap our woefully inadequate brains around and Who does not confound our puny capabilities. So when God actually goes and does something that only an infinitely good, holy, perfect, merciful and powerful Being could do, you protest. The fact, however, is that God can do whatever He wants; and whatever is fitting, we may be sure that He will do.

God can do the impossible more rapidly and easily than we can blink our eyes or draw a breath. It was perfectly within His power to preserve Mary free from the taint of sin from the instant of her conception. This singular privilege of His grace was purchased for her by the limitless merits of Christ's suffering and death on the Cross. God, not bound by the constraints of time or space, was perfectly capable of applying these merits beforehand and granting this privilege in advance of the Crucifixion. Thus God really was Mary's Savior, and did not need her to sin in order to be her Savior: His intervention to prevent her from receiving the taint of sin that she would otherwise have contracted as a descendant of Adam was also a salvific act. Have you never been prevented from committing sins -- by being deprived of means or opportunity, or because you have never experienced the temptation to commit particular sins? These are also interventions of God's grace. So you should know from experience that God saves us, not only by forgiving sins we have actually committed, but also by preventing us from committing sins we would otherwise have committed, perhaps to our eternal ruin. Why, then, should it be so hard to accept that God, out of the abyss of His goodness and mercy, could exercise His infinite power to prevent the Mother of His Son from being tainted by the least stain of iniquity from the very instant she began to exist?

It is altogether fitting that God should preserve Mary inviolate and immaculate from the first instant of her life. God always gives us the grace we need to do the work He gives us: the greater the work, the greater the grace given to carry it out. Was ever a more important mission given to a mere human being than that entrusted to Mary? It was her task to supply the matter out of which the all-holy Son of God would take flesh, to bear Him in her womb, to nurse Him and to rear Him to manhood, and to share in her soul in the agonies of His Passion. This touches on a point raised by my correspondent in a follow-up comment:

Jesus was the perfect sacrifice for dying for our sins because He was without blemish. If Mary had no blemish either, that would pretty much validate her for crucifixion too. Which would make Jesus less important.

Here my correspondent, though off the rails in the implications for the importance of Jesus, hits on an important truth. Mary did in fact suffer with her divine Son, more than any other human being could have. The saints (e.g., St. Alphonsus Liguori) are of the opinion that her sufferings were greater than that of all other men who have ever lived or will ever live put together, and that only a miracle kept her from dying of grief. This is why Catholics honor her under the titles of Mother of Sorrows and Queen of Martyrs: only her Son's sufferings exceeded hers. When she presented her Son in the Temple, holy Simeon prophesied that a sword would pierce her soul, that out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed (Luke 2:35). It makes sense that she should bear so great a share in her Son's Passion: not only was she his loving mother; she was also fully aware that He was God, and therefore of the horrible outrage that He should be murdered by His own creatures. Moreover, would it have been possible for her to suffer entirely for his sake and not at all for her own if she herself had had a share in the sins that caused Him to be nailed to the Cross? Still, this share of hers in Christ's suffering does not in any way diminish Him. Jesus was the perfect Sacrifice not only because He was without blemish, but because He was God. Mankind had outraged the infinite God, and therefore it would take infinite merits to repair the outrage; these could only be offered by the Son of God.

If you do not accept the Immaculate Conception, then I am bound to ask you why you would want the Mother of God to have been a sinner. Is this not tantamount to wanting an unworthy vessel for the Incarnate God? Does it make sense for the woman entrusted with bearing and caring for and suffering alongside the Son of God to have spent even a single instant under the dominion of hell? No: especially when you consider that the Woman of Genesis 3:15, between whom and the serpent God put enmity is none other than the Mother of God, and her Seed is none other than Jesus Christ:

I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.

Here is scriptural proof of the Immaculate Conception. If God creates perfect and implacable enmity between the Woman and the serpent -- and surely it is unthinkable that if God creates enmity between the Mother of God and evil, this enmity will be imperfect and half-hearted -- then it follows that she could never be under the serpent's sway, or in allegiance with him, as she must be if she had sinned. Thus it was fitting for God to preserve her without sin from the very beginning.

Since it was perfectly possible for God to preserve Mary free from sin from the moment of her conception, and it was fitting that He should do so, it follows that He in fact did do so. It would be a gross omission on God's part, and incompatible with His infinite perfection, if He should leave undone that which was fitting. Therefore, we may safely take it that He did not leave it undone.

Potuit, decuit, ergo fecit! He could; it was fitting; therefore, He did it!

H/T Canterbury Tales.

Eye-Openers from the New Translation

2011-12-10T14:36:00.000-07:00

Now that we have the new, vastly improved English translation of the Roman Missal, for the first time since childhood, I need a hand missal for the Ordinary Form of the Mass. Of course there are pew cards at church with the new, corrected versions of the people's responses; but I want to savor the new translation with my eyes as well as my ears. My local Catholic bookstore did not carry any nice missals with English on one side and Latin on the other, and there wasn't time to find and order one, so I picked up a copy of the New Saint Joseph Sunday Missal for 2012 -- a very good investment for just a few bucks.

There are a few realities to which the new translation has opened my eyes. Firstly, when samples of the new translation began to come out a few years ago -- before I ever attended Mass in the Extraordinary Form -- it became clear to me for the first time that the Mass is full of scriptural allusions and signs of the supernatural that had been effectively blotted out in the now-obsolete translation. Now that we have a translation more in line with the original Latin, these little treasures have been restored: it is like getting a pair of glasses after a lifetime of myopia, and realizing for the first time that you hadn't really been able to see.

The second eye-opener was that the Ordinary Form of the Mass has actual propers -- introit, offertory, communion -- that should be sung. All I have ever gotten all my life was the four-hymn sandwich. It was embarrassing to be a cradle Catholic and not know until this summer -- when my chant schola was asked to sing the Simple English Propers for a Mass in the Baker Diocese -- that Mass in the Ordinary Form is supposed to have sung propers, and that the four-hymn sandwich is supposed to be the option of last resort. But that one Mass this summer was the first Ordinary Form Mass I have ever attended with all the sung propers...and I haven't been to another one since.

The third thing I have come to realize, now that I require worship aids for the Ordinary Form, is...just how hard the Ordinary Form is to follow.

It is a common complaint about the Extraordinary Form of the Mass that it is too complicated and difficult to keep track of. However, once you get past the Latin, the structural simplicity of the Extraordinary Form becomes evident. Whether it's Low Mass, Missa Cantata or Solemn High Mass, the Extraordinary Form has one penitential rite; a single, one-year cycle of readings; one Eucharistic prayer -- the Roman Canon -- one set of prayers post-consecration; and a few variable parts which are dictated by feasts or seasons, and are therefore entirely predictable. In this rootless age, the world considers this stability to be boring. The reality, however, is that it has the two-fold advantage of being (a) comforting and reassuring, and (b) memorable. Constant repetition plants the liturgical texts firmly in the memory, where they become seeds for meditation and aids in the cultivation of virtue.

The Ordinary Form, on the other hand, seems to consist almost entirely in variations, the use of many of which is determined entirely by the pleasure of the priest. There are three forms of greeting; three forms of the penitential rite; eight possible Gospel acclamations for use during Lent; two possible professions of faith; no fewer than ten (10) choices of Eucharistic prayer; three possible memorial acclamations; and four options for dismissal. Unless you know your priest well enough to be acquainted with his customs and preferences, there is absolutely no way to know which of any of these he is going to use, which leaves missal-jockeys at a loss. By the time a person figures out which Eucharistic prayer the priest is saying, and then finds it in the missal, it's half over. One questions the extent to which all this freedom of choice conduces to the ability of the average pew-sitter to participate in the Mass.

Indeed, it is often said of the Tridentine Mass that it makes passive spectators out of the faithful in the pews; but one has to wonder whether that is not in fact more true of the Ordinary Form of the Mass, especially as it has been celebrated in so many places for so many years. The anti-traditionalists make much of the fact that the older form of the Mass is in a language that the people (allegedly) do not understand; the music is (purportedly) beyond the ability of most people to sing along with; and the people don't get to say anything because the responses are (frequently) said for them. What the "active participation" crowd fails to grasp is that this freedom from exterior bustling actually leaves one with enough time and energy to participate interiorly, and that this is aided by the structural constancy of the Extraordinary Form.

The Ordinary Form, however, creates a new set of problems. The vernacular Mass, coupled with the proliferation of options, has the effect of excluding those whose vernacular is other than that in which the Mass is offered. At least when the Mass was always in Latin, a Spanish-speaking Catholic could attend Mass in Nagasaki and still feel at home, supported by the knowledge and experience gained from the constant repetition of the same texts, over and over. The same problem arises when it comes to singing along with the music: will that Spanish Catholic be able to sing Japanese songs in Nagasaki? Besides which, the stuff that (contrary to the mind of Vatican II) has supplanted Gregorian chant is often so terrible as to be truly unsingable. On top of this, the lousy English translation of the Roman Missal did a lot to obscure the supernatural aspect of the liturgy and and distort Catholic theology, thus barring Catholics from receiving the truths contained in the Mass; thankfully, this is now being corrected. But the renewed need for worship aids occasioned by this new translation brings home the fact that the person regularly attending the Ordinary Form is ceaselessly buffeted by the vicissitudes within the Ordinary of the Mass itself that are the product of so many zillions of options. You may well ask: why don't I just forget about the worship aids and just sit and listen? You mean -- quit worrying about trying to follow the Mass and become...a passive spectator?

If there is one thing to which the new translation of the Roman Missal may open many eyes, it is that the attempt by the post-conciliar experts to construct a whole new Mass may have been very ill-advised, and that we would perhaps have done better to just leave the Mass alone. But then, as the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus once pointed out, it is a mark of our fallen human nature that we always make things harder than they need to be.

Mary, Conceived Without Sin, You DID Know

2011-12-08T00:00:00.027-07:00

Raise your hand if you have ever heard the song "Mary, Did You Know?" within the precincts of a Catholic church. I can't see you, but I know you're out there. My hand is also up. Somehow, because this song mentions the Mother of God, it has become a Christmas tradition in some parishes. But although the gentleman who wrote "Mary, Did You Know?" clearly means well, this song is both musically inappropriate for Mass and subversive of the Catholic faith.

From a musical standpoint, "Mary, Did You Know?" is basically a pop song, and although the Mass has been saturated with such for a couple of generations now, the fact remains that it is not sacred music suited for use at Mass. But even more objectionable, from the Catholic point of view, is the lyrical content.

"Mary, Did You Know?" is based on some abysmally erroneous assumptions. To begin with, it is supposed that Mary does not know that her holy Infant is the Son of God. Some saints -- for instance, St. Alphonsus Liguori -- are of the opinion that even before the Annunciation, Mary had a profound understanding of prophecies and Scriptures concerning the promised Messiah. But even without such an understanding, it would have taken a high degree of inattention on Mary's part to the message of Gabriel and the inspired greeting of her cousin Elizabeth for her to labor under ignorance of her Son's divinity. It is further supposed that Mary does not know that her Son will suffer for the redemption of mankind. This would have required her to utterly gloss over the prophecies of holy Simeon concerning her Son as God's salvation, a sign of contradiction, and concerning the sword of sorrow that would pierce her own soul. The idea of the Mother of God not being in possession of the most critical facts about her divine Son, particularly in view of explicit revelations received by her, is absurd on its face.

But there is an even more blatant error in the lyrics of "Mary, Did You Know?" that ought to induce in every Catholic a sharp intake of breath. It is a defined dogma of the Catholic faith that the Mother of God was conceived without original sin. On December 8, 1854, in the Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus, Pope Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception:

We declare, pronounce, anddefine that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed VirginMary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular graceand privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of JesusChrist, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from allstain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore tobe believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.

Contrast this with the following lyrics from "Mary, Did You Know?":

Mary did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water?
Mary did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters?
Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?
This child that you've delivered, will soon deliver you.

Whereas Catholics accept as revealed truth that Mary was free from sin from the instant of her conception by virtue of the anticipated merits of Jesus' suffering and death on the Cross, the foregoing is based on the assumption that Mary was under the sway of sin at the time she gave birth to the Christ Child, and that she would remain so until His Sacrifice of redemption. In short, it is a flat denial of the Immaculate Conception. As such -- and for this reason alone -- it should never be sung in a Catholic church, or find any place in any Catholic liturgy, and Catholics should not embrace it.

Perhaps a fitting way to honor today's feast of the Immaculate Conception -- in addition to fulfilling our obligation to attend Mass -- would be to defend the dogma which this feast celebrates by doing what we can to see that "Mary, Did You Know?" remains unheard in our parishes during this and every Christmas season.

Remember Pearl Harbor

2011-12-07T10:55:00.197-07:00

Aerial view of Pearl Harbor taken in 1986

This post goes up seventy years to the minute after the Japanese began their attack on Pearl Harbor. This 70th anniversary is the last one to be marked by the Pearl Harbor Survivors' Association: due to the extreme old age, infirmity and immobility of its dwindling membership (approximately 175, mostly in their 90s), the Association is officially disbanding this month. Only about 125 survivors are expected to attend this year's commemoration at the scene of the pivotal and defining moment of their young lives.

