March 2004 Archives

10. You panic when you think you've run out of shallots.

9. You know precisely how many days it's been since you last sharpened your heavy European knives.

8. You refer to pre-ground black pepper as "grey dandruff."

7. You call the "parmesan cheese" in the green can "white dandruff."

6. You believe fresh garlic has sacramental qualities.

5. You can tell where an olive oil originated by tasting a single drop.

4. You have a quasi-erotic attachment to roasted pignoli.

3. You look down on people who don't know that "pignoli" is Italian for "pine nuts."

2. You think the first step for preparing "instant" mac-and-cheese is making a roux.

And the #1 way you can tell you're a food elitist...

1. You would spend more on a truffle than a car payment.

In February, Bishop Ratko Peric of the Diocese of Mostar-Duvno in Bosnia-Herzegovina issued a new summary of the Medjugorje case. At the end of the report, he lists the Holy See's statements:

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has intervened four times through two of its Secretaries, while the Prefect, Cardinal Ratzinger, also made an important intervention.

In 1985, Msgr. Alberto Bovone notified the Secretary of the Bishops' Conference of Italy not to organize official pilgrimages to Medjugorje.

In 1995, Msgr. Tarcisio Bertone wrote to the bishop of Langres, Msgr. Leon Taverdet, and repeated the same to Msgr. Lucien Daloz of Besan�on, France, who were interested in knowing the position of the Holy See on Medjugorje.

Finally, in 1998, the same Secretary wrote to Msgr. Gilbert Aubry, bishop of Reunion. All these letters emphasized that pilgrimages, whether private or public, are not allowed if they presuppose the authenticity of the apparitions, since this would be in contradiction to the declaration of the Bishops' Conference of Yugoslavia.

Ratzinger's frei erfunden. In 1998, when a certain German gathered various statements which were supposedly made by the Holy Father and the Cardinal Prefect, and forwarded them to the Vatican in the form of a memorandum, the Cardinal responded in writing on 22 July 1998: "The only thing I can say regarding statements on Medjugorje ascribed to the Holy Father and myself is that they are complete invention" - "frei erfunden".

L'Espresso's www.chiesa department presents an excerpt from the testimony of Romanian priest Tertulian Ioan Langa to the persecution of the Church under Communism.

(Thanks, CWN.)

Maryknoll, back in the day, used to produce men like Father Vincent Capodanno, who was awarded the Medal of Honor when he dove into machine-gun fire to protect a wounded Marine. They sent missionaries to the furthest, most inhospitable places on Earth to bear witness to the Gospel. For administering corporal works of mercy, they were legendary.

Today, they are indistinguishable from any other left-wing organization, except they pretend to be motivated by Christian values. You won't find any reference to abortion, or any other life issue, in their 2004 election guide. They favor

• Abolishing the "drug war";
• Addressing the "root causes" of terrorism (how original!);
• Closing the "School of the Americas" (a boutique cause of the Left);
• Ending subsidies and tariffs that protect domestic industries at the expense of poorer nations. (Okay, I'm with them on that one.)

What any of this has to do with Jesus Christ, I'm not certain. Here's a sure sign that their political commitments are more important than the poor: they're against technology that will produce more food for hungry people.

Let them be as the fig tree in the Gospel.

Bizarre Attractive Force Found In Mayonnaise

Our Holy Father should inspire to live fully the work to which we're called.

Pope John Paul II will keep a full Holy Week schedule, including Easter Mass in St. Peter's Square and a Good Friday appearance at the Colosseum, the Vatican said Tuesday

"It ain't over until..."

Springfield, MA, vocations director Fr. Thomas Pacholec is raising money for clergy abuse victims by running in the Boston Marathon April 19.

Alix and I went to the National Gallery Sunday (for the second time in a month, no less) and spent some time looking at the Van Eyck Eric explicates so well below.

My favorite canvas in the gallery is on tour, having been replaced by a triptych, which, while good, is a pale disappointment to anyone looking for the Raphael.

See the gallery's website for more information on this piece. Please, no emails telling me why the race, locale, structures, or colors are all historically incorrect. We don't care, and neither should you.

Some more details about the Annunciation painting posted last week, which was painted by Jan van Eyck around 1434-36.

ECCE ANCILLA D[OMI]NI This is backwards and upside-down because Mary is speaking to God the Father (seen in the upper window)
	SCENES OF HEROISM The floor has illustrations of one man doing great things (in this case, Sampson destroying the enemies of God)
	COMPLEX COMPOSITION The composition uses two perspectives: the foreground objects have a vanishing point somewhere in Mary's abdomen, thus focusing attention on where Jesus is conceived. The other lines have their vanishing point just past the righthand side of the painting.
		THE TRINITY God the Father appears in the stained-glass window at the top, God the Son is in Mary's womb, and God the Holy Spirit is the dove descending on the golden sunbeams.
	INTRICATE DETAILS At left, see how the crystal of Gabriel's scepter is translucent, allowing part of his hand and the pillar in the back to be visible. Also, note the light refracted through the circular glass in the topmost picture.
THE MOST ASTONISHING DETAIL The painting is only a little over a foot wide and slightly less than three feet tall. It was the left panel of a triptych, a three-part painting that usually had one central painting in the middle, with two painted panels on the sides that closed to conceal all of the paintings. Typically, a sacred triptych would have been closed except during Mass, at which time it would have been opened while the priest was at the altar. The congregation would have been too far away to see any fine details (though they would have been able to see that it was the Annunciation), and the priest would have been busy praying. This meticulous work -- hours of sketching, layering expensive pigmented oil paints, getting the simulated lighting and skin tones just right -- would have scarcely been seen by anyone except God Almighty. More information about the painting is at the National Gallery of Art.

Formation... It sounds so proper!

Why can't be just educate people through formation instead of having the Vatican issue "repressive" documents about liturgical abuse.

