Partisan Politics

Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report laments that folks are judging Kavanaugh's guilt or innocence based on our party affiliation. Cook brings up Gore v. Bush in 2000 in Florida as a similar instance.

In one sense I disagree with him.  I'm a conservative, but I have no idea whether Kavanaugh is guilty and I strongly object to the presumption of guilt when there's no corroborating evidence. I can't be alone in that.  So to say that Republicans think he’s innocent and Democrats think he’s guilty seems simplistic. 

And it's complicated as well by the fact that it's alleged to have happened over 30 years ago in high school.  As Rod Dreher has said, "I do not understand why the loutish drunken behavior of a 17 year old high school boy has anything to tell us about the character of a 53 year old judge. By God’s grace (literally), I am not the same person I was at 17. This is a terrible standard to establish in public life."

On the other hand, there’s the 2000 Florida election.  It’s actually more similar to Kavanaugh confirmation than I first thought.  In both cases there was a controversy towards which the underlying truth would be hard or impossible to find.

For Florida, most observers say that Bush probably would’ve won if a limited statewide recount were allowed by the Supreme Court to go forward.  But we’ll never know for sure, and even if a limited recount were done Democrats would’ve complained that a broad recount of all disputed ballots statewide was not done.
 
For Kavanaugh, Democrats would prefer an investigation of months or years, preferably one they have some power to oversee.  And even then there’s no guarantee any sort of definitive proof would be reached. 

In both cases one can say that the absence of hard data, of facts, leads people to retreat to their respective political corners.  Duh, and why shouldn’t they? It's far more troubling when people cling to something obviously false because of their political ideology rather than something that is disputed.

Let He Who Has Not Thrown Ice Cast the First Icicle

credit:Steve Kelley

Hopefully our long national nightmare will soon be over.  Assuming Flake doesn't live up to his name again, although  I predict a bull market for shouters in Senate elevators.

And I'm certainly impressed by the Dem senators ability to underperform even the lowest of expectations. Kudos to them. It's hard to be pessimistic enough not to be disappointed by their performance.

There's a bit of asymmetry going on as there's been a lot of calls for investigation into Kavanaugh's past and character, but little into Ford's past. But new details are trickling out that suggest she's not the truth-teller she's portrayed to be.

Hopefully in the future confirmation hearings will be "safe, legal and rare" or something like that.  Certainly a whole lot shorter. I can see why they won't be though - the venue guarantees you the white-hot spotlight which is crack-cocaine to ambition-addled senatorial brains (I'm talking 'bout you Spartacus). And these hearings offer the huge added benefit of never facing a tough vote, as judiciary Democrats were going to vote no on whoever Trump nominated.  It's an oasis of free advertising.

We’ve heard these hearings are a job interview.  If that’s the case, then it’s as if a panel of Elmer Fudds was deciding whether a marksman should be hired as a wabbit hunter.

One partial solution is that nominees should, at the direction of the president’s party, decline to answer any question from the opposite party’s senators.   While this won’t decrease the preening, presidential auditioning and outright lies, it will allow the potential justice the dignity of not having to pretend to care. There is no reason to go through the demeaning charade in a pitiful attempt to win votes and it’s no wonder Justice Alito tries to avoid walking past the Senate building where his hazing was held. Future confirmation hearings should ideally adhere to a strict party-line vote.

It’s ironic that in a age when Congress continually strives to give away its power, it is clinging to “advise and consent” - in a predictably abysmal manner.

Spiritual Battlefield

Interesting to see a couple of recent references to the image of this world being a "spiritual battlefield".  I wasn't aware of it being a controversial image.

Surely part of the explanation for the recent mentions is how ... bloody ... the field hospital that is the Church has become.  A couple months ago our pastor felt it incumbent, for good reason, to begin praying the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel after Mass weekly.

In a David Martin interview with Bishop Campbell (bishop of Columbus), he mentions in an aside how he feels he's always on a battlefield.

Bishop Campbell responded hesitantly:

"It's spiritual warfare, as St. Paul calls it.  But it's...  we don't want to conceive of it in terms of victory or defeat, what we are doing is choosing Christ, it is a constant selection, a constant choice in all we do." 

And the inestimable Amy Welborn offers on her site:

"I have always thought of it this way. God created us in His image and our destiny is eternal life with Him. Darkness is fighting against that, is fighting to win us. It is Temptation 101, yes? But when we leave the battlefield image out of this dynamic because we are uncomfortable with it or think we have progressed beyond it, and we much prefer to talk of “journeys” and “seeking,”  we profoundly misunderstand the nature of the journey to Peace. Darkness doesn’t want you to live in the light of God’s accepting, constant, trustworthy love, and throw everything in its power to keep you out. 

Yes, it is a battle."

