The Conclave, the Church and the Touching Naivete of Liberals

Paul at Catholic Cartoon Blog gets it right once again.

The Cardinal Electors have now fixed a date to begin the conclave: Tuesday, March 12th.  Of course, for an event for which I want to be glued to the news, they had to choose a date when I will be in court all day.  Yet another matter of earth-shaking importance on which nobody consulted me.

But in any case, I don't want to be glued to just any old news source.  The secular media (and some "Catholic" media, too) just don't get who the Church is and what she's all about.  They don't get why their sacred cows aren't sacred to her.  And they don't get the fact that a change in Popes does not translate to a change in doctrine.  They need not hope that the next Pope will permit gay "marriage," or extol the virtues of abortion, or start ordaining women to the priesthood.  Bl. John XXIII is the nearest thing to a "good" Pope that there is in the minds of liberals, because they hopelessly misunderstand him, but it never entered his mind to implement these policies of theirs.  Even Paul VI, who allowed the liberals to run riot on his watch, upheld the Church's prohibition of birth control, in the face of acute and immense pressure from both Catholics and non-Catholics to do the opposite.

Nevertheless, uncorrected by experience, the liberals go on hoping.  It would almost be cute, if it weren't so sad.

Benghazi

Some things to remember on Election Day.

On September 11, 2012, a horde of terrorists assaulted the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, murdering our ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens; U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith; and two former Navy SEALs, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.       This attack coincided not only with the 11th anniversary of 9/11, but also with the storming of our embassy in Cairo.  Aided and abetted by the media, the administration portrayed these outrages as having been provoked by a purportedly anti-Islamic film uploaded to YouTube, the producer of which was rounded up and tossed into jail.   The Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, stated that no rescue operation was launched because it was too unclear exactly what was happening. 

This was on Thursday of last week, when we learned that, not only did the White House know the attack was premeditated, and who perpetrated it, but that they were receiving a live video feed of the attack from a drone.  The White House knew what was happening, while it was happening.    Then Friday, we learned that operatives at the CIA annex in Benghazi were not only thrice denied permission to go in and defend the consulate; they were specifically ordered to stand down, and were denied military assistance.   

Two former Navy SEALs, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, defied the order to stand down, along with at least two others.  Tyrone Woods singled out the source of mortar fire on the consulate, and painted it with his laser in the expectation that a missile would come in and take out the target.  "Expectation" is the key word here.  There would be no point in painting a target with a laser unless you were counting on a missile, especially since, by painting the target, you give away your position.  Tyrone Woods had reason to believe a missile would be forthcoming.  No missile came.  The mortars were not taken out.  Tyrone Woods was killed by mortar fire.

The Obama administration's response to this casus belli rises only from the mendacious to the buffoonish.  When the bodies of our slain embassy personnel were brought back to the United States, their families -- who did not plan to comment publicly until the White House's real-time knowledge became known -- were nonplussed at the apparent lack of concern on the part of the President and top members of his administration.  To the father of Tyrone Woods, the Vice President of the United States said: "Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?"

How appropriate that the Obama flag logo has as much class as the Vice President, and looks like blood smears.

I Am in the Wrong Line of Work

This:

Source.

...just sold at auction for $34 million.  This is the highest price ever paid for a...work?...by a living artist.  The creator of this alleged masterpiece, Gerhard Richter, is the same who is responsible for defacing Cologne Cathedral with a dreadful pixel-window, an unworthy replacement for a stained glass window destroyed during the Second World War.

But back to the $34 million junk pictured above.  Who are the biggest suckers in this scenario?  The critics who praise this delerium tremens to the skies?  The anonymous party who forked over a king's ransom to get it?  Or the rest of us working slobs who bust our butts for peanuts, when we could be covering ourselves in paint, rolling around on a piece of canvas, and selling the product for eight figures?

I know I'm in the wrong line of work.      

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Yesterday, I found myself at a Mass caught in the clutches of a sort of pop music "choir." The guitars, tambourines, mics, and bee-boppy quality of the repertoire destroyed all meditation and recollection.  I couldn't look at the priest through most of the Mass, because he was on the verge of dancing to the beat.  Despite the presence of a perfectly good choir loft, the oversized group and their many accoutrements were parked next to the altar.  The sight of even the best-behaved musicians next to the altar is a major distraction; even more so when they are dancing around and/or dressed outlandishly or immodestly.

