“I know what you mean about being repulsed by the Church when you have only the Jansenist-Mechanical Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. It’s never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.” - Flannery O’Connor “Habit of Being”

Islam intellectually bankrupt? go here

Eve Tushnet rates the charities: here

I love that there is a Cardinal Ratzinger fan club. And boy do I want one of those kitschy "Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club" coffee mugs with the slogan "putting the smackdown on heresy since 1981". But alas the link to buy is broken...

A quote:The loss of joy does not make the world better -- and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the courage and impetus to do good. We have a new need for that primordial trust which ultimately faith can give. That the world is basically good, that God is there and is good. That it is good to live and be a human being. This results, then, in the courage to rejoice, which in turn becomes commitment to makng sure that other people, too, can rejoice and receive good news. -Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, pp. 36-37.

My brush mit greatness (alias D. Connaughton) on Eve Tushnet's blog. Also: who knew?

Interesting blog-o-rhythmn from Amy Welborn:
Feminist Brenda Walker is arguing that multiculturalism is a threat to liberal values and social freedom and refered to current and future immigrants such as 'conservative Catholics and Moslems'."
Conservative Catholics? Gee, she couldn't mean Hispanics could she? Why doesn't she just come out and say it then: "You know, our right to get our unborn babies killed might just be threatened if we let in too many Mexicans." I hate to bring this up, but one of the dark sides of 19th century women's suffrage movements was a distinct nativist tone to much of the argumentation. The push was for middle class Anglo-Saxon women to be able to vote in order to balance out the waves of African-Americans and mostly Catholic and Jewish immigrants.

Quoteables
To those who loathe the bourgeoisie,
I offer this advice to thee:
Get very rich or very poor,
And you won't be bourgeois anymore. - Clifford D. May

A happy childhood leaves you hideously unprepared for life. - Kinky Friedman

Entertainment Uber Alles
"Day was turned into night, and light into darkness: - an inexpressible quantity of dust and ashes was poured out, deluging land, sea, and air, and burying two entire cities, Herculaneum and Pompeii, while the people were sitting in the theatre." - Dion Cassius, lib. lxvi in preface of Lytton's "The Last Days of Pompeii"

good stuff from Mark Shea's blog:
"I Have Said Elsewhere...
that mercy, in addition to being God's greatest quality is, when demanded of us, his most appalling one. We love the idea of mercy for ourselves. We hate it and regard it as a travesty of justice when applied to others, especially others whose sins hurt us. I recently wrote that part of the duty of laypeople is, of course, to extend forgiveness to the priests and bishops who have so agonizingly betrayed us. I got complaints back from folks saying, in effect, that we are under no obligation to forgive if they don't acknowledge their sin. This attitude, in addition to being flatly against the model of Jesus Christ and St. Stephen, who forgave their unrepentant murderers, is a formula for modeling the American Church on that happy land known as the Balkans, where people remember everything and learn nothing.

Yes, the perp may go on living in denial till the day he dies. But if we forgive, we do not have to live with his having endless power over us till the day we die. Refusal to forgive is like taking poison and expecting the other guy to die.

And from another Sheaite entry:
A priest I know once pointed out to me that one of the marks of the satanic is that it claims to see right through you, to identify you with your sins and pin you to the wall like a bug on a card. The devil, in speaking to Jesus, says "I know who you are!" He does the same to us. He says "I see right through you. You are your sins. This is who you really are!" In contrast, Jesus never does this. Indeed, in the miracle of grace he distinguishes us from our sins and frees us from them. Peter says, "Go away from me, for I am a sinful man" and Jesus doesn't say, "You're damn right you are! You sicken me!". He liberates Peter from that. He calls him by a new name and gives him a new life.
Something that troubles me about the way in which we treat sin is this tendency to speak as though our sins name us. "Now we know who Jesse Jackson--or Cardinal Law--or Whoever--really is." The answer of the Faith is, "No you don't. Not when you are naming people by their sins." Sin is what destroys persons. It's not what constitutes them. To the degree that we sin we are not who we really are. Doesn't mean that we can't sin, of course. Radical evil is a reality. Nor does it mean that we should not speak clearly of evil when it is committed. But when we say that "This is who X really is" we are in fact delighting in evil and rejoicing in a lie. The point of the gospel is not that our sins name us, but that Jesus comes to free us from our sins and really name us. It's a reality we as Catholic will have to cling to, not least because of the temptation we will feel to indulge it as more betrayals from our clergy come to light.

I think the search for humility in the bishops is a vain search, for the humility gene is one they simply don't have. They are politicians, and we know that an admission of guilt from a politician requires a DNA-stained dress. The best we can hope for (and I think it HAS been achieved) is that they will not shuffle bad priests any more. They have gotten that message, even if they will not publically confess their sins. I have come to peace with that because I confess my sins in the privacy of the confessional and therefore will give them the right to do the same.

I think clerics look at the laity the same way a customer service manager looks at customers. Lay people require priests to work for them, they are needy. My uncle is a pharamcist and he says they all secretly loathe working with 'the public'. Isn't that what clerics do? But isn't that quite human? The customer makes demands, often unreasonable. As one customer service manager I know says, "The customer isn't always right, but the customer is always the customer". I'm not excusing this mentality at all, but I think anyone who works with the public everyday has to fight against an "us against them" mentality.

"Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas.
As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion
in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy
and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the
expression is capable, becoming more and more human.
When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined
scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system,
when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he
says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own
imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed
but contemplating all, then he is by that very process
sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the
vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass.
Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded."
G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, Ch. 20

From Nat'l Review Online:
"Um, this is getting really weird. One month ago, a red heifer was reportedly born in Israel. Rabbis checked her out and found her to be unblemished. Apocalyptic types hardly need to be reminded that an unblemished red heifer is needed for the sacrifice to purify the Temple Mount for the rebuilding of the Jewish temple, in anticipation of the Messiah's coming (or Second Coming, depending on which way you swing theologically). The Temple Mount, of course, is currently occupied by the Al-Aqsa mosque. You do the math; I'm headed for the hills, and hoping this is a hoax." Go here

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of hearts, there remains . . . an un-uprooted small corner of evil."- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, "The Ascent"

Reflections on pedophile priests.....

Nietzche was so pious as a youth that he was called 'the little pastor'. Stalin was a seminary student. Do intensely spiritual environments produce either a Satan or a Judas or a Nietzsche or, contrarily, a Gabriel or Peter or Aquinas? Do religious communities produce either great saints or great sinners, whereas laymen & women are more likely to be mired in mediocrity?

Don't we humans only respect 'scarcity'? Did the priests begin to treat the sacred as profane due in part to their overfamiliarity with the sacred? Isn't that why God had the high priest only visit the Holy of Holies once a year in the O/T?

Knowing her to be my mother
only by virtue of her holiness
for if she were a sinner
she would pick and choose.
But she chooses all to mother
as her son chooses all to save.
Confident only in her holiness
I gaze upon Purity;
for the fruit of her perfection
is her perfection's source.

St.Therese of Liseux struggled with the fact that she had
never committed a mortal sin, distraught at feeling she wasn't as dependent
on God as someone who HAD committed a mortal sin. Amazing.

Le' Difference btwn Mary & Eve
Eve disobeyed God and consumed fruit, Mary obeyed God
and bore fruit.

"Excessive confidence in the ability to understand the
will of God, is irreverent because it fails to recognize human
limitations. Reverence means understanding the difference
between the human and the divine. " -
Paul Woodruff

"We shall say no more, 'Our god,' to the work of our hands." Hosea 14:7