October 2: Feast of the Guardian Angels

For those of you who are skeptical about guardian angels, I give you Psalm 91:11-12:

For He will give His angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.

And then there is Matthew 18:10:

See that you do not despise one of these little ones; for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of My Father who is in heaven.

And if you have a problem with people addressing themselves to the angels, consider Psalm 103 in which, if you pray it, you do just that in verses 20-21:

Bless the LORD, O you His angels, you mighty ones who do His word, hearkening to the voice of His word! Bless the LORD, all His hosts, His ministers that do His will!

If you object to the idea of taking counsel with the angels, then consider Exodus 23:20-22 -- which also tells us Whom it is we are really taking counsel with:

Behold, I send an angel before you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place which I have prepared. Give heed to him and hearken to his voice, do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him. But if you hearken attentively to his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.

And so, herewith:

The Litany of the Guardian Angel

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy. Christ, hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us.
God the Father of Heaven,
have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
have mercy on us.
God the Holy Spirit,
have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, One God
have mercy on us.

Holy Mary, Queen of Heaven, pray for us.
Holy Angel, my Guardian...
Holy Angel, my Protector in all dangers...
Holy Angel, my Defense in all afflictions...
Holy Angel, my most faithful Lover...
Holy Angel, my Preceptor...
Holy Angel, my Guide...
Holy Angel, Witness of all my actions...
Holy Angel, my Helper in all my difficulties...
Holy Angel, my Negotiator with God...
Holy Angel, my Advocate...
Holy Angel, lover of Chastity...
Holy Angel, lover of Innocence...
Holy Angel most obedient to God...
Holy Angel, Director of my soul...
Holy Angel, model of Purity...
Holy Angel, model of Docility...
Holy Angel, my Counselor in doubt...
Holy Angel, my Guardian through life...
Holy Angel, my shield at the hour of Death...

Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, spare us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

Let Us Pray.

O God, Who with unspeakable providence vouchsafe to send Thy Angels to be our Guardians, mercifully grant, that we, Thy supplicants, may be always defended by their protection and enjoy their eternal society, through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Our Lord, Who lives and reigns with You, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, One God, world without end. Amen.

Angel of God, my Guardian Dear, to whom His love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light, to guard, to rule, and to guide. Amen.

October 2, 1928: Deo Omnis Gloria!

Deo omnis gloria! -- "All glory to God!" -- is one of the little prayers that was always on the lips of St. Josemaría Escrivá, who founded Opus Dei 80 years ago today.

St. Josemaría's desire that all glory go to God is behind the name "Opus Dei," which means "God's work." The goal of Opus Dei is the sanctification of everyday life in the world. It has nothing whatsoever to do with scheming cardinals, albino assassin monks, or the arrangement of dead guys into a representation of Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Not even the fact that final papal approval was granted in 1950 by the e-e-e-e-v-i-i-i-l-l-l Pope Pius XII adds a shred of sinisterness to Opus Dei.

So happy 80th birthday to Opus Dei! And long may it continue to give the enemies of the Church the vapors.

Creeping Toward Winter

A sure sign that autumn is here, and the mercury on the thermometer will soon be dropping, even amid summer heat's last hurrah: the end of irrigation season.

Dozens of irrigation canals like this one, and countless ditches, run all over Southern Idaho, and even the city of Boise. When the water starts flowing, you know the grays of winter will soon give way to green, growing things; when the water recedes, you know winter is on the way back. The Nampa-Meridian Irrigation District's main artery shuts down today; by this time next week, the canals and ditches will all be dry.

After weeks of whining and moaning about the heat (oppressive for Idaho, hovering around 100), pretty soon now we'll be able to settle back into our usual routine of whining about the cold.

October 1: Feast of the Little Flower

My grandmother had a devotion to the Little Flower. When my mother was a little girl, Nana hung a big, beautiful picture of the Little Flower in her bedroom. When I was little, I would sometimes stay in that bedroom, and I would stare endlessly at that picture. After my grandmother died, it was lost for years. After I moved to Idaho, it turned up and came into my hands. It hangs now over my mantelpiece. (The above picture isn't it. My picture is a print of a painting. I haven't found the exact picture on the Internet, and I broke my digital camera. Maybe I can persuade The Redoubtable One to bring his ever-active camera over and photograph it for me.)

Novena to Saint Therese of the Child Jesus

O Little Therese of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. O Little Flower of Jesus, ask God today to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands... (mention specific request). Saint Therese, help me to always believe as you did, in God's great love for me, so that I might imitate your "Little Way" each day. Amen.