A Japanese camera captured that moment on the morning of December 7, 1941. The images of Japanese planes, tiny yet unmistakable, can be seen passing over Ford Island. The U.S.S. West Virginia and U.S.S. Oklahoma, on the far side of the island, have just sustained torpedo hits.

One of the iconic images of the Pearl Harbor attack: the U.S.S. Arizona burns. The explosion of the Arizona's forward magazines claimed 1,177 of the 2,403 American lives lost at Pearl Harbor. The crew of the nearby U.S.S. Tennessee attempts to fend off burning oil with fire hoses.

The first two chaplains to die in World War II -- one Protestant minister, one Catholic priest -- died at Pearl Harbor. Protestant chaplain of the Arizona, Capt. Thomas Leroy Kirkpatrick, sprang to action in sick bay as soon as the attacks commenced. Sick bay was so near to the forward magazines that he was killed almost instantly in the great explosion while ministering to the wounded. Chaplain Kirkpatrick still lies with his crewmates in their sunken ship at the bottom of the harbor.

Chaplain Kirkpatrick's clock was recovered from the wreck of the Arizona, the hands frozen at the moment the forward magazines exploded. (Source.)

The U.S.S. Oklahoma, capsized and burning. 429 men perished aboard the Oklahoma.

The total number of the Oklahoma's dead would have reached 441 if it were not for Fr. Aloysius Schmitt, Lieutenant Junior Grade, Acting Chaplain.

On December 7, 1941, the young priest from St. Lucas, Iowa, had only been ordained for six years, appointed a chaplain for two and a half years, and had celebrated his 32nd birthday only three days earlier. Did he have any suspicion that that was to be his last birthday, and indeed almost his last day on earth? Yet although death came to Fr. Schmitt suddenly, it did not find him unprepared, nor even without Viaticum: when the Japanese attack began, he had just finished celebrating Mass.

When disaster struck, Fr. Schmitt went to sick bay to minister to the wounded and dying. Mission Capodanno gives the following moving account of what happened next:

When the Oklahoma was struck and water poured into her hold, the ship began to list and roll over. Many men were trapped. Schmitt found his way -- with other crew members -- to a compartment where only a small porthole provided enough space to escape.

Chaplain Schmitt helped other men, one by one, to crawl to safety. When it became his turn, the chaplain tried to get through the small opening. As he struggled to exit through the porthole, he became aware that others had come into the compartment from which he was trying to escape. As he realized that the water was rising rapidly and that escape would soon be impossible, he insisted on being pushed back through the hole so that he could help others who could get through the opening more easily. Accounts from eyewitnesses that have been published in the Arizona Memorial newsletter relate that the men protested, saying that he would never get out alive, but he insisted, "Please let go of me, and may God bless you all."

Fr. Schmitt, martyr of charity, was posthumously awarded the Navy/Marine Corps Medal for his selfless bravery, which saved the lives of twelve crewmen who otherwise would have been trapped in the sinking ship.

Remember Pearl Harbor, soon to pass from living memory. Remember and do not forget.

If You Like Getting Goosebumps...

2011-12-06T20:28:00.000-07:00

...you'll love William Byrd's Ave Verum Corpus.

Here is a link to the score.

Ave verum corpus,
natum de Maria Virgine,
vere passum, immolatum
in cruce pro homine,
cuius latus perforatum
fluxit aqua et sanguine:
esto nobis praegustatum
in mortis examine.
O Iesu dulcis,
O Iesu pie,
O Iesu, fili Mariae.
Miserere mei. Amen.

Hail, true Body, truly born
Of the Virgin Mary mild
Truly offered, wracked and torn,
On the Cross for all defiled,
From Whose love pierced, sacred side
Flowed Thy true Blood's saving tide:
Be a foretaste sweet to me
In my death's great agony.
O my loving, Gentle One,
Sweetest Jesus,
Mary's Son. Amen.

Is Passing Cooties a Necessary Expression of Ecclesial Communion?

2011-12-04T16:40:00.000-07:00

The last post featured a discussion about hand-holding at Mass as forced intimacy. Now the question arises whether hand-holding is a necessary component/expression of communion -- that is, ecclesial communion (cf. paragraphs 946 et seq. of the Catechism of the Catholic Church) -- with our fellow Catholics.

In arriving at an answer to this question, a few salient facts need to be recognized. Firstly, the Church does not instruct us to hold hands during Mass. Secondly, at least some of our shepherds, exercising their legitimate teaching and governing authority, are discouraging the practice. Thirdly, non-Catholics and even some who are not baptized often attend Mass and get swept up into the hand-holding; in what sense can we truthfully express "communion" in the sense it is here meant with those who are objectively and by definition not in ecclesial communion? Fourthly, why, if hand-holding is essential, is it not done in every Catholic rite? Fifthly -- and perhaps most significantly -- the practice only dates back to about the 1970s. If hand-holding is indispensable to our sense of ecclesial communion, why did it take until about 40 years ago for us to start doing it?

Hand-holding is totally unnecessary. We are already one, not only with each other at Mass, but also with the Holy Souls in Purgatory and all the blessed in heaven, and all who will ever attain heaven, as members of the Mystical Body of Christ and partakers of the one Eucharist. In fact, here is a secret: where everyone at Mass is really focused on God, and giving Him the worship that He is due, without diverting their attention to their neighbors, the whole community aspect takes care of itself -- and in a much deeper and satisfying way than the superficial, pop-psychology group-therapy ice-breakers that have crept uninvited into the liturgy. God even occasionally grants us a feeling of the love-communion between ourselves and the rest of the congregation, even though we do not know them: a taste of the Communion of Saints. This is true even in -- perhaps one could say especially in -- the allegedly stodgy, hide-bound, chauvinistic Traditional Latin Mass, where there is no room for the touchy-feely infestations that have plagued the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite. Here is a fulfillment of the Scriptural promise that if we seek first the Kingdom of God and His Justice, the rest will be added unto us.

But we short-circuit this promise when we do our own thing at Mass and try to do "communion" on our own. This makes hand-holding not only unnecessary, but worse than unnecessary. It is a distraction that diverts our attention away from the Eucharist that is the true source of our Christian unity, and even causes us to believe that the Eucharist is not sufficient. It leads us away from a true understanding of our Catholic faith, and toward a distaste of that which is authentically Catholic and therefore really calculated to bring us closer to God.

Even though hand-holding only started the ecclesiastical equivalent of thirty seconds ago, there are many who ascribe all kinds of imaginary meaning to the practice, and would feel deprived of a sense of communion if they couldn't engage in it. That a false significance, unsupported by any legitimate authority, has attached to this innovation in so short a time itself shows its perniciousness. Authority is critical in the Church, even more than in the arena of the civil law, where binding precedent must always be consulted before a legal determination is made; the acceptance and embrace of traditions of men ought to be completely foreign to the Catholic mind. Yet here is a classic example of an artificial tradition in action, to the detriment of true faith. This false tradition can't be done away with too soon.

Yes, Please Keep Your Cooties to Yourself

2011-12-03T19:21:00.000-07:00

I hope Fr. Finigan does not mind my lifting this great picture which perfectly captures my sentiments on the subject of hand-holding during Mass. In a word, I can't stand this practice. It is one of the reasons I wear a veil at Mass: it sends the message -- pretty effectively -- that I am highly unlikely to welcome hand-holding. If somebody does forcibly grab my hand, I just look that person the eye and tell him no, I do not hold hands. I don’t see where it is uncharitable not to submit to this importunity. On the contrary, I ask where the charity is in allowing people to force themselves on others with impunity. If they don’t know better, then they need to learn; if they do know better, then they need to be reproved.

Fortunately, priests and even bishops are beginning to come to the aid of their shy, reserved, and introverted lambs and beat back the assault of touchy-feely-ness at Mass. Bishop Roger Foys of the Diocese of Covington, Kentucky is putting the kibosh on hand-holding during the Our Father on the grounds that it is not a legitimate part of the liturgy. Naturally, this is creating an uproar among the poorly formed. Those of us, however, who recoil with horror from unwarranted intrusions into our personal space wish blessings upon the good bishop and hope and pray for a great many more like him.

What the touchy-feely, group-therapy-oriented crowd don't seem to get is that touching such as hand-holding, hugging, etc. are products of real intimacy and not producers of it. You can't create intimacy with another person by forcing that other person to accept an imposition. As the great 20th-century Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand pointed out, there are steps to be gone through on the path to intimacy with another person — even God. This truth is exemplified beautifully in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass in the prayers at the foot of the altar, wherein the priest only approaches the altar of sacrifice by degrees, after putting himself on his guard against presumption and irreverence, and carefully preparing his soul by contrition for his sins. The steps to intimacy are necessary; hand-holding with strangers and other foolish practices designed to bypass them violate the natural order.

In fact, I will go farther and submit that there is a sinister purpose behind these ice-breaking exercises, namely, the breaking down of necessary inhibitions, thereby making individuals vulnerable to manipulation. Indeed, a great deal of what we have been seeing and hearing at Mass in recent decades must be characterized as manipulation: the secular music; the gimmicky props and vestments; the joke-laced homilies; the touchy-feely intrusions. In none of this stuff is there any food for the intellect or even the memory. Take the stuff away and people scream that they are being deprived of that which brings them closer to God; but really, they have just been having their emotions massaged and manipulated. After such soothing treatment, we are prepared to swallow anything served up to us, which is what we have been doing, to our detriment, for the last half-century.

So thank God for the shepherds who are doing something to divest Catholic worship of the worldly accretions and encrustations that have done so much damage to our faith and our Christian witness.

Another One for the Unreconstructed, Ossified Manualists: How to Serve the Dominican Rite Mass

2011-12-02T00:14:00.001-07:00

Fr. Vincent Kelber, O.P., celebrating the Bl. Margaret of
Castello chapter's first ever Dominican Rite Mass, November 19, 2011.

Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, the rising interest in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass is lifting the boat of the traditional Rite of Mass as celebrated within the Order of Preachers. Years ago, the Order opted to go with what is now known as the Ordinary Form of the Mass, and put its own Rite into mothballs, soon to be all but forgotten. But the Dominican Rite is making a comeback -- even going so far as to put in an appearance last month in, of all places, St. Paul's chapel at Boise State University (almost certainly that venue's first ever celebration of Mass in Latin, ad orientem...and yet the building remained standing).

If you're going to have the Dominican Rite Mass, you're going to need altar boys (no girls, thankfully, per the instruction Universae Ecclesiae); and if you're going to have altar boys, you're going to need instruction. There is nothing like a teacher for proper instruction; but where teachers have died out, books will have to serve. And so out of the ashes rises the Dominican Altar Boys' Manual, recovered from oblivion and once again made available through the efforts of Br. Corwin Low, O.P. and Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P. If you attend a Dominican parish, or if you are a member of a lay chapter with an interest in reviving the treasures of our Dominican heritage, this would be the perfect Christmas gift for yourself or anyone who serves Mass or trains servers.

This manual is so reasonably priced that I myself ordered two for the great, big altar boys in my chapter.

Out of the Mouths of Babes and Whatsits

2011-11-27T18:05:00.001-07:00

Today marked not only the beginning of the new liturgical year, but also the date the new English translation of the Roman Missal takes effect in the United States. Now what we are hearing at Mass is a lot closer to the original Latin, and in a more elevated style of language better suited to the solemnity of the occasion. In fact, there are many parts of the Mass, particularly the propers, that we will now hear for the first time, ever: if you have been following Fr. Z.'s weekly scrutinies of the proper prayers, and especially the collects, you are aware that much of what we have been hearing is not a translation at all, but something totally different and made up out of whole cloth. And if you've been following Fr. Richard Simon's Rev. Know-It-All series on the new translation, you are aware of some of the theological distortions with which the now-obsolete translation was replete. These are some of the ills which the Third Edition is meant to remedy.

Which brings us to some of the ongoing though futile complaints about the changes. Today A.P. runs a story about the launch of the new translation. Several of those whose opinions were solicited for the story had positive responses; but then there were those who just had to rush their ignorance and defiance into print. One Maribeth Lynch, a publisher aged 51, described herself as "distraught" about the changes and -- according to the story -- "would refuse to 'learn the damn prayers.'" It goes on:

"It's ridiculous. I've been a Catholic for 50 years, and why would they make such stupid changes? They're word changes. They're semantics," she said. The priest "spent 40 minutes today on the changes instead of on the important stuff, like changing water into wine."

A publisher needs to be explained the importance of words in the formation of knowledge and ideas? Is changing water into wine really what happens at Mass? Is the new translation even more deficient than we thought? Hopefully she just misspoke.