Yet, for some reason, this circus is still considered by many to be preferable to sacred chant, in Latin (I don't think chant and English are a good fit), sung from the choir loft, or at least from the back of the church.  I never cease to be amazed at the visceral hatred of and prejudice against sacred chant -- all of a piece with the irrational hatred of the Extraordinary Form Mass, often on the part of people who have either never attended one or only remember it as a distant childhood memory. I guess the problem with chant is (a) it takes effort, talent and discipline to master; (b) it suffers no mediocrity; (c) one cannot imprint one's own idiosynchratic stamp on it. 

But the reality is that there is true freedom in chant. Once I have mastered a piece of chant, singing it makes me feel as though I am soaring. Not being metrical, it is free of time, which is a prison; it is thus, in its own way, a little taste of eternity, which is beyond time.  Which, maybe, come to think of it, is part of the problem with chant: (d) it embodies too much freedom, the unbearable lightness of being.  That's a threat to our taskmasters, the liberals in both the religious and political spheres, who live in dread lest we develop a taste for true freedom, as in the freedom of the sons of God.  

So now would be a good time to dig through our old trunks and pull out the much ballyhooed non-conformity of our youth.  Remember that?  Now we can press it into the service of something really worthwhile.  Try chant.  Get used to singing it, or at least listening to it, and you find that it quite puts the lie to the idea that it and other aspects of traditional worship represent repression and hide-bound uptightness.  On the contrary, it opens our eyes to the difference between the banal and the transcendent.  The discipline of chant is itself freeing: one is only free to create or convey beauty with discipline, because true beauty must be orderly, as Truth is orderly.  Freedom without order is really chaos, and chaos is another prison, the prison of ugliness and insecurity.  That is what we have had in our worship for far too long, and our faith has suffered on account of it.  We no longer recognize chaos for what it is, and we fail to embrace Truth and Beauty, which, as Keats said, are the same.

We need to break out of this prison.  But when we've grown up not knowing anything else, it's hard.  Freedom is dangerous and frightening in our increasingly regimented, collectivist, atheistic age.  Yet we have the tools we need to make our escape, if we just use them.  Consistent exposure to sacred chant and traditional worship are the files that Pope Benedict has baked into the cakes of Summorum Pontificum and Universae Ecclesiae and smuggled to us in our cells.

"I Be Concubining" II: Supercharged

A girl must be like a blossom

With honey for just one man. 

A man must be like honey bee 

And gather all he can. 

To fly from blossom to blossom 

A honey bee must be free, 

But blossom must not ever fly 

From bee to bee to bee. 

-- "Song of the King," from The King and I

Five years ago, we heard from the convicted thief in Avondale, Ohio whose bid for leniency in front of the court included the plea that he had been "concubining" with various women and had six babies on the way.  Like the sentencing judge, we thought that was a pretty big jaw-dropper.

But that was because we hadn't yet met the Grand-babydaddy of Concubining, Mr. Desmond Hatchett of Knoxville, Tennessee.  Mr. Hatchett, who must be like the honey bee and gather all he can, has thirty (30) children by eleven (11) different blossoms.  "I had four kids in the same year.  Twice," he says by way of partial explanation.

But it's turning out that this honey bee, not being as wealthy as the King of Siam, is not in fact as free as all that, or gathering very much either, flying from blossom to blossom to blossom.  He's finding out the hard way that (a) the authorities are not going to let him get away with not supporting his children, but (b) you can't support thirty (30) kids on minimum wage, which means (c) half his wages (the legal maximum) are garnished, and (d) he's in constant trouble with the courts.  Yet (e) he fathered nine of these children within the last three years, proving that (f) it still hasn't occurred to him to keep his britches zipped.

Nevertheless, Hatchett is seeking a break on his child support payments.  Some of his kids -- ranging in age from toddler to 14 years -- are collecting the princely sum of $1.49 a month.

Are the taxpayers going to let these kids starve?  Of course not.  Nor should we.  It's not their fault that they were born to such rotten parents.  But thanks to the wanton irresponsibility of Desmond Hatchett and the idiot women who spread their legs for him, coupled with the immorality of the welfare state that encourages them to continue in their follies, these kids start life at great risk for living in poverty, being the victims of violence at the hands of the other jerks their mothers bed down with, getting involved in drugs and other criminal activity, and generally ending up as losers like their parents.