Oh! no, you will see...it will be like a shower of roses. After my death, you will go to the mail box, and you will find many consolations.

-- Saint Therese on June 9, 1897 after Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart told her she would be very sorry after she died

I can attest to this. When I ask the Little Flower for her intercession, and she gets God to grant my prayer, she always sends me roses -- usually in huge quantities. (If the answer is no, the roses disappear.) The last huge favor I asked for, I also asked for a sign of yellow roses if the answer was yes. And got them. Continuously. And then received what I asked for.

St. Therese is a powerful friend. Take your toughest problems to her.

A Complaint I Never Thought I'd Hear

After years of bitching and complaining and putting down lawyers, denizens of Idaho's small counties are finding out: yes, they do need a couple of lawyers here and there after all.

According to the Idaho State Bar, there are 3,165 active lawyers in the state. (I'm willing to bet there are more lawyers than that in New York City alone.) The Second Judicial District, which includes the small counties of Clearwater, Idaho, Latah, Lewis and Nez Perce, has just 178 active lawyers. Of these, most are probably in Latah County (Moscow) and Nez Perce County (Lewiston). There are probably more lawyers in this picture of the Briefcase Brigade than there are in all of Idaho County, the biggest county in the state in terms of square mileage, but one of the smallest in terms of population.

And so, when somebody in Idaho County gets charged with a crime, and can't afford to hire private counsel, court-appointed counsel has to be imported all the way from Moscow. That is a drive of at least two hours -- could be more, depending on the weather.

So if anybody out there reading this is in Idaho County, and is charged with a crime, and has court-appointed counsel, and is not scheduled to go to court until winter, then there are two things you need to do: (1) Since the chances are fairly good you're Catholic, go to confession. And (2) be very, very good to your public defender.

Banned Books Week: A Celebration of Freedom?

Today the American Library Association begins its 26th annual celebration of Banned Books Week, an event designed to keep before our eyes the specters of Fahrenheit 451 and Nazis and other totalitarian thugs setting fire to mountains of forbidden books, reminding us to be ever on the lookout for the forces of darkness and tyranny that set out to stifle human thought by regulating what we read.

That, at any rate, is the stated purpose of Banned Books Week. But is that really all there is to it? A review of the ALA's Banned Books Week materials on the Internet (apparently under renovation, with many non-operative links) raises a few questions.

1. Is the mere regulation of library materials, without more, contrary to liberty, where citizens remain free to purchase the materials libraries may not carry? Most libraries are public entities, staffed by government employees and funded by the taxpayers. Must taxpayers support with their dollars access to materials that violate the ideals they cherish? Must they acquiesce in the respectability that library access confers on that which is by nature not respectable? Are not the patrons of scurrilous materials free to purchase them at privately-owned bookstores and newsstands, or even off the Internet?

2. What is the nature of the "censorship" the American Library Association dreads and fears? The ALA's website includes a set of guidelines for librarians who face "challenges" to library materials. "Challenges" -- which the ALA apparently finds undesirable -- include the following (taken directly from the ALA' s website):

• Expression of Concern. An inquiry that has judgmental overtones.
• Oral Complaint. An oral challenge to the presence and/or appropriateness of the material in question.
• Written Complaint. A formal, written complaint filed with the institution (library, school, etc.), challenging the presence and/or appropriateness of specific material.
• Public Attack. A publicly disseminated statement challenging the value of the material, presented to the media and/or others outside the institutional organization in order to gain public support for further action.
• Censorship. A change in the access status of material, based on the content of the work and made by a governing authority or its representatives. Such changes include exclusion, restriction, removal, or age/grade level changes.

As the ALA clearly concedes above, "censorship" necessarily entails government action against a work based on its content. But the ALA also lumps in with censorship citizen complaints of various types. Do citizen complaints against library smut threaten the survival of the First Amendment? What about the First Amendment rights of those who do not want their tax dollars underwriting sexually explicit, anti-Christian or violent material?

3. In surveying the ALA's list of "Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000," it is clear that some of these books are accepted as literary classics (by the way: has anybody seriously questioned whether The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are, at this late date and after numerous film and television adaptations, really on the "censorship" hit list?). But many of them are aimed at children or "young adults" (i.e., children). Now parents have not only the right but the duty to regulate their children's reading. Are they not entitled to be alarmed when public institutions undermine their parental efforts by providing their children with easy access, behind their backs, to literature that is forbidden to them at home? Are concerned parents in fact the primary source of the "challenges" the ALA finds so ominous? Is the ALA being intellectually honest in holding that freedom includes the "freedom" of little kids to look at inappropriate materials against the wishes of their parents?

