Are parts of Massachusetts going up in flames? Are people taking to the streets? Is furniture being thrown from 5th-story windows - all because of this:
Putin Gets Patriots Super Bowl Ring
Following a meeting of American business executives and Putin at Konstantinovsky Palace near St. Petersburg on Saturday, Kraft showed the ring to Putin — who tried it on, put it in his pocket and left, according to Russian news reports.
The Diocese of Arlington does not permit altar girls.
The northern VA chapter of Call to Action is not happy about it.
They have a quaint little way to protest (apparently left over from last Lent.)
I wonder what kinds of "alternative non-profits" the money goes to...
Man Interrupts Service, Arrested by Police
A man who handcuffed himself to Cardinal Roger Mahony's chair during services today at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels was later arrested by police...The incident occurred as about 3,000 people attended Mass this morning at the downtown cathedral. An estimated 200 demonstrators were outside the cathedral at the time to protest what they say is Mahony's continuing cover-up of sex abuse crimes in the church.
This morning's demonstration outside the cathedral was organized by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP.
Tamberg said the man is a "very angry, angry" member of SNAP.
"very angry, angry member of SNAP" sounds redundant to me.
Jewish Evangelical Christian Dawn Eden wants to become a Catholic: welcome aboard!
One of my choristers mentioned the battle royale at the Bishop's conference over the Memorial Acclamation "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again."
He said the conference took a sizable chunk of time debating this issue, and he thought it was silly since there are so many other "pressing matters."
Since he was alive during VII, he's lived through massive liturgical reform. Funny that the same upsetting of the norms, which was fine and proper 40 years ago, is now a nuisance to the folks who lived though it in the 60's.
The article doesn't do justice to the issue - from what I heard, the movement to get rid of that refrain is because the text isn't found in an historical liturgical texts.
Cardinal Egan does make a good point, that the folks in the pews are prone to a "sense of instability" about changes to the liturgy.
What would remedy the sense of instability? Another round of massive liturgical reform. An actual implementation of the GIRM rather than lip service with a focus on where Bishops have pastoral discretion. Authetic texts instead of adaptations that change God as "He" to God as "External One." Music that reflects the glory of God instead of the emotional yearnings found in pop-tunes turned hymns. (Side note: my trips to California always include going to parishes where everyone is supposed to stand through communion. My friends tell me they were told it's because of the GIRM. From what I can tell, no other items from the GIRM were implemented - one big, upsetting, non-universal item implemented instead of all the various items that are completely in the spirit and authority of Vatican II.)
So it's doubtful that our current crop of Bishops, particularly the boomers, would get serious about liturgical reform. Some seem to be more interested in recreating the liturgy in their own image
instead of being true to the rules and guidelines of the universal church.
Lord, heart full of mystery
Since your love surpasses all knowledge, lift up our too weak understanding to the sublime height of your heart!
Since we are tempted to not believe in your love, give us new eyes to see the incredible, to recognize the endless immensity of your goodness.
Since our gaze remains attached to material and visible realities, may your heart illumine our view of the world, make us understand the deep meaning of creation, open to us the secret of the destiny of all things, called to meet again in your love.
Since we acknowledge in humanity and its history so many faults and wrong turns, which could incline us to pessimism, lift up again our optimism by showing us how your love manages to use evil for the sake of good, to transform human dispositions, to supernaturally direct the march of events in the direction of your heart!
Since we ourselves experience the force of evil, make us know by experience the greater power of your love, and make us discern how your heart is at the center of our life and at the center of the world, where the triumph of charity is established more and more!
--by Jean Galot, SJ
(The second prayer in this series is already on the blog, in an entry from March 25.)
Lord, whose heart is open
Toward your heart make me walk
In an ardent pilgrimage.
To your heart make me cling
From all the thirst of my being.
Into your heart make me penetrate
Even to its infinite depth.
By your heart make me breathe
Sharing your sigh of love.
For your heart make me work
without ever sparing my effort.
On your heart make me rest
and taste your intimacy.
From your heart make me radiate
goodness and apostolic zeal.
In your heart make me dwell
transformed into your charity.
--by Jean Galot, SJ
(translation by RC)
If I am posting a link to the Periodic Table of Dessert.
Many misguided people, particularly those who have spent too much time in university classrooms, think that economic rights are for the rich and powerful. The opposite is true: in the absence of a legal system that safeguards private property, the rich can always protect their interests by hiring muscle and buying influence. (That's how organized crime was born.)
Jews and Christians agree that private property is divinely sanctioned, which is why God explicitly forbade theft in the Seventh Commandment. But the right to property is a natural right, and thus accessible to anyone with a functioning intellect. Ancient civilizations, East and West, prohibited thievery and often prescribed death as a punishment. Indeed, besides preserving the lives of its members, a mark of a functioning society is the ability to keep one man's hands off another man's goods.
