Author: Sal

Help me out, pilgrims, my new clothing store for big and tall clergy needs a name. Latin could be funnier than English. Think not only diocesan clergy but orders too.

I never knew all this about Jimmy Carter. I think the only good thing Carter did was give us Reagan!

Europe’s thought police: It’s easy to forget at times the benefits of being a writer or polemicist in the United States. The First Amendment protects everyone — from the hate-monger to the well-paid purveyors of conventional wisdom. Not so in Europe. Last week saw two truly disturbing consequences of the combination of leftist do-goodery with the force of the state. A British man got into a verbal fight with some Muslim Brits on the street when they averred that the Americans who perished on September 11 “deserved to die.” Provoked by that obscenity, the man burst into what was an unfortunate diatribe against Islam. He now faces jail time under a new British law that forbids the insulting of anyone else’s religion. The Muslims face no such liability, of course. Hating Americans is not forbidden under the new religious hate-crime laws. I guess if it were, there’d be precious little space left in the jails. Meanwhile, in Paris, the lively liberal polemicist, Oriana Fallaci, is also facing criminal charges for writing a book highly critical of some of the more extreme currents in contemporary Islam. A while ago, it was just the Ayatollahs who issued fatwas against writers challenging Islam. Now it’s Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. One small but wonderful detail: Miss Fallaci’s lawyer is the exquisitely-named Christophe Bigot.

From zenit.org – the address that professor Gerhard Ludwig Müller of the University of Munich delivered during a videoconference organized Sept. 28 by the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy. On Oct. 1 John Paul II appointed him bishop of Regensburg.

Liturgical scholars during the first half of the 20th century worked in an excellent manner for the renewal of the liturgy, because they were theologians. These new narrow-minded characters instead, who consider the liturgy a playground for their fixations, simply consolidate the liturgical crisis, because they create a liturgy which is aimed at exterior effects and not at transmitting the contents of the faith.

Read the whole thing! I think we’ll be blogging about this for quite a while. Would it be too much to expect a similar statement from an American Bishop?

I took a day trip with a friend and her sister to the Eastern Shore of Maryland this past weekend. Since we had a three and a half hour drive each way, we had ample time to talk. I found that they were both “recovering” Catholics. This was after I related to them my story about defending the faith at work. They were both raised Catholic and received the Sacraments through Confirmation. One goes to Church on Christmas and Easter. The other isn’t practicing at all. The first one is drawn to pray at a Church near her home in front of the Blessed Sacrament. When she goes she feels at peace. I told her it was because God is there in the Tabernacle. Her sister said until she grew up she went to Church every Sunday and she “spun the beads” each night before she went to sleep. She finds the Church confining now, both for the people and for God. “You can’t put God in a box,” she said. She says she is much happier now than she was as a practicing Catholic. “I think people should just be good and kind – they shouldn’t have to worry about all those rules to go to Heaven,” she said. “My God doesn’t work that way.”
“You and I have different Gods,” I said. There was an uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. Our next topic was the weather.