Fact is: the document on liturgical abuse is meant to be used in formation. It addresses the dos and don'ts in areas where some people who have in the past been responsible for formation have failed.

People who are on the CreativeLiturgy™ Bandwagon - take heed! No more stones instead of bread. Stop adding a few tablespoons of yourself into your liturgical activity and pay attention to hundreds of years of standard practice and to the actual text of the Vatican II documents instead of the Voice of Vatican II that you hear in your head.

Seriously. I've had it and skulls will be cracked if you don't pay attention.

I'm looking forward to the Vatican document on Liturgical abuse in the same way I look forward to a constitutional amendment that affirms marriage is between a man and a woman.

What's the correlation?

It's the in both cases, the "informed professionals" have sought to impose norms that are counter to what the average person knows to be true.

If you see a nun in a leotard prancing about the sanctuary during the 1st reading, the average person knows that's wrong.

When mayors are "marrying" same-sex couples, the average person knows that wrong, that it's not a marriage but rather a farce and a political statement.

So the idea that guidelines on liturgical abuse could be "repressive" is quite outrageous. If the liturgists who brought us the Mass of the Unordained Women or the Dance of the Winter Solstice had repressed their own desire to remake the liturgy in their own image, we wouldn't need the document.

People are longing for truth and a prayerful liturgical atmosphere. I'm sure the guidelines will help with that in as much as the Do-it-yourself-Liturgists can bring themselves to obey them.

Yassir Arafat gives the thumbs-up to "The Passion of the Christ."

Oops! That will have to wait until Easter! Just like the new Vatican Document on liturgical abuse!

The document has been unusually controversial.
...
Among other things, the draft insisted on limiting the role of lay ministers, forbade liturgical dance, warned against use of nonapproved texts, cautioned against pseudo-liturgical rites by and for women, and said distribution of Communion under the forms of bread and wine is not always a good idea.

That sounds reasonable, not controversial.

At the end of the session, Servite Father Silvano Maggiani, president of the Association of Professors of Liturgy, read a message expressing the liturgists' fear that the liturgical reform movement opened by Vatican II was being closed down.

The reform needs to be reformed! The reform "movement" isn't a movement any more - it simply perserves liturgical practices that are supposed to give more meaning to things many lay people don't even understand. Take the glass chalice, for instance. "We want people to see the red of wine - it looks like blood." Is is blood, Christ's blood, after the Consecration, but focusing on the accidents of wine doesn't help anyone to come to belief and reverance for the Blessed Sacrament.

What we need is orthodoxy and stability in the litgury, and a renewed focus on faithfulness to the Magisterium and Catechesis. The yahoos who want to re-form the liturgy every Sunday need to realize there are a multitude of souls at stake.

Father Maggiani told Catholic News Service that the association later sent personal letters to Pope John Paul II and other high officials at the Vatican, expressing "bewilderment, unease, fear and concern" at the apparent direction of the liturgical abuse document.

Father Maggiani, a consultor to the office that prepares papal liturgies, wrote that it was not right to "define as abuse things that are not." Any real abuses should be corrected not with a "repressive" spirit but through formation, he said.

He also wrote that it would go against Vatican II to try and return to a "schism ... between lay faithful and ordained ministers."

What a load! Reading things like this make me want to grate cheese.

NCR reporter John Allen interviewed Cardinal Pell about Vox Clara on March 11. The interview may be found here. My favorite question and response:

Let me ask you something I hear from a lot from non-experts, which is that as important as questions of translations may be, the quality of liturgical experience is much more influenced by how good the homily is, how beautiful the music, and how welcoming the community. If you really wanted to do something about liturgy, wouldn't it make more sense to address these other variables?

...[T]hese other things are enormously important. Whether they are so clearly superior to this issue I think is debatable, but it's not a debate that's particularly worth having. You see, it's a very difficult thing to do anything about the welcome in a community, the quality of preaching, but here with these translations - that's something that we can improve. Also, if you get the right quality of language, it can be a great help to worship, in calling people to prayer. You've only got to look at the enduring influence of something like the Book of Common Prayer, or the King James Bible. Even though its language is no longer appropriate, the King James Bible was written to be proclaimed. You've only got to get up and read it and you can feel that. I don't want a quaint translation. I want something that is clear, though not everyday by any manner or means...

And in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God into a city of Galilee, called Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. Who having heard, was troubled at his saying, and thought with herself what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said to her: Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God.

Luke 1:26-30

The Annunciation is one of my favorite feast days, and it's very popular with the Johnson kids, too. This is the day when God's promise of salvation has begun to be fulfilled. Let us praise the Holy Virgin by whom that salvation comes.

Now this is one for the geek Catholics: obscure intra-Church stuff with an ecumenical angle.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church has petitioned the Pope to be raised to the dignity of a patriarchal Church -- giving its principal archbishop the title of Patriarch of Kiev. In practice, their clergy have been using the title for years. Since the Russian Orthodox Church gave itself the same status many years ago, it only seems fitting that the Ukrainian Church, which was founded earlier, should have it too. The prelates of the Russian Orthodox Church, however, don't take kindly to the idea.

Here's a statement from Ukrainian Catholic bishop Basil Losten.

A pediatrician who says a fetus can feel pain during an abortion will be allowed to testify in a legal challenge to a new law banning a type of late-term abortion, a judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Richard Casey ruled Friday that Dr. Kanwaljeet S. Anand can testify as a government witness at a trial scheduled for later this month.
...
Dr. Kanwaljeet S. Anand Anand has conducted research on pain in fetuses and newborns and concluded that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks of gestation.

Marvin Olasky's Christian newsmagazine WORLD has a cover story on art and culture, and makes an interesting point about art as a divine vocation:

"Bezalel and Oholiab and every craftsman in whom the Lord has put skill and intelligence to know how to do any work in the construction of the sanctuary shall work in accordance with all that the Lord has commanded." And Moses called Bezalel and Oholiab and every craftsman in whose mind the Lord had put skill, everyone whose heart stirred him up to come to do the work (Exodus 35:30-36:2).

