The Latin Mass

I received a book catalog with a quote (not my ellipsis) from Cardinal Ratzinger: "By incessantly inventing new Eucharistic prayers...we have sunk farther and farther into banality." And it occurred to me that there has been a rather large hole in my hit-and-miss education. I have little idea what a pre-Vatican II Mass consisted of. I've been to two Tridentine liturgies but in the distracting newness of it I didn't get a complete sense of what was actually being prayed.

If we are what we pray, then the Liturgy to some extent forms us. (Of course, you have to pray it to be formed by it and I've heard it said that few back in the '50s paid much attention to it and instead said their own prayers & private devotions.) But here the Church was formed for hundreds of years by a liturgy I was completely unfamiliar with! For history's sake alone I should have read the text of the Latin mass before. But fortunately, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I was able to here.

The Mass seemed more expressive of our mutual dependence; there are more mentions of and prayers to the saints (and our dependence on God was expressed visually by the priest facing the same direction as the people). There was more focus on sinfulness of course. But oddly, given how clerical the pre-Vatican II church was and how the priest is seen as an altus Christus, there was an equality in the confessions of priest and people. The priest alone expresses sorrow for his sins, before God and the laity, offers an act of contrition and the parishioners respond, "May almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins, and bring you to everlasting life.". The laity then identically express their contrition and the priest responds with the same prayer asking God's forgiveness.

Update: I found this interesting post.

Rich

Scott Hahn's latest arrived in the mail yesterday and it is rich. Flipping at random, I read a sidebar on the historicity of the Flood, a common enough question in a scientific-minded age. There are also copious quotations from Church Fathers and the Catechism, including a long quote from Augustine's "City of God" concerning David & King Saul and how David's tremendous respect and solicitude for the unsavory Saul was due to Saul's annointing (Saul as 'The Lord's Christ'), which is inspiring example of seeing God where others don't.

I wish we'd had resources like this when I was young. At our Catholic high school we suffered through the heretical "Christ Among Us" (one that Amy Welborn especially loathes). We were also heavy into John Powell S.J.'s stuff, which is better that "Christ Among Us" but not nearly as rich as Hahn's. Newly reverted and feeling the zeal, a few years back I wrote our high school and chastized them for their mediocre Religion program. I received a very defensive reply. And I have more sympathy for them now. It's hard to know what you don't know, and I think they just didn't know any better. They thought they were doing the right thing and giving us the proper tools to evangelize ourselves and the world.

Just An Old-Fashioned Love Song?

I was at a place of great financial temptation leafing through the impressive Spiritual Formation Bible, a Protestant version but with Catholic-friendly Dallas Willard among its editors. I read the introduction to "The Song of Songs" and was a bit disappointed with Dallas.

The editors wrote that this book celebrates the physical love between a man and a woman only, end of story. They said it shows how this shows that the Church was wrong to hate the body and hate sex and wrong to allegorize this book for a thousand or more years. Either/or, not and/both. Compare and contrast to Ronald Witherup in The Bible Companion:

The origin of some of the text might well be in secular love poetry from the ancient Near East, but its preservation in the Bible assures us that there is also a deeper meaning to appreciate...Interpreters through history have always appreciated deeper levels of the text. Rabbinic interpreers saw in this love relationship the symbol of God's covenantal love for Israel as his bride. Christian interpreters picked up on this deeper symbolism, seeing in the book the allegory of the relationship of Christ to his church.

Where I've Visited



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What If They Had Met?   - new fiction

He was jowly from a long history of fast food washed down with cheap beer, but he still had his hair. The man across the table looked a mirror image but for being older and having less to offer a barber.

“So, how’s the karaoke circuit been treating ya?” asked the older man.

“That ain’t fair. I’ve got some record deals brewing. And speakin' of brew, I ain't seen see yours at our QuikMart!”

“Well, that’s what you’re drinking partner. My fifteen minutes is over and it’s affecting sales.”

They sipped the beer and complained bitterly about the National Enquirer.