So what's the answer?  Contraceptives are not the answer.  This guy is the product of a society that has eaten, slept and breathed contraceptives for decades, as evidenced by his willingness to use numerous women as masturbatory aids.  Abortion -- the compounding of sexual abandon with murder -- is certainly not the answer.

The answer lies in the last place few people in today's world are willing to look.  Two thousand years ago, a Man born in a stable and crucified on Calvary gave us the perfect system for avoiding situations like Desmond Hatchett's and the dreadful plight of his thirty unfortunate children.  The only trouble with it, from the point of view of honey bees and blossoms like Hatchett and his concubines, is that it compels one to make sacrifices.  But a little self-denial goes a long way, and living a virtuous life is a great antidote to indentured servitude.

H/T Charleston Thug Life.     

Happy Lenin's Birthday!

That's what you're really saying any time you celebrate Earth Day.  Yes, April 22nd is the birthday of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, Soviet thug dictator, mass murderer and tool of Satan.    That Earth Day falls on his birthday is no coincidence.  Any time you refrain from using a plastic bag or a styrofoam cup, or throw out all your incandescent light bulbs in honor of Earth Day, what you are really celebrating is the leading exponent of the most murderous ideology in human history.

I'd like to be a multibillionaire, so I could open up a new oil refinery every April 22nd.  But since I'm not a multibillionaire, I'll just have to settle for turning on all my incandescent lights tonight.

The Devil Wants Us to "Fast" from Holy Water

I am happy to be able to report that it has been a couple of years since I last saw in my area the reprehensible practice of depriving the faithful of holy water during Lent.  This is a no-no which every faithful Catholic ought to be prepared to remedy on sight.  No permission is needed, nor should it be asked.

Over the years, I have noticed a curious pattern with certain liberals on the subject of penance.  Those liberals who actually give thought to the question of penance are not fans of the old-style, stricter disciplines that once prevailed before the Second Vatican Council; but they are very fond of the curious idea of "fasting" from holy things.  One hears about this particularly in the context of "fasting" from Holy Communion, in connection with the (self-inflicted) priest shortage.  Apparently, some people think we ought also to "fast" from the use of sacramentals, and particularly holy water, during Lent.

Common sense will admit of only one response to this quack theology: the devil wants us to "fast" from sacraments and sacramentals.   

The devil wants us to make our children "fast" from Baptism and Confirmation, so that they can "decide for themselves what religion they want to be."  The devil wants persons in a state of mortal sin to "fast" from Confession.  The devil wants young couples to shack up and "fast" from Matrimony.  The devil wants young men called to the priesthood to "fast" from Holy Orders.  The devil wants souls to "fast" from the Bread of Life, the medicine of immortality and the antidote to the poison of sin that is Holy Communion.  The devil wants souls in death's shadow to "fast" from the Anointing of the Sick so they can be overtaken by the agony of their last struggle in a state of abject weakness.  The devil wants us to march weaponless and defenseless into warfare by "fasting" from the use of sacramentals, like holy water.

Lent is a time of intensified spiritual combat in a world already swarming with the armies of darkness.   Bring out the St. Benedict medals; bring out the Miraculous Medals; bring out the rosaries and the scapulars and the Sacred Heart badges and the crucifixes.  Away with the sand and the twigs and the cactus and other similar debris in stoups; let a 55-gallon drum of holy water (blessed, of course, according to the hell-whipping 1962 Rituale Romanum formula) be stationed at every entrance to every church.

The Barque of Bigots

"Throw back anyone who disagrees with Chris Matthews!"

According to alleged Catholic Chris Matthews, the Catholic Church is a magnet for bigots.  "If you're really anti-gay," declared Matthews, "you become a Catholic now."  Yet another reason for the Westboro Baptists to hate Catholics: we're competition!

When this little item first came out, the memory instantly flashed back to an incident involving another nutjob Matthews statement some years back about the current occupant of the White House -- an incident brilliantly and hysterically illustrated by the irrepressible crusading Canuck, TH2:

 So, yeah, I think we need to consider the source.

"Easy" Street

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.

Hall Monitor Nation

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.

Filth as a Political Statement

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?     

The Real Discrimination

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.

A Better Way to Commemorate 9/11

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

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.

Throwing Your Heart in the Trash

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 World's Silliest Felt Banner

Life holds few distinctions, but I think we may safely boast that here, at my parish, hangs one of the silliest felt banners in all Christendom.