This is the first text of Scripture that directly teaches the doctrine of vocation: Bezalel has been "called by name." Bezalel, also the first to be described as having been filled with the Holy Spirit, is given a task by God, who has called him not into some prophetic office, but to work with his hands, to serve God and his neighbors by being an artist.

Via Vociferous Yawpings: Bai MacFarlane is fighting the divorce in court, God bless her.

The story of how the couple met isn't on his web site CatholiCity any more, but Google's cache still has it.

It's hard to imagine these two very public Catholics being eligible for a declaration of nullity, and I presume Mrs. MacF. will make the case against that too if it comes up.

What the heck went wrong?

When you register for American Airlines' frequent-flier program, they give you a choice of about 200 salutations, including "Admiral" and "Vice President" and titles of nobility. I could not resist -- no longer am I a mere commoner. As you can see by this envelope, I am...

Massachusetts' highest court once again rules that old obstacles to free sexual expression must be swept aside.

BOSTON (AP) The state's highest court ruled Monday that the state's law against incest doesn't apply to stepparents and said it was up to the Legislature to enact a ban.

Ruling in the case of a 60-year-old man accused of having sex with his teenage stepdaughter, the Supreme Judicial Court said under the current law the incest prohibition applies only to natural or adoptive parents.

Wendy Murphy, a professor at the New England School of Law, said she appreciated the court's ruling ''in a technical sense,'' but she questioned why the justices didn't recognize the role of stepparents in modern families when they have recognized the changing nature of families in other cases.

For instance, the SJC noted the ''changing realities of the American family'' in its landmark decision in November that found it was unconstitutional to ban gay marriage in the state.

Here's a recommendation for those who wish to engage Newman at the heart of his Catholicity - unapologetic orthodoxy rooted in the supernatural. Buy it for yourself or for a mamby-pamby liberal Catholic you know who trots out Newman to justify their view of the development of doctrine or the crappy implementation to date of Vatican II. Maybe you know an Anglican or Anglo-Catholic who clings tenaciously to the Church of England. They, too, would do well to read this book.

In the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, it is customary for someone -- a server or other layman -- to assist the priest as he chants the Gospel. The server stands in front of the celebrant and bows his head, and the priest rests the Gospel book open upon it.

This does not work very well when the server is about 4 inches taller than the celebrant, even after bowing his head.

It's a good thing this maladroit arrangement happened at a liturgy on Saturday morning, and only nine people were present. I can't really tell what it looked like, because my head was underneath a book at the time. Anyway, Bishop John was very nice about it later.

Obviously, all else being equal, the answer to this post's title is "yes." I think the answer is "yes, but not right now," and I'll explain why.

This is a surprisingly neutral article about Evangelical efforts to convert Iraqis to Christianity. Let me first say that I have the highest respect for the zeal and fearlessness displayed by many Evangelicals, and I have no doubts about their sincerity or love of Jesus Christ. The best of them could teach your average Catholic a thing or two about how to live a Christian life without compromise.

That said, I have serious concerns about how Evangelicals run their foreign ministries. They center around two issues: the prudence of evangelizing in Iraq right now, and their attempts to convert Christians to their brand of Christianity, without regard to the Christian communities that already exist in that culture.

Let's take the second point first. When I was in Nicaragua a couple of years ago, I saw many Evangelical churches aggressively proselytizing in the Juigalpa province, a poor, rural area. I can understand evangelizing a non-Christian population, but the people were uniformly Christian. This is a part of the world where a large town's main general store is named after the Fatima apparitions, and bus drivers put a religious slogan ("Jesus Bendiga Mi Camino"), a picture of the Virgin, or both on the rear of their vehicles. (I also noted with satisfaction that Catholic churches weren't even marked as such, and that everyone -- Catholic or Protestant -- knew where they were.)

Converting Catholics is an explicit denial that Catholicism is Christian. If Evangelicals really believe that it doesn't matter what church you go to, as long as you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, then why attempt to lure away poor, believing Catholics? Or active members of other Christian traditions who are entirely orthodox about the nature of Jesus?

Next, take a look at this quotation from the article:

"It is every Christian's requirement to share Jesus Christ's gospel with everyone on the planet, including every Muslim," said Richard D. Land, president of the public policy arm of the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. "If that causes anger and violence, it only shows we must speak more loudly."

I don't mean to lampoon Mr. Land or his efforts. (Okay, maybe just a little.) But there's a serious question as to whether they are undermining the long-term prospects of the Gospel by concentrating on short-term growth of storefront churches. Arabs are enamored of conspiracy theories, and Iraqis are particularly enthusiastic in their love of such things. (Please, spare me any lectures on the evils of "ethnic stereotypes," because this is generally true. Ask anyone who's spent time in the Middle East.)

There are many Iraqis -- by no means all, but a very significant minority -- who believe that the U.S. invaded Iraq to steal its oil wealth and convert the inhabitants to Christianity. Since wealth-stealing and forced conversions are recurring themes in that part of the world, that isn't as absurd it might seem, and I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss their concerns.

Right now, the United States and its allies are trying to stabilize Iraq so it can have a decent society. That will be hampered if there is a widespread belief among the populace that the "crusaders" are there to destroy or subvert Islam. The Christian message will find a more receptive audience when the hearers are less paranoid and more self-confident.

I'm not a relativist, and I'm not saying that Iraqis don't deserve to hear the Word of God. Some places just aren't ready for the Gospel yet. Why not wait another year or two, when things are more stable and there's a native Iraqi government in place? Contrary to the comment in the article, there's no "six-month window" to spread the Gospel in Mesopotamia.

A friend asks prayers for the family of Catholic writer/speaker Johnnette Benkovic:

+ Please storm heaven for the necessary graces. He had recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. Jesus, mercy.