Still, it is clear that 50 years as a Catholic have failed to teach Miss Lynch a thing or two. Like the Source of the Catholic Church's authority, and the gravity of every Catholic's obligation to obey the same. Like the fact that in the matter of giving God the worship that is His due, nothing is small and everything counts. Like the fact that how we pray shapes what we believe, and what we believe shapes how we live.

Miss Lynch, learn the "damn prayers." You, and people who think like you, are the reason we need this new translation. It is precisely to restore to you the inheritance that has been stolen from you that so much time, talent and treasure have been poured into this project. When your Mother the Church takes away the fetid gruel you have been feeding on and replaces it with steak and potatoes, the appropriate response is gratitude.

UPDATE: Interesting, the HuffPo version of the A.P. story has Maribeth Lynch saying something rather different, to wit:

"It's ridiculous. I've been a Catholic for 50 years, and why would they make such stupid changes? They're word changes. They're semantics," she said.

"It's confusion. All it's doing is causing confusion," she said. "You want to go to church and be confused?"

Still silly, yet somehow less silly than the quote from the local TV station.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T07:56:00.000-07:00

No, this is not the Obama administration, the executive board of the American Bar Association, or even the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

St. Antoninus of Florence, O.P.: Exactly What Is Needed, And Therefore Worth Reposting

2011-11-20T23:31:00.001-07:00

Antoninus of Florence, born in 1389, bore the marks of great piety and virtue from an early age. While still a boy, he presented himself to the Friars Preachers in Fiesole and begged to receive the habit. Because of his tender age and delicate constitution, the prior was reluctant to admit him, and told him that if he came back at the end of the year having memorized the Decretal of Gratian -- the then-existing body of canon law -- he would be admitted. This seemed tantamount to an outright refusal, but Antoninus accomplished the task, and received the habit at the age of 16.

Antoninus' excellence in all the virtues, conscientiousness and prodigious intellect carried him to the highest levels in the Order, and eventually in the hierarchy of the Church. In 1446, despite his entreaties to the contrary and attempts to escape, Pope Eugenius IV made him Archbishop of Florence, which the holy Dominican proceeded to deep-clean from top to bottom. On May 2, 1459, Antoninus died at the age of 70. He was canonized in 1523 by Pope Adrian VI, and in 1559, his body was found to be incorrupt. The memorial of St. Antoninus is celebrated on May 10th on both the current and pre-conciliar calendars.

Prayer to St. Antoninus

(translated into English by Doug Sousa)

O Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, in God's heaven you shine with the two-fold crown of bishop and doctor. Illumine our way through this life and make our hearts invincible in temptation. You who were called the "saint of good advice," guide us through the confusion of our thoughts and the rebellion of our will.

The poor called you "father," and in you found protection and help -- physical bread for their bodies and spiritual bread for their souls. As the daily cares of this earthly life become increasingly burdensome, we turn to you who wisely pointed out the demands of social justice in the midst of difficult economic circumstances. Obtain for us from God the freedom to serve him alone, to live in fraternal love, and to use the goods of the earth to seek the treasures of the life to come. Amen.

Why We Should Pray for Condemned Prisoners -- Especially the Worst

2011-11-17T00:14:00.003-07:00

On February 28, 1987, Paul Ezra Rhoades kidnapped 21-year-old Blackfoot convenience store clerk Stacy Baldwin. He robbed the convenience store she worked at and drove her off to a secluded spot, where he shot her twice and left her for dead. It took her an hour to die of her wounds. A little over two weeks later, on March 16th, Rhoades entered another convenience store and shot the 20-year-old clerk, Nolan Haddon, five times. He was found alive in the walk-in cooler the next morning, but soon died of his wounds. Two days later, Rhoades kidnapped 34-year-old schoolteacher Susan Michelbacher, raped her and shot her nine times. Her body was found two days later. The following year, Rhoades was condemned to death for the kidnapping and murders of Baldwin and Michelbacher, and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Haddon.

On October 19th, Rhoades was served with a death warrant, issued by Judge Jon Shindurling, ordering that he be put to death on Friday, November 18th. The Commission of Pardons and Parole denied Rhoades' petition for a commutation hearing, and yesterday the Ninth Circuit denied his motion for a stay. The execution is scheduled for Friday at 8:00 a.m. at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution south of Boise.

There can be no event more solemn than the death of a human being. No sooner does the soul separate from the body than its will is fixed for eternity and it goes to its eternal reward. If it goes to Heaven, then it is free from sin forever, and will never be separated from God for all eternity. If it goes to Purgatory, then it is certain to attain Heaven once it has been purged of its sins. If it goes to Hell, then it will suffer endless torments forever, without hope of reprieve or clemency. Once the soul leaves the body, there is no going back. There is no time to repent of sins or do any good deeds or change its mind. The time for all that is in this life; once that time is over, it is irretrievably gone. How different all the time we wasted in this life will look when our last moments are upon us -- if we are fortunate enough not to be taken suddenly and unprepared.

In that bleak execution chamber at IMSI, Paul Ezra Rhoades will meet his Maker and stand in judgment before His Throne. That is a moment that should cause rejoicing to no one, even the families of his victims, since at all times we ourselves hurtle relentlessly toward that moment. It is a moment that none of us can hope to escape: a moment when we shall be stripped of all our delusions of ourselves in the light of Truth. How will we bear the abysmal contrast between what we are pleased to call our own "goodness" and the Perfection of Goodness, in Whose eyes the least shadow of sin is a hideous blemish? How will Catholics answer the charges against us in that final tribunal, when we have gone on offending God even in spite of the light of Faith and the graces and helps of the Sacraments that we have received? If we do not beg God's pardon while there is still time, can we hope to fall higher in the test than notorious sinners who have perhaps not received the same lights and graces that we have squandered?

Divine Justice will exact a fearful toll from a mass murderer like Paul Ezra Rhoades, if he does not avail himself of Divine Mercy while there is still time. But all it takes is one mortal sin for us to suffer the same fate that endangers him. The most leniently punished souls in Hell are in Hell nevertheless, and in eternal torment. Of our charity, and in the hope of winning mercy for ourselves, we should pray for the grace of repentance and conversion for Paul Ezra Rhoades in these critical last hours of his life, if he has not already repented and converted. If he is destined to be executed as scheduled, then we should pray that he will suffer his death with resignation and offer it up as restitution for his crimes.

None of this precludes praying also for the souls of his victims and for their families. But, as prayer for the living and the dead is a spiritual work of mercy, for this man whose end is coming we should pray for the same graces and helps that we hope for when our own ends draw near.

UPDATE, 11/17 at 20:03 MST: The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to stay Rhoades' execution.

UPDATE, 11/18 at 09:23 MST: After a 55-minute delay following the denial of a last-minute motion for stay, Paul Ezra Rhoades was executed. He was pronounced dead at 09:15 MST.

11/11/11: St. Martin of Tours and Veterans' Day

2011-11-11T11:11:00.043-07:00

How appropriate that Veterans' Day, formerly known in the United States and still known in Europe as Armistice Day, should coincide with the feast of St. Martin of Tours, who began his career in heroic charity as a Roman soldier. How appropriate, too, that the fratricidal slaughter of 1914-1918 should have drawn to a close during the month in which the Church remembers and prays for the dead.

This Veterans' Day -- the 93d anniversary of the formal end of hostilities in the First World War -- is doubly unique. First, because of this date's once-in-a-lifetime calendrical configuration: the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of the 21st century. Secondly, because 11/11/11 is the first Veterans' Day in history to be celebrated without American veterans of World War I. The last surviving American veteran of that war, Frank Buckles, passed away on February 27th of this year. There is now only one remaining known World War I veteran in the world: Florence Green, aged 110, who served in the Women's Royal Air Force.

V. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord.

R. And may perpetual light shine upon them.

V. May they rest in peace.

R. Amen.

November 8: Feast of All Dominican Souls

2011-11-08T22:25:00.000-07:00

On November 8th, the Order of Preachers celebrates the Feast of All Dominican Souls.

Rest in peace, Sr. Elizabeth, Sr. Noreen, Sr. Donalda and Sr. Kathleen -- the Dominican sisters who ran the Catholic grade school I attended. When the not-very-prepossessing Sr. Elizabeth was lining us up outside our classrooms in the morning and measuring the distance between each kid, and Sr. Kathleen of the bright orange hair was bopping us over the head with pencil erasers, and they were all marching us off to Mass in our uniform sweaters in 90-degree weather, I little thought that I would one day become their sister in St. Dominic.

Nor, I suppose, while they tried unsuccessfully to make me keep my desk clean or quit acting up on the playground, did they ever foresee such an eventuality.

November 7: Feast of All Dominican Saints

2011-11-07T08:17:00.000-07:00

Today the Order of Preachers honors its saints. I am happy to report that we have a large number of beati and canonized saints, as well as three Doctors of the Church, to wit: St. Thomas Aquinas; St. Albertus Magnus; and St. Catherine of Siena. In fact, the Dominican Third Order is thus far the only Third Order to have produced a Doctor of the Church (Catherine of Siena).

Herewith some prayers to and in honor of Dominican saints:

Prayer to St. Antoninus of Florence

O Spem Miram

Litany of St. Catherine of Siena

Litany of St. Thomas Aquinas

Litany of St. Dominic

Prayer to St. Albertus Magnus

Prayer for the Intercession of Bl. Bartholomew Longo, T.O.P.

Prayer in Honor of Bl. Villana de Botti, T.O.P.

Prayer to St. Martin de Porres (whose feast we just celebrated last week)

Ejaculations to St. Dominic

Chaplet of St. Dominic (also known as the Cry of Anguish)

The Dominican Litany of Saints

And of course, in the sidebar, under Victory Topics, there are the Novenas of St. Dominic and Bl. Margaret of Castello.

Don't Forget the Church Suffering

2011-11-05T21:03:00.000-06:00

We should always pray for the Holy Souls in Purgatory, but November is the month when the Church specially remembers them. Per the Enchiridion of Indulgences, we can gain a plenary indulgence for the Holy Souls every day for the first eight days of November by praying at a cemetery and fulfilling all the other necessary conditions for a plenary indulgence.

We should get into the habit of praying often, and remembering the Holy Souls whenever we pray. Say the Requiem Aeternam (reproduced below) at the end of your daily Rosary. Pray for the Souls whenever you pass by a cemetery, and when you receive Holy Communion. The Dominican friars have a beautiful custom of reciting the De profundis (Psalm 129) in the cloister walk, where deceased friars were traditionally buried, before meals. The traditional grace after meals -- which we have largely gotten out of the habit of saying, and which is reproduced below -- contains a prayer for the Holy Souls.

The best thing we can do for the Holy Souls is to have Masses offered for them. In this way we can benefit not only the Church Suffering but also the Church Militant, by contributing to the material support of the Church. Your average diocesan priest is basically a beggar: he is obliged to support himself and depends on stipends to supplement his small salary.

The Holy Souls are powerless to help themselves: the time for praying for ourselves and offering up our sufferings and trials ends at death. The Church Suffering is entirely dependent upon the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant for the relief of their sufferings. Can the Souls nevertheless help us in their present state? Opinions differ. The Church does not publicly pray to them for their intercession, but we are permitted to pray privately to them. They are, after all, certain of gaining heaven once they have satisfied all their debts to Divine Justice. It cannot be doubted that, once freed from their prison, they can and do help those who helped them.

Personally, I believe the Holy Souls can help us by their prayers. I once was in dire need of oral surgery at a time when I was out of work and uninsured. In my desperation I appealed to the Holy Souls, and in short order I was connected with an oral surgeon who performed the necessary procedure free of charge. I believe the Souls are at least as anxious to help us as they are to be helped by us -- maybe even more so.

But really, the attention we give to the Holy Souls ought to consist mostly in our prayers and sacrifices for them -- especially those who were our family and friends.

Some prayers for the Holy Souls:

Grace after Meals

+ We give Thee thanks for all Thy benefits, O Almighty God, Who livest and reignest forever; and may the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

Requiem Aeternam

V. Requiem aeternam dona ei (eis), Domine.

R. Et lux perpetua luceat ei (eis).

V. Requiescat (-ant) in pace.

R. Amen.

V. Eternal rest grant unto him/them, O Lord.

R. And may perpetual light shine up on him/them.

V. May he/they rest in peace.

R. Amen.

Prayer of St. Gertrude the Great

Eternal Father, I offer You the Most Precious Blood of thy Divine Son, Jesus, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the universal church, for those in my own home and in my family. Amen.

And since our primary order of business on this earth is to be worthy to join the Holy Souls someday in eternal beatitude, we should also get into the habit of making provision for our final hour by praying for a holy death. Herewith an appropriate prayer by Bl. John Henry Newman:

O my Lord and Savior, support me in my last hour by the strong arms of Thy Sacraments, and the fragrance of Thy consolations. Let Thy absolving words be said over me, and the holy oil sign and seal me; and let Your own Body be my food, and Thy Blood my sprinkling; and let Thy Mother Mary come to me, and my angel whisper peace to me, and Thy glorious saints and my own dear patrons smile on me, that in and through them all I may die as I desire to live, in Thy Church, in Thy faith, and in Thy love.