The United States was founded on the ideal of private property. Our forefathers were so incensed with practice of housing British soldiers in private homes that they outlawed it in the Bill of Rights. They affirmed this fundamental right by only allowing a citizen's property to be taken under two circumstances: if he was convicted of a crime, or if the public good demanded it.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court, without asking the people's permission, has authorized multi-billion-dollar corporations to steal people's houses, as long as the corporation can pay more taxes to the city government. You'd roll your eyes if a screenwriter came up with a plot that involved a major drug company commissioning a city council to destroy people's homes in order to build an office park, but that's pretty much what's going to happen in New London, Conn. Here are some of the little people whose homes are going to be demolished:
Petitioner Wilhelmina Dery, for example, lives in a house on Walbach Street that has been in her family for over 100 years. She was born in the house in 1918; her husband, petitioner Charles Dery, moved into the house when they married in 1946. Their son lives next door with his family in the house he received as a wedding gift, and joins his parents in this suit....Big corporations are essential to modern life, as they are the best instruments for doing big things like creating new medicines, building airplanes, or running communications networks. But they're also made up of sinful human beings who can commit evils, and they should be restrained by the law appropriately.
This ruling represents a failure of justice at all levels of government. Theft is theft, whether it is performed by a burglar in the dead of night, or by a city council's decree, duly ratified by our unelected judicial tyrants.
It's summertime, the season for outdoor Masses in garden shrines, the time for big events like WYD, and it's also the silly season where the fringe types like to put on their events too.
This week, the BBC ran a feature on a so-called ordination conducted by some of those German riverboat priestess dames, now pretending to be bishops.
As for the motivation of the would-be deaconette, here's a quote from the show's audio: "I'm a strong person, and some women, they are in the ceremony, in the background, and I like to be in front of them, and I feel, when I was younger, that the place where the altar is, that's my place."
Abp. John Foley, answering the reporter's questions to provide a Catholic point of view, has it pegged: "There's a universal call to holiness in the Church... I hope that all of us would strive for holiness and not for power."
(via the CWN blog)
Here's a list that will get his knickers in a bunch...
I got the latest issue of Catholic Answers
apologetics & evangelization magazine and it's full of great stuff:
A dressing-down of renegade theologian Fr. Richard McBrien (Nice tie, padre!)
An article about the vocation of women and how they are part of God's plan for sanctifying the world.
An article about Pope B16 written by a seminarian who was in Rome for the election.
John Mallon of Inside the Vatican sent this appeal the other day:
As Father's Day is celebrated today, "Inside the Vatican" brings you a way to help a young Catholic father save the life of his unborn child by keeping alive his wife, who lies in a permanently brain dead state after collapsing 6 weeks ago.On May 7th, 2005, the day before Mothers' Day, Susan M. (Rollins) Torres, 26, a pregnant mother with a two-year-old son, Peter, collapsed in her home. She was rushed to the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, VA, where she has been diagnosed with stage four melanoma and is brain dead with no hope of recovery.
Susan was 17 weeks pregnant at the time, and although the doctors have given her no hope of survival, they are fighting to keep her unborn child alive until at least July 11 where he or she will have a viable chance at life.
Her husband Jason, a devout Catholic, has quit his job and divides his time between Susan, sleeping at the hospital room every night, and his young son.
Mr. Torres faces a crushing debt because of his decision to keep his wife alive in order to save the life of his child. Susan's medical insurance leaves $1,500 a day to be paid by him out of pocket, not to mention the expensive care that the baby most likely will need in the neonatal ward if he is born.
The plight of the Torres' family has recently received wide media coverage, following an op-ed piece written by Jason's brother Justin for the Dallas Morning News, in which he discusses the way the abortion culture has negatively affected even his devoutly Catholic family, causing them and the doctors to wonder for a moment if they were doing the right thing in sacrificing so much for the life of an unborn child.
However, both the Torres and Rollins family are determined to do what it takes to try to save Susan's unborn baby's life, which they are convinced would be Susan's desire as well. Jason says his decision to try to save his unborn child's life at enormous financial cost is also very much based on his Catholic faith. The Torres family, which has seven children, are devout Catholics, and Susan converted while she was a student at the University of Dallas, where she and Jason met.
In an effort to escalate the awareness of their situation, and to help raise additional funds, friends of the Torres family have established The Susan M. Torres Fund to help defray the $1,500 a day ICU medical costs that insurance does not cover.
Please help this family by sending a donation. Any amount is appreciated and it is tax deductible. Donations can be made online through PayPal at http://www.susantorresfund.org, or sent to:
The Susan M. Torres Fund
c/o Faith and Action
P.O. Box 34105
Washington, D.C. 20043-0105For more information, please visit http://www.susantorresfund.org
This case reminds us of the limitations of the concept of "brain death"; there are three main systems in the body, and it seems arbitrary to make one of them the sole criterion of life and death. In spite of what legal definitions may provide, it's arguable that a human being is not dead until all three of the body's main systems (brain, lung, heart) have stopped.