In its alleged quest to secure the blessings of liberty, the American Library Association ignores and indeed opposes the most obvious safeguard on liberty: the cultivation of virtue. In a letter to a cousin, John Adams wrote:

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, They may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.

In a letter to his wife, Adams wrote:

The furnace of affliction produces refinement in states as well as individuals. And the new Governments we are assuming in every part will require a purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues, or they will be no blessings. The people will have unbounded power, and the people are extremely addicted to corruption and venality, as well as the great.

Virtue is tough to cultivate while you're busy shoveling dirt into your heart. As long as freedom means nothing more than the removal of obstacles to societal corruption, the genuine article will remain in peril. So maybe it's about time the American Library Association quit worrying about parental objections to Heather Has Two Mommies, and started exercising its hitherto unused freedom to read more of the Founding Fathers. (And while they're at it, maybe that most scurrilous of reading materials, the New Testament.)

September 28th: Memorial of the Martyrs of China

Today is the memorial of the 120 Martyrs of China, canonized October 1, 2000 by Pope John Paul II. Several are Dominicans; most perished during the Boxer Rebellion. Wounded and oppressed China needs the intercession of all of them as much now as she ever did.

Here is a link to the Pope's homily from the Mass at which he canonized these saints, along with St. María Josefa of the Heart of Jesus, St. Katherine Drexel, and St. Josephine Bakhita, whose life and hope Pope Benedict XVI described at length in his encyclical Spe Salvi.

God Love the Math Geeks

Using a network of 75 computers running a Windows XP program, a group of mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a thirteen-million-digit prime number. It is the 46th known Mersenne Prime, named after the 17th-century French scholar and Minim Friar Fr. Marin Mersenne, who came up with a partial list of these apparently remarkable numbers. This discovery qualifies the UCLA group for a prize of $100,000.00 offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the first discoverer of a Mersenne Prime exceeding ten million digits.

This is the first I have ever heard of Mersenne Primes, and after trying to find out exactly what they are, I feel like I know even less about them now than I did before they intruded upon my blissful ignorance. My particular brand of geekery runs along other than mathematical lines, so I just simply do not get what Mersenne Primes are -- other than that it is unknown whether there is an infinite number of Mersenne Primes.

But since greater minds than mine think Mersenne Primes are worth at least a 75-computer network and a $100,000.00 prize, I take it they are something special. I therefore offer my congratulations to the UCLA team.

Stick to What You Know

A cardinal rule of authorship: stick to what you know. It is next to impossible for a writer to be persuasive, moving or even interesting without following this rule.

This bodes ill for playwright Buddy Sheffield, whose bawdy musical Idaho! opened off Broadway on Thursday. Asked whether he has ever been to Idaho, Sheffield says: "I haven't, but I know it's beautiful."

Questioned about the cornfields and the repeated references to Idaho as "the prairie," and the heavy Southern drawls, and the pig-hugging farmers (not to mention the high prevalence of table-cloth-pattern dresses, battered cowboy hats, farmers posing for pictures with potatoes and rifle-toting grannies), Sheffield says he knows he does not accurately portray the Gem State -- but that's all good, because his play just portrays New Yorkers' stereotypes of Idaho.

Sheffield hopes he will be able to capitalize on the crass ignorance he assumes is an outstanding trait of New Yorkers and take his purported spoof of the great Broadway musicals to the Big Time. Straining all credibility, he declares: "I hope the musical runs for five years on Broadway and everybody in Idaho gets to come and see it and feel proud about it."

Yuh-huh.

September 25, 1066: The Battle of Stamford Bridge

942 years ago today, King Harold Godwinson -- the last Anglo-Saxon king of England -- whupped both King Harald Hardråde of Norway and Harold's turncoat brother Tostig, the outsted Earl of Northumberland at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

In what would turn out to be the last of the Viking invasions of England, Harald Hardråde and his army landed in England earlier in the month with a view to conquering England. Acting on intelligence, Harold Godwinson took the Norwegians at unawares at Stamford Bridge, where the latter were waiting for supplies and an exchange of hostages and not expecting armed opposition. Although the Norwegians fought valiantly, they went down to defeat. Their survivors were allowed to return to Norway, conditioned on their pledge never again to attack England.

Unfortunately for Harold Godwinson, he was only two weeks away from getting his own butt whupped, and himself killed, at the Battle of Hastings. Whereas Harold's victory marked the end of the age of Viking invasions of England, William the Conquerer's victory marked the end of the Anglo-Saxon age. Centuries would pass before another English-speaking king sat on the throne of England.