November 2: Feast of All Souls

2011-11-02T23:28:00.000-06:00

I hope Fr. Erik doesn't mind my lifting his pic of a priest offering Mass in black vestments; but his post on black vestments reminded me of my thoughts on my own (hopefully distant yet inevitable) funeral.

I wish to state now and for the record that when I come to die, I want a solemn requiem Mass, complete with black vestments -- black, not violet -- a choir capable of singing the propers and ordinaries in Gregorian chant, together with the sequence Dies Irae, and the requisite number of men in holy orders plus altar servers. (This is one reason for hoping I have many years yet to live, because at present there are very few local clergy who know how to do a solemn requiem Mass, and -- as I am just a poor civil servant -- I wish to spare my friends and relations the expense of flying in the necessary personnel. However, I do expect them to incur this expense in case -- which God forbid -- the situation has still not been rectified by the time of my demise.) I want these proceedings to take place in a Catholic church that resembles a Catholic church and not an airplane hangar. I do not want to be eulogized at my funeral, because that is not the appropriate venue for an eulogy. I want all the traditional Catholic solemnities, accoutrements and observances at my interment.

My reason for desiring these arrangements is not purely because I am traditionally minded, although that happens to be true. My primary reason is because, at my funeral, I want people (a) to pray for my soul, and (b) to meditate upon their own ends. And nothing, I think, will better equip them for these tasks than a solemn requiem Mass and all that goes with it. The solemn requiem Mass is the product of a Church who, being a Mother, mourns her children even amid our hope of glory in the life of the world to come; provides them with much-needed suffrages after death; and provides for the need of those left behind to mourn and to be mindful of the Last Things.

All this was scrapped, or nearly scrapped, during the Church's Great Leap Forward in the wake of Vatican II, on the grounds that we are an "Easter people" and all this solemnity is too depressing. Thus have the windows of the Church been opened on the noisome fume and broil of a polluted world. As our society has backed away more and more from God and from our Judeo-Christian roots, even Catholics have adopted the attitude that funerals are "really for the living" -- a notion that basically gives us license to do what we want with funerals. What we want in our increasingly Godless age is distraction from our own fear of death, with which we are rudely confronted by the passing of someone close to us; so at funerals, this generally translates into (a) whitewashing the tragedy and horror of death; and (b) assuming that the dear departed is "in a better place" -- regardless of the kind of life he led. How many of us have been to Catholic funerals where the deceased all but has the title "Saint" affixed to his name? How many souls are stewing in Purgatory because their friends and relations have been led to believe they were immediately hoisted up to heaven and plunked down at God's right hand?

To avoid all danger of being canonized at my funeral, and to provide for the edification of mourners, I want traditional Catholic rites, down to the last detail. And a hundred years in Purgatory for anybody who so much as thinks about singing "On Eagle's Wings" or anything out of Oregon Catholic Press at the funeral, or "Dancing with the Angels" at the interment.

Beauty Is Truth, And Truth Beauty -- No, Really!

2011-10-22T19:05:00.000-06:00

Any time I argue in favor of Gregorian chant at Mass, there always seems to be somebody around -- somebody, that is, of the Haugen-Haas mindset -- to inform me that my preference for chant is purely a matter of taste, and that other people have different tastes and opinions. What never gets explained is why, if liturgical music is purely a matter of taste and opinion, their opinion always deserves to prevail over mine. The answer, of course, is that where no one acknowledges universal standards, the party that prevails is always the one with the most power. Thus, the ultimate end of relativism masquerading as "liberalism" or "tolerance" or "progressivism" is that might makes right.

Fortunately, however, there are universal standards; and even more fortunately, there are some in authority who stand up for them. Bishop Robert C. Morlino of the Diocese of Madison in Wisconsin is one such, and his recent column in the diocesan organ, the Catholic Herald, addresses precisely the question of beauty and the liturgy. The liturgy, he declares, "always requires beauty in its celebrations." Imagine a bishop coming out with the following just 15 or 20 years ago:

Since the frequently mistaken implementation of Vatican II (almost 50 years ago), many liturgies have taken place which are, at least, less than beautiful. To this statement, our country and our culture would respond immediately, "but beauty is in the eye of the beholder," or, "everything is beautiful, in its own way." Just as our culture has sought to relativize everything important to human nobility, asserting that it is human nature not to have a nature, so too is this the case with beauty itself.

But Bishop Morlino does not simply lob hydrogen bombs and then run for cover. He goes on to spell out the universal standards for what is beautiful:

Beauty is not, in fact, simply in the eye of the beholder, from the viewpoint of reason. For reason tells us that beautiful, good, true, and one are interchangeable; therefore, whatever is beautiful is also good and true, and expresses unity and harmony.

In order to understand what beauty is, it is useful to understand what it is not:

Beautiful can never be mistaken as an indicator of what pleases some majority of people somewhere. The fact that our parish likes to sing a particular song at the liturgy cannot, of itself, make that song beautiful. To be beautiful, indeed, is to be good and is to be true. As much as some people may enjoy the musical antics of Lady Gaga, these cannot honestly be described as beautiful.

We must never forget that, being wounded by original sin, it is possible for us to take as good that which is not good. We are not only capable of loving what is unworthy but also of rationalizing it. Consider, for example, the ancient Roman taste for gladiatorial games, under the guise of admiring the combatants' skill and prowess. Of course, the need to rationalize a taste for violence, or overt sexual displays, or low company, or other forms of spiritual trash, at least shows that the person caught in those snares still realizes, deep in his core, that these things are wrong. Eventually, however, if we wallow long enough in baseness, that spark of conscience will be smothered and we will no longer see a need to rationalize.

Bishop Morlino goes on to explain his thesis, picking, as a particular example, on a selection from the Oregon Catholic Press repertoire:

Beautiful means, in the first place, embodying the truth. Some of the songs that we sing at liturgy contain lyrics which clearly are not true — for example, the song “All Are Welcome.” As a matter of fact, the liturgy takes place mystically in the heavenly sanctuary. All are welcome at the liturgy who truly seek salvation in and through Jesus Christ, by following God’s Will, as spelled out through His Son’s very Body, the Church. People who have little interest in doing God’s Will don’t fit at the liturgy. And certainly, by their own choosing, the poor souls who suffer in Hell for all eternity are not welcome. Those are simple, but true facts. Thus the song, “All Are Welcome,” gives an impression that the choice for the Will of Jesus Christ, as it comes to us through the Church, makes no difference; and nothing could be further from the truth. It could therefore be concluded that the song, “All are Welcome,” is not beautiful so as to be appropriate-for-liturgical-use. Being true is necessary before anything can be beautiful.

To become inured to such as "All Are Welcome" has serious consequences. Set to an (appropriately) insignificant melody, the sentiments as expressed in "All Are Welcome" rise only from the nonsensical to the sophomoric ("Let us build a house where love can dwell/And all can safely live,/A place where saints and children tell/How hearts learn to forgive."), and the doctrine stinks ("Let us build a house where love is found/In water, wine and wheat:/A banquet hall on holy ground/Where peace and justice meet."). Yet, for years, we have preferred this diet of spiritual Spam to the prime rib that is our birthright and heritage; and, as a result, we no longer know what is good.

Bishop Morlino goes on to explain that that which is beautiful appeals to our dignity and nobility as rational creatures made in the image and likeness of God:

But, it is equally important for something to be good so that it also might be judged beautiful. The truth, which is clothed by beauty, must be such as to ennoble the human person in terms of bringing out his or her very best, both of intellect and of will. The beautiful must embody that which is true, but also ennobling to our human nature as made in the image and likeness of God. Whatever is beautiful must fix our minds and our hearts on the things above, according to St. Paul (Phil 4).

Beauty, then, is a taste of the supernatural. The last sentence in this paragraph contains a good rule for determining whether we are in the presence of beauty: to what does this thing I am considering direct my mind? It must be admitted that the 20th century could be described as an age of the exaltation of the ugly, whether in art, literature, cinema, drama, architecture or music; and even the Church bears its scars. When I enter a church built during the last century, do I feel as though I am in the portico of heaven? Or do I feel like I'm in an airplane hangar? Does the music make me feel as though I am at the foot of the Cross, or in the audience at a Broadway musical? If I were an alien from the Andromeda Galaxy observing the sacred liturgy, would I guess by the vessels used at Mass that they contain Something precious?

I will give Bishop Morlino the last word:

When one realizes that to be authentically beautiful, something must be both true and ennobling of our human nature, that tells us a great deal about what exactly is appropriate at the liturgy. Because it is the source and the summit of our lives as followers of Christ, the liturgy must never be anything less than beautiful, beautiful in such wise as to evoke the correct sacramental attitude of reverence, beautiful as befitting our communion at the liturgy with all the angels and saints.

H/T Fr. Z.

Going It Alone

2011-10-20T20:54:00.000-06:00

I have been listening to Bach's St. Matthew Passion (conducted by Leonard Bernstein and performed in English); and this, coupled with a recent Fr. Z. post about the sin of presumption, has gotten me to thinking about Peter's three-fold denial of the Lord.

Peter's sin was basically the same as the sin of Judas. We are accustomed to distinguish Peter from Judas by looking to the fact that Peter repented of his sin, while Judas gave in to despair. Both realized the horror of what they had done, but unlike Peter, Judas failed to have recourse to the forgiveness that would have been his for the asking.

It is easy to see how sin made its way into the heart of Judas: greed. But how did Peter, who loved Jesus above all things, fall into sin? Was it not because he thought he could resist temptation all on his own?

Imagine if, instead of protesting that he would not betray Jesus even if it meant his death, Peter had asked the Lord not to let him give in to temptation. How many things in our lives would have turned out differently, had we done that?

A Silver Lining to the Ugly Vestment Cloud

2011-10-13T22:36:00.000-06:00

When I saw this unfortunate spectacle over at Bad Vestments, I was very much afraid that I recognized the clergyman in question as His Excellency, + Alexander Sample, twelfth bishop of the Diocese of Marquette in Michigan. I hoped I was wrong, but it turns out I was correct. The sight of this first-rate, orthodox and faithful bishop with an Egg McMuffin on his chest was depressing.

But on further reflection, it seems clear that we must respect Bishop Sample now more than ever after seeing him in that get-up, which had to be somebody's idea of a joke on him. No doubt this dreadful chasuble was proffered to him during a visit to one of his parishes. Instead of throwing a temper tantrum about having to look ridiculous, he put it on, and then put on a smile. Clearly he is a man of charity, humility and penance.

Though I can't say it would surprise me if the makers of this polyester travesty have filled their last order from the Diocese of Marquette.

Filth as a Political Statement

2011-10-12T00:06:00.000-06:00

Much like their forebears at Woodstock...

...Occupy Wall Street protesters elevate America's level of political and cultural discourse -- not to mention hygiene. Source.

The more I hear about the Occupy Wall Street mob, with their overrunning of public places, turning parks into garbage dumps and open-air elimination, the more I compare them to their hippie/yippie/SDS forebears -- and the more a paragraph from Leo Rosten's 1970 classic A Trumpet for Reason kicks around in my head. I couldn't rest until I'd thumbed through my autographed copy and found, on p. 51, Rosten's pithy comments on the deliberate cultivation of filth by radicals:

The glorification of dirt is a clinical signal of psychological disturbance. I feel sorry for the hippies who cannot know the psychological price they pay for this infantile regressing to the anal level. The "corruption and chaos" they reject, in their search for Arcadian innocence, is -- alas -- transported within themselves. Their hell is inside them. It is folly for adults to glamorize the hippies' weird cult. It is cruel to idealize mental illness as a new "youth culture."

Any less true today than it was 41 years ago?

Is This Really a Bad Idea?

2011-10-10T22:56:00.000-06:00

The city of Topeka, Kansas is coming under fire because it has announced that, due to lack of resources, it will no longer prosecute misdemeanor domestic violence cases. This follows the Shawnee County District Attorney's announcement that that agency will no longer prosecute misdemeanors.

Naturally, this is being made to look like a regression back to the Neanderthal era, when a caveman could get away with clunking a woman over the head with a club and dragging her off by her hair. "When an abusive partner is arrested, the victim's danger level increases," says Becky Dickinson, interim director of the YWCA Center for Safety and Empowerment. "The abuser will often become more violent in an attempt to regain control. Letting abusive partners out of jail with no consequences puts victims in incredibly dangerous positions."

What doesn't get mentioned is the fact that domestic violence has been politicized to such an extent that it is almost impossible to deal with it in a common-sense, reasonable manner. Section 21-5414(a) of the Kansas Statutes defines domestic battery as follows (emphasis added):

(a) Domestic battery is:

(1) Knowingly or recklessly causing bodily harm by a family or household member against a family or household member; or

(2) knowingly causing physical contact with a family or household member by a family or household member when done in a rude, insulting or angry manner.