Would you take a moment to do what you can for the Torreses?
There's good news today: the baby kicked!
E-Mail Embarrasses 119 Failing Students
LAWRENCE, Kan. - More than 100 students who failed their classes at the University of Kansas last semester found out who shared their misfortune. The school's Office of Student Financial Aid sent an e-mail to 119 students Monday notifying them that they were in jeopardy of having their aid revoked.But the names of the students were included on the e-mail address list — meaning everyone who got the e-mail could see the names of all the other recipients.
FINDING MY RELIGION
Music leads pianist to a life of Catholicism
Classical pianist Jacqueline Chew rebelled against her Christian upbringing and became an atheist while attending the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the 1970s. But her love of music eventually led her back to a spiritual life.Chew was so taken with the work of Olivier Messiaen, a pioneering French composer known for his sacred Catholic music, that after hearing his composition "Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus" ("Twenty Contemplations of the Infant Jesus"), she began questioning her belief that God does not exist.
Next month, Chew, who released a CD of "Vingt Regards" last year, will take her interest in Catholicism to a new level. She will be received as an oblate, a layperson living outside a monastery who promises to follow the rules of St. Benedict in her private life, at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a community of monks in Big Sur.
Paige is still in the hospital with Molly, so I just watched a violent movie I knew she wouldn't see: "The Passion of the Christ." Though I wrote about it here several times last year — or more specifically, I wrote about the hysterical reaction to it — I hadn't seen it until tonight.
I was surprised at how much the movie didn't surprise me, probably because I had already read so much about it. It was so transparently grounded in the Faith that I experienced it more as a simple visual representation of Jesus' suffering and death than as an art object. There was no effort to convince, or even to teach. If you didn't know who Jesus was, or what he did prior to Holy Thursday, "The Passion" will not tell you because those things lie outside its scope. The images are so stark and the plot so barren of any narrative tricks that the subtitles were almost superfluous.
It's too much to hope, but perhaps other filmmakers will take up related projects. They needn't be believers; Robert Bolt wrote "A Man for All Seasons" and "The Mission" and he was not a praticing Christian, though he was sympathetic to those who are. Gibson did excellent work in fleshing out the characters of Pilate and his wife, and clever artists could take other biblical characters (Barabbas, Thomas, Paul) and turn them into protagonists of other movies.
It did surprise me that "The Passion" didn't make me pity Jesus' suffering as much as I thought I would, but perhaps that is a good thing. It seems to me that pity is a very dangerous emotion, capable of belittling its object. Pity puts the focus on the one who pities, not the one who has suffered misfortune. I felt the same way when I saw my fellow Marines injured. I helped them to my utmost, but I wouldn't have expected anyone to feel sorry for me if I had been wounded. We were Marines — we were supposed to suffer. It would have been ignoble to consider one's own suffering as more important than someone else's.
Similarly, I have never been disturbed by movies with scenes of battlefield violence, but I find it extremely difficult to watch the innocent and helpless suffer. I don't know how I made it through "Schindler's List," vowing never to watch it a second time. That is why, more than Jesus, it was Mary's pain that grieved me deeply. God is impassible and immutable; my personal sins cannot injure him in his divine nature. But seeing my sins contribute to a mother having to watch her son tortured to death is horrifying. I understand why God suffered for our salvation, but her? Why her? At least Joseph died a quiet death before the Crucifixion.
The answer, as "The Passion" explicitly shows, is that God wanted Our Lady to help guide and nurture the infant Church, just as she held baby Jesus to her breast after his birth. Yet we are all still culpable for piercing her sinless heart with the results of our sins, something I first contemplated when I wept in front of the "Pietá" in St. Peter's, long before I took the Faith seriously.
We try to ignore it, but the effects of our misdeeds careen around the world, affecting people who aren't directly involved. Happily, the converse is also true: our good deeds spill out and cascade through others' lives. I pray that for myself, and for all of us, the latter deeds outweigh the former.
Pope set to return to traditional liturgy:-
VATICAN CITY | June 19, 2005 5:11:27 AM IST
Pope Benedict XVI wants to restore the traditional ceremonial Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, with Latin instead of the vernacular and Gregorian chants.
Vatican expert Sandro Magister reported in his weekly newsletter Saturday that the pope is expected to replace Archbishop Pietro Marini, his predecessor Pope John Paul II's master of liturgical ceremonies.
Whoever follows Marini will have orders to restore the traditional style and choreography of papal ceremonies in St. Peter's.
Out will go the international Masses so dear to Pope John Paul II's heart, with such innovations as Latin American and African rhythms and even dancing, multi-lingual readings and children in national costumes bringing gifts to the altar.
Pope Benedict wants to return to the Sistine Chapel choirs singing Gregorian chant and the church music of such composers as Claudio Monteverdi from the 17th century. He also wants to revive the Latin Mass.