Dear G--,
Our son, Simon, was killed today in his truck in an accident. Please pray for us...please pray for us.
Johnnette

AP reports

China has shut down a pair of Web sites that were free-ranging user forums known as blogs, stepping up government attempts to control political discussion on the Internet, a media watchdog group reported even as one site reappeared Friday.
However, a note Friday on the page of the second site, blogbus.com, said it was still closed due to content problems.
"Because individual postings contained forbidden content, the server is temporarily down. We will seek a speedy resolution to the problem," said a message on the site's Web page.

The characters in The Duplex don't know it, but Lenten abstinence is not required on Solemnities (such as St. Joseph's day) that fall on a Friday.

Can. 1251: Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

You been here FOUR HOUR!
You scare my wife!
You eat my profit!

More clues as to how Senator John "F-ing" Kerry treats the "little people":

[On his next ski run], a reporter and a camera crew were allowed to follow along on skis — just in time to see Mr. Kerry taken out by one of the Secret Service men, who had inadvertently moved into his path, sending him into the snow.

When asked about the mishap a moment later, he said sharply, "I don't fall down," then used an expletive to describe the agent who "knocked me over."

The incident occurred near the summit. No one was hurt, and Mr. Kerry came careering down the mountain moments later, a look of intensity on his face, his lanky frame bent low to the ground.

P.S. Note to Senator Kerry: personally insulting your bodyguards is a bad idea on many levels.

Startling news that will turn the tide.

Headline: Blood Runs thru Streets as an Angry Mob Riots After Seeing "The Passion of the Christ" - Gibson Partially to Blame

er... maybe it's

Headline: Couple Fails to Resolve Rudimentary Theological Dispute and Resorts to Violence. Cops involved.

Via CNN.

The secular religion of environmentalism has found a new harbinger of death: the decline of British butterfly populations. Aaaack! Ratify the Kyoto treaty! Recycle your toilet paper! Drive your SUVs off a cliff (after filing the proper environmental impact statement with local, state, and federal authorities)!

Nature emits at least 95% of the carbon dioxide that's released into the atmosphere. Humans release less than 5%. But it's that 5% that is going to destroy the butterflies and the rest of the planet. Never mind that major volcanoes have put more debris and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than man ever has, and in short, violent spurts.

Strangely, although many environmentalists buy into the Gaia hypothesis, which says that the Earth is a single organism with many parts (including humans), they think a small rise in one kind of gas spells disaster for the planet. Is the Earth really that fragile? It's survived five major rounds of extinction before. You'd think that plant life would increase a little bit to exploit this increased resource. It isn't like CO2 is a new gas, invented by evil scientists.

Another good question is: so what? Environmentalists would respond that mass extinction would throw off the "equilibrium" of the planet. Again, so what? The planet would eventually find a new stasis after a while. According to paleontologists, something like 99% of all species are already extinct; what does a few more matter? Organisms come, and organisms go, and the planet seems relatively indifferent to their fate.

I referred to environmentalism as a "secular religion." I didn't mean that clean air and water are religious concepts, but rather that the ideological "story" of environmentalism is rooted in quasi-religious, quasi-Christian beliefs. There is the innocent Garden of Eden (when man was a hunter and gatherer), the Fall (agriculture, or perhaps industrialization -- theologians disagree on this point), the Redemption (Earth Day, 1970), and the Apocalypse (global warming).

Once you've decided that man's actions are dangerous and that we somehow stand outside of nature instead of at its pinnacle, it's just a question of gathering evidence of man's destructiveness. You do that through generating studies with the foreordained conclusion that man is going to destroy the Earth. Faith seeking understanding, as it were.

If the Earth is created by God and given to man, then it's a moral failure to abuse it. But if there's no God, then what does it matter if a few species disappear? Or a lot of species? Unless butterflies are God's creatures and thus beautiful and worthy of respect in their own right, it's hard to feel sorry for them.

Ok... so it's an eco-terrorist.

Still - this is a bit amusing:

In another e-mail, [suspect] Cottrell tried to recruit his fellow Caltech students to pose as runners and plaster 1,000 bumper stickers that read "My SUV supports terrorism" on vehicles in the Los Angeles area. But when the bumper stickers arrived, "terrorism" had been misspelled. The plan was abandoned.

Should liturgical music feel good? If so, not so - why?

How many of Senator John Kerry's grandparents are ethnically Irish?

WINNER: The Poster Formerly Known As Anonymous Coward, in 23 minutes. Like Saint Patrick, Kerry is 0% Irish.

What was Saint Patrick of Ireland's ethnic background? (No fair using Google to answer.)

WINNER: Father Jeffrey Keyes was quick to point out that St. Patrick was born in Britain, and that St. Patrick was a Roman citizen. He was not ethnically Irish. He only ended up in Ireland because the kind, gentle folk of that land kidnapped and enslaved him.

Look at Thoroughly Modern Mary, a parody-blog by the talented Jeff Miller. Dom says he dosen't know which is scarier, TMM or Mr. Miller's other parody-blog, Moloch Now, and neither do I. I did think TMM was uproarously funny, though, probably because of our own sometime visitor, Sr. Nouveau Mary.

Allen the accountant (plug) sent this St. Louis Jesuits spoof over the transom:

Though the markets may fall and the bonds turn to dust
Yet the standard of gold shall last
As a treasure to all who trust not the bank
Sing the praise and the glory of gold.

A short summary of Senator Kerry's military experience: he commanded a vessel in Vietnam, and was decorated for valor. He received three non-life-threatening wounds during his four months in Vietnam. Because of these wounds, he abandoned his comrades by petitioning the Navy to let him leave a combat zone (there was a rule allowing three-times-wounded servicemen to leave).

That landed him in a cushy desk job working for an admiral. Then he got the Navy to release him before his committment was over, in order to run for Congress. He then testified before Congress about war crimes he never saw, committed by men he never knew (and who were later proven liars.)