Section 21-5414(c)(1) defines a "family or household member and provides in relevant part:

"Family or household member" means persons 18 years of age or older who are spouses, former spouses, parents or stepparents and children or stepchildren, and persons who are presently residing together or who have resided together in the past, and persons who have a child in common regardless of whether they have been married or who have lived together at any time. "Family or household member" also includes a man and woman if the woman is pregnant and the man is alleged to be the father, regardless of whether they have been married or have lived together at any time....

A couple of things become immediately apparent. First, in an age when the status of "victim" is prized so highly, any person aggrieved by someone living under the same roof has an inordinate amount of leverage to invoke draconian penalties against the other party, including the near-total and irretrievable loss of his Second Amendment rights under the federal Violence Against Women Act, whose sanctions are triggered by a misdemeanor conviction related to domestic violence -- even if the conviction is for a lesser offense. Thus is a further wedge driven between family members in the shape of a hair-trigger "right" to invoke the coercive police powers of the state, instead of resorting to the charitable resolution of domestic disputes.

Secondly, it is clear that the law ranks a trivial, non-harmful incident during a fight -- say, a push -- with a bloody beat-down that lands a woman in the hospital with bruises and broken bones. As a denizen of the criminal justice system, I can attest that a good many domestic violence cases are of the push variety, where no one was actually physically injured. Thus is authentic domestic violence trivialized.

So before we start condemning the city of Topeka for setting the clock back to the Neolithic Age, perhaps we ought to take stock of the consequences of political correctness on the law of domestic violence, before we all end up in the same fiscal bind.

October 7th: Most Holy Rosary

2011-10-07T16:56:00.000-06:00

Heaven intervenes in the Battle of Lepanto, where the Muslim fleet outnumbered that of the Christians.

Per the Rule for the Dominican Laity, I pray the Rosary (five decades) every day. I don't usually pray the Luminous Mysteries, because I prefer the traditional 150 Hail Marys that mirrors the 150 Psalms. (Pointing out that the very number of Hail Marys in the Rosary is biblical enables one readily to refute what I call the Jimmy Swaggart Theorem of the Rosary, which runs roughly thus: since there are 10 Hail Marys to one Our Father, this proves Catholics prefer Mary to Jesus 10 to 1.)

Although many objected to Bl. John Paul's change to the Rosary, he is not the first Pope to have made such a change. As. Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P. has reminded me, during the latter half of the 18th century, the Franciscan Pope Clement XIV replaced the last two Glorious Mysteries with the ones we are familiar with today: the Assumption and the Coronation of Mary. The Glorious Mysteries used to be: (1) the Resurrection; (2) the Ascension; (3) the Coming of the Holy Spirit; (4) the Second Coming of Christ; and (5) the Last Judgment. I suppose it could be said that Pope Clement did not substantially change these last Mysteries, but merely changed their emphasis. Mary, after all, is a type and figure of the Church: she anticipates the state of the Church at the end of time. Our physical bodies will share in our triumph at the Second Coming, as Mary's already does in her Assumption; and we shall be crowned in glory at the Last Judgment as she has already been.

The best way to conclude this post seems to be with the Lesson from the Extraordinary Form of the Mass for today's feast, taken from Proverbs 8:22-24, 32-35. The Church applies these praises to Our Lady:

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old, before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived. Now, therefore, ye children, hear me: blessed are they that keep my ways. Hear instruction, and be wise, and refuse it not. Blessed is the man that heareth me, and that watcheth daily at my gates, and waiteth at the posts of my doors. He that shall find me, shall find life, and shall have salvation from the Lord.

Pray the Rosary every day. If you're already doing that, keep doing it. If you're not...start! The times grow more and more ominous.

Worship the Lord in Holey Attire...?

2011-10-06T12:50:00.001-06:00

Fr. Richard Simon of Skokie, Illinois in the Archdiocese of Chicago -- also known as Reverend Know-It-All -- hits another one out of the park with his latest offering on the subject of holy attire, or how not to dress for Mass. In an age when heavily-made-up women march through the church doors in spray-on rayon, unshaven men slouch in in tattered shorts and flip-flops, and tarted-up little girls in slutty white dresses present themselves for their First Holy Communion, Fr. Simon's take is a must-read. This excerpt is probably the punchiest and most succinct summation that I have ever seen on the subject:

There is only one Mass in all of history. The upper room, Calvary the inn on the road to Emmaus, the early weekday Mass and the 5PM Vigil Mass on Saturday evening are all the same thing. You aren’t just lounging in the 3rd row from the back near the closest door to the parking lot. You are standing before God’s throne in the presence of untold billions of saints and angels. Perhaps you can’t see them, but they can see you, and I think I hear some giggling among the smaller cherubs.

There you stand at the most exalted gathering in all of human and angelic history, wearing old plaid gym shorts a ripped T-shirt and flip flops. I suggest wear something a little more presentable. The seraphim and the patriarchs don’t think your knobby knees are quite as attractive as you do. It’s all about being comfortable, isn’t it? It’s a big enough bother to have to go to Mass anyway, God should be grateful just to see me there! And now you want me to wear actual clothing?

...All the powers of Heaven and all the saints of Earth are there even if you can’t see them. And they are looking at you. And they think that outfit you’re wearing is ridiculous.

The Real Discrimination

2011-10-05T13:11:00.000-06:00

Jesus, Parent 1, and Parent 2 most kind,
Bless us now and in death's agony.

It has been announced that henceforth applicants for British passports will not give the names of their mothers and fathers, but instead will be asked about "Parent 1" and "Parent 2." This is in response to pressure from the homosexual lobby, which complains of "discrimination" against the children of same-sex "parents."

I think the best response to this so far comes from Fr. John Boyle of Caritas in Veritate, who says:

When you enter the world of political correctness you end up discriminating against those who have natural rights, the right of a father and a mother to be recognised as such, not simply as a parent. "Parent" is a term that includes both father and mother but does not distinguish between them. Each has a right to be recognised. Feminists should protest about the lack of recognition of the woman as mother. In this sense, all distinction between the sexes is denied, which is of course one of the fruits of the denial of the purpose of sex: the generation of offspring. This denial begins at contraception.

In our rush to acquire "rights" to things we have no business pursuing, we chuck our legitimate rights out the window. Then one fine day we will wake up and find ourselves chained up from head to toe, and wonder why.

The Battle Lines are Being Drawn

2011-10-04T23:39:00.000-06:00

Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, U.S.A. may smile as he marches into battle against the enemies of natural law, but he has probably never been more serious in his life.

Now that the Obama Regime has given the green light to military chaplains to perform same-sex "marriages" in states where such purports to be legal, the question arises: will West Point's Chapel of the Most Holy Trinity host same-sex "marriages"?

Ixnay on that, says the Military Archdiocese. Says Archbishop Broglio's spokesman, Taylor Henry: "Holy Trinity is an actual Catholic parish, unlike the non-denominational chapels that are found on other military installations, and the only services held there are Catholic services. The Catholic Church does not perform the sacrament of matrimony for same-sex couples....[N]o Catholic chaplain is authorized to perform a same-sex marriage under any circumstances."

End of subject. Not a lot of wiggle room there. What more can be added?

The archbishop finds himself having to guide his flock through territory more dangerous than the physical battlefields on which they risk their earthly lives -- and he has to do it with fewer than 300 priests. Archbishop Broglio has a record of plain speaking on the Obama Regime's assaults on Christian civilization (see, for example, his statement in June of last year regarding the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell", and his statements last month on forced coverage of sterilization and contraceptives and in defense of the Defense of Marriage Act). It is well that the shepherd of our soldiers is so bold and forthright, because the time swiftly approaches -- and let us not kid ourselves on this -- when Catholic chaplains will be ordered to witness same-sex "marriages."

May Servant of God Fr. Vincent Cappodanno, Servant of God Fr. Emil Kapuan, Servant of God Fr. Willie Doyle, St. Lawrence of Brindisi, and all holy military chaplains intercede for Archbishop Broglio and his priests, under siege by their own government.

Not All that Gets Thrown Out Is Trash

2011-10-02T17:29:00.000-06:00

In his 1907 encyclical Pascendi Domini gregis, Pope St. Pius X identified and condemned modernism, which he dubbed the "synthesis of all heresies." Seeing the ground that the modernists continued to gain, St. Pius issued the motu proprio Sacrorum Antistitum in 1910, in which he ordered all clergy, seminary professors, preachers, religious superiors, holders of eccelsiastical office, etc., to swear an oath against modernism. This order held until after the Second Vatican Council, when the oath ceased to be required.

Now that the oath is no longer sworn, the question arises: what could any orthodox priest, bishop or religious superior find objectionable in it? Who gained by not having to swear it anymore? By the time the oath was discarded, modernism had gained more ground than ever in the Church. The oath clearly sets forth what it is that must be rejected, so no one could plausibly argue that he had to take it in a state of ignorance. The inevitable conclusion, then, is that some of those who were required to take the oath swore falsely. One shudders to think of newly-ordained priests beginning their ministry with an act of perjury.

Today, the tide is turning, but modernism is still woven closely into the fabric of Church life. How many of us, even at this late date, have not heard the old modernist chestnut that the Feeding of the Five Thousand was merely a "miracle of sharing"? Or that Jesus did not know He was God? Or that the Blessed Virgin made the Visitation to her cousin Elizabeth in order to escape lynching because she was unmarried and pregnant? (Yes, I actually heard that one from the pulpit.) And how many of us still have to attend Masses that look more like Broadway musicals or night club acts than the unbloody re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Calvary?

Today, picking up a cue from Fr. Z., Fr. Ray Blake posts the Oath against Modernism, signs it, and asks others who have blogs to pass it on. Well, I have a blog, so here is the Oath against Modernism, much needed today in spite of -- perhaps because of -- having been tossed aside.

THE OATH AGAINST MODERNISM
Given by His Holiness St. Pius X September 1, 1910.

To be sworn to by all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries.

I . . . . firmly embrace and accept each and every definition that has been set forth and declared by the unerring teaching authority of the Church, especially those principal truths which are directly opposed to the errors of this day. And first of all, I profess that God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world (see Rom. 1:90), that is, from the visible works of creation, as a cause from its effects, and that, therefore, his existence can also be demonstrated: Secondly, I accept and acknowledge the external proofs of revelation, that is, divine acts and especially miracles and prophecies as the surest signs of the divine origin of the Christian religion and I hold that these same proofs are well adapted to the understanding of all eras and all men, even of this time. Thirdly, I believe with equally firm faith that the Church, the guardian and teacher of the revealed word, was personally instituted by the real and historical Christ when he lived among us, and that the Church was built upon Peter, the prince of the apostolic hierarchy, and his successors for the duration of time. Fourthly, I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical' misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously. I also condemn every error according to which, in place of the divine deposit which has been given to the spouse of Christ to be carefully guarded by her, there is put a philosophical figment or product of a human conscience that has gradually been developed by human effort and will continue to develop indefinitely. Fifthly, I hold with certainty and sincerely confess that faith is not a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality; but faith is a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source. By this assent, because of the authority of the supremely truthful God, we believe to be true that which has been revealed and attested to by a personal God, our creator and lord.

Furthermore, with due reverence, I submit and adhere with my whole heart to the condemnations, declarations, and all the prescripts contained in the encyclical Pascendi and in the decree Lamentabili, especially those concerning what is known as the history of dogmas. I also reject the error of those who say that the faith held by the Church can contradict history, and that Catholic dogmas, in the sense in which they are now understood, are irreconcilable with a more realistic view of the origins of the Christian religion. I also condemn and reject the opinion of those who say that a well-educated Christian assumes a dual personality-that of a believer and at the same time of a historian, as if it were permissible for a historian to hold things that contradict the faith of the believer, or to establish premises which, provided there be no direct denial of dogmas, would lead to the conclusion that dogmas are either false or doubtful. Likewise, I reject that method of judging and interpreting Sacred Scripture which, departing from the tradition of the Church, the analogy of faith, and the norms of the Apostolic See, embraces the misrepresentations of the rationalists and with no prudence or restraint adopts textual criticism as the one and supreme norm. Furthermore, I reject the opinion of those who hold that a professor lecturing or writing on a historico-theological subject should first put aside any preconceived opinion about the supernatural origin of Catholic tradition or about the divine promise of help to preserve all revealed truth forever; and that they should then interpret the writings of each of the Fathers solely by scientific principles, excluding all sacred authority, and with the same liberty of judgment that is common in the investigation of all ordinary historical documents.

Finally, I declare that I am completely opposed to the error of the modernists who hold that there is nothing divine in sacred tradition; or what is far worse, say that there is, but in a pantheistic sense, with the result that there would remain nothing but this plain simple fact-one to be put on a par with the ordinary facts of history-the fact, namely, that a group of men by their own labor, skill, and talent have continued through subsequent ages a school begun by Christ and his apostles. I firmly hold, then, and shall hold to my dying breath the belief of the Fathers in the charism of truth, which certainly is, was, and always will be in the succession of the episcopacy from the apostles. The purpose of this is, then, not that dogma may be tailored according to what seems better and more suited to the culture of each age; rather, that the absolute and immutable truth preached by the apostles from the beginning may never be believed to be different, may never be understood in any other way.

