Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive - C. S. Lewis

The following is an excerpt from Ironic Catholic's comments on my Mass Report post last week. I think this paragraph should be required reading for anyone who is going to die:

Not that I have any control over this…but when I die, I want someone to remind me about the love of Jesus Christ. I want someone to ask me about repentance and offer reconciliation. I want someone to challenge me that the best is yet to come, that this suffering joins me with Christ, and like his suffering, it is not the last word. God is here and God will be there and has already broken my path for that journey. I want to receive the anointing of the sick, and be told that God will raise me up. I don’t want someone asking if I’m “in touch with my values.” And especially if I am weak and in pain, I hope the person helping me have a holy, joyful death will not expect me to “take the lead.”

This stirs up a lot of thoughts and emotions for me. How in the past I may have had the opportunity to deliver this message to a dying friend and how I failed, how embarrassing death is and how tongue-tied it can make us, what a bastard death is but how radically and profoundly our faith in Christ confronts it. I'm reminded of how Walker Percy shined the light on this in his fiction -- recall Lonnie's death in The Moviegoer and how Binx responded to questions from Lonnie's siblings about the hope of the resurrection, and recall the deathbed baptism scene in The Last Gentleman, how matter-of-fact and therefore how good the priest was -- and of how Percy approached his own death. Percy himself often pointed to the witness of Flannery O'Connor and how she confronted death with courage and a clear vision of God's grace. - blogger at Korrektiv

2 Things You Only See on PBS Pledge Week ... Frank Sinatra, singing "America the Beautiful." - "The Corner"

Shortly after Rowan Williams was named to Becket’s chair, we spent a cordial ninety minutes together at Lambeth Palace, Canterbury’s London headquarters. I gave him a copy of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II; we spoke of John Paul’s theology of the body, and then fell to discussing the difference between “sacramental” and “gnostic” understandings of the human condition. The former insists that the stuff of the world – including maleness, femaleness, and their complementarity — has truths built into it; gnostics say it’s all plastic, all malleable, all changeable. The sacramentalists believe that the extraordinary reveals itself through the ordinary: bread, wine, water, salt, marital love and fidelity; the gnostics say it’s a matter of superior wisdom, available to the enlightened (which can mean, the politically correct). Dr. Williams seemed convinced that the gnosticism of a lot of western high culture posed a great danger to historic Christianity and the truths it must proclaim. He was right. The gnosticism that infects the Episcopal Church USA has just about driven the Anglican Communion over the cliff. - George Weigel, though at the beginning he sounded Thirsten Howell-the-Third-ish

I think the imprecision of the word "love" is preferable to going about saying things like, "I apprehend donuts as pleasurable." - Tom of Disputations

The fact is that until fairly recently the Arab/Muslim world didn't have a giant chip on its shoulder about the Crusades. After all, they won. And it wasn't as central an event in their historical narrative as it is today. It's only with the export of Marxist notions of European colonialism and exploitation to the Middle East that the radicals started harping on it. In other words, Bin Laden's whole emphasis on "Crusaders" and the knee-jerk response to the word is tied up in the Westernization of the Middle East. Alas, it's the wrong kind of Westernization but Westernization nonetheless. We saw similar dynamics in places like Vietnam, where French Marxism was appropriated by nationalist movements and therefore deemed "authentic" by leftist observers. This is one reason, it seems to me, why the whole post-colonial studies crowd (or whatever they're called today) seems to think that Marxism is an authentic third world doctrine, even though it couldn't be more European.... - Jonah Goldberg

I've looked at the new Benedictine book but I have the same NRSV allergy. I'm trying to get over that, though, in light of Augustine's comment in the Confessions about the artless Hebrew Psalms and how their lack of Roman class revolted him til years later when he returned to them with humility and discovered their infinite depth. It irks me to admit it, but the Word comes to life even in the lumpy wet cardboard English of the RNAB.I've looked at the new Benedictine book but I have the same NRSV allergy. I'm trying to get over that, though, in light of Augustine's comment in the Confessions about the artless Hebrew Psalms and how their lack of Roman class revolted him til years later when he returned to them with humility and discovered their infinite depth. It irks me to admit it, but the Word comes to life even in the lumpy wet cardboard English of the RNAB. - Bill White of "Summa Minutiae"

I was thinking about the relationship between the bishop and the people of his diocese, and trying to come up with a way of saying that yes, he is their servant, but no, they aren't his masters. After testing several analogies, all of which failed, I finally hit on one that I think works pretty well: The Bishop is the shepherd of his Church....All this works reasonably well (I presume) for a reasonably competent shepherd herding ordinary sheep. It's considerably more difficult when the sheep are baptized Catholics. And when those baptized Catholics are educated in the Faith to the point where they have strong opinions about what the bishop should do, forget about it. And yet, the relationship remains one of shepherd and sheep, even when the sheep are smarter and wiser and holier than the shepherd. It's certainly not easy, and it can be positively lousy, for a sheep to know better than its shepherd, but the promises of Christ don't include ease in this life. And however smart and wise and holy they may be, sheep without a shepherd are lost. - Tom of Disputations

Dissident Catholics are more worrying than atheists. - Cardinal Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, via "Spirit & Life"

It is ironic that in the almost 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the focus of many American commentators has been fixed not on the crimes of the socialist bloc, but on the supposed "silence" of Pius XII... Writers such as Sartre (and in America, Lillian Hellman) who backed Josef Stalin all through his purges and genocides are still considered respectable, and Marxism is still treated as a legitimate analytical tool in universities — even as the last traces of Christian influence are systematically purged from public life. ...And yet, as a Christian, I find something comforting in this fact. The Nazis and the Communists knew deep down that the Church was their most implacable foe. Stalin’s famous sneer “How many divisions does the pope have?” has been answered. The silent artillery of time will in the end reduce all heresies and expose all falsehoods. - Paul Cella via Bill Luse

"I can walk in the rose garden, watch the joyful capering of my dog, and see the indisputable work of God. The key is beauty,” says Koontz, who converted to the Catholic faith while in college. “If the world is merely a complex and efficient machine, beauty is not required. Beauty is in fact superfluous. Therefore beauty is a gift to us. If we were soulless machines of meat, the survival instinct would be all we needed to motivate us. The pleasures of the senses — such as taste and smell — are superfluous to machines in a godless world. Therefore, they are gifts to us, and evidence of divine grace. The older I’ve gotten, the more beauty, wonder, and mystery I see in the world, which is why there are ever more of those three things in my books." - author Dean Koontz, via Tim Drake on NCR