Archbishop Marini always planned the ceremonies with television in mind, Magister said, and that emphasis will remain. A decade ago the Vatican set up a system for transmitting papal ceremonies world wide via multiple satellites.
(UPI)
This is the newest member of the Johnson family, Molly Colleen, who was 4 hours old when her picture was taken. She was born today at 10:32 a.m., and her mother is doing just fine. The kids can't wait to meet their new baby sister.
Molly weighs slightly under 8 pounds and she is 19 inches long. She is very good at crying already, and came into the world hungry, so I'm sure she'll be fine. Mother and child will probably be back home on Monday, barring any complications.
On Saturday at 3pm, my team will deliver our capstone project to an audience of frazzled MBA students, academics, and semi-luminaries of the DC-area business community. By 4pm, I'll have complete all the requirements for my degree.
I hope to catch up on the blogging once I'm done writing stuff about Porter's Five Forces (no Steve - "Cheese" is not one of Porter's Five Forces...), Libyan foreign investment regulations and cash flow projections...
The other CL excuses are:
RC - upgraded us to MT 3. Lots of work.
Eric - expecting baby #4.
Pete - he did the last post, so he's doing fine.
Bryan and Alex - probably trimming Chairman Meow so he maintains his lion cut for the summer...
Where's Kathy Shaidle when you need her? I spent five hours in the emergency waiting room (having been refered there after a previous hour-and-a-half wait at a walk-in clinic. I was at the walk-in clinic because a year later my family still cannot find a family physician, even though we are living in the Canadian city that is the least affected by slow healthcare delivery) with my youngest daughter before we saw a physician! The medical staff were great, so I'm not blaming them for the wait. Nevertheless, that's what happens when you live with a socialized medical system that is understaffed and underfunded.
While there, we hung around with the parents of this eight-year old boy. They are very nice people who have been all over the press after the boy was reportedly and intentionally run down in his own driveway by a cab driver. What the media is not reporting is the ethinic origin of the cab driver, which reportedly appears to to be the same as that area of the world that produced "air rage" on 9-11-01.
Even a religious song can be the occasion of a mondegreen, a case of misheard lyrics. Gathering Goat Eggs has an example.
The Grateful Catholic links to a story of what Catholic astronauts do by way of religious observance when they're up there.
My pal Mike Humphrey got a question at his web site CPATS:
In the "Our Father" it says: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."When we sin against a perfect God it takes that perfection to forgive that sin; so why would I ask God to forgive as I forgive, when as an imperfect creature the best I could do is forgive imperfectly?
Sincerely yours,
--Someone who has way too much time on his hands
The questioner has a real point. This prayer has a hook to it, a condition that perhaps we can't fulfill.
I could quibble with the idea that as imperfect creatures, we could *only* forgive imperfectly. After all, we aren't operating on our own unaided strength, but do have divine assistance. Our Lord wouldn't give us an assignment that's beyond the strength He gives.
When we're friends of God, friends of Jesus Christ, we are redeemed, and this redemption is not just an external imputation of righteousness (as in Luther's somewhat exaggerated expression about snow on a dunghill), but also a change that sanctifies us interiorly. Our Lord lives in us: He makes us "sharers of the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4) and strengthens our good acts with the supernatural virtues He places in us. He enables us to perform acts that are truly virtuous and whole. He empowers us to forgive fully with the help of His mercy.
We're called to do that, and occasionally we do; but alas, we often don't. We often don't cooperate fully with divine grace; we don't live up to the condition in that prayer, and yet we're stuck praying it, because that's what Jesus gave us to pray! He's revealing to us what the Father is like: he is holy, mighty, immortal, and merciful. We can live that mercy too toward others, precisely because He is holy, mighty, and immortal.
As you can tell by the appearance of the site, CL is under construction while I'm rebuilding it under MT 3.
There are a couple of changes for end-users. Commenters can sign on through the TypeKey service, and occasionally comments will be held for review before they appear on the site if the spam-blocking software raises any warnings about the text.
The newest member of the Johnson family is scheduled to be delivered on Friday, June 17. We're starting this novena tonight. Novenas are a big endeavor, but if you want to throw some random prayers our way for Paige's health and the baby's, feel free.
Amnesty International, like Greenpeace, is an organization I would join if it wasn't run by ideologues. Human rights should unite everyone of good will, but Amnesty has always been harder on Western or pro-Western governments than on the truly repressive regimes.
Now they have veered into Bush-hating territory. Two weeks ago, they caused a minor fracas by referring to the terrorist detainee camp in Guantanamo as a "gulag," then admitted they had no idea whether that was true. (Hint: unless it's a slave-labor camp, it's not a gulag.)
Dr. William F. Schulz (no relation to John or Steve), the director of Amnesty International USA (isn't that name an oxymoron?) said, "We have documented that the use of torture and ill treatment is widespread and that the US government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of this odious human rights violation."