Sen. Kerry is the kind of officer that enlisted men loathe -- working the system for his own benefit instead of theirs, advancing his own interests with no loyalty to those underneath him. His haughty demeanor would have only exacerbated their dislike. Maybe he was a different man back then, but I doubt it. I'd be curious to see what his former subordinates really think of him. They're probably too classy to denounce their former commanding officer in public, but it would be great to get them into a bar and see what they say after a few drinks.

Men are willing to fight and die for a flawed, arrogant, and even cruel leader if they sense he shares their struggles and believes in their cause. They despise self-serving careerists, because they know that selfish men will often endanger their lives for no good reason, and think of the people around them as merely means to an end.

And would a white dress be inappropriate?

A priest friend of mine (and a fellow Casey Democrat supporting Bush) tipped me of to the following troubling story. It appears that the Kerry campaign reportedly assaulted a woman for using her first ammendment rights to express remorse for her abortion. "I just wanted Kerry to know my abortion hurt me," the woman says, before Kerry's campaign aids grabbed her sign and tore it to pieces. "They wouldn't even let me keep the pieces."

Not surprisingly, I just checked the website of a certain fourth year philosophy student and there isn't a peep out of him about this incident. Ah well, I imagine he only would have attempted to blame the President for making abortion a wedge issue. Don't be fooled. It is the demoncrats who, in positioning themselves as the Abortion party, and reportedly assaulting the rights of women who dare speak against Terry's patriarchy, have made abortion a wedge issue among Catholics.

Kind of cool to have another planetoid around.

It's a place where these guys can go!

This is in response to Catholic Light's favorite Protestant, Ken Shepherd, who commented on a previous post about praying to the saints.

Ken, I have to take issue with your assertion that "asleep" in the NT is anything other than a euphemism for bodily death. Is our God the God of the living, or the dead? In Revelation, are the saints who cast their crowns before the Lamb "asleep"? No: "...they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them" (Rev. 7:15)

Or Revelation 4, which describes the worship of the Lamb that goes on "day and night"?

Are the saints indifferent about what happens on Earth? "...I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, 'How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?'" (Rev. 6:9-10) That sounds like they're tremendously concerned with enacting justice on earth.

You don't cease to be a member of the Church merely by dying. There is one body in the Lord, not separate bodies for the physically living and the dead. "From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work." (Eph. 4:16) Some do the work in heaven, others do it on earth. There's nothing we can do for the saints in heaven; they have attained perfection. However, since they have been transformed into "little Christs," they have the ability to pray to the Father and intercede on our behalf, just as Revelation says they do.

I think it's best to leave the question of imputed righteousness for another day. (For now, I'll point out that Christ himself commanded us to "be perfect, even as my Father in Heaven is perfect," and I think he meant it!) What I'd like to do is ask, if you don't mind, when and where you think prayer to the saints originated? Because I can show you references to that practice that are contemporary with Scripture, and in the decades following. To my knowledge, that wasn't even a significant point of controversy within Christendom until Martin Luther reacted against the real, scandalous, and devil-inspired abuse of relics and other saint-related devotional practices.

If the practice is wrong, it was wrong almost from the very beginning, since as I mentioned before there are ancient accounts of the earliest Christians venerating the graves of the saints and building altars over their bodies. And why didn't Jesus step in to stop it? What was the Holy Spirit doing for 1,500 years, if it wasn't guiding the Church? Why would he allow his children to persist in such gross errors for so long?

An actual license plate, seen in a northern Virginia parking lot:

The Left is always accusing conservatives of being "haters," motivated by animus and little else. But it's becoming increasingly clear that this is what the psychologists call "projection."

OpinionJournal.com has a piece by Methodist minister Donald Sensing about the connection between artificial contraception and gay marriage. Though on the surface, the two phenomena have little in common, he makes the right connections:

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of "saving marriage" is pretty specious. There's little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.

If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?

I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

It is my fervent hope that Protestants join the Catholic Church in opposing artificial contraception, the exacerbating cause of bad marriages, illegitimacy, spousal abuse, and abortion. (It isn't the sole cause, and eliminating it wouldn't make those problems disappear, but it drives those problems.) Such a change would only be a return to the universal Protestant tradition until 70 years ago, when the Anglicans decided they would abandon Christianity for the siren-call of the world, and decide to place their faith in latex and chemicals instead of God's providence.

As I mentioned in a previous post, our family was hunting for a house for the last few weeks. We just bought one today. It's about three miles south of where we live right now -- that will add maybe another 5-8 minutes to my commute. No big deal when your commute is already a bit less than an hour.

Just to add to the "praying to the saints" discussion, we have been asking for St. Joseph's intercession all along. We think he came through for us, big-time: the house is bigger than we thought we'd get, and at a very fair price. We're still going to finish our novena, though.

The going rate for ousting a pro-American European government: 200 dead Spaniards.

The cliché is right this time: the terrorists did win. They might not have been on the ballot, but they managed to turn mass murder into an effective political tool.

UPDATE: David Frum voices the same opinion at NRO today. "Lesson: terrorism can work. Prediction: therefore expect more of it. Expect more terrorism aimed at the United Kingdom, against Australia, against Poland, and – ultimately – against the United States. For the terrorists must now wonder: If murder can influence elections in Spain – why not in the United States?"

Ken Shepherd has some comments related to the post about the St. Joseph novena.

I'm going to defer to my friends at Catholic Answers, who, when I was struggling with things like this, gave me the biblical, theological and rational grounds for what Catholics believe and do. If not for them and God's grace, I might be an angry ex-Catholic today.

Some may grant that the previous objections to asking the saints for their intercession do not work and may even grant that the practice is permissible in theory, yet they may question it on other grounds, asking why one would want to ask the saints to pray for one. "Why not pray directly to Jesus?" they ask.

