Email response:
I know - Merton had an independent, critical spirit, which I'm sure he hoped the monastery would help mold and even..overcome. He went in some interesting directions at the end of his life, that's for sure.

I'm reading Thomas Merton's last journals ('67-68) and it is positively purgatorial. It's hard to endure the juxtaposition of his early, inspiring work The Seven Storey Mountain and his last journals. They are certainly honest. And so what if he's not a saint? Just because you are a monk (or bishop) doesn't make you better than anyone else. Merton comes off as an Edward Abbey - crabby, nature-loving, beer & bourbon drinking, hater of America, etc...Maybe all heroes have feet of clay and I should get over it. It's certainly a familiar pattern - the bright-eyed, idealistic youth moving towards a cynical, curmugeonly older age.

Merton on his monastery: "Is this institution worth preserving? Maybe - but let someone do it who do it who knows how and is interested. Not me!"

Veni Sancte has a very interesting post on 1968, the year of the Church's Maginot line (i.e. Humane Vitae). He says that "The teaching of the Church is shaped by human experience and human experience is shaped by the teaching of the Church. What happens when the circuit is disrupted? Especially difficult is finding the source of the disruption. The teaching Church is blaming the learning Church and the learning Church is blaming the teaching Church. If history is any guide, I would place my money on the learning Church as coming out ahead. When the learners are telling the teachers that what they are teaching is not the learners’ experience of human existence, nothing can be taught."

But I don't think the learning Church is protected from error. And therein lies the difference. The teaching Church has no choice in teaching that contraception is an evil, if she believes it to be so, regardless of what the learning church thinks or "experiences". The choice in how hard to crackdown is whether or not the Church wishes to risk becoming a remnant, like the Amish. And in these days when bishops act like CEOs, one senses they won't take that path. And so we will probably continue to muddle through with an increasingly polarized Church.

Interestingly, Islam & Mormonism are two fast growing religions that have in common they ask a lot from their adherents. The perfect way to marginalize oneself as a Church is to be weak and capitulate and ask nothing...(Jesus must've understood this in asking that we become perfect as the Heavenly Father is perfect). Mormons, of course, are expected to do two years of missionary work and fast from caffeine, alcohol, etc...Muslims are expected to pray five times a day and fast one month a year. So I don't quite understand why Humane Vitae should've been the lightening rod it has become in the sense that practicing it be considered so unreasonable. My wife and I use NFP and don't find it unduly burdensome.

Perhaps the point is that American Catholics find an undemocratic Church a scandal in of and itself. Democracy is in our very blood now; dissent as natural as breathing. Tocqueville wrote in 'Democracy in America': Two things must here be accurately distinguished: equality makes men want to form their own opinions; but, on the other hand, it imbues them with the taste and the idea of unity, simplicity, and impartiality in the power that governs society. Men living in democratic times are therefore very prone to shake off all religious authority; but if they consent to subject themselves to any authority of this kind, they choose at least that it should be single and uniform."

My mother experienced the confusion in 1968, and the confusion was born mostly because the authority became fractured and no longer uniform. She went to a priest to confess her use of birth control and the priest told her, "it's okay, that's not really a sin". This disconnect was what turned her off. In the next sentence Tocqueville writes that "Religious powers not radiating from a common center are naturally repugnant to their minds." It was at this point my mom became of the "learning Church" and dissented from the teaching of Humane Vitae. The tendency in a democracy is to hold one's own opinion as gospel, unless there is a single, uniform authority. And because that authority was fractured in 1968, by dissenting priests and even bishops, we are still suffering the consequences.

Cranky Professor brings back pleasant memories of Rome...(Fade to flashback music)...I've this vivid memory of the pushy Italian nuns at St. Peter's who formed an impentetrable line for Communion making it difficult to merge...Instead of waiting for the rows ahead of them to empty, they came up from rows back. Charitably, we chalked it up to their great hunger for the Eucharist..