At best, Dr. Schulz is misrepresenting and exaggerating Amnesty's findings. Even the few details they provide are questionable:
The Bush Administration cited Egypt for beating victims with fists, whips and metal rods. And yet US Major Michael Smith testified at an administrative review hearing last year that an autopsy of a captured Iraqi general revealed he had suffered five broken ribs that were "consistent with blunt force trauma, that is, either punching, kicking or striking with an object or being thrown into an object."
Five broken ribs might be painful, but that couldn't have been the cause of death. And who broke those ribs? Dr. Schulz implies that it was U.S. troops. Yet for all he knows, it was the general's fellow inmates.
Don't take my word for it — read the report yourself, or at least some of it. The country findings are long on summary, short on detail. The moral equivalence would be laughable if it weren't so sickening:
US-led forces in Iraq committed gross human rights violations, including unlawful killings and arbitrary detention, and evidence emerged of torture and ill-treatment. Thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed during armed clashes between US-led forces and Iraqi security forces on the one side, and Iraqi armed groups on the other [emphasis added].
On the one side, you have thugs and murders who bomb mosques, churches, marketplaces, civilian vehicles; who kidnap and behead the innocent in the name of God; who desperately want to beat the rest of Iraqi society into submission so they can administer their "human rights violations" (and you can bet Amnesty won't be invited to observe.) On the other, you have thousands of Iraqis and Americans trying to stop these human beasts and build a more just society. But to Amnesty, it's just two sides fighting.
Dr. Schulz calls for "a truly independent investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention centers" and says not doing so "is tantamount to a whitewash, if not a cover-up, of these disgraceful crimes." Why isn't the Justice Department and the military judicial system equal to the task? Are they not independent? If not, who are the guilty men who are going free?
This irresponsible statement is an accusation against dozens of Bush Administration figures: "You're a criminal. Prove you aren't." Ironically, if a government presumed that a suspect was guilty and made him prove his innocence, they'd be violating the accused's human rights, and Amnesty would complain. Ye hypocrites!
"Looking Back" over at Town Hall
What will future generations think when they see the front pages of our leading newspapers repeatedly preoccupied with whether we are treating captured cut-throats nicely enough? What will they think when they see the Geneva Convention invoked to protect people who are excluded from protection by the Geneva Convention?
And here's a related story about how we can't patrol our borders without wondering if we're introducing non-indigenous plantlife into the desert! Give me a break!
Man Delivers Pizza After Being Shot in Leg
Thomas Stefanelli, 37, said dedication to his job at Hungry Howie's Pizza kept him on the job after a struggle with a robber Saturday night left him bleeding from a bullet wound in his left thigh.
HoDean, always good for a quote:
"You know, the Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people. They're a pretty monolithic party. Pretty much, they all behave the same, and they all look the same… It's pretty much a white Christian party,'' the former Vermont Governor [Howard Dean] told a San Francisco roundtable in reaction to a question about the lack of outreach to minority communities by political parties....Pretty funny coming from a former governor of a 97% white state. One could say that, at least demographically, the Democrats are a "Christian" party, given that over 90% of Americans identify themselves as Christians, over twice the number that say they're Democrats.The comments are another example of why the former Vermont governor, who remains popular with the party's grassroots, has been a lightning rod for criticism since being elected to head the Democratic National Committee last February. His comments last week that Republicans "never made an honest living in their lives," which he later clarified to say Republican "leaders," were disavowed by leading Democrats including Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.
Unless "Christian" is a code word for "Evangelical" or "fundamentalist," Dean probably means that the Republican party is the home for people who place their faith first in their lives. This nutty little man will drive off religiously serious voters, who tend to be morally conservative but are probably persuadable when it comes to, say, education or tax cuts.
And that's bad for the country. Both major political parties ought to be friendly toward religious voters — they used to be. 1984 was the first year that (to my knowledge) a pro-abortion Democrat ran for national office. Evangelicals used to split their votes between the parties, and Catholics used to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.
Now, one major political party forces believing, orthodox Christians to betray or ignore their faith, if they vote for its candidates. You cannot be in favor of medical experiments on tiny human beings, gay marriage, easy divorce, condoms for schoolkids, abortion, and pornography, and reconcile that with Christianity. In the long run, you either cast your lot with the ways of the world, or the ways of God. It isn't that the GOP is the party of God and the Democrats aren't; that is far too simplistic. Rather, the Democratic platform contains elements that go against the plain meaning of Scripture and 2,000 years of Christian tradition. On top of that, a large number of Democrats hate — the word is not too strong — people of faith and disdain them with words normally reserved for people who commit mass murder or high treason.