The taste and judgment of this display become even more apparent in context.  What 104-year-old cathedral would not be improved by such a decoration?

Reason no. 3,247,854 for restoring the tabernacle to the (high) altar: to get it away from the felt banners.

(And no, that is not the original tabernacle.)

A Curious Thing about Priestesses

Ever notice how the women who want to be Roman Catholic wymynpriestesses never seem to be interested in Latin, Gregorian chant, the Breviarum Romanum or the Extraordinary Form of the Mass?

A Ringing Endorsement

It's not every day I get new entries for the Victory Endorsements feature on my sidebar.  An insult has to be really juicy before it's worth putting up as an endorsement.  But today is a red-letter day.  I just got the following comment from "Carol" to an expose I put up four years ago: "Edwina Gateley: Pagan Priestess":

Sign me, 'proud to be an ex-catholic,' if you, the above, are any example of what being catholic is all about.

What about'judge not, lest you be judged?' Jesus came to set us free from 'Law' with a new law, a true law: 'love one another.' How many of you judges do what Edwina does. . .work with those society considers the lowest of the low, prostitutes. The hurting. I think you're all too concerned with getting your theology self-righteously perfect. Pls. read about Pharisees, oh you perfect ones.
Sign me,
so glad to be free of religion

Personally, I suspect Carol was proud to be an ex-Catholic long before I ever came along.  No doubt I am being accused of "judging" because this post was written in praise and defense of the judgment of Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Diocese of Phoenix, who judged that Edwina Gateley was not fit to give a retreat in his diocese in June of 2007.  It's funny how people who profess themselves emancipated from religion nevertheless are always wanting to trot out Bible verses.  If Carol is "so glad to be free of religion," I wonder she has any use for the Bible, or for Jesus, or for principles like "judge not lest ye be judged."

Oh, by the way, Carol, speaking of rash judgment: I want to address your point -- if something as gauzy as your comment can be said to have anything in it as sharp as a point -- about your confidence that I have nothing to do with people society looks down on as the lowest of the low, etc.  As a matter of fact, I am a public defender.  I doubt seriously that the beatings I take on a daily basis in the service of the "lowest of the low" have ever entered into the darkest imaginings of Edwina Gateley.  

And I bet she makes at least three or four times my salary not taking them.

Color Me Unsympathetic

So Live Nation's attempt to cash in on Charlie Sheen's continuing implosion by getting people to pay to watch his drug-induced rants is off to an inauspicious start.  Sheen's "show" at the Fox Theatre in Detroit ended prematurely amid boos, jeers, and a steady stream of walk-outs.  People who paid anywhere from $49.00 to $84.00 (and God knows how much more from scalpers) are demanding their money back.

Articles on the bombed-out performance quote audience members as saying they expected a comedy show.  Baloney.  Whatever other kinds of expectations these sharks may claim, the fact is, they smelled blood in the water.  Spurred on by Charlie Sheen's prior embarrassing conduct, they paid for front-row seats to his continuing meltdown.  As far as I'm concerned, they can consider the loss of their shekels a down payment on the penance they deserve for exploiting a fellow human being in his affliction and demeaning his dignity -- however complicit Sheen himself might have been in it.

Besides which: these vultures got exactly what they paid for.  They bought their tickets in the hopes that Sheen would behave like a drug-crazed jackass, and that's precisely what they got, however unrealistic their idea of such behavior might be.  The reality of addiction bears no resemblance to a sitcom: scripted and predictable, with every crisis neatly resolving within half an hour.  The reality of addiction is perpetual chaos, frenzy, injustice, selfishness,  manipulation, insecurity, unpredictability, bottomless consumption, and an endless series of catastrophes, one after the other, punctuated by fines and terms of imprisonment.  These people paid to see all this, and now they're not happy; whereas anyone who has ever had to live with a substance abuser could have described it to them for free.

I for one have no sympathy.  In fact, I hope these hyenas don't get their money back, just as I hope Live Nation loses huge on this disgraceful speculation of theirs.  