“I don’t care what they say, it’s not what the rags think of us that matters, or the country or even the world. I've been given the promise dude. I remember it morning and night, every time I f—k up I remember the promise.”

The older man shrugged and offered the younger a bowl of peanuts. They returned to a topic they had in common, their famous brothers.

“They’re both smart as hell. If my brother had your brother’s discipline—“

“And if my brother had your brother’s charm —“

“They’d have ruled the world wouldn’t they of?”

"Like if chocolate met peanut butter."

A stranger walked up. “Don’t I know you?” he asked.

“Prolly. I’m Roger Clinton, and this is Billy Carter.”

           ~

They parted company. On the jukebox a Patty Loveless song played...

After all my lonely nights
Without an end in sight
A morning shining bright for me awaits
Where the sweetest times will last
All's forgiven from the past

Someday I will
One day I know I will
Someday I will lead the parade

Though they've scattered through the years
Old friends will gather near
With nothing but the kindest words to say
And the sweetest times will last
All's forgiven from the past

Someday I will
One day I know I will
Someday I will lead the parade

And the sweetest times will last
All's forgiven from the past
Someday I will lead the parade

Stating the Obvious

Yogi Berra said that "baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical." Similarly, in many ways war is ninety percent mental, or psychological. So Bush can't say that things are going poorly or moderately poorly in Iraq, if in fact they are. Nor can he, or should he, say anything negative about the sorry state of Islam & Muslim culture because that worsen the situation; it's often best for leaders to not state publicly the root of a problem.

Ultimately terrorists won't be defeated from without, but from within. That is, it won't end until Muslims finally begin to shame their bloodthirsty co-religionists. The biggest Muslim scandal today isn't Osama Bin Laden, but his enablers - the Muslim community. Where are the Muslim protest marches against Osama? Why haven't contributions to mosques fallen precipitously? And, as Tom Friedman of the Times mentioned, there was a fatwa calling for the death of a novelist, Salman Rushdie, but no fatwa issued by any prominent cleric against a mass murderer like Osama bin Laden or Al-Zawahiri. Sigh.

    

'Makes up stories! Great, horrible enemy! Must be killed!'

'Bombs embassies, kills civilians, a bit overzealous at times but all-around good guy. Tips his barber well.'

UPDATE: a more definitive piece here, via Julie.

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

It's particularly easy to be snarky when blogging, because it feels like you're not really talking to anybody. Which is weird, given the fact that you're talking to everybody. - Karen Hall of "Some Have Hats"

In human affairs there is nothing from which he does not extract enjoyment, even from things that are most serious. If he converses with the learned and judicious, he delights in their talent, if with the ignorant and foolish, he enjoys their stupidity. He is not even offended by professional jesters. With a wonderful dexterity he accommodates himself to every disposition. As a rule, in talking with women, even with his own wife, he is full of jokes and banter. No one is less led by the opinions of the crowd, yet no one departs less from common sense. - Desiderius Erasmus on St. Thomas More, via Meredith of "Basia Me, Catholica Sum"

I can easily see how the nuclear family in and of itself tends to reduce family size. Having only one set of hands to care for baby is a massive job. Two sets of hands, is livable but hard. How having a grandparent, aunt, cousin, etc. around to help out makes a big boost in terms of restoring sanity to new parents. I'm certain this logic carries forward when adding further children to the mix, although after 2 I'm told economies of scale begin to kick in. I know there are many other factors influencing small family size -- including the expense of raising children in this culture and the death of the family wage for the married man. But that's my two cents for the night. - Olde Oligarch

I read somewhere that the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs was nearing its apex in America, but that outsourcing of service jobs was just beginning and would soon be having a huge impact. That rings true...Tonight, as I was out buying a pizza for dinner and fighting the long line at the carry-out at Pizza Hut, it occurred to me that outsourcing begins at home. I don't fix my own car anymore, don't even change my own oil anymore. I don't fix my own furnace, I don't even try. Someone came and replaced our doors and windows, we had our roof done by a firm -- my own father, at my age, would have spent his evenings doing all those things and my own mother would have spent the evening making dinner instead of us having carry-out. It's a changing world. - Rock of "Lofted Nest"