Democrats will either abandon their quixotic quest to build their free-love, quasi-socialistic, pacifist utopia because the American people have rejected it, or they will convince Americans that the post-Christian society is the way to go. The only way they've been able to keep their party going is through racial demagoguery and promises to sustain middle-class welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare. Most Americans don't think that 13-year-old girls should have sex, much less get abortions without their parents' permission, and they don't think two men can make a marriage. If the party would drop its advocacy of those two issues alone, it would cause serious damage by stealing away weakly committed Republicans. But then a lot of hard-core Democrats would have to abandon deeply-held religious beliefs of their own, whether or not they label those beliefs as such.
I just got back from the Religious Book Trade Exibit where Michael Trueman and I were signing copies of Surprised by Canon Law for Servant Books. Both Mike and I had a wonderful time and we met up with Amy Welborn and Michael Dubreil (who were signing books for OSV) among a host of other cool people.
On another note, I've decided to shut down my account with Wachovia after they wanted to charge me $75 to make a deposit into my bank account. Yep, you heard that right! $75 to DEPOSIT a check into my bank account. Not withdraw, wire transfer, or some other specialized service, but to deposit money into the account. At first they simply told me there would be a fee without telling me how much (or providing me with a phone number or contact person whom I could ask -- I had to look this up myself on the internet), and they hung up on me when I asked. I had to call back.
When they told me the fee was $75, I responded that charging a customer $75 for a deposit was outrageous and morally reprehensible -- especially when I had made similar types of deposit in the past without incurring a fee, have never overdrawn, etc... The individual insisted it wasn't a fee for making a deposit, but because I didn't have enough money in my account to cover the amount of the deposit (Duh! That's why I was trying to deposit more money into the account) and that I might be tempted to withdraw the money before the check cleared (well then freeze the funds or don't post the deposit until the check clears!)
They then tried to talk me into keeping the account open, but they couldn't waive the fees. I was like no thanks, this is completely and utterly disgusting, and I have no intention of bringing Wachovia any more business.
Monday morning I went to visit this wonderful Orthodox church, actually a privately-owned chapel built by a Greek immigrant farming community in Alabama. It's a curious story.
The head of the Southern Baptist Mission Board spoke to a meeting of the agency's trustees in May, and the Board's website reports what he had to say about Catholics:
MISSIONS IN CATHOLIC COUNTRIESHis diagnosis probably does apply to many Catholics, but the solution to that problem should be scripturally sound evangelization: the Gospel with a visibly united Church, with the Sacraments instituted by Christ, with a link to the apostolic authority Christ established.In his president's report to trustees, Rankin noted the passing of Pope John Paul II, a man beloved by millions of Protestants and evangelicals "for his zeal, his personal warmth and his unyielding stand for human dignity, the sanctity of life and many other moral convictions shared in common."
Rankin added, however, that nearly 1,200 Southern Baptist missionaries continue to serve in 65 predominately Roman Catholic countries where 852 million people live. "Why would we invest such efforts in Catholic countries? The answer is quite simple: It is because they are lost," Rankin said. "The people may be identified as cultural Christians since that is their socio-religious profile, but most of them do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.... They, too, deserve an opportunity to hear, understand and respond to the life-changing message of the gospel. They cannot be ignored in our commitment that all peoples would know our Lord Jesus Christ."
Rev. Walter Cuenin of Our Lady, Help of Christians, a large parish in comfortable Newton, Massachusetts, defends himself in this week's bulletin (page 2): we're not undermining church teaching, we're just welcoming gays who happen to be civilly married, engaged couples who happen to be cohabiting, and divorcees who happen to be remarried without annulments. These practices "may not be the ideal", but these people are in "messy" situations, and we "welcome them and work with them on their journey".
This all seems kind of reasonable on the surface until you read on page 3 that two of the parish's organizations are inviting everyone to attend the Boston "Gay Pride" parade and hear a speech at an interfaith service by an advocate of "same-sex marriage". This goes beyond welcoming individuals with their problems: this is endorsement, this is advocacy.
Will the parish also encourage celebrations of pride in other cases of emotional disorder or objective wrongdoing? Maybe Invalid Marriage Pride Week will include a parade in which liberated upper-middle-class men stroll down the avenue, each with a trophy wife on his arm. Gluttons will ride with pride on floats made of food and eat them all the way down Boylston Street; tax-cheats (now out of the closet) will make a gross public display of paying their employees under the table, and the bacchanals will all be announced in the parish bulletin so that the faithful can participate.
Right now, C-SPAN2 is presenting a live conversation with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, as part of their "In Depth" interview series. The program will probably also be repeated later in the day on that channel or on C-SPAN 1.
A presentation on hymns in honor of the most sacred Heart of Jesus, from last night's Vatican Radio program.
[The audio is 6'20", and 6MB in Ogg Vorbis format; if you have a recent RealPlayer, it should do fine.]
A friend forwarded an e-mail protest petition to me about the coming DaVinci Code movie, but I'm not signing on.