Also, God answers in particular the prayers of the righteous. James declares: "The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. Elijah was a man of like nature with ourselves and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth its fruit" (Jas. 5:16–18). Yet those Christians in heaven are more righteous, since they have been made perfect to stand in God’s presence (Heb. 12:22-23), than anyone on earth, meaning their prayers would be even more efficacious.

The full article is available at www.catholic.com.

I wrote this essay about Martha Stewart four years ago in a writing class. I had intended to shop it around for publication somewhere, but my daughter was born a month later and I never got around to it. Not knowing much about Ms. Stewart and her empire, but seeing that she made a lot of people angry, I wanted to know more about her. An excerpt:

Feminists probably think of Martha Stewart the way capitalists think of pawnshops – the seedy side of their ideology, unsightly yet unavoidable. She may be a success on her own terms, but that success is compromised by her subject matter. It’s all right to be a rich corporate lawyer, but to become wealthy by telling people how to give parties, well, that’s so very…domestic.

I have a social-justice question for Senator John Kerry: how can you be for "international cooperation" and against "Benedict Arnold CEOs" who "outsource" American jobs?

Translated, that means we aren't going to let Indians compete for American IT contracts or allow the Chinese to sell us Happy Meal toys. So you're going to simultaneously deny those countries access to American markets, and then expect they'll support your foreign policy?

How will that work, exactly?

Pope St. Gregory the Great (d. 3-12-604)

(His current feast is 9-3, to commemorate his ascendance to the papacy. Today is his dies natalis, though, and celebrating twice per year isn't too much, is it?)

Priest targeted after testifying in suit

RCF.org has tons of background on this issue. Arlingtonians come down on both sides - some supporting Fr. Haley and castigating the Bishop, some saying Fr. Haley is a disobedient snitch. Fr. Haley will be tried in ecclesiastical court next week at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary.

A Catholic priest who exposed the sexual misdeeds of fellow clergy at three parishes in the Diocese of Arlington is being prosecuted by his own bishop on five ecclesiastical charges.
The Rev. James R. Haley, an Arlington priest, will appear before a church tribunal to answer charges brought against him by the Most Rev. Paul S. Loverde, bishop of Arlington. Presiding as judge will be the Most Rev. Thomas G. Doran, bishop of Rockford, Ill.

I met LtCol. Robert Zangas when he was a captain and I was a mere PFC. He had a sly sense of humor and an honest demeanor, and though I did not know him well, he seemed like am excellent officer, and he was well-liked by everyone in our civil affairs unit.

His tour ended at our unit, but a decade later he returned, just in time to go to war. I was in the first detachment to go to the Mideast, and he was with the rest of the unit, but after the war we all regrouped in the city of Al Kut to run Wasit province until we could turn things over to the Army. LtCol. Zangas's professionalism and good humor was a calming influence on many Marines, and his leadership contributed greatly to our successes.

After the war, LtCol. Zangas returned to Iraq, this time as a civilian working for the Coalition Provisional Authority as a press officer. This week, two men dressed as policemen murdered him, another CPA employee, and their Iraqi translator. He leaves behind a wife and three children.

Please pray for the soul of Robert Zangas, and for his widow, and his fatherless children. Also, please pray that we never abandon Iraq to the vicious thugs who prowl about that country seeking to oppress its people once again.

Break their teeth in their mouth, O God!
Break out the fangs of the young lions, O LORD!
Let them flow away as waters which run continually;
When he bends his bow,
Let his arrows be as if cut in pieces.

(Psalm 58:6-8)

UPDATE: There's an AP story about the attack here.

I watched about 10 minutes of Hannity and Colmes last night and finally couldn't take it any more.

Here's the question: What's worse? Calling someone a crook or calling someone a [name describing a posterior region]?

Both Bush and Kerry have committed verbal gaffes, thinking they were off mic and off camera. Bush and Cheney agreed back in the last campaign that a certain NYT reporter had some personality deficiencies. Kerry's comment calls into question the moral behavior of Bush & Friends.

Why these things are treated equally among the talking heads is beyond me.

start a Novena to St. Joseph.

His feast day is March 19.

Sens. Push Law for Receipt of Votes Cast

Sens. Bob Graham of Florida and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York are pushing legislation that would ensure a printed receipt of votes cast on new touch-screen computer terminals, arguing it will restore voter confidence in the election process.

Don't you think these receipts will end up in the same place your grocery receipts go? The receipt from your trip to Bennigans? Your dry cleaning claim checks? Your lottery tickets?

as much as you love the person you hate the most.

This Lenten message sponsored by Catholic Light.

As we suspected, Ashcroft-haters are full of glee that the Attorney General is in intensive care. Michelle Malkin, conservative Catholic columnist and total badass, takes them apart in her latest column.

As Joe Sobran and various others have pointed out, one complaint about the Passion movie is to call it "pornographic" because of its violence.

But apparently you can leave out the qualifier! The admirable Jesuit professor Fr. Ronald Tacelli gave a talk at my parish on Sunday, and mentioned the latest theory he's heard from the cultured despisers of religion. Some people are saying that Passion is just plain porn: or gay porn, to be specific. Now that's pretty ridiculous, Professor Tacelli says: if Mel Gibson were to turn the Crucifixion of our Lord into gay erotica, the liberals would be praising it! They'd say it's "transgressive"!

For several years, I've been bouncing around the idea of helping start a plainchant choir at my parish. Mainly, the idea has been bouncing around in my head, because my desire exceeds the amount of free time I can spare, as well as my expertise (which is pretty much limited to loving chant and having many CDs of early church music).

Then one of the organists at our parish said he would be willing to help coordinate a plainchant group and help with the music. He also knows of one other bass who could sing. This may come to nothing, but if the time commitment isn't too great, I'm very excited to do it.

Anyone have any advice? How to pick music, how many voices to recruit? Your thoughts will be poured into the empty vessel that is my mind.