I promise that I shall keep all these articles faithfully, entirely, and sincerely, and guard them inviolate, in no way deviating from them in teaching or in any way in word or in writing. Thus I promise, this I swear, so help me God.

Respect Life Sunday

2011-10-02T13:00:00.000-06:00

Today my parish observed Respect Life Sunday. Father preached forthrightly that abortion is always and everywhere a sin, an intrinsic evil, and that freedom does not mean we are free to commit abortion.

Excellent.

I will see Father, and raise him. What about the evil of contraceptives? Will we ever get rid of abortion as long as Catholics buy the cultural line on contraceptives? Imagine if priests got up in front of their congregations and declared that contraceptives are always and everywhere a sin, an intrinsic evil, and that freedom does not mean we are free to contracept.

We have a long way to go.

Bells

2011-10-02T09:21:00.002-06:00

When I was a kid, there was always the sound of church bells in the air. I could hear the bells -- or, more accurately, the carillon -- from my parish church, St. Catherine of Siena in Reseda, California, all the way from home. There were the Westminster chimes that ushered in every hour; there were the Angelus bells three times a day; there was the single tolling bell for Mass; and then there were the special chimes at noon, followed by bell renditions of hymns. I don't know whether they got the bells up and running again after the Northridge earthquake, but I hope they did.

Now I seldom hear church bells. I cannot hear any from my home, although there is a Catholic church nearby that has a carillon. The bell is rung a few minutes before Mass at my cathedral parish, and sometimes when I go downtown for Mass on Sundays I can hear a bell or two from the Protestant churches. But these days, the world is full of sourpusses who complain to the sourpusses on city councils about church bells exceeding decibel levels. The liberal First-Amendment rampart watchers are nowhere to be found when local governments and courts silence church bells; the overall effect has been to substitute them with less edifying ambient sounds.

And so we turn to, of all places, YouTube for edification. Today I felt like listening to church bells. Here is an interesting video on the bells of Cologne Cathedral in Germany, where you can hear each of its individual bells -- some of which go all the way back to the Middle Ages -- and then all of them together (plenum):

And here is one where you can just listen to all of them for a while:

October 1st: St. Therese of Lisieux

2011-10-01T10:10:00.000-06:00

The Communion of Saints is not a figment of the Catholic imagination, as St. Therese of Lisieux herself testified. Since her death in 1898, she has continued to prove it. Her Little Way was instrumental to the sanctity of Fr. Willie Doyle, S.J., the "Trench Priest" of World War I who was born in 1873 -- the same year as the Little Flower herself -- and killed at the Battle of Ypres in 1917. Because of this influence of hers on this courageous and lovable priest who did not live even to see her declared Venerable, many souls were saved.

St. Therese is often remembered for her promise to let fall a shower of roses after her death. Let no one scoff at the weakness of those who ask for roses as a sign of her intervention: there is a reason for it. Just ask Fr. Gordon McRae.

For the Feast of St. Therese, say 24 Glory Be's, in thanksgiving to the Holy Trinity for each of the 24 years of this saint's life on earth. In the third year of her life, she formed her determination to give herself entirely to God; in her fifteenth, she entered Carmel.

It Really Is That Simple

2011-09-30T23:46:00.000-06:00

Once you've flown first-class, you don't want to go back to coach.

Once you've had a cable internet connection, you don't want to go back to dial-up.

Once you've dined on prime rib, you don't want to go back to spam.

Once you've tasted dark chocolate, you don't want to go back to circus peanuts.

Once you've drunk champagne, you don't want to go back to Steel Reserve.

Once you've experienced Gregorian chant, you don't want to go back to Marty Haugen.

Sound Matters

2011-09-26T21:36:00.000-06:00

My dear friend, The Redoubtable Marcus Magnus, turns up the darndest things. He is a fount of all kinds of stuff I would never even think to look for on my own. Such as the following line that ought to be silkscreened on T-shirts and distributed to bishops, priests and seminarians all over the country:

QUIDQUID LATINE DICTUM SIT ALTUM SONATUR

Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.

Another reason why -- although I am a chauvinist for English in most matters -- some things really are better in Latin.

Random Thoughts

2011-09-24T16:57:00.002-06:00

-- Today is the anniversary of my admission to the bar. I swore my attorney oath before the state supreme court and federal district bench thirteen years ago today. And I've been swearing ever since.

-- Would that Catholics were as zealous for their Faith as the Communists are for their anti-faith. Yes, that use of the present tense is deliberate. Are we really to believe that Communist zealots ceased to believe and abandoned their mission to go out and conquer the world just because the Soviet Union collapsed?

-- I don't have television at home, so I haven't seen the latest shows until recently when I went to stay for a few days with some relatives who never miss Big Brother. In the particular episode I saw, the contestants had to crawl on their bellies through a huge pool of highly viscous doughnut glaze, sprinkles and marshmallows; grab a doughnut; crawl back through the glaze; slide the doughnut onto a vertical pole; and then keep repeating the process until time was up. The one with the most doughnuts on the stick won. By the time it was all over, the pool of glaze was gray and filthy, and the contestants were covered in slime. All this was so that they could be in a position to decide who stays in the house. Everyone lived in dread of being voted out of the house. I think I would have lived in dread of having to stay in.

-- One of the best features of the Traditional Latin Mass is its silence. The entire canon of the Mass, except the words Nobis quoque peccatoribus, is recited in silence. Silence marks a boundary between our noisy, overcrowded, high-velocity earthly life and the supernatural plane on which the Mass takes place. In the Novus Ordo, we are not allowed to have silence. We are not allowed to rise above the din of everyday existence.

-- Earlier this week, a few hours before the state of Georgia put Troy Davis to death for murdering a police officer, the state of Texas executed Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist who murdered a black man by dragging him to death behind his pickup truck. Why was there no noisy public outcry over Brewer's execution like there was of Davis'? Surely, if the death penalty is wrong for a black man who protested his innocence up until the moment of his death, it is equally wrong for a murdering white supremacist.

-- Would that there were some way of driving tattoos out of style. Would that there were some way of causing multiple piercings and ear tunnels to cease to be cool. Would that people would quit showing up to court with pink and green hair. Would that the overweight would ditch the revealing clothing. Perhaps, for the sake of the common good, Newt Gingrich could be persuaded to tattoo Mount Rushmore across his chest, get a couple of great big ear tunnels and a couple of upper lip piercings, like a vampire's fangs, dye his hair with Jello, and don a mesh shirt.

-- There is nothing like watching news coverage of a story relating to one's professional line to find out just how lazy the media can be. Before the local newspeople report on a high-profile criminal case, what would it take for them to pick up the phone, call any lawyer, and find out the correct legal terminology for describing what is going on in court? When a person is charged by complaint with a felony in the state of Idaho, he does not get a "preliminary trial," but a preliminary hearing. And when he is charged with an enhancement under what is popularly known as the "three strikes" law, he is accused of being a persistent violator, not a "perpetual offender." Why do we repose so much trust and reliance on people who regularly commit these totally avoidable and inexcusable gaffes?

-- The flaming space junk of death that was expected to crash-land on earth yesterday has apparently landed in the Pacific Ocean, though it's impossible to say for sure where. NASA calculated the odds of anyone being hurt by the debris at 3,200 to one. Meanwhile, the odds of winning even $100.00 in the Powerball lottery are 13,644.24 to one.

-- Apparently, this is an enormous weekend for college football. Sadly, I can't bring myself to care, except to the extent of avoiding the area around Boise State University. I once had a colleague seat himself in my office and solemnly lecture me on why I should care about Bronco football. This tactic did not succeed in convincing me.

-- Call me crazy, call me infantile, call me retrograde: I do like a Shirley Temple, even at my age. In the early years of my legal career, when the colleagues would gather at a favorite local tavern after a hard day in court, my drink of choice was a Shirley Temple with extra cherries.

-- Cats do snore.

So Much for "Choice"

2011-09-20T23:04:00.000-06:00

What was the comment attributed to Henry Ford about the Model-T: you can have it in any color you like, as long as it's black. Under the current leftist regime, health care is to be the new Model-T: we can have it in any color we like, as long as it clashes with natural law and Church doctrine. Archbishop John C. Nienstedt of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis & St. Paul is drawing our attention to how the new Model-T threatens to run over our freedom to practice our Catholic faith. An excerpt:

Under HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (a[n alleged] Catholic), the department is imposing a "preventative services" mandate requiring all private health plans — including ones administered by the church and its agents — to provide coverage for surgical sterilizations, prescription contraceptives approved by the FDA, and "education and counseling" for "all women of reproductive capacity."

...

Unfortunately, this is the logical result of a seismic change in this administration's approach to religious groups involved in providing social services to, among others, the poor, the homeless, the sick, the immigrant.

It began when President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton started using the term "freedom of worship" as distinct from what we have always known as "freedom of religion."

Under the concept of "freedom of worship," church agencies are restricted to hiring employees only from their own denomination and providing services for clients only from their own denomination.

Such a concept restricts Christian believers in their charitable outreach to society and, in effect, encloses them within their own sanctuaries.

This is radical secularism at its epitome. It is an affront to the centuries of Christian service offered by churches to clients of all backgrounds, color or creed. And, it is the slippery slope to a completely secularized state wherein people of religious conviction will be required to privatize their beliefs and in doing so, at least for Catholics, render their faith meaningless.

The archbishop urges Catholics to make their voices heard on this issue and write letters of opposition to Kathleen Sibelius and our elected representatives, and also to write to our representatives in Congress to support the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act (H.R. 1179, S. 1467).

Catholics have been lying down on the job for decades, ever since we stopped listening to the Magisterium and started listening to the world. The acceptance of contraceptives led to the acceptance of abortion on demand, as surely as night follows sundown; and more and greater evils continue to flow from this capitulation. Time for us to clean up our own acts, and take back the lost ground.

H/T Fr. Z.

A Chicken in Every Pot and a Car in Every Garage

2011-09-18T23:40:00.000-06:00

V for Victory! has been nominated for a good dose of self-satisfaction in the 2011 Catholic Cannonball Awards in the category of Most Church Militant. Go over and vote for V for Victory!

If elected the Most Church Militant, I promise a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. And to everyone who votes for me, I promise to give the next two dollars I find floating on a millstone down the Boise River.

Meatless Fridays Are Here! (At Least in England and Wales)

2011-09-18T18:23:00.000-06:00

No more of this on Fridays in England and Wales!

For the first time in decades, Catholics in England and Wales are required to abstain from meat. This past Friday, the 16th, was the first day for the newly restored mandatory discipline. I have not heard that the earth opened up, or that the streets were choked with corpses, or that the sky caved in. On Friday, September 16th, nobody died of mandatory abstinence. If they failed to die in England and Wales, the odds are pretty good they won't die anywhere else.

Don't forget to vote in the Victory sidebar poll on meatless Fridays!

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Ten September 11ths Ago

2011-09-11T00:00:00.002-06:00

Funny how we always remember exactly where we were and what we were doing the moment some earth-shattering event takes place.

On September 11, 2001, I was working in the public defender's office in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. I was pretty self-absorbed that morning. I did not turn the TV on while getting ready for work (I had TV then) and in the car I listened to a station that played '80s music. At one point, as I was getting close to the office, the DJ said he would do his best to continue with the 8 straight hits (or whatever it was), but he was pretty shaken by what had just happened, as he was sure we all were. I wondered what he was talking about, but it didn't occur to me to switch to talk radio to find out. I pulled into the parking lot, got out of the car, and let myself in through the back door. Just outside the door to my office, a bunch of the support staff were huddled around the desk of my secretary, Lori, listening to the radio.

"What's happened?" I said.

"The World Trade Center is gone," Lori said.

My mind went immediately to the first attack on the Towers in 1993. I'm pretty sure the first thing I thought actually came out of my mouth: "So they've finished the job" -- "they" being the bunch responsible for the 1993 attack, or their compatriots. Despite the rumors that began immediately about domestic terrorists (the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was still fresh in our memories), the first instinct was to prove correct, as it usually does. A thing like this could only be an act of war.

By the time I learned what was happening, about two and a quarter hours had passed since the first plane crashed into the Towers. It was almost an hour and a half since the third plane crashed into the Pentagon. The plane crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania had just taken place an hour before. It seemed likely at that moment that as many as 50,000 people might have perished in just the Towers alone -- more than 20 times the number of people who died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that had taken place almost exactly 60 years earlier, and to which parallels were being instantly drawn. Although -- thankfully -- the number of slain on 9/11 proved to be only a fraction of that 50,000, it was still a grievous total that greatly surpassed Pearl Harbor.