For one thing, the group putting on the campaign, TFP, is already suspect in my book: operating as a blasphemous personality cult for its Brazilian founder, TFP was condemned by the bishops of that country in 1985. He's dead now, but the organization carries on, using the outrage at offensive anti-Christian movies to attract supporters and raise money for itself.
Furthermore, complaining about the movie isn't enough. The false philosophy and spirituality in the book and movie do damage to souls. As this Presbyterian fellow writes, the book presents its own spirituality which a lot of people find attractive instead of the authentic message of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.
All the complaint campaigns, all the TFP postcards sent to Sony Pictures and all the Catholic League press releases issued by Bill Donohue, protesting that studios and publishers feel entitled to insult Christianity without rebuke, won't undo that harm to souls.
A more serious response, an effort to communicate to the public, to correct the erroneous ideas in the DVC is needed. As usual, the protest petition came with a request to send "$25 or $50 or even $100" to spread the campaign further, but $50 worth of whining postcards won't really help souls. If somebody were putting together a media evangelization project to counter the errors in the DVC, that would be worth a donation.
I'm in Mobile, Alabama for a few days, where most of my mother's family lives, so I attended Mass Saturday afternoon at the stately Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.
The congregation was under 50 people, as the downtown area was practically empty on a steamy Saturday afternoon. (You know it's humid when you step out of an air-conditioned store into the parking lot and your glasses fog instantly!)
An enjoyable aspect to the Mass was that the priest and servers took the time to make the processions move calmly and slowly, giving us time to sing three or even four verses of the hymns. (Efficiency of motion is not the goal, men!) The hurried clergy up North need to learn something from these guys. The choices of music were OK: the hymns were "Be Thou My Vision" and "O God our Help in Ages Past", and the Mass Ordinary music was from the Mass in honor of Pope Paul VI and the Danish Amen Mass.
Mobile's definitely a Baptist town, but the Church was here first when the city was settled by the Spanish and French, and I'm glad to see her continuing growth here.
[Some pictures of the Basilica's very nice windows are on-line at stainedglass.org.]
Here's another customer service announcement, if my blogmates don't mind.
One of my customers just launched a dietary supplement to help improve memory, concentration and focus. It's called Alcar.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Gerhard Schroeder 
were losing his grip as the Eurofederalist constitution melts down, but no, he's just having a bad photo-op. Since he's got an election coming up in a few months and is likely to lose, I guess you could call it a John Kerry moment.
If you knew a bunch of guys who collectively predicted the winning Super Bowl team before the season started, you'd think they were smart but lucky. However, if after 10 seasons they made seven correct Super Bowl predictions, you would think they really had a grasp of the sport.
But if you knew a group that kept insisting they knew everything about football, yet in 10 years they never managed to name one of the Super Bowl teams, much less the winner, you might question whether they understood the dynamics of the game.
The news media are a lot like the latter group of football fans. They've gotten Iraq wrong in so many respects, one wonders why they bother offering any analysis at all. You remember what the "experts" predicted: invading Iraq would provoke the "Arab steet"; unlike the Gulf War, the Iraqis would defend their country to the death; the United States military is unable to fight an insurgency effectively; turnout in the January election will be light; and so forth. (Curiously, they never predicted that we would find no weapons of mass destruction.)
They do continue, though, as in this account of a BBC reporter confidently predicting an imminent Iraqi civil war. There is a great deal of wishful thinking bound up in that remark, but is part of a much larger, much longer pattern: Stalin is our friend and would never do anything nasty. The North Vietnamese are patriots and would never harm their fellow countrymen. Ronald Reagan will start a nuclear war. Sanctions will dislodge Saddam's army from Kuwait....
Primarily, the press makes bad calls because they have a faulty view of how the universe works. Rather than fix their model so they can make more accurate predictions, they continue to insist on the validity of their assumptions.
This manifests itself in odd ways, most prominently in how they analyze President Bush. The reasoning seems to be this: because he is a slack-jawed Texan who lives his faith, and knows nothing about the outside world, the president is a fool. Therefore, everything he does is foolish. Ergo, any specific action or policy is likely to be disastrous.
This also explains why religous coverage is so abysmal, when it exists at all. Most mainstream press members think that religion is a secondary or tertiary characteristic about a person, like height or body weight, something that might or might not affect one's daily life. For most people in the world, it is what they build their lives around. Instead of making bad predictions, the press is simply baffled by the whole subject and resorts to comfortable terms. Thus, clergy are "liberal" or "conservative," not "traditional" or "hererodox."
In a quite different but still related example, you would have thought that a year ago, Moqtada "Mookie" al Sadr was routing the American military and leading a mass Shiite revolt. In reality, most Shiite leaders looked the other way as the gallant men of the Army's First Cavalry Division slayed 5,000 of Mookie's goons. There was no general Shia uprising, and now the would-be revolutionary is trying to get into normal electoral politics. Had the press considered Mookie's lack of status in the Shiite clerical pecking order, they might have realized that few imams would come to his aid.