We searched for our grail, the little French restaurant run by lay missionaires called "l' eau Vive" where the cardinals of the church party and where, after dinner, comes the ritual singing of Ave Maria in French, sung in such sweet and childlike tones that the hair on your skin stands up. We found the little restaurant, where JPII frequented before his papal promotion and where discreteness is the word, but not easily. I ask various people where "Le Monterone" is...A policeman knows but isn't telling, another local tells but doesn't know. The pleasure of looking and finding was greater, and it is that little area of Rome I consequently remember most - the little café Le Euastochio where big shots sip cappuchino, where religious shops line the square like a geiger counters triggering the nearness of the eccleciastical restaurant.

One night in Rome venturing out after a couple glasses of wine (the in-room refrigerator had provided the wine at no immediate cost other than my signature on a sheet of paper), I walked in the light rain to a new (i.e. hundred year old) church. I peaked inside it's slightly ajar doors, and inside were the comforting images of saints. I stealthily moved in and saw that some sort of singing practice was going on. The language barrier being such, I could make out nothing of their sounds; it was completely opaque. I felt like a voyeur, an outsider, and lurked in the shadows. A man in his late 40s, with a look of annoyance, began the long trek down the aisle. Reading body language, I scattered. I bolted out the door, delighted that I'd provoked a response, and then observered from a distance as the man looked left and right and left again, and then closed the church doors completely. I was on vacation, and if I could enter the locals lives, even in a perfectly annoying way, then at least I was impacting.

Interesting blog from Eve Tushnet on "How one becomes what one is".

Another from the NY Times:
Contrary to all appearances, Catherine Millet considers herself no libertine. Being French and an intellectual, however, she has a particularly precise definition of that term. "I don't think I am a libertine in the literary, 18th-century sense of the word," said the 54-year-old author of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," a surprisingly dry memoir, given its clinically detailed descriptions of group sex and seemingly innumerable affairs energetically pursued over the course of two decades by Ms. Millet.

Yet her own conclusions about sex are much more mundane. "For a long time, people said that procreation was the point of sex," she said. "Today people tend to think that the point of sex is pleasure, orgasm. But sincerely, I don't think there's any point to sex at all. People think there's some secret they'll discover in that black box of sex, which will help them to live better or make them happy. And in fact there's nothing, nothing, nothing there at all."

Re: that last paragraph. Isn't this the perfect mirror of our whole materialistic mindsight? It reminds me of someone who has studied biochemistry and de-mystified the body - it's just cells....there's no soul there....She went about her "research" in the most clinical, empirical way imaginable and came up empty. What a great metaphor for modernity.

NY Times piece on work:
 I happened on one of those online lists showing which wire-service articles have been e-mailed most frequently. The leader of the pack, by a great margin, was a Reuters article headlined ''Boring, Passive Work May Hasten Death: Study.'' In the prior six hours, it had been e-mailed 870 times....Apparently a nation of people sitting at their desks and avoiding whatever simple operations they are supposed to be performing found a certain resonance in the idea that, as the study put it, ''the meaningfulness of work may be an important contributor to the mortality experience.'

Thoroughly enjoyed my birthday celebration at Mecklenburg Garden’s Restaurant in downtown (and I do mean downtown) Cincinnati. Set amid tenement buildings and urban color, we survived the walk into Mecklenburgs without incident. The restaurant oozed a sort of tangible Germanness, though it might’ve been my imagination since it didn’t exactly have an apostolic line of succession – i.e. there were breaks when it was something other than a German restaurant. But it didn’t matter, since we enjoyed tremendously good food and company. I chose the beer with the most syllables, as good an indicator of a great beer as any other for any beer company confident enough to call themselves“Fahrenesbruder Dunkel Scheinheimer Bier” (or whatever it was) must be good. After all, by the time you get done saying the name you could’ve had a Bud Light. But the beer lived up to its name. As did the steak. And dessert. Ohhhhh..! St. Thomas wrote that “bodily pleasures are often more intense than intellectual pleasures, but they are not so great or so lasting” and that is true, but surely doesn’t mean we should ignore the God-given bodily ones.