 _

There is Biblical data attesting to both the reality of both God’s justice and his mercy, and a problem with having a pessimistic disposition is the tendency to read the negative data as more “realistic” and “true to life”, and to see more hopeful Scripture as unduly optimistic.  So there’s certainly a battle within the pessimist in the trusting of life after death but also in the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice in light of our often woeful merits. 

The Hearing du Jour

I got sucked in today by the dramatic Kavanaugh versus his accuser confirmation hearing. It’s powerfully addicting soap opera but I suspect not good for one’s soul.

It seems to me the cause of this debacle of bad feeling, of further division of the hate-filled camps, was created by three prime actors: wavering, dithering GOP senators like Jeff Flake and Susan Collins who cherish their image as powerful mavericks and demanded to hear a fact-free but emotional Dr. Ford, Diane Feinstein (I’m old enough to recall when she was respectable) about whom the best one can say is that she doesn’t like to ruin someone’s life prematurely unless she deems it “necessary”, and the poison of non-forgiveness in the form of a woman bringing up a 36-year old accusation from high school.  A potent enough cocktail.

Extremely moving opening comments by Kavanaugh.  His righteous indignation was apparent and perhaps it helped that he figured if this country wants to be run on emotion and not facts, he’ll serve up some emotion. As Fr. Philip Devous tweeted:

“Apparently the new epistemology of corroboration, evidence, fact-finding is that becoming emotional=truth. Next time a priest is accused of something we’ll see if this new convenient cultural standard is remembered.”

As Raymond Arroyo said, it’s all Oprah, no Perry Mason.

I think it was unintentionally funny that the Dem congress folks acted like lying to Congress was no big deal at all, compared to lying to FBI. Then why hold hearings at all?

It’s frustrating that a committee supposedly spearheaded by the GOP gave Ford a platform despite her having no collaboration other than her own imperfect memory.  And then had a questionner... oy vey. Optics I get, but the optic was supposed to be a woman challenging another woman, not a woman playing footsie with her.  Senate GOP hired her? This is exactly what gave Trump traction, the belief (rightly or wrongly) that Republicans like to play by the rules set by the media.

It’s also interesting that both Ford and Kavanaugh won rave reviews today even though (because of?) they conformed to sexual stereotypes: the fragile, vulnerable woman, and the tough protective guy upset over the carnage done to his friends’ reputations, as if appealing to subconscious archetypes or prejudices.

Stream of Semi-Consciousness

Thought I’d try a new thing on the blog, a stream-of-thought(lessness) vibe induced by sensory pleasures like running or music or massage. Call it anti-politics.

This morning I dissociated with perfect insouciance from the lush landings of Parini poetry to a double-play of Hotel California (a song so Hell-scary one could use it as a sermon). Later I swum-run the ovals in the gym; I had a choice of taking dogs on a scrum or soloing around the track and oh the release of it, the lock-point unjammed. The ship sailed from the gated community. Athena from beyond her trapeze’d bars, rings the rung-bells and I dreamt from dazed eyes of the torched light.

I ran regales of Gaul, provinces of distant pleasures, azures of blue sand and white skies of tremulous clouds breaking in and out of consciousness along the horizon line of raised hairs and hares beyond cares. Work fatigue and a general world-weariness led me into the zone of Disney animation, into a doze of days, into that lush garden of fruitopia.  Work fled.  I wandered to and fro, near and far. Memories inched to the surface without quite reaching the surface.  I didn't think about the "noise".

My eyes fell into spheres quoi-distant, I ran into childhood memories.  I slowed down latitudinally under the influence of longitudinal touch.  My mind bloomed with the agate of sleep;  I pictured a luminescent blue sea that became caramelized as stone that I could carry in my pocket.  I drifted off, drifted in, my body and all its manifold flaws handled by this tactile witchcraft.  All oils and smooth sailings with terabytes of tactile data, I experience ESP: extreme sensory perception. I perceive every nuance of motion and I cauldron up places half-remembered like when I was a kid at night in bed a memory of being on the edge of sleep the comfort of voices downstairs. It's like Ps 133: "It is like precious oil upon the head, coming down upon the beard."  Like what E.E. Cummings wrote:

“Now comes the good rain farmers pray for(and no sharp shrill shower bouncing off burned earth but a blind blissfully seething gift wandering deeply through godthanking ground)”

Alley alley umcomefree!  Or words like that. Is that even English? The guppies we caught at kids in creeks.