Scrappleface reports: 9th Circuit overturns Iraqi Constitution.

RC conviced me I should start posting my Catholic choir tidbits here, so I will. He has root access to our Web server after all...

So item 1 is this:

Brian Baldwin mentioned he found the Latin Mass with no singing to be a spiritually uplifting and peaceful experience. I can relate to that, primarily because as a musician I can be easily distracted by the music.

Why is that? Trained musicians like Brian who have years of teaching experience, a graduate degree and thousands of hours of performance experience have had one thing drilled into them: a focus on quality. Mediocrity has no place in musical performance, whether it be a lousy composition or an ensemble that just doesn't cut it.

And so when Catholics like Brian and me get the hit parade of Top 40 ditties composed since Vatican II, mostly mediorce pieces performed by well-intentioned people with a wide range of talent and training, we often can't shake our own training and listen in a uncritical manner.

Critical listening doesn't lend itself to prayer. So we find ourselves wishing for holy silence, or at least lower lowels of clap-trap and ching-ching and God forbid the whap-jingle of the plastic tambourine.

By the way, now that the national abuse report is out, and many of the dioceses have put out their reports, I suppose it's an appropriate time to post this link: a database of known abuse allegations, compiled from media reports, diocesan statements, and public records.

Cardinal Ambrozic leads the way:

TORONTO, March 5, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a press release yesterday, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto reported that it has suspended the faculties of Father Tim Ryan. The Toronto Scarboro Foreign Mission Society priest who, in August 2003, filed an affidavit with the Supreme Court of Canada in support of homosexual marriage.

[via Relapsed Catholic.]

The Washington, D.C. area is built around two-income families. The second income might be part-time or full-time, but it has to be there or else you'll fall behind, because the price of everything is calibrated to households with two parents working.

We're looking for a new house, and confirming the above statement. Desirable real estate is a finite commodity, and people are willing to pour increasing amounts of money into acquiring it. Ergo, prices are rising fast. Ergo, more mothers are pressured to go to work to pay the bills; a lot of the money they earn is then devoted to real estate; and the prices rise even higher.

Today we bid on a house, and lost. That's okay -- it was the first contract we wrote, and it can take several before you get one accepted. What's crazy is not that we bid $10,000 more than the asking price, and the winning bid was $10,000 more. That is merely discouraging. The terrible thing is that of the four bids they were considering, ours was the only one that required an inspection.

"Why the italics, Eric? What is the big deal?" You wouldn't buy a car without a test drive. And you would want a trusted mechanic to look the car over, right?
These folks are willing to take their chances with something 20 times as expencive. If the house has a bad roof, cracked foundation, or extensive water damage, you aren't going to see that during an open house when the real estate agent is serving cider and cookies.

You could easily be stuck with $25,000 of damage, with no legal recourse. There are apparently a lot of kooky people out there who don't see that as a problem. Their kookiness becomes our problem, because all else being equal, if they offer the same price as we're offering, the sellers will choose the nutty no-inspection contract over ours.

This rant is not a cry for sympathy. I have confidence that God will help us find a place to live. Financially, we're doing pretty well, mainly because we made a tidy profit on our previous house. My point -- you were hoping I had one, if you've even read this far -- is that people's selfish choices make a big difference. If you choose to pursue your upscale lifestyles, it ratchets up the price for everyone else. (How the hell can a working-class family buy a house around here?) Next time you hear someone say, "What I do doesn't affect anybody else," you have my permission to smack them with a rolled-up real estate section.

North Korea warms to Kerry presidency bid

North Korea's state-controlled media are well known for reverential reporting about Kim Jong-il, the country's dictatorial leader.

But the Dear Leader is not the only one getting deferential treatment from the communist state's propaganda machine: John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic candidate, is also getting good play in Pyongyang.

There is a message here for America. Don't vote for Kerry!

More comments on a movie I haven't seen:

Charles Krauthammer's column today about "The Passion" is most unfortunate, mostly because he's wrong, but also because his analysis is one of the most penetrating.

So it is with sadness that I read him saying that "...Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ' such a singular act of interreligious aggression. He openly rejects the Vatican II teaching and, using every possible technique of cinematic exaggeration, gives us the pre-Vatican II story of the villainous Jews." Further, "these deviations [from the written Gospels] point overwhelmingly in a single direction -- to the villainy and culpability of the Jews."

Usually, Krauthammer's Friday column is worth reading because his analyses are better-written and original than most writers. This column is a tired rehash of points that have been made a thousand times elsewhere, and the writing itself is perfunctory. Saying that Jews "come off rather badly" is completely disingenuous -- does Jesus come off badly? How about his mother? Mary Magdalene? Simon of Cyrene? From what I've heard, they're all portrayed sympathetically, and from what I've read, they were all...Jews!

What people are really objecting to is not "The Passion" but the Christian understanding of the Crucifixion -- that it was an internal Jewish dispute that the Romans were dragged into. Preferring to keep the peace rather than do justice, the local imperial representative ordered Jesus of Nazareth to death.

The only way to call that an anti-Jewish interpretation is if you say that Christ and the members of his movement were not "really" Jews. Perversely, that's what anti-Semites have done throughout history, and that warped tradition continues to this day. Is he saying that some portion of the Judean population could not have possibly urged the death of Jesus Christ? Or that a Jewish mob, constituting a small percentage of the population, might have urged his death -- but we should never mention that fact, even if it is coupled with the teaching that whatever group was the proximate cause of Jesus' death, we are all ultimately responsible for crucifying Christ because of his sins?

It's extremely disappointing to see Charles Krauthammer lend his considerable prestige to a false and insulting charge against believing Christians.

How Bush can destroy Kerry fast

I started reading Music and Morals this week because the author, Basil Cole, OP is part of duo of Dominicans preaching a mission at our parish. I'll blog more specifically about the book at some point, but one of Fr. Cole's key points is that the function of liturgical music is to facilitate prayer.