My wife's professor (at a Catholic college) said that St. Thomas Aquinas 'hated women'. News to me. One 'example' she used is when he chased a prostitute around the room with a hot poker (a prostitute provided by his parents to try to prevent him from becoming a Dominican). Michael Novak says no

Self-indulgent Bloggin' Exhibitionism is Out....(bummer)
Sayeth Eve Tushnet:
The final nifty characteristic of blogs that I discussed was the personal nature of the writing. Now, this can be either a bug or a feature. It is just creepy to detail every moment of your life, or worse yet, to air your dirty laundry in public--who is reading your site? Why are you writing it? I think last night I sounded more critical of personal-life blogs than I really am--when they're funny, their appeal is pretty much the same as Dave Barry's. But there are some blogs that really do suffer from exhibitionism, and that's lame.

"But Momma, that's where the fun is..." - Manfred Mann's 'Blinded by the Light'

"One of America's specific problems is fame and glory... partly on account of its extreme vulgarization. In this country, it is not the highest virtue, nor the heroic act, that achieves fame, but the uncommon nature of the least significant destiny. There is plenty [of fame] for everyone, then, since the more conformist the system as a whole becomes, the more millions of individuals there are who are set apart by some tiny pecularity." - Jean Baudrillard

Matt Labash in The Weekly Standard (re: Walker Percy & Bourbon)
"Make no mistake, I have nothing against wine. When I visit my wife's relatives in Tuscany, I drink their Brunello with an urgency that could be better addressed by an intravenous drip bag. Likewise, I have no quarrel with beer. These six-pack abs didn't build themselves. They're imported--from Milwaukee.

[But] a good bourbon is the ideal slow-and-steady pick-me-up. Bourbon is the spirit most likely to put you in an easy sipping rhythm with all its attendant benefits: the relaxation and conviviality, the brief waylay in that magically lucid state that resides somewhere between stone-cold sobriety and intoxication.

Walker Percy was a seminal bourbon fan for whom drinking Scotch was akin to "looking at a picture of Noel Coward," a whiskey he said assaulted the senses "with all the excitement of paregoric." Thus he advocated bourbon's analgesic benefits to help Joe Suburbia cope with existential questions such as, "Is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?"

Lest one think Percy was an unrepentant lush, he added: "If I should appear to be suggesting that such a man proceed as quickly as possible to anesthetize his cerebral cortex by ingesting ethyl alcohol, the point is being missed. Or part of the point. The joy of bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C(2)H(2)OH on the cortex, but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime--aesthetic considerations to which the effect of alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary." Link

"Omar Khayyam's wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is wine-bibbing. It is bad, and very bad, because it is medical wine-bibbing. It is the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not happy. ... He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad." GK Chesterton more here

Christianity is the only religion which has ever united in a common faith, equally clear, complete, and steadfast the common people and philosophers, the ignorant and the learned. It affords a singular phenomenon in the annals of humanity. - "Causes and Cures of Unbelief" by James Cardinal Gibbon

St. (Padre) Pio said that he was just "a monk who prayed" and that prayer is our only weapon....St. Therese on that subject courtesy Amy Welborn.

Our Dominican priest had much to say last night on the OT/NT connections..
1) Cain offered God 'the fruits of the earth' - i.e. bread and wine - which God rejected. Abel offered the perfect sacrifice (unblemished lamb), acceptable to God. We re-enact this when we go to Mass, admitting we are Cains by bringing up at the Offertory the fruits of the earth, but after the Consecration we offer the unblemished Lamb (Christ). If the Eucharist is just a symbol (i.e. bread and wine) then we are offering what God rejected in the OT.
2) In the OT, the image of the serpent healed the snakebit. In the NT, Jesus in the form of man, "made sin for us", heals us.
3) John's gospel promises that God will teach us the Scriptures. There is great freedom in the gospels. "But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." (John 21:25) The catechism exists as boundary, to warn us from areas the Church has proven not to be fruitful.

Abel's blood "cried out for vengeance" while Christ's blood cries out for mercy.

A young life on the front lines of love and sex...a poignant blog entry.

Charity is the queen of virtues. As the pearls are held together by the thread, thus the virtues are held together by charity; as the pearls fall when the thread breaks, thus virtues are lost if charity diminishes.- St. Padre Pio

Saturday is St. Thomas More's feast day as well as my birthday. Since my actual first name is Thomas, I have a special affinity for this great saint. Between the apostle, Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More, it's an embarrassment of riches.