This is a fixable problem, but it is an open question as to whether the oldline media can reform itself. They pay themselves in flattery, imagining themselves to be master analysts of the universe, and feeding one's own intellectual pride is as addictive as a narcotic. Admitting their errors and making ideological adjustments is possible, but it's not the way to wager.
What else but the blindness caused by sin could lead officials of the University of Western Ontario to offer this man an honorary degree? They want to give the title "Doctor of Laws" to an illegal abortionist, a man who scoffed at laws, a doctor of death who survived the Holocaust in Europe only to add to another one in North America.
What is the University's attempt to make this acceptable? Officials offer to give the same title to the president of the University of Notre Dame at the same event: to put a Catholic priest on par with a mass-production abortionist. News (and an on-line petition form) can be found on-line. Also, the Catholics for Life site has more information: scroll way down to the "Background Information".
One of Hank Williams Jr.'s songs is called "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down." Yet a few years later, he recorded "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight." What happened — did he get new rowdy friends? Or did his old friends get rowdy again?
Bonus random thought: Hank Jr. has recorded a lot of crappy music, but his best songs make up for that. These lines of his might be my favorite, from "Family Tradition":
Lordy, I have loved some ladies
and I have loved Jim Beam
and they both tried to kill me
in nineteen-seventy-three....
Was anyone else skeptical of computer-generated movies when they first started coming out? When I read about "Toy Story," I was more than skeptical. The name was dumb. The company that made it, Pixar, was created by Steve Jobs, the too-clever-by-half co-founder of Apple. How could they cut humans out of the creative process? And so on.
Somehow, my lovely girlfriend (now wife) convinced me to see "Toy Story" on videotape, and to my shock, I completely loved it. Before we started having kids, I saw it three times, and I've seen it twice with them.
There hasn't been a Pixar movie I disliked, yet every time a new one comes out, I still go through the same cycle: hearing about it and thinking it will be lame, reluctantly seeing it because of good reviews, and then thinking it's the most innovative and compelling film I've seen in a long time. Maybe I have difficulty believing that they can equal or top their previous works.
True to the pattern, when "The Incredibles" opened, I was unenthusiastic. Nothing about the plot sounded compelling — family of superheroes doing super stuff, yawn — and I never saw it in the theater.
Which is something I now regret. Paige bought the DVD the weekend it came out, and not only did I find it completely mesmerizing, by the time it was halfway over I thought, "When can I see this again?"
Like J.S. Bach, Pixar is content to work within existing genres. Dramatically speaking, "The Incredibles" breaks no new ground. Not only is the plot conventional, you've seen most of the visual tropes in at least a dozen other action-adventure movies, like the hero chained up after being caught by the bad guy, or the superhero protagonists striking a pose right before they fight their enemies. The score contains overt references to the early James Bond movies.
But like Bach, so much inventive genius is poured into this film that it seems completely new. At Pixar's birth, people assumed that if it was successful, it would be because it harnessed the nascent power of computer graphics. In reality, they are the most successful studio in Hollywood because they grasped something very old: that plot, character, theme, and spectacle (in that order) are the keys to making good drama, just like Aristotle taught twenty-four centuries ago.
Also, the studio makes family-oriented entertainment without descending into blandness or cloying preachiness. The original beginning of "The Incredibles," shown in rough form on the bonus DVD, showed Elastigirl as a new mother, getting insulted by a career woman who thought being a full-time mom was a dumb choice. Incensed, Elastigirl gives a speech about there would be much less evil in the world if more parents spent time raising their own kids, et cetera. Though I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, the revised beginning is far better — the pro-motherhood message is subtly woven through the movie, which makes it more effective, not less. And besides, even without delivering any lectures, Elastigirl is self-evidently a total badass.
Celebrating human excellence, and how insane it is to pretend that some people's special gifts aren't really special, is the other important thematic thread. "The Incredibles" could be seen as a satire in the same vein as "Harrison Bergeron," the only thing Kurt Vonnegut wrote that's worth reading twice. Not allowing the gifted to excel doesn't hurt the gifted folks, the movie says, as much as society in general. One might think of the way people insist that Jesus, Mary, and the saints were "just like us," which is true if you mean they shared our human nature. But they were better than us, qualitatively better, and if we want to be better ourselves, we should try to emulate them, not pull their memories down to our level to please our complacent, lazy souls.
I could go on, but I won't, because lots of you have already seen "The Incredibles." If you haven't, and the philosophical aspects don't entice you, rent it for the sheer joy. You will care more about those cartoon movie people than most live-action movie people. (There's an essay waiting to be written about how animated characters are looking more and more realistic, and "real" actors look less and less.)
In the "making of" documentary, Brad Bird, the director and writer, says that the movie's goal was to fuse "the mundane and the fantastic." Kind of like the immanent and the transcendant. Sounds like a formula for lasting success.