Here's a tip I learned long ago...and it works. First, remember: the commandment is to love your neighbors (including your enemies). It doesn't demand that you like them! So. About that SOB who is constantly telling you exactly what you're doing wrong with your life...or that total idiot who just cut you off in traffic...or that in-law who insists on telling you the proper way to raise your own children...or that [fill in the blank #*@(@*#&@ person]? Here's what you want to do: (I didn't make this up. A friend -- a holy person, actually -- clued me in on this one long ago.) Pray for the creep. (N.B. It's probably not a hot idea to use the word "creep" in your prayer.) Here's a prayer I often use: "Dear God, please put that so-and-so in a higher place than me in Your Heavenly Kingdom. Amen." That's it! - the inimitable Pewlady

Any discussions about the "practical" aspects of [early reception of the sacrament of Confirmation] must take a backseat to theology, and the mis-placement of confirmation oh, lo these many decades in many parts of the world has really been a travesty, and done great damage to a proper theological understanding of confirmation itself and the sacraments of initiation as a whole. And, turning to pragmatic considerations, anyway, as we've discussed here before, adolescent confirmation, shorn from its baptismal associations and proximity to Eucharist, by 10-15 years in the life of the one celebrating, has become, in practice, less a sacrament (in perception) than a ritualized sociological marker of, not Christian initiation, but initiation into adulthood (sort of), and, more practically, a tool for blackmail...go through this, and you won't have to go to religious ed any more. More common than you think. - Amy Welborn of "Open Book"

For more than a day after intercourse with a woman, a man will experience a moderate psychological aversion to women other than the one he slept with. - Patrick of Orthonormal Basis, on a study that lends support to the exclusivity factor in relationships

As a side note, Philip Jenkins, an Episcopalian, has a line in his book "Hidden Gospels" suggesting early Church fathers would have thought it absurd that Christians should have Scripture in their homes. They couldn't envision Scripture outside the Sacraments.- Rich Leonardi of "Ten Reasons"

The theory of evolution is far more than adaptation and survival of the fittest, or however the popular mind seeks to characterize it. The materialism and randomness at the heart of the theory must be dealt with by theists, who do their faith no credit by simply saying, "Oh, God could have started it all." At heart, the Darwinian theory of evolution and traditional Judeo-Christian theism are a much harder fit than many people think. That said, I'm not for teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. What I am for is a more honest instruction in the theory of evolution - acknoweldging the problems, the gaps and the intelligent, scientifically-based challenges to it. One could do this, I'd think, without espousing Creationism. - Amy Welborn

In Germany, he was asked about survival of the fittest. He told them it was not a strange thing at all -- the fit will survive of themselves. "But in my experience," he said, "what I have seen is the survival of the unfit. And that is where God's glory comes in." - Sundar Singh via "Happy Catholic"

For Whiter Teeth Buy Crest

One of the things least appealing about modern life is how easy it is to drown in all the trivialities and superficialities. Perhaps I've getting curmudgeonly, but it's the little things that annoy. Such as the ubiquity of advertising.

For example, I'm watching the All Star game and the camera lingers on someone vaguely familiar. And it's Billy Bob Thorton. Big whoop, I think. And so you'd think that would be it, right? No. The announcers do a commercial for his next movie! This was planned; there was nothing inadvertent about it. So now I'm wondering: did Thorton go to the game for love of the game or pimp his movie? And since when did we sign up for commercials outside the alloted 2, er, 3, er, 4 minutes between innings?

In the past ten years corporations have gotten really good at simply not leaving any profit on the table. Bleeding you the way the gov't does. Like having both an income tax and a sales tax, movie houses have discovered the profit in both having a fixed price at the gate and an extra tax within by making you sit through twenty minutes of commercials. The correct consumer response is to avoid going to movie houses. So you buy DVDs and soon they'll have commercials you can't skip through.