Vulgarity as a Servant of the Common Good

*****WARNING: CRASS LANGUAGE IS QUOTED HERE*****

For quite some time now, I have been noticing bumper stickers with this logo:

The pink ribbon, of course, is a symbol of breast cancer awareness.  But this logo is an example of how, in recent years, the crusade to find a cure for breast cancer has been coupled with fifth-grade-boy-humor slogans like "Honk if you love boobies!" and "I love my big tatas" and "Caught you looking at my tatas."  So I started wondering: how did the cause of breast cancer research, of all things, fall into the hands of the vulgarians?

It turns out that "Save the Tatas" is a brand.  "Save the Tatas" sells a wide variety of products, from T-shirts to ball caps to baby and dog attire to something called "Boob Lube" soap, all sporting the above logo or some similar specimen of mammary-gland humor, a percentage of the proceeds of which (the website claims 25%, totaling $606,000.00) is supposed to go to funding breast cancer research.


But "Save the Tatas" has competitors.  There is another outfit out there called "Feel Your Boobies," which also sells merchandise, whose goal is to issue a constant stream of adolescent reminders to women to perform breast self-examinations -- or, as they can't get enough of calling it, to feel their boobies.  Then there is "Save2ndBase," another hawker of merchandise, including T-shirts with slogans such as "Take Care of Your Rack," surmounted by an image of deer antlers, and "Save 2nd Base, surmounted by two large, strategically-located baseballs.   (At least now, at long last, I finally understand what "getting to second base" means.)

Clearly, there is money to be made with all this breast cancer merchandising, and the adolescent gimmickry is a tool for making money.  The purpose of this inquiry, however, is not to determine whether the money for all the pink ribbon junk is really going to fund breast cancer research (and there are those who say that very little of it actually does).   Nor is it to find out how much of the money raised actually goes to the abortion industry (in fact, donees of  the above groups include the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which in turn gives money to Planned Parenthood, and also takes time out to publish documents that purport to debunk the theory that abortion contributes to breast cancer). For our present purposes, we can assume that every last dime raised by the sale of "Save a Life, Grope Your Wife" T-shirts actually goes to fund legitimate breast cancer research.  The question here is whether a net gain redounds to the common good by pressing vulgarity into the service of finding a cure for this deadly disease, even if it raises huge quantities of money that would not otherwise be raised.


I can already hear the howls of opposition.  "But this is about breast cancer research!  This is about curing a disease that kills thousands of women every year!  This is about raising awareness for early diagnosis!  What could be more important than saving lives?"  Certainly, saving lives is important (although, as noted above, the Susan G. Komen Foundation does not further the cause of life by contributing to the already overflowing coffers of Planned Parenthood).  And breast cancer is no joke: the National Cancer Institute says it is the most common cancer in women after skin cancer. 


But there are other values.  We are not put on this earth either for the sole purpose of prolonging our time on it, or to devote ourselves entirely to eating, drinking and being merry.  Our overriding duty is to view this life in the light of eternity, and act accordingly; and we ought, while we are here, to do all we can to create a society that is conducive to this end.

The coarsening of public discourse, and the celebration of the low and the crass, is destructive of this end; nor can it really be said to achieve its ostensible purpose.  So far from drawing attention to the seriousness of breast cancer, the vulgarisms peddled on bracelets and T-shirts and hats really draw attention only to themselves, and to those who sport them -- witness the websites that peddle these wares, which encourage customers to send in photos of themselves wearing or displaying them.  All these things really are are a way for people who feel straitened and confined by the requirements of decorum to publicly flout the rules of polite society; to congratulate themselves on "caring" while avoiding the grueling and messy toil that making a real difference requires; and to win admiration and validation for their impudence, which is touted as courage or forthrightness.

And by exalting coarsened sensibilities, all we end up with is the transformation of people -- especially women -- into objects.  All this focusing on "boobies" and "tatas" does nothing but reduce women to nothing more than the sum of their body parts.  And since women are the ones pushing and promoting this garbage, we make the world safe for neanderthals by stripping ourselves of the social defenses that formerly kept their boorish behavior in check.   Worse, we lose the ability to distinguish between decorum and boorishness.  It should come as no surprise to us to find ourselves at the mercy of the mouthbreathers and knuckledraggers who regard us as nothing more than playthings.  But it will be our doing, because we encouraged it, and because we lashed out at the good, chivalrous men who would otherwise have intervened to prevent it.


When you stop and consider it, we really do not want a world that encourages the proliferation of this sort of thing:

But that is exactly where we are headed.  Crassness and vulgarity make treacherous servants, and we are fools to think we can harness them for the good.