And I was thinking about some folks who think that if you can't sing along it's not good liturgical music. I know some music directors that minimize the role of the choir because if the choir sings by itself the congregation can't participate. I've experienced people taking offense that they can't sing everything on the program - every note and every word of every piece. There's a gentleman with a loud voice that sings lots of things that are intended for the cantor simply because he knows them (sometimes we have the cantor sing the refrain to the communion hymn prior to the congregation coming in.)

That's simply a misunderstanding of prayer and the role of liturgical music. Vocal participation on the part of the congregation must happen, but just as prayer is a conversation with God and one must listen to God, there are time where a person should listen to the choir. One-way prayer from a person to God doesn't facilitate long term spiritual growth.

So - the drumbeat of "participation" as reflected in having the congregation sing everything is actually not what's intended with liturgical prayer. In the same way we don't say all the prayers of the priest there's a role for the choir to lead and act in some ways as the voice of God at certain times.

The so-called "compromise" proposal that would have forced Massachusetts voters to choose between full gay marriage or civil unions, with no option to refuse both -- is on the way out. House Speaker Tom Finneran has moved to separate the two issues and give voters a choice. Offering two amendments to the voters -- one to ban gay marriage and one to establish civil unions -- looks like a compromise package that pro-family legislators can legitimately support.

Hi, y'all! 19-year-old convert Nathan Nelson has joined us at stblogs.org with The Tower, and gen-Xers Bobbi and Brian have brought over their own blog, a companion to their website Revolution of Love.

I was reading an interesting article the other day, one which I now wish I had bookmarked. The crux of the piece is that most boys tend towards either wimpiness or barbarianism, whereas true manliness is found as a happy medium between these two extremes. Since most boys won't find this happy medium on their own, however, they need fathers to guide the course and correct them were needed.

Unfortunately, because divorce is rampant in today's society and fatherhood has been greatly devalued, we're seeing a generation of boys grow into either barbarians or wimps. This reminded me of a couple of incidents, the first from my college days and the second from my primary school days.

Back in college one of my best friends was a male librarian. He immensely enjoyed the library sciences and had hoped to make a career out of it. When I asked him why he had returned to college to study some other discipline, he replied bluntly: "Because all the other male librarians with whom I worked were homosexual. As a heterosexual I got sick of 1) being stereotyped a homosexual by the general population; 2) being stereotyped a homosexual by other male librarians trying to pick me up when we would get together as male librarians, and 3) always being exposed to the homosexual chatter from the other guys at librarian conferences that basically amounted to size and how it was (mis)managed."

Concerning the third point, I am not and have never been homosexually inclined. Yet for some reason the topic seemed -- albeit in a manner much less promiscuous -- vaguely familiar. Where had I experienced these as topics of conversation before? The answer hit me the other day while conversing with another orthodox Catholic author. I was explaining how, from my Tribunal experience, homosexuality is often linked to narcistic personalities. The same goes with certain acts of a solitary nature.

"Yeah, that was one of my favorite activities when I was fourteen," the individual replied. "I prayed about it because I knew it was wrong, but what really stopped me was when my dad caught me. He embarrassed the heck out of me."

And this takes me back to when my dad was studying for the permanent diaconate. The families of the candidates would travel once a month to a town located in the middle of the diocese. Here our parents took classes while some of the men and ladies from the local KofC organized events and babysat for the families at the local Catholic school where our parents studied. One morning, in the boys' change room at the gymnasium, I was hanging out with the other boys who fell between the ages of eight and ten. For whatever reason, we began to compare the size of something other than the floor hockey equipment we had been using out on the gym floor. One of the younger brothers told on us and we got caught.

Our fathers were called out from their classes to correct the situation, and they did. First they dealt with us collectively, then each father took his son somewhere private to deal with the issue individually. We were told, both individually and collectively, that what we had done is wrong, that certain things were to remain private, that this is not how Catholic men behave, that they as candidates to the diaconate were embarrassed at having their classes interupted because of our misdeeds, that a priest was being made available for our confession, etc... Our fathers really stuck together on this issue and continued to embarrass the heck out of us for the rest of the weekend. Additionally, there was no peer support since we were all separated for the remainder of the weekend.

Although resentful at the time, we were fortunate to have fathers who told us "to grow up". Men don't engage in certain behavior and our fathers let us know where we crossed the line. I've heard a lot of similar stories from other guys. In one case, with a friend who grew up without a father in the inner cities, and whose entire gang had been stopped by the police one evening for minor acts of mischief, it was the drill sergeant in the Marine Corps who administered the correction. With another friend in a similar situation, it was his football coach.

Which makes me wonder whether, in many cases, homosexuality is simply a progression from a sophomoric jocularity that went uncorrected. Boys will be boys. Which is why they need fathers (backed up by coaches and drill sergeants) to turn them into men. Where boys don't have men to guide them into manhood, young women suffer. For they end up having to choose between barbarians who treat them as sexual objects, or wimps who need to be mothered.

The lay-run National Centre for Padre Pio in Barto, PA, has released a statement of its position about the decree by Allentown's bishop Edward Cullen prohibiting the celebration of the sacraments at the Centre's chapel. Board members say that the Bishop has not responded to their canonical appeal and they are therefore appealing to Rome.

(I'd be happy to post a link to a statement from the bishop about the case, but have not been able to find any on the diocesan website. If any readers know where to find a statement from the diocese, please post a link in the comments.)

You can't be the second black president. You're not black. In fact, your face is a map of Ireland. Get real.

British video artist Leo Earle has a clever two-minute Quicktime film about finding God in the midst of doing the dishes.

The Weather Channel has a build your own tornado game on their Web site. It will provide you a two minute diversion in its current form.

An upgrade that would make me play longer:

The ability to put Andy Rooney in the path of an F5 tornado.