Pedantry: one of the perqs of writing for Catholic Light

I keep seeing the word “perks” to describe special privileges, such as: “A free parking space is one of the perks of the job.” It should be perqs, as in “perquisites“:

Etymology: Middle English, property acquired by means other than inheritance, from Medieval Latin perquisitum, from neuter of perquisitus, past participle of perquirere to purchase, acquire, from Latin, to search for thoroughly, from per- thoroughly + quaerere to seek
1 : a privilege, gain, or profit incidental to regular salary or wages; especially : one expected or promised
2 : GRATUITY, TIP
3 : something held or claimed as an exclusive right or possession

Happy Lame-o-ween

In a fit of dementia, I bought about 5 pounds of candy this morning. Teresa had mentioned something about having fun dressing up and handing out candy in the past, and I was at the grocery store and saw Kit-kats, Milky Ways, 3 Musketeers, M&Ms and Snickers on sale. Remembering that the “fun size” was always a big hit when I was a kid, I bought one bag of each.
I got home and informed my wife of the purchase. She frowned and said, “No one comes here. We should be in the basement watching a movie instead of waiting for the kids to show up. But now we have to because if we don’t hand out the candy then you will eat it.” I assured her I wouldn’t eat it but she said didn’t really believe me, sort of like Marion Barry telling the cops that the crack had been left in his car by the previous owner.
So around 4pm we started the setup: Candles in the windows (the kind that can light cats on fire), terra cotta pumpkins with candles inside in the walk, and a basket full of candy.
We had the following folks show up:
2 astronauts my wife tried to make small talk with: “Where’s your space ship?” “We’re just kids in costumes! We don’t have a space ship!” (Stupid adults!)
1 tiger
3 teen agers dressed up as disgruntled youths.
1 sort of sailor looking person
A handful of witches.
A girl who described herself as “a gothic person.” Even me, in my lame understanding of modern culture, know they are called “Goths” and they just need to be in all black, black hair and maybe an extra-white face. This girl had a black shirt, a little cross and some jeans on.
So Teresa and I started talking about Halloweens of ages past. “How many times did you go dressed as a Hobo” I asked. “At least seven or eight… I bet you can’t dress like a Hobo these days… wouldn’t be proper…”
I told her my mom used to make our costumes. I was Death one year. I was a hobo on several ocassions, but mom thought the hobo costume needed bells sewn on for some reason… I’ll have to ask her about that.
Teresa said her best costume was that she wore her dad’s sailor uniform from WWII, and a girlfriend dressed like the Sweetheart he meets dockside when the ship comes back to home port. And when they rang the doorbell, her friend would leap into her arms so that Teresa was holding her up. Now that’s an interesting costume.
We’ve been getting grunts and half-done costumes, and it’s not even the time
the high school kids show up.
Before I start sounding like that old dude from 60 minutes, I leave you with this.
I did get to spend some nice time with my wife talking about Halloween’s past and I’ve gotten about 5,000 calories out of the house. Not a bad way to spend the evening, even if I have to answer the door for a “Gothic Person.”

Faith of Our Parents

Normally, I think music directors stop singing most hymns after two verses out of laziness and haste, but let’s go along this time, and sing just two verses of Fr. Faber:

Faith of our fathers, living still,
In spite of dungeon, fire and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy
Whene’er we hear that glorious Word!
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.
Our fathers, chained in prisons dark,
Were still in heart and conscience free:
And truly blest would be our fate,
If we, like them, should die for thee!
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.

At my parish we have a very good reason to stop there. The third verse in the Seasonal Missalette runs as follows:

Our mothers, too, oppressed and wronged,
still lived their faith in dignity;
Their brave example gives us strength
To work for justice ceaselessly….

As you probably know, that was not written by Fr. Faber, and it doesn’t take a da Vinci to decrypt it as a bunch of feminist code-speak. Just count how many of those 23 words come loaded with whiny left-wing resonances, and you’ll get the point.
Ideology was obviously the primary concern in producing that text, because nobody interested in beauty would have written it: just try to wrap your mouth around that word “wronged” and sing it attractively. You can’t.
“Welcome to Saint Humbert’s Parish. The entrance hymn is number three-hundred-and-one, ‘Faith of Our Fathers’. We will sing verses one, two, and four, because verse three is some crock o’s— they put in there to please the feminazis. Please rise and greet our celebrant.”

Andrew Stuttaford, National Review Online’s resident skeptic

Andrew Stuttaford does not like religious belief. I am sure he likes some religious believers, and some of them are, doubtless, among his best friends. Yet in National Review Online, he makes it clear that the blasphemous movie “Life of Brian” is a Gospel to him.
“The Corner,” NRO’s blog, is turned over to Stuttaford on most weekends, where he vents about two topics: health puritans, and religious believers who won’t get with the secularist program. I am with him on the first point, though his attacks on the no-smoking-and-drinking crowd are tiresome by now.
The second point is the key to his thinking, at least the thinking he contributes to NRO. Stuttaford seems to loathe — the word does not seem too strong — the beliefs of Islamists, Evangelicals, and religious believers of all stripes, probably in that order. For instance, he does not merely disparage radical Islamist clerics in his native Britain because they incite murder and undermine civil society. He thinks they need to shut up because the U.K. is a secular nation, and their God-talk has no place in the modern world.
An exaggeration? Here are his words of praise for “Brian”: “If there’s any type of belief that runs through the movie, it’s disbelief, unbelief, a world-weary skepticism.” Stuttaford means this as a compliment, though the world needs more skepticism the way it needs more genocide.
“The real target of the movie’s satire is not religion as such, but the unholy baggage that too frequently comes with it — the credulity, the fanaticism, and that very human urge to persecute, well, someone.” I could make the same case about sports fans or science-fiction devotees. Since the Enlightenment unleashed its monstrous crimes, all for secular reasons, religion is a distant second to politics as a raison d’abattre. I’ve seen drunks come to blows over perceived slights — and religion is a primary cause of “unholy baggage”? Not human frailty?
Given the massive failure of secularism to make people happy, whether through ascetic utopian scemes (Marxism) or wretched excess (consumerism), it’s touching that Stuttaford can maintain his faith in it. To maintain his beliefs, he takes aim at easy targets like Scientology or Jerry Falwell, avoiding more formidable targets like, say, Confucianism or Catholicism, which have vast intellectual traditions that don’t fit into his model of religion as “superstition.”
He continues: “There’s a lovely moment when, appalled by the spectacle of the faithful gathering beneath his window, he tells them that, ‘you don’t need to follow me, you don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves, you’re all individuals.’ Simple stuff, but, these days, pretty good advice.”
But we’re not “individuals” in the sense that we are radically separated from everyone else. We rely on others to grow our food, make our electricity, build our houses, and most other necessities. None of us has invented our worldview out of whole cloth; we choose what we believe (hopefully) based on whether it is true or false.
Our species is more interconnected than it has ever been, yet some persist in thinking that we can somehow be “individuals” in the most literal sense. Yet the more disconnected people are, the more miserable they become. When entire societies embrace that philosophy, they begin a slow march toward oblivion, just as Britain and Western Europe’s populations are slowly dying.
Belief in the unfettered self is the most superstitious belief of all, and the surest path to self-destruction.