Richard Chonak: July 2003 Archives

The mostly black Baptist church in Louisiana that plans to pay white visitors for attending reminds me of the first time I went to a mostly black church.

When I was a catechumen, my sponsor and I visited various congregations' services, and one of them was at a "Jesus-only" United Pentecostal church. The congregation was small, maybe 30 people: just a few extended families, it seemed. During the sermon, the black minister looked down at us amid his flock and said, "You boys: don't think you're saved just because you're white!" We answered, "A-men!" and everyone laughed.

The Syro-Malankara diocese of Trivandrum is reporting a unusual Eucharistic manifestation in May 2001: markings appeared on a consecrated Host in the form of a face. The bishop writes:

...if we cannot find any human means active in the event, it would be reasonable and wise to believe that Our Lord has given us a special sacramental sign through a special intervention.

For us believers what we have seen is something, which we always believed. Our real attention should now be focused on the question why Our Lord gives us this unique and extraordinary sign. We must prayerfully reflect on the meaning of this sacred symbol. If Our Lord is speaking to us by giving us a sign, it certainly needs a response from us.

The Irish Elk wonders about today's archiepiscopal installation Mass:

One wonders what value sign-language interpretation at the front of the church has for any deaf worshipers seated at the back.

Actually, there was a designated section occupied by deaf faithful in the front 2-3 rows. They were right in front of us, the choir. Hm.

A German scholar of Near Eastern languages proposes a solution to the many incomprehensible passages of the Qu'ran. Since Syriac-Aramaic was the written language of Arabs in Mohammed's time, and written Arabic did not yet exist, Christoph Luxenberg (a pseudonym) re-interprets the existing Qu'ran as a document originally written in Syriac and finds that this approach clarifies puzzling passages.

It took 300 years until the Qu'ran's transcription into Arabic became stable and, as an academic reviewer puts it, one "cannot assume that the earliest Arabian commentators understood correctly the grammar and lexicon of the Arabic of the Qur’ān."

The popular implications of this approach are enormous: some of the most controversial passages in the Arabic Qu'ran are affected by the new interpretations this theory proposes. Would Wahhabi terrorists blow themselves up if they were promised a reward of "raisins" and "juicy fruit" in paradise instead of "72 virgins"?

Even more surprisingly, Luxenberg suggests that Mohammed may have been a Christian describing himself as a "witness to the prophets" rather than the "last of the prophets".

(Thanks to CWN for mentioning the story.)

Ever done the tourist rounds in New England? Made it to the monument at Plymouth Rock? Been... underwhelmed? Well, just imagine what kids on school trips think of it: no wonder it made a list of ten lame landmarks.

Come to think of it, I don't know why Indians come to protest here every Thanksgiving, all mournful-like. Why bother? They've got a memorial that, even unfinished, is already impressive.

First, an amusing bit:

After 38 years, being a Franciscan brother is still the great joy of my life. I wish that after so long I were doing it better, but God and my community have not given up on me. Although, when I have been bishop in lovely vacation spots, my Provincial used to say, “O’Malley, when will you get a real job?" Brother Paul, does this count?

The faithful interrupted the Archbishop's homily several times with applause, most notably at this passage:

In a community of faith, we learn to worship our God, to forgive one another and to serve those around us. We discover the true dignity of each and every person made in the image and likeness of God. No matter how small the unborn, no matter how debilitated, and unproductive the aged and infirm, we must take care of each other. No one is expendable. Each and every person counts in God’s sight. The Gospel of Life will always be the centerpiece of the Church’s social Gospel.

Here's the text. Just read it all.

Fr. Sibley posted the other day about a weird little kitchen gadget called the Octodog.

I realized today that this looks like the ideal gift for one of those "Yankee swap" party procedures.

For the uninitiated, here's how they operate: the participants each bring a wrapped present. These all go into a pool. Each participant in turn then does the following:
1. Choose a package from the pool.
2. Unwrap it in plain view.
3. If someone else already has unwrapped another gift that one prefers, one may take it in exchange for the gift one originally chose.

It's a marvel that this little war-of-all-against-all became the central event of office Christmas parties. Well, maybe not.

Comfort and joy, everybody!

The seamy underbelly of St. Blog's is exposed by Jeff Miller: he says that some people listed as participants in group blogs rarely or never post. Obviously a case for some truth-in-labeling enforcement, eh?

Civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate reviews the Massachusetts Attorney General's report on the sex-abuse scandal. According to him, Reilly's demands are unreasonable and unconstitutional.

Presbyterian, you say?

The Cathedral's music director, Leo Abbott, has pulled in about 40 singers from several choirs, including ours, to help with the Archbishop's installation Mass on Wednesday, so I've got the list of music. It runs quite a gamut from the beautiful to the banal. Leo knows how to cover all the bases.

As you might expect on such an occasion, the Mass itself will be multi-culti with readings in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, and supposedly will fit the whole thing within two hours. To achieve that, the procession starts 20 minutes before the scheduled time of the Mass.

Nicely enough, His Excellency popped in during the rehearsal to greet the faithful and thank us for coming.

Now, the list:

No, I don't mean this type of odd "icon": we've already talked about that artist.

I mean the images designed by a "Brother Simeon" and sold under the name of "Monastery Icons". Maybe you've seen them in religious gift shops or even in parishes. The vestibule of my mother's parish** in New Hampshire has two large panels from them, each about 4' x 6'. They're a fairly popular source for icons of Western saints: they've been churning out images of St. Francis and Ste. Therese and Padre Pio (even before he was beatified) for years. Whatever's popular, they'll produce.

They don't look like classic Orthodox icons: the colors used are different, and some of the decorations are foreign to the tradition. Is this "Sacred Heart" image (sorry, the link's broken now) an icon or a sort of mandala?

Ever wonder where they come from? You'd expect that a monastery producing icons would be most likely Orthodox, or maybe Eastern Catholic. This group has had several different names over its history, as it moved from one state to another, and it's actually belonged to several religions. The term they used for the longest time -- and maybe they still do -- was "Gnostic Orthodox". According to their "abbot", the real teaching of Christ is "an esoteric interpretation" of Christianity that includes a belief in reincarnation and "magnetic therapy" healing.

Just to let you know where they're coming from. I personally wouldn't buy anything from them, but it's your call. Somebody's given me one of their images, and writing this reminds me that I oughta get it blessed real good.

** (another Stupid Vosko Church [tm])

Those Dominican religious who vandalized some equipment at a missile base have been convicted; their sentence is jail time and restitution. But they'll get even: if the US doesn't do away with its nuclear weapons, they'll cow the government into submission with those fierce expressions.
They only dress Puritan when on scowling duty. Here's their usual habit:

Here they are, engaging the culture with the riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition:

they spilled containers of their own blood into shapes of crosses on the tracks and on the wall of the missile silo.

"I've been tested. I don't have AIDS," Gilbert told the court. "We brought the blood in baby bottles. "

Then, with the bloody crosses drying in the autumn sun, the nuns sang a song about the sacred Earth and chanted, "Oh God, teach us how to be peacemakers in a hostile world."

After about 40 minutes of this, several soldiers driving Humvees crashed through the fence and, with their weapons drawn, surrounded the gray-haired women and handcuffed them.

This is irresponsible. How long will the US military go on tolerating stupid peace songs? I'd have cuffed 'em after 5 minutes.

Update: Occasionally they do wear something more conventional. Fr. Sibley spotted them in their decontamination suits.

The good folks at the National Park Service have reversed themselves and restored three bronze plaques with Scripture quotes to their places in the Grand Canyon. Somebody must have realized that they weren't legally obliged to roll over and take them down immediately when the ACLU complained. One neat thing about this story is that the plaques are a gift from the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, a group of Lutheran nuns (!) that's not well known in the US.

Is it a celebration of the seven deadly sins? A gentle caution about them? You decide.

A young lawyer and youth minister joins a dwindliing, maybe dying, religious community: the Sisters of St. Joseph of Boston (CSJ) are mostly over 70 years of age; only seven are under 50. For now, she's tutoring immigrants in English, and she plans to assist them by returning to the practice of immigration law.

What motivates Deirdre Griffin? In this profile, it's a desire to be involved in "her causes", a generosity to the underprivileged, a sense of "vocation" -- but since it's filtered through the lens of the writer, one can't assume we have the whole picture. The writer doesn't mention the words "Jesus" or "Christ". It does, however, describe the young lady twice as a "feminist". Are socio-political categories the only ones a newspaper writer can understand? I have to hope that the gal who was the president of a college Catholic student group has a personal faith life and some sense of a personal relationship with Christ.