Of course our first instinct was to glue ourselves to the news and try to take in these stupefying events. But we had court that day, and clients to see, and business to transact, and hearings to prepare for, and life had to carry on. But every minute we weren't in hearings or attending to our work, we were talking about the attacks, and what they meant, and what would happen next. It is a thing that cannot be understood except by those who lived through it: the outrage -- not only over the attacks themselves, but over the footage of Arabs dancing in the streets in celebration at the murders of thousands of innocent people -- the uncertainty; the realization that we ourselves might die in this new war -- for it was clearly war -- our impotence as individuals and littleness in the face of malign forces beyond our imagining; our attitude of defiance in the face of that impotence and our clinging to God and to each other in our littleness.

The world utterly changed on that bright September morning. Though it would be more accurate to say that the change in the world was manifest only on that morning: the change really came the day an extra-national, fanatical movement conceived the idea of using passenger jets as missiles to attack our military and commercial and government centers. On that day, a new fruit from hell, long in the growing, became ripe for the picking. That was the real day the world changed; only we who stood outside the tiny circle of conspirators could not know it. Perhaps the world has changed yet again without our knowing it. Are we ready to face it?

9/11 was a shot across our bow. Thankfully, nothing like it has happened again to us in the intervening 10 years, thanks to the brave men and women who defend this country. It galvanized us and woke us up; but sadly, we have gone back to sleep. Even the triple catastrophe of New York, Washington and Shanksville has failed to make us straighten up and fly right. We have proven ourselves more willing than ever to surrender our liberty to the government. Our moral confusion and cultural degeneracy have increased. Who, on September 11, 2001, could have imagined that by the tenth anniversary of that dreadful day, we would have submitted ourselves to the government of the enemies of all that this country has ever stood for?

On this 10th anniversary of 9/11, we should pray for the dead and their families; for the safety of our armed forces; and for our repentance and conversion as a nation.

A Better Way to Commemorate 9/11

2011-09-09T17:39:00.000-06:00

Against all odds: the Battle of Lepanto, 1571

A few weeks ago, I commented in this space about how America's quest for law, order and security has ceased to reflect a civilized order. Now, ten years after the Islamist outrage that has provided Big Government with a convenient excuse to balloon out to ever vaster proportions, one woman is fighting back.

On March 31, 2011, a blogger named Amy Alkon refused to go through the naked scanner at the airport. She decided not to submit quietly to the obligatory body grope that was her only alternative to the scanner, but instead to protest by sobbing loudly at being searched and bereft of her dignity without probable cause or even reasonable, articulable suspicion. When the searching fingers of the TSA goon-ette got rather too searching and too rough -- repeatedly -- Amy took her name down and consulted a lawyer. And also blogged about it. Enter attorney Vicki Roberts, who sent Amy a letter on behalf of the goon-ette demanding half a million dollars for slander, libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Amy's own lawyer, Marc Randazza, fired off a response that ought to be required reading for anyone about to board a plane in the post-9/11 era. A choice excerpt:

After the 9/11 attacks, America wallowed in fear, and ignoble politicians took advantage of that national temporary psychosis. In doing so, they foisted an intrusive security apparatus upon us, but one that was never effective at making us safer. It was, however, effective at rolling back our rights under the Fourth Amendment. We may have killed Osama Bin Laden this year, but he actually defeated the American way of life ten years ago. On September. 11, 2001, America went from "the land of the free and the home of the brave" to a nation of mewling cowards, eager to give up their liberties for perceived "safety." One of the worst symptoms of this transformation is the TSA and its minions of blue-shirted "officers." As numerous investigations of these checkpoints' efficacy reveal, anyone with a marginal IQ and the desire to evade them can and will do so.

While the TSA fails miserably in providing security, it excels in undermining our protections under the Bill of Rights. This petty army has done its best not only to grind the Fourth Amendment into dust, but to strip us of our dignity as human beings. The Internet is replete with videos of travelers being groped by the TSA in a way that would result in sexual assault prosecutions for people other than TSA agents, all while the victims cry, protest, and express their horror. Your client may feel that she is in no way culpable for these wrongs, but her continued employment by the TSA and her actions against Ms. Alkon are an integral and inseparable part of the TSA’s abuse of all Americans. Fortunately for all of us, people like my client take the position that TSA agents cannot simply do whatever they want – not without dissent.

Kudos to Amy Alkon for not just bending over for the enemies of liberty. While Mayor Bloomberg purges the official 9/11 commemorations of clergy and first responders, others have found a more appropriate way to cherish the memories of those who died on that bright September morning ten years ago because our enemies hate freedom.

No Time for Prayer

2011-09-07T18:23:00.003-06:00

One of the most haunting and moving images of 9/11.

We are advised that the absence of clergy at the official tenth anniversary commemoration of 9/11 at Ground Zero -- where the first certified casualty was FDNY chaplain Fr. Mychal Judge, O.F.M. -- is necessary to streamline the schedule. Said Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a radio interview: "There's an awful lot of people who would like to participate and you just can't do that...so the argument here is elected officials and those who were there at the time."

Well. After all, the clergy might use up the time...praying. Or -- which The Divine Spark In All Of Us forbid -- inviting others to pray.

I am reminded of some remarks Fr. Vincent Serpa, O.P., made at the Dominican Lay Provincial Council meeting in Oakland, California last year. He recalled looking over the agenda of some Dominican event or other and discovering a glaring omission. "When do we have Mass?" he asked one of the organizers.

"We don't have time for Mass," said the organizer.

Fr. Serpa's reply: "If you don't have time for Mass...you don't have time for anything."

If we don't have time for public prayer at the commemoration of an act of war on our soil that left 2,977 Americans dead...we don't have time for anything.

Labor Day

2011-09-05T09:53:00.000-06:00

So basically, today, we celebrate work by laying around.

Cool.

Throwing Your Heart in the Trash

2011-08-30T23:54:00.000-06:00

He who is sated loathes honey, but to one who is hungry everything bitter is sweet.

Proverbs 27:7

Now that the feminists have made the world safe for neanderthals by clearing away all the rules and taboos and social norms that once kept boorish behavior in check, and put the kibosh on the sexual exploitation of women, all sorts of things are acceptable that should not be. And now that the unacceptable is not only acceptable but respectable, many women seem unable any longer to distinguish between a good catch and a loser. It is at once amazing, frustrating and heartbreaking to see what members of my sex are prepared to put up with in the name of Not Being Alone. In our oversexed world, full of promiscuity, fatherless families and irreligion, we have been trained to view ourselves as nothing.

This is a depressing tide that I cannot stem alone. But I still want to do my poor bit to shed some light into this overwhelming darkness. So, for all the ladies out there who are in a bad situation or teetering on the brink of one:

Your Boyfriend Is Probably a Loser If:

...He Is Violent and/or Emotionally Abusive. Yes, this should be obvious, but sadly, for many, it is not. Where there is true love, there is peace and trust. Real love wants nothing but the best for the beloved; in fact, the ultimate goal of real love is the salvation of the other person as well as oneself. No one who truly loves you is going to use physical force on you. Period. No one who truly loves you is going to terrorize you, or keep you in a constant state of frenzy, or belittle you or manipulate you. Such behavior is repugnant to true love. True love would rather die than treat the beloved that way. If that is the treatment you are getting, run, and don't look back.

...He Is Chronically Unemployed. Bad times hit us all. I have been out of work in my life, and I know exactly how harrowing it is to have bills mounting and no money coming in. But if your boyfriend is out of work, what's he doing about it? Is he out pounding the pavement? Is he at the unemployment office coming the classifieds, sending out resumes, making phone calls, visiting potential jobsites, signing up with temp agencies? Is he taking anything and everything that comes along, no matter how grueling or humiliating, until he finds a good job? Sending out an application a day is not looking for work. Devoting ten minutes a day to job hunting and spending the remaining 23 hours and 50 minutes to sleeping and playing video games is not looking for work. Waiting to be named ambassador to the Court of St. James is not looking for work. Is your boyfriend capable of holding a job for more than two weeks at a stretch, or has he had six jobs in the last six weeks? Does he show up on time to work, and do his job diligently? Or does he party all night and then sleep until 3:00 p.m.? Is his mother paying his bills? Are you? If a guy is not serious about work, how can he be serious about a relationship?

...You Are Taking Care of His Financial Obligations to the Criminal Justice System. First off, if your boyfriend has constant entanglements with the criminal justice system, don't walk, but run for the nearest exit. He's not in all that trouble because the cops are out to get him: the common denominator in all his woes is him. Secondly, if you are constantly bonding his ass out of jail, or paying his fines, or paying for his court-ordered domestic violence treatment that he has to do because he beat you up, that should tell you everything you need to know about what he thinks is your mission in life.

...You Are Constantly Accompanying Him to Court. This might be your turkey's idea of a date, but it should not be that of any woman in her senses. Add another three strikes if the reason you're accompanying him is because his driver's license is suspended and you are his ride.

...He Does Drugs or Abuses Alcohol. A guy who does drugs is not taking care of business. He is, however, wasting a lot of time and money on his habit. Habitual drug use does impair your mental faculties over time, and it does stunt your emotional growth -- and yes, this includes marijuana. Also, if the guy does illegal drugs in your home, or uses your car for his illegal drug activity, you could end up having your property forfeited out from under you. Plus, people do steal in order to nourish their habit. A guy who abuses alcohol will be a source of endless domestic misery even if he can hold down a steady job. Marrying an addict will not cure the addiction.

...He Asks You for Sex. Startling -- in this day and age -- but true. Sex is not merely recreational. It is the deepest expression of love and commitment possible between two human beings. It is a total self-giving. It leads to the creation of life. It calls for reverence. That is why it is only for marriage. Anything outside of marriage is a mockery. A man who wants to bed a woman down without any sort of commitment is only using her. Every good father understands this: that is why good fathers are the natural enemies of boys who want to bed down their daughters. It is a shame that so many girls grow up in fatherless families, and therefore never learn this. But if you have a good father, or know one, think about this: run from any man who wants to do anything with you that that father would protect his daughter from.

...He Wants You to Shack Up. Remember this, ladies: shack-up relationships are made to be walked away from. What else could possibly be the point of playing house without a marriage license? Moving in with him will not make him marry you. Repeat: moving in with him will not make him marry you. All you are doing is providing this jerk with a housekeeper, an economic advantage (is he even working?) and commitment-free sex into the bargain. And by the way, you will not hang on to the bum by getting pregnant by him, either. If he really loved you and any future kids, why would he be afraid to enter into a legally binding commitment with you?

Ladies: it is perfectly okay to be alone. In fact, that may well be your vocation. It is far, far better to be alone than to live in the captivity of an emotional slave-driver. If your man is a bum, he doesn't just need the love of a good woman. If he is a bum, he is incapable of appreciating you or your love, except to the extent you serve his purposes for the moment; you cannot fix him. If he is a criminal, it is beyond your poor power to reform him. You will not succeed where the criminal justice system, with all its money and coercive police power and shrinks and probation officers, have failed. The cube of sugar he tosses you now and then is not worth the gallons of bile you get the rest of the time.

A man is not a unique fixer-upper opportunity. If you can't cure a decent man of annoying little habits like leaving the seat up, or throwing his socks on the floor, or filling the bathroom sink with his whiskers, how much less can you expect to succeed in making Sir Galahad out of Al Capone.

The Front Widens in the War on Children

2011-08-24T22:59:00.001-06:00

I have previously reflected in this space on our society's hatred of children under a veneer of sentimentality. Until now, nothing made this more clear than the twin scourges of contraception and abortion, jealously guarded and cherished as "rights," coupled with the spectacle of western governments attacking the seal of the confessional in the name of "protecting" the innocence of children.

As the much-reviled Ann Coulter correctly points out in her book Guilty, marriage has been effectively destroyed as an institution that protects children. We have grown complacent in the face of wave after wave of assaults on marriage, and therefore children: the promotion of licentiousness under the guise of freedom; the divorce of the sex act from procreation; the wide acceptance of concubinage and fatherless families; the movement for "sex education" for younger and younger children, together with the distribution of contraceptives to children; and, most recently, the increasing legal recognition of "marriages" between people of the same sex.

Now that we are so nonchalant about promiscuity, and homosexuality has come out of the closet, is it any wonder that aficionados of other forms of perversion are feeling a little bolder? Now the pedophiles are lobbying to have their twisted predilections removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). At a symposium hosted by a child-molester advocacy group called B4U-ACT, Dr. Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote address, expressing his support for the destigmatization of sexual attraction to children. It is claimed, among other things, that "children are not inherently unable to consent" to sex with adults; that pedophiles "have feelings of love and romance for children" indistinguishable from romantic feelings between adults; and that "the DSM should 'focus on the needs' of the pedophile, and should have 'a minimal focus on social control,' rather than obsessing about the 'need to protect children.'" There is now even a euphemism with its own acronym for pervs: "minor-attracted people" or "MAPs."

There can be no doubt that ours is an age in which the unthinkable quickly morphs into the commonplace. A hundred years ago, who could have imagined that by 2008, 41% of all children born in this country would be born out of wedlock? Fifty years ago, who could have imagined that by 2011, the number of abortions performed in this country since 1973 would approach the total number of those killed during World War II? Thirty years ago, how many people seriously believed that by 2011, ten countries and six of the United States (not to mention D.C.) would legalize gay "marriage"?

So perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss the disgusting pretensions of the cho-mo lobby. It is now a crime in some countries to publicly ventilate views consistent with the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality; we may very well live to see a day when it will be a crime for parents to keep their children out of the reach of degenerates.

H/T The Digital Hairshirt.

Still Waiting...

2011-08-17T06:21:00.003-06:00

...for a convincing explanation...

...as to why this is worth commemorating.

August 16, 1917: Death of Fr. William Doyle, S.J.

2011-08-16T09:36:00.000-06:00

I hope one of these days, August 16th will become the feast of St. William Doyle, the "Trench Priest" who died in the midst of his ministry to the dying at the Battle of Ypres 96 years ago today, a martyr of charity. But for now, it is simply the anniversary of the death of Servant of God Willie Doyle. Fr. Willie has appeared several times in this space (e.g., here, here, and here). An entire blog is dedicated to his memory: for the ether's best compendium of Fr. Doyle commentary and biographical material, as well as Fr. Doyle's writings, visit Remembering Fr William Doyle SJ.

Fr. Doyle does have a cause for canonization, but it has been in the deep freeze for decades. Let us hope and pray for the rekindling of devotion to him, so that he may once more step into the trenches to the rescue of his beloved Ireland and Society of Jesus.

Amil Myshin, R.I.P.

2011-08-13T14:11:00.004-06:00

Today, a multitude of family, friends, colleagues, judges, prosecutors and court staff descended upon the chapel at Summers Funeral Home in downtown Boise to pay their respects and say farewell to a great lawyer and remarkable human being.

Three years was all too short a time in which to get to know Amil Myshin. I enjoyed going up to the fifth floor of the courthouse and watching him on his hind legs, when my own calendar permitted. But the best thing was the lunchtime conversations. Amil was a great raconteur. Whether he talked about old cases, or his sons, or his days in the service, or my first boss who used to work with him, or his scuba-diving adventures, it would have been a delight -- if it were possible -- just to sit and listen to him tell stories all day. And laugh. Amil had so much laughter in him that it would have taken a concerted effort not to laugh with him. It was as much fun to watch Amil laugh as it was to laugh oneself.

The Gospel of Matthew says that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks; and so it is possible to learn a lot about a man as much by what comes out of his mouth as by how he conducts himself. What sort of a man did Amil's words and conduct reveal? It was clear that he enjoyed a good fight; but -- if one can trot out a metaphor -- he was no common, swaggering street brawler. Amil was a gentleman. And -- to extend the metaphor -- it was not for the sake of seeing blood spurt from wounds or feeling bones crack beneath his fists that he enjoyed a fight, but for the contest of wit and skill and endurance that he carried out with quiet dignity. And he never forgot that matters of life and death hung upon his skill. His courage always rose to match the stakes for which he fought, stakes than which there are none higher in the legal system.

What mark should decades of defending accused murderers -- looking at crime scene and autopsy photos and poring over gruesome reports and listening to witness accounts of unspeakable brutality and witnessing a client's execution -- leave on a man's soul? No lawyer or his family could come entirely unscathed through such ordeals. Amil was no different: he took some real blows on account of his work. The danger of taking on hardships is that we may permit the toughness they build up to carry over into callousness. But during the time that I knew Amil, in the last three years of his life, he was kindly, patient, gentle, modest, self-effacing, understanding, and cheerful. In fact, considering all that he had seen and gone through over the years, his character was as remarkable for those things that it lacked as for those that it possessed. Amil's vocabulary was not always the cleanest -- that is unfortunately a side effect of our trade -- but his professionalism was such that I never heard him utter a harsh word all the time I knew him, even in his moments of exasperation. Even a consummate professional like Amil must occasionally let slip some flaw, whether he wants to or not; yet every time I interacted with him, I was struck by the complete absence in him of bitterness, egotism, pettiness, vindictiveness, meanness, vanity or pusillanimity. And I could not -- cannot -- help considering how poorly my own behavior and attitude compared with his. Even the last time I talked with him, when he was obviously ill and weak and distracted, he was uncomplaining and dignified, and still managed a few laughs.

But years and years of high-pressure, high-stakes, high-profile cases take their toll at last. Amil shone out as a clear beacon over miles of rough seas, but the tower that housed that beacon was crumbling. He struggled hard to go on preparing his last big case, even as his strength ebbed, until finally even his still-robust spirit had to yield to his physical exhaustion. By the close of August 6th -- the Feast of the Transfiguration -- all was over.

Greater love than this no man has, said Jesus, that he lay down his life for his friends. What I saw of Amil, especially toward the end, convinced me that he did indeed lay down his life. Who were the friends for whom he laid it down? Anyone who has ever worked as a public defender, as he did, could rattle off a fairly accurate description. Clients who worked hard to try his patience. Clients who called him 20 or 30 times a day and left threatening or raging messages on his voice mail. Clients who tried to manipulate him and play him off against his co-counsel. Clients who complained about him. Clients who wrote nasty letters. Clients who tried to make trouble for him and get him fired off their cases. Clients who would do and say things publicly that would blow weeks' worth of his hard work all to hell, and create weeks' worth of additional work into the bargain. Clients who fought him every step of the way, even though he was their only friend in the whole system. Yet, for their sakes, he was glad to give all he had, even the strength to go on living. Amil savored the thrill of combat, but in the end, he fought -- and died -- for love.

I do not know whether Amil thought of it in those terms, but with all that he had and all that he did for them, he loved every last societal outcast that he defended, no matter what they stood accused of or what they had actually done. I do not know what level of commitment Amil had to the Christian faith, but he clearly knew something about sacrificial love. He clearly knew, and lived, the love that is not a warm, fuzzy feeling, but an act of the will. He knew, and lived, the love that wills to serve, freely and voluntarily, to the best of one's ability -- and even to the death -- people one knows will repay one with nothing except rank ingratitude. Can such a love as this fail to cover a multitude of faults?

I trust that, in that supreme moment, when Amil stood before his God in the greatest trial of all, upon whose outcome depend the greatest stakes of all, it did not. R.I.P.

Amil Norman Myshin, Jr. (1946-2011)

Worshiping in Glass Houses...?

2011-08-11T23:45:00.000-06:00

The Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, California. Author: Buchanan-Hermit

Bishop Tod Brown -- who, by the way, used to be the Bishop of Boise -- wants this to be the next Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. In fact, the diocese has upped its offer to purchase the building from $50 million to $53.6 million -- cash.

I dunno. On the one hand, subscribing as I do to the Catholic Church's peculiar claim to be the One True Church, I kinda like the idea of the Catholic Church baptizing a building that had not previously been devoted to Catholic worship. Plus, it is suggested that this may be the best the diocese can expect in the way of a new cathedral from Bishop Brown, who (a) is running out of time before he has to tender his resignation to Rome; (b) has a great desire to raise a Tod Mahal in the Diocese of Orange, and (c) is a man of the same stamp as the Cardinal who gave Los Angeles the Taj Mahony.

On the other hand, there are some inescapable facts about the Crystal Cathedral:

-- It's ugly.

-- It was not designed to serve as a setting for Catholic worship.

-- It's ugly.

-- The present bishop of the diocese is not likely to want the Crystal Cathedral to look like a space for Catholic worship.

-- It's ugly.

-- The next bishop may very well want a Catholic-looking cathedral, making this a huge white elephant to cope with.

-- It's ugly.

And what about the fact that southern California is where we keep a huge percentage of all the world's earthquakes? Sure, the Crystal Cathedral is still standing, but it's only 31 years old: it hasn't really exactly stood the test of time. I can picture hundreds of worshipers being julienned under a Niagara of shattered glass.

And did I mention: the Crystal Cathedral is ugly?

It is true that the current Cathedral of Orange is notso hotso, and that the diocese could really use a new one. But maybe it's time for Catholics to stop resigning ourselves to settling for the least ugly alternative. Surely, the best thing would be to leave the relatively small current mess to the next bishop, whoever he is, rather than saddle him with the enormity now contemplated.

Bishop Brown turns 75 this November 15th. Let him offer up, for his flock, the sacrifice of not being able to give the diocese his own peculiar stamp.

And the Crystal Cathedral would indeed be peculiar.

O Wondrous Hope

2011-08-08T13:17:00.002-06:00

Dominican student brothers sing the Dominican Hymn O Spem Miram:

And here is our friend Giovanni Vianini teaching the Dominican chant version.

What wonderful Hope thou gavest in thy dying moments to those who were in sorrow around thee, when thou promised that thou wouldst help thy brethren after thy death. Fulfill thy promise, Holy Father, and help us by thy prayers. Thou who so often showed thy strength by healing the bodies of the sick, and bring to us also the power of Christ and heal our sick spirits. Alleluia.

And on this feast of Holy Father Dominic, I learned of the passing of Amil Myshin, an attorney I worked with. Amil was a kindly man, full of laughs, a gentleman and a fine lawyer who spent himself in the service of some very challenging clients and died in harness. Please pray for the repose of his soul. R.I.P.

UPDATE: Idaho Statesman story on Amil.

To Save Bruised Reeds and Smoldering Wicks

2011-08-07T17:46:00.000-06:00

I have been thinking lately about an occasion on which a friend in the Charismatic movement decried the rules and conditions attached to novenas, the gaining of indulgences, the practice of pious disciplines, etc., and the alleged tendency on the part of many people to get so caught up in these rules as to deprive themselves of peace of mind and freedom of spirit. Some relief was expressed over the fact that many of these rules have been abandoned over recent decades.

Naturally, I objected, and registered my protest. I admit to being of a legalistic bent -- it is no accident that I became a lawyer. But although I have previously decried, in this space, the tyranny of petty rules and regulations, the question of religious disciplines and devotions does not come under the category of petty rules. Rules that help us in the primary business of our lives on earth -- gaining heaven -- cannot possibly be thought of as petty. In fact, I submit that Catholics who would like to do away with rules and disciplines in the Church come dangerously close to courting a parsimonious, judgmental spirit that may one day lead them out of the Church altogether.

It would be wonderful if we were all so mature in our faith as to be able to fly straight to God like an eagle flying up to the sun, instead of needing signposts and guides and road markings and other things that assure us that we are on the right path. But Jesus knew better when He instituted the Church, and gave her the power to make rules in His name. These rules are not bludgeons against charity; they are the product of charity. They are tutors. They help us to love God in the way He wants to be loved. They help us to persevere in prayer. For some, they help to make up for a lack of childhood formation. They make it clear whether or not we have attained some spiritual goal for which we have striven, such as the gaining of an indulgence. (Some Catholics, by the way, are in the unexamined habit of conceding that Martin Luther was right about indulgences, forgetting -- if they ever knew -- that he opposed not merely the sale of indulgences but indulgences themselves, which violates the teaching of the Church.) In short, the rules are teachers, helpers and supports. They are a means by which God not only meets us halfway, but actually stoops all the way down to us in our littleness.

There are those who think that obedience to rules is a bad reason for ever doing anything for God's sake, and that if we are going to pray or attend Mass or use the Sacraments, it is worthless unless we do so in a spirit and with a feeling of joyful generosity. The ultimate end of such thinking is the belief that it is wrong to require Catholics to attend Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation, or to receive Holy Communion or go to confession at least once a year. I submit that this view is not only foolhardy but opposed to generosity. The inescapable facts are that we still suffer the effects of original sin, and therefore most of us will not do what we ought to do unless we are required to. For proof, one need look no farther than the effective abolition of Friday penances. If we have the choice whether to abstain from meat on all Fridays of the year, then most of us will not do it. I did not do it until I entered the Order of Preachers, in which year-round Friday abstention is still practiced. Nor can the case be made that the world is a better place for the failure of Catholics to observe disciplines. This is probably one of the reasons why the bishops of England and Wales are bringing back mandatory abstention on every Friday of the year.

But those who don't like obedience are overlooking one very important thing: God does like obedience. Ask any faithful priest or religious, in whose lives obedience is central. St. Faustina teaches that the tiniest acts stamped with the seal of obedience are of immense value in God's eyes. And most of us ought to know from experience that most of the time, God wants us to labor in obedience in order to train us up in the will to do His will. Good feelings about doing things for His sake are a pure gratuity that He grants or withholds at His good pleasure, and so it is a mistake to judge the quality of good acts based on their presence or absence. Merit lies, not in our feelings, but in our will. And our will, tainted by the effects of original sin, needs training. Hence rules.

Rules consistent with the Gospel and made in charity uphold the weak. For some people -- maybe many or even most people -- obedience to rules is all they have to keep them on the straight and narrow. Far be it from anyone to judge the quality of their love for God, or to take away their only support during hard times. To abolish the rules is not freedom. It is not mercy. It is in fact an act of brutality. It is the breaking off of bruised reeds, and the quenching of smoldering wicks. God save us from those who want to "save" us from rules.