My friend Ham o' Bone begins filming his movie, or at least two "shorts" of seven minutes long, next week. Which is probably what prompted a dream last night in which I was looking for stuff to film at a local grocery mart. I was looking for something meaningful to say amidst a tide of Tide - but everything seemed washed of meaning. I wonder if decreasing patience with trivialities is the definition of a religious fanatic? Or is it the definition of the spoiled & impatient?

I was under the impression that Bone was going to show these film "shorts" to various & sundry movie people with short attention spans (i.e. those would rather watch film than read scripts). But he's going to try to get it independently funded by doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs (to the tune of at least a million) and get the movie made on his own. But there's the problem of distribution. And how will he advertise---

Man Behind the Curtain

Amy Welborn made some provocative comments concerning the Wizard of Oz:

"I've always (well, not always...for the past couple of decades, anyway) wondered about this, and Michael brought it up the other night when we were in Knoxville, and we all sat around watching The Wizard of Oz on TCM. Is The Wizard of Oz responsible for the massive loss of faith and the embrace of subjectivism in the West? Could it be? I'm sure you've thought about this too - no all-powerful Wizard, just a little man behind the curtain, tricking everyone. No need to really have anything real within - just believe that you have a brain, a heart and courage, and take on the external signs, and you're there, baby."

It's certainly a very Pelagian story. I recall as a child being let down by the ending - that the wizard (the God figure) was so powerless. It's a very naturalistic story in keeping with those who think Christ didn't multiply the loaves and fishes but simply inspired people to express their latent generosity by sharing what they had on them.

Many progressive Catholics appear to see the sacraments in a similar light, not powerful as conduits of grace in their own right due to the promises of Christ, but only psychologically valuable. Ronald Rollheiser in "Holy Longing" says daily Massgoers don't go to be sustained by God or seek his blessing but to keep themselves from falling apart, comparing them to alcoholics going to AA meetings. For them any old ritual will do and God is ancillary. Sad.

Terror & Torture

I'm not an expert on torture techniques, except with respect to the infliction of my poetry on unsuspecting readers. But I do watch the television show 24, which gives me some credibility. And the technique seems to be to occasionally let off. Let the guy think about it. Give him some room to come to the conclusion that he needs to see things your way.

So when I read something by Victor David Hanson the other day I wondered at the similarity between torture and terrorism:

Terror is the signature of the Islamist: hit, back off; hit, back off — hoping in a few years to erode the will and nerve of affluent and leisured Western countries.

Bin Laden has so far only made one mistake: He took down the entire World Trade Center rather than the top floors, and had the misfortune of having George Bush as president. Thus he lost Afghanistan and ended up with democratic reform from Iraq and Lebanon to the Gulf and Egypt. Train bombings in Madrid and bus explosions in London, like the carnage in Iraq, are preferable, since they are enough to terrify and demoralize the Westerner but not quite enough to knock sense into him that only military resistance and victory will save his civilization.

So the attacks will never quite be of such a stature to convince Western voters that one more such explosion will destroy their societies. The trick is instead to wage war insidiously, incrementally, and stealthily to avoid an overwhelming response. A cooling-off period in between 9/11 and 7/7 in which Western apologists, pacifists, and Islamist sympathizers go to work is essential for the terror to continue.

Perhaps. But it seems that the West is even more threatened, if less dramatically, by low population replacement rates. Europe, like an old soldier, won't die but will likely fade away.

Finally, ABC's This Week constantly reminds us of soldier's deaths. Here's the story of one soldier's heroism.

Crayons to Oils

This blogger's visit to The Cloisters brought back vivid memories. I'd visited there seven years ago this month and recall enjoying the tranquility and the sense of history.

I went back to my trip log and found it didn't stand up well. The writing was trite and unremarkable even though at the time it sung. But that doesn't negate the "joie of words" experienced at that time and nor does it negate the current joy of words as blogged here, even if they not age well.

Writing doesn't much matter but it reminded me how we as a church have progressed doctrinally, developing into a great oak from a small acorn. The joy Israel took in her books of Moses was no less joyful for its "looking through the glass darkly" and incompleteness.

Deja vu

Re: Journalism

I think the root cause of American's disillusionment with the press is not Jayson Blair and his ilk. Those who have brought true shame to the profession in recent years don't bother me that much. Every institution has their Jayson Blairs; the fact that there are corrupt police or lying journalists or child-abusing priests does not mean that the police, newspapers and the Catholic Church should be abolished or looked down upon. It only means that when a crime is made known the institution has a responsibility to correct and admit it. (And blogs certainly help journalists with that - St. Blog's own Christopher Blosser recently shed light with an excellent post on Pope Benedict's history that resulted in an admission of error from the writer for the The American Spectator.)

What does bother me is the seemingly intentional bias one encounters in newspapers like the Dispatch. Like not having a home-grown conservative on the Dispatch editorial page. Like having a regular guest political columnist who is odious on the life issues (Professor Oldenquist of OSU) without a contra voice. And like a recent Sunday front page article on gay marriage that was unintentionally hilarious for the way it framed the issue.

No doubt a certain amount of bias is unavoidable because we all come with all our viewpoints. But it's the lack of effort to overcome bias that makes people think less of journalists. "Coloring the News" by William McGowan and Bernard Goldberg's books are very persuasive on this point.

Journalists have a remarkably difficult job because fairness requires enormous discipline, and many writers seem to be long on passion but short on discipline.

My Fair Brother-in-Law

Went to a musical Saturday night, "My Fair Lady" put on by the arts council of one of the suburbs of Columbus. My brother-in-law played Professor Higgins and did a marvelous job. I love expressions of joy in movies which is why I'd always liked Gene Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain" and why I particularly liked the moment that Eliza "got it" - the "Rain in Spain" scene - in this production.

My father-in-law mentioned during intermission how his son had lived this for the past six months or more. Spent hours and hours at play practice, memorizing lines and missing family gatherings and all for what? Three performances. Poof, and it's over, he said. (I thought of it as akin to blogging - a lot of time spent doing something that has that similar Poof! quality.) I'd never looked at it like that before. Hadn't thought about all that went behind this two or three hour performance. When we congratulated the actors afterwards we were thanking them not just for the performance but for that iceberg of time & energy submerged beneath this evening's tip.

Credits

Lately fellow bloggers have done a yeoman's job in directing me to instructive and/or pleasurable books. I'll have to take any future suggestions more seriously *grin*. In no particular order:

Steven Riddle recommended the engaging Randy Wayne White novel "Sanibel Flats". It's the pluperfect backyard hammock read.

Jeff Culbreath recommended John Meehan's Two Towers, which I started Friday and has been surgically attached to me ever since. (I even brought it to Saturday night's "My Fair Lady"; my mother-in-law became briefly interested in it thinking it was about the New York tragedy.)

Recently finished Frank Deford's marvelous biography of Christy Matthewson and John J. McGraw. Mark of "Irish Elk" recommended it after I'd already started reading it but still receives post-credit for his good taste. The book is so well-written that I looked in vain for another Deford offering, finally settling on Michael Sokolove's "Hustle: The Myth, Life, and Lies of Pete Rose" which looks to be a more depressing read than Deford's "Old Ball Game".

Other recommendations that I have followed up on, in the sense of buying the book though shamefully not in having started yet:

Kathy the Recusant Carmelite: "The Persecutor" by Sergei Kourdakov
William 'The Quiet Man' Luse: "Joan of Arc" by John Beevers
Mama 'a book a day keeps the doc at bay' T: "A Green Journey" by Jon Hassler
Tom of Disputations: "A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist" by Abbot Vonier
Steven '20,000 Books Under the Bed' Riddle: "Nourished by the Word: Reading the Bible Contemplatively"
Bill 'Rock Star' White: "Modern Times" by Paul Johnson