I thought about how interesting it was that of a body made up of nearly countless muscles, we tend to hide our tension in a tiny subset of them, and how an algae bloom of relaxation can occur when released.  The whole body and mind and soul feel it, feel the release of that single muscle tendon.  An image of the Body of Christ and how the tension found in its smallest member affects the whole.  An image of the 99th sheep restored, or the the mustard seed and how we slough it off at our own peril.  The catering to the "insignificant to the point of invisible" muscles as sign of St. Therese's "Little Way".  It made me want to do my job better.
_

Ah gliddy gloop goopy ah la la lee low... to borrow from Good Morning, Starshine. The Sierra Nevada alps of my shoulder blades. Straightenin' the curves. Ah, ah, triple awe-ah. That little green space alien from childhood cartoons fixed in my semi-consciousness. I dreamt of outer places in my inner space, I dreamed of inner spaces in outer space.  Wandering the dream beam.  Mustn't lose balance!  Epidermis epiphanies. Ectoplasmic ecstasies, the neck that holds the unlock. Into it I bowered, accepting of fleeting emotions till I was wrung and loosed, stamped, franked and freighted to Frankfurt.  I wandered lonely as a cloud or, alternatively, I wandered lowly as a cloud.  Low cloud alert!
_

Dizzily, tingly, past Rembrandt’s of the past revisited in mind eye like watercolored tourniquets around veins running sideline passes.  All around the watchtower I felt the booze-soothe of the manifold, uncovering layers upon layers, lost in beckoning horizons under induction and fellow-feeling.

I was back running laps in the basketball overlook at the old YMCA gym, the banked curves...I was on the shore-beach of Calypso. The bass treble of the trombone back. The high trills of the neck groove.  The trellising along the instep and the inscape. To berry fields and bonny days, to the windswept windows of the great ship Norwegian.  My blades slumped then reversed guard, en garde! no more. More sleepy than sleep...

Done With Catholic Schools

It's anecdotal of course, but the fact that some of my nieces and nephews rarely attend church despite going to Catholic schools from cradle through high school is  souring me on Catholic schools. To put it mildly.

I'm feeling like the Church shrinkage is due to poor Catholic education at least in part. And certainly the bishops and the institutional church are hapless; it’s no accident that the bishops tried to start a TV network that was dead-on-arrival while an obscure monastic nun made EWTN a fixture on every cable box.  The problem with EWTN now is that it lost its star power (Mother Angelica) and now likely appeals only to the elderly. But I could be wrong.

And it was interesting to hear on a news podcast an author (Franklin Foer) say that the addiction to smart phones has a spiritual cost as they distract us from the eternal, non-superficial questions. It seems a perfect storm: modernity’s profound religious ignorance combined with a tech age of constant distraction. Looks like there is no hope, only Hope.

The answer is prayer, not money, but on the latter I think the way to go is to support non-institutional third parties like the Augustine Institute and the St Paul Center, both aimed towards high school kids and seminarians. Scott Hahn is also doing a lot of work in this area and the fact that two of his sons are in the seminary shows me he’s doing something right. So I stopped donation to local Catholic grade school and to the bishop's fund drive and started one to Augustine Institute.

A Twitter thread from professor Gregory Hillis, on the current bleakness:

I have students in my intro theology class write spiritual autobiographies and almost every one written by a Catholic witnesses to the failure of the Church in educating families and children in the faith.

I've thought a great deal about what needs to change. My first suggestion would be that catechesis needs to be mystagogical in approach so that children in particular are immersed in the experience of God, apart from which its doctrine and morality remain incomprehensible.

I mean by this primarily that attempting to teach the faith apart from an immersion in a genuine and profound understanding and experience of the sacraments is bound to fall short. Prayer and theology should never be separated.

My second response would be that young people have many questions and they should feel welcome to ask difficult questions without being made to feel as if they're virtual apostates for questioning the faith.

We're long past the time when theology teachers and clerics can simply say "Because the Church says so." They need to be allowed to doubt, allowed to explore, and allowed also to understand & experience the generous response the Church has always given to well-formed consciences.

I'm a convert as well, and many of the cradle Catholics I know who understand the faith are those who have explored it on their own independently of the church. They shouldn't have to do that.

Kavanaugh (Sing like Van Halen's "Panama")

I’m kind of obsessed with the Kavanaugh hearings. It’s beyond frustrating that Sen. Grassley let slip the golden opportunity he had to get Kavanaugh confirmed when Dr. Ford was making all these unrealistic demands and wishy-washy senators like Collins and Flake were getting peeved at the arrogance of Ford (or her lawyers)...  Grassley could’ve manned up and said, “no Ford” and gotten the vote done. But he dillied and dallied, enthralled with the woebegone farce of having a “fair hearing” which is the most ludicrous thing ever.  It appears the 85-year old is stuck in the 1980s - didn’t he get the memo that the Dems play bloodsport? It’s a straight party line vote now and will be for as long as the eye can see.

It's too bad the whole confirmation process wasn't two days long and a vote done immediately.  Kavanaugh was already vetted six ways from Sunday but for some arcane reason this Congress has spent almost three months and still hasn’t gotten him out of committee.  You can’t make it up.

It’s ironic that about the only congressional prerogative that the Congress wants to hold on to is the “advise and consent” of presidential Supreme Court appointments — and, of course, they’re doing an abysmal job of it.