Thank you, Cardinal Arinze!

The rules of the 2000 Roman Missal are taking some time to implement correctly, and Rome has had to correct some misinterpretations. For example, clergy in some parishes and dioceses have been troubling Catholics by telling them that they are now to remain standing after receiving Holy Communion. To the relief of the faithful, Cardinal Arinze has confirmed that the rules in the new GIRM are not intended to forbid kneeling or let it be forbidden.

(via Adoremus)

In principio erat verbum. At least that's what I think it says. It really looks like "verbu", with the "m" turned into a sort of squiggle above the "u". "Et de9 erat verbu~." Apparently this guy Gutenberg was into that sort of IM spelling the kids all use, in which u swap in a digit occasionally and shrtn th wrds s mch s psbl. Gotta be economical about the paper: it doesn't grow on trees, you know.

Yes: a five-foot-long knitted tableau of the Last Supper.

Take this, all of you: knit one for the Father, purl two for the Son....

Bill Bright helped many people find faith in Jesus Christ. May he receive the reward of a good servant.

Now that Pete's back from Lost Wages, let's have some canonical trivia. Be forewarned: even I think this is a boring post, so skip down to the next entry if you have a low threshold for ennui.

Mark Shea's blog and other blogs (and other sites) have been discussing same-sex attraction and priestly vocations, and in all the back-and-forth, a certain document has been much cited: a strong statement against taking risky cases into religious life.

The document is an instruction on "Careful Selection And Training of Candidates For The States Of Perfection And Sacred Orders" from the Sacred Congregation for Religious, dated 2 February 1961. Here's the relevant passage:

Advancement to religious vows and ordination should be barred to those who are afflicted with evil tendencies to homosexuality or pederasty, since for them the common life and the priestly ministry would constitute serious dangers.

I like to see Church documents in the original language sometimes, so I dropped in at the library of our local bad-Catholic college to look it up. The logical place for me to seek a published instruction from a Roman dicastery was the Vatican monthly Acta Apostolicae Sedis, but neither the 1961 nor 1962 volumes had it.

Here's what I could find: the English version seen on the web comes from an old edition of the anthology Canon Law Digest, whose editor Fr. Bouscaren observes that the instruction was never actually published in AAS. Rather, it was sent privately to religious superiors.

That's unusual for a Vatican document, since (correct me if this is wrong, Pete) a law isn't in force until it's published, and the conventional means of publication is its appearance in AAS. Yet despite the apparent lack of publication, an April '61 announcement from the same Sacred Congregation for Religious called the February instruction "public law".

So go figure: is it in force, or isn't it? I have to wonder whether the Instruction's content -- the very mention of these unfortunate tendencies -- might have been considered too frank and shocking to publish in the usual way. In the end, it doesn't matter much, since other more recent documents don't differ much from this one.

A wealthy Colombian movie producer pays peasants to be sterilized:

...he asked to be identified as William Tell after the Swiss patriot who was ordered to shoot a small apple off his young son's head.

Explaining his choice of name, he said his parents were Swiss. While the historic Tell fought against the tyranny of the occupying Austrians, he said he does battle with the tyranny of fertility.

Isn't this sad? Some faithless man gives away money and land, leading poor men to sin: a penny for your soul.

Worried sick but too late to call off the operation, Colombian peasant Marquelis had a panic attack and passed out at the clinic.

Fainting won him only a brief reprieve, and the father of three was soon under the knife. After a few delicate snips, Marquelis became the proud -- if sterile -- owner of acres of land under a private Colombian program that gives plots to men in two Caribbean coast towns who undergo vasectomy operations.

"When the moment of truth came, I almost called the whole thing off. But then I decided: I have to do it," he said.

"I have to do it"? This mutilation is not even undertaken as a fully free choice at one's own initiative, but is a matter of bribery and pressure. It expresses a profound disrespect for human dignity and for conscience. Just imagine what howls of outrage would be heard if the Church were doing something similar: say, offering people money and land for conversions.

Thanks to the Claretian Fathers in the Philippines, you can download a Powerpoint-format presentation of the readings in the Sunday liturgy. Here's how this week's looks when converted to HTML pages for the web. I'm impressed to see the missionaries of our day using modern technology to express the Word of God with such tasteless and unattractive results.

Sometimes an announcement in the Catholic press sounds so bland, so routine, that you might think nothing unusual or even interesting was involved. For example, this ZENIT item sounds like a routine bit of bureaucratic functioning: a certain bishop has been appointed to some position as the "pontifical commissioner" to a certain religious community, whatever that means.

This is actually one of the weirdest cases of phony mysticism I've heard of, in an era when false mystics and apparitions are "the scourge of the Church" (in the words of E. Michael Jones). What does the Church do when a visionary attracts followers - and even inspires the founding of new religious communities - but the founder turns out to be a fraud with a heretical message? In this case, the Church suppressed the visionary's lay movement but let the religious community continue, provided that it accept direct supervision by a bishop appointed by Rome.

What did the founder do or say that was so bad? Oh, she's alleged to be the reincarnation of Our Lady, that's all.

A friend who works in radio sent this over: "Here's my vote for the best line in Blair's speech today!"

(I'm not making this up, you know.)

From Jewsweek. As Nancy writes on her Hello, Failure blog, "Some Jews who apparently have a LOT of time on their hands have begun bar and bat mitzvahing their dogs," sometimes with the co-operation of their rabbis! Oy.

When conservative Jewish pundit Dennis Prager talked about this on the radio, he got a lot of letters from Christians thanking him for mentioning the item: they were grateful to know that religious silliness wasn't just something turning up in their churches!

Those Viet Commies got this one right.

More on funerals: Dom mentions the story of the Santa Fe priest being sued because he allegedly said that the faithful departed, an 80-year-old gentleman, (1) wasn't very faithful and (2) had departed for -- well, somewhere other than paradise.

That beats the other case of funerary denunciation I knew about: when Bishop McGann criticized the late CIA chief William Casey at his 1987 obsequies.

A friend sent in a bit of oral history that circulates among the Discalced Carmelites:

Then there was the OCD in OK City that agreed to say the funeral for the mafioso at the request of the widow. He began his homily by saying, "You are comforted by the thought that your husband, your dad, grandpa, your friend and business associate is now in Heaven with Jesus. Well, he isn't. He is in Hell and in the deepest pits of Hell, which is where all of you will wind up if you don't repent."

The provincial transferred the priest shortly thereafter.

He sure didn't learn to preach like that in a program of Clinical Pastoral Education.

(EXTRA) Questions for class discussion:
What do you think about these situations? If the deceased appeared to die impenitent of serious sin, does it make sense for a priest to say (in some way): this guy probably went to Hell; do not follow him. Or should the deceased simply be denied a Catholic funeral?

Illustrative examples (especially from the lives of the Saints) are welcome.

Here's an upcoming event for us New Englanders; Genevieve Kineke from Canticle Magazine sent the announcement over:

A Day of Prayer
35th Anniversary of Humanae Vitae
25 July 2003
1:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Portsmouth Abbey, Portsmouth, RI

NATURAL FAMILY PLANNING
Questions? Reflections? Concerns?
Bring them to "A Day of prayer".

For details, read on...

Coming soon: a device that interprets your cat's meows! How hard can it be? (1) "feed me" (2) "I gotta go" (3) "pet me" (4) "leave me alone; I don't want to take a bath".

Deacon (and attorney) Keith Fournier, together with the founders of "Catholic Online", Michael and Sandy Galloway, is announcing a movement to foster "a new Catholic Action" in the US, or rather, a pair of movements: one educational in nature, the other activist. It looks like they're good people doing a good work.

I'm not sure they've picked the right man to head the political side of the movement, though. Ex-Boston mayor and ex-Ambassador to the Vatican Ray Flynn's an OK guy in my book (we crossed paths one day outside a confessional), but I don't see any evidence that he's been effective in his US political work since coming home from Rome.

I don't think he's ever really recovered his standing among pro-lifers since he gave his support to the sleazy Bill Clinton, and his image tends toward adjectives like "peevish", "whiny", and "self-promoting", in addition to local papers' portrayal of him as a habitual imbiber. But there are plenty of second acts in American life, and maybe this is Ray's.

Congratulations to all.

We don't have to guess at what will happen if marriage becomes a mere private matter. Maggie Gallagher looks over to Europe.

Over on the Catholic men's mailing list I operate, the question of women and work came up, and as you might expect, Pope John Paul has written on the subject in his encyclical Laborem Exercens.

His teaching obviously does not correspond to some bumper-sticker slogan about individualistic "women's rights" or a repressive notion of "women's place". Instead it's about how people are more important than money, about the dignity and value of child-raising, and yes, about motherhood as a distinct role and a vocation, whose value society needs to respect and foster.

Let me summarize the main points:

• the working world should accommodate itself to the variety of workers, men and women, to their special talents, and to their family responsibilities;


• a "family wage" should enable a father to support his family, so that the mother has the freedom to care for the development of her children.

Here's the passage:

John Paul II "for Dummies": a little guide on how to read the papal prose.

Rob Diaz has posted a link to the trailer for Mel Gibson's "The Passion". You could probably just play it as a stream off that link, but I'd suggest you download it to your own machine first. You're gonna want to see it more than once.

I'm off to a summer-school reunion day in New Hampshire. I'm pleased to see that the winter school at St. Paul's has finally added a Catholic chaplaincy and a Sunday Mass at their beloved chapel. But I won't be staying for the whole day's program in Concord; there are country bookstores to be shopped, all the way to Sunapee.

In another summer excursion, I've signed up to attend the Thomistic theology conference next month at Ave Maria College. It'll probably be over my head technically, but at least it'll help as an orientation to the subject. Fr. Bryce expressed some interest in the conference too, and Victor's not far from there: will it be safe to bring all of our eccentricity together in one place?

From January: Robert Epstein, the editor-in-chief of Psychology Today tells how he found "a dark, intolerant, abusive side of the gay community" after the magazine dared to publish a small ad for Joseph Nicolosi's book, A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality (excerpt). Dr. Epstein seems to hold pretty liberal views, but let's give him two cheers for his willingness to let ideas contend on their merits.

Chris Reilly, our sensible Catholic friend up in Maine, is starting a blog, and even though it's not hosted here at stblogs.org, it will definitely deserve your patronage!

Welcome, Chris!

A piece in today's WSJ (subscribers only) looks at the popularity of funerary eulogies and mentions the new regulation in Newark:

Religious leaders are looking for ways to make eulogies more appropriate and to give verbose eulogists the hook. (A minister's consoling hand on a eulogist's shoulder really means, "Enough.") Earlier this year, Roman Catholic Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark, N.J., caused a furor by decreeing that eulogies don't belong at a funeral Mass. Too many eulogies are more about "how grandpa was a great pool player," without any mention of religious significance, says the archbishop's spokesman, Jim Goodness.

Archbishop Myers would prefer that "words of remembrance" be given at funeral homes or gravesites, but says priests may consider allowing brief comments before Mass begins. His decree, which went into effect July 1, has already sharply reduced church eulogies among the 1.3 million Catholics in the area. Other dioceses are fine-tuning their own eulogy guidelines.

Understandably, many mourners argue that eulogies are the most meaningful part of a service.

In some funeral services, that may be so, but when the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the setting, the context in which a funeral takes place, Christ speaks -- and has already spoken -- His word about the value of the departed one.

Sometimes the efforts of a eulogist can backfire:

Even noncontroversial eulogies can be problematic. [One funeral director] recalls a funeral in which eulogist after eulogist said glowing things about the man who died, leading an exasperated audience [sic] member to stand up and say, "Let's stop joking. He was a no-good S.O.B.!" The room went silent, and the priest quickly concluded the Requiem Mass.

Here's a story about how some Oakland Catholics got organized to let the Vatican know about problems in their diocese, with the use of a little technology.

The gay Anglican priest recently appointed Bishop of Reading has withdrawn his acceptance of the post.

Talk about "burying the lead"! Sean Roberts must not have realized that a modest detail in his blog entry should really be the headline.

It is a case of bad news and good news. The good news is that Abp. Chaput has permitted the establishment of a Russian Catholic community in Denver sharing the building of an ordinary Roman-rite parish. That'll make a grand total of four Russian Catholic parishes in the US.

The bad news is that this came about because of some dissension in Denver's Ruthenian Byzantine parish, where the admirable Fr. Chrysostom Frank served for some years. Sean has that story too.

(via Amy)

"He's my husband, I married him for better or worse, thick or thin, ‘til death do us part. There was just no way I could give up hope on him."

While Pete gets to have the day off down in Florida, I'm hoping we can put him to work a little bit with a canonical question.

A notice on my local parish's bulletin board announces a day of recollection to be held at a shrine in a nearby diocese on a certain Saturday. The notice says that the 4 p.m. Mass that ends the day's program will be a Saturday Mass and will not fulfill the Sunday obligation.

My question is: is that right? Plenty of parishes will offer Sunday vigil Masses at 4 p.m., and those will fulfill the obligation; does observing the Saturday liturgy make a difference? If I remember right, a wedding Mass on Sunday afternoon fulfills the obligation, and of course that is not the regular Sunday liturgy either.

O Brussels, thou hast become a gushing fount of stupidity!

European Union privacy regulations now forbid hospital chaplains to be told the religion of a patient. (Merci, messieurs.) However, British ingenuity has stepped in: a Catholic women's association has invented a laminated ID card for Catholics to carry in case they should be sent to a hospital unable to speak.

In a praiseworthy feature, the card makes a point of rejecting euthanasia by dehydration: "I would like my nursing care to include fluids - however administered."

While I'm up at 3 am tinkering with my computer, EWTN is presenting a moving special about Courage, the spiritual support group for Catholics overcoming same-sex attraction. The program is built around members' experiences of conversion and recovery, including that of writer David Morrison.

It'll be on the air -- well, on the cable -- again tonight (Thursday, July 3) from 11 PM to midnight ET.

(By the way, folks, would you take a moment to say a prayer for "Bill", who struggled with this problem for a long time and has fallen away? Thanks.)

"If he continues doing the right thing, I could see myself going back to church one day.''

Finally. The attempt to build a mosque in front of Nazareth's Basilica of the Annunciation has been the subject of wrangling for years. Christian leaders considered it an act of aggression at one of the holiest sites in the Christian world.

[Minister of Construction Natan] Sharansky said two main reasons led to his committee's recommendation to ban the mosque's construction. He said that Muslim leaders had not honored previous agreements regarding the size of the proposed mosque and had antagonized Christian pilgrims arriving in Nazareth. In addition, Sharansky noted the united opposition of the worldwide Christian community.

"We have an obligation to safeguard the holy places and protect the rights of minorities and their freedom of religion," Sharansky said in defense of his recommendation to protect the Nazareth church.

In this case, it's a pretty substantial minority: 40% of Nazareth's population is Christian.

Pro-abort group's survey says 51% of women favor restricting abortion to extreme cases. Thanks, Mrs. Wattleton!

(via Drudge)

Catholic Light has been at stblogs.org for a month now, and our statistics show about 50% more visits per day than we had at Blogspot. Thanks for coming by!

In last weekend's general assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, fittingly held in Boston and reported in the Globe, some startling language was heard.

I don't mean the common words that punctuate rap records -- no, these words really got the attention of the audience:

[Rev. Victoria Weinstein:] "I'm talking about the hot-button words, like `God' and `spirit' and `spiritual' and `soul' and `sacred'...."

...there was some audible gasping during [UUA president William] Sinkford's opening speech yesterday, when he remarked that 'souls are saved one at a time.'...

Prodded by a new president, a onetime atheist who had a conversion experience in a hospital room, the Unitarian Universalist Association is embarking on a freewheeling debate over whether to reverse its decades-long drift away from what...[the Rev. Mr. Sinkford] calls the ''language of reverence'' and instead begin to ''name the holy.''

As the saying goes, the wellsprings of grace are infinitely deep.

At the office today, I heard one end of a phone conversation. A co-worker got a call from a friend, who started telling her the latest news about Jane, a student gal they know who is perpetually broke:

"I don't understand. Jane is gonna 'sell an egg' and get $4000?...
What is it -- Fabergé?"

Bp. Sean in Palm Beach and today in Boston.

And the same to all our northern neighbors. The French version of your national anthem has a lovely Catholic ethos.

The divergence between the two language versions makes me wonder, though: when French- and English-speaking Canadians sing it, are they singing about the same thing? The French text is about a valorous history of bearing the Cross to defend home and right, while the English version centers on patriotic love for a land that is rising strong, glorious, and free: a different emphasis.

In the USCCB's statement on Lawrence v. Texas, counsel Mark Chopko seems to think it doesn't lay the basis for sweeping aside marriage law: "This case was decided on the narrowest grounds. Justice Kennedy took pains to insulate this case from broader conclusions."

Here in blogdom attorney Dale Price is skeptical, so he poses a challenge: can anybody devise an argument to keep anti-polygamy laws?

(Thanks, Mark and Dom.)