It feels almost quaint now that the Founders intended for the Congress to make laws, declare wars, and balance the budget when the Congress now does little but grandstand, smear, and tacitly approve law-making by executive and judicial branches all so they can keep their precious jobs.

But as much as I feel like the country is going downhill I do recall that states like dysfunctional California -  and cities like Chicago and Detroit  - still muddle through somehow and survive despite their horrible governance. I guess people are resilient even given bad leadership.  Until they aren't.

When Two Titans Clash

Arguably there's no one in the public square I more admire and follow than Jonah Goldberg and R.R. Reno (National Review and First Things respectively). 

So I was shocked when Reno wrote a hit piece on Jonah and his new book. Wow. I go back longer with Jonah but Reno has the gigantic influence of being formed by Catholic Christian faith.

Reno comes off as unhinged though, sadly.  Just makes it as personal and vituperative as possible.  While Jonah’s book’s great fault lay in how he refuses to see the West’s soul infused by Christianity, and Reno’s left field rejoinder is histrionic and sympathetic to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Jonah says a little nationalism is good, but it’s a jealous god and demands more and more. 

John Zmirak opines on the clash of the titans and seeks a middle ground perhaps: 

Catholic theocratic "Integralism" and soulless, ahistorical Liberalism are equally futile and destructive. The vital synthesis of English liberties and Christian resistance to intolerant governments is what forged America.

_

Speaking of stars, the morning prayer psalm that asks “oh stars of light, give praise to God!”  is more meaningful now that I have a more intimate relationship with the stars thanks to the new transom in the sunroom. I see them now, and they feel more real to me.  It still kind of astounds me that Mars and Saturn, both so far away, were so present on the southern horizon last night. They had both seemed kind of abstract to me, pictures in astronomy books back in grade school but now they’ve come alive and they seem like they’re only a mile or two away.   It’s funny how approachable the stars can be if one suspends disbelief in the rational knowledge of their great distance. No wonder the ancients were far more conversant with the stars given they probably didn’t feel that far away to them as well. 

Waylaid and Off-Kilter

I feel waylaid and off-kiltered by the news of one the early Catholic bloggers (one with extreme high-octane intellect) died in a bicycle accident.  Left a wife and college-age children, about my age.  He was wearing a helmet yet apparently still died of head trauma.  In one of those morbid things I tend to do, I went to his blog and read his last comment to one of his posts. Just feels so sad. 

He was a strong debater but not into ad hominems or straw men attacks, which made him feel like a throwback and the rare seeker after truth.  

_

I recently encountered someone on FB who had his back up and we got into it. It’s always surprising to encounter rough seas on the FB page of a Catholic, but Lord knows I should be used to that by now.  The funny thing is that my expectations have not altered going way back to circa 2003 when I got blasted by somebody on a Catlick blog for sport.  

Anyway, I was told to do something to myself that is anatomically impossible and is, or would be, against Church teaching. So I’m shocked a Trad(ish) Catholic would recommend I do something to myself against the tenants of the Church.  As is typical in these situations and as my pride is wont, I swung back hard although I didn’t ask him to contravene Church teaching, so there’s that. 

So today I read a lovely post on the same FB page (not the commenter mentioned above but the FB owner) who wrote about trolls: 

One of the clearest evidences that there is life outside of Facebook is that people will endure abusive, offensive comments from friends because they know that there is more to that friend's character than their FB persona suggests. The rest of us have to take it on faith, though...

It's how I know that Christian charity exists, that some people are given chance after chance even after most people would just block them.

And lo and behold my nemesis chimed in and humbly admitted he was trollish and then mentioned the loss of his wife to cancer and I realize that his life and mine may be on the same green earth but he’s seen troubles thus far that I pray I don’t have to endure.

Someone chimed in on the FB post and said, “I am lacking in Christian charity, so I tend not to post controversial things.”   Ditto for me.

And no less than Pope Francis has led the way inasmuch as he says he does not read his critics as it’s not good for his mental health. I think that’s true for most of us. (Although the Holy Father's recent homilies, like Trump's protestation that he never watches CNN, shows that he's at least tuned in to what his opponents are saying.) 

Everyone is going more towards their “natural” political and religious camps given that the unnaturalness of social media encourages spleen-venting and thus the unlikeliness of logic-based, civil discourse.   

The other telling thing is how Pope Francis went through a very dark period during the late ‘80s in which he has to basically just be a priest, which apparently was unsatisfying for the lack of power and influence. He went to a Jewish psychologist for six months of weekly visits for mental health help. This tracks well with his highly ambitious persona (such that he would feel at sea in just being a priest). 

Interestingly, he says he can’t live alone, again for mental health reasons, so that’s why no papal apartments.  This would seem to mitigate the meritoriousness of his eschewing the regal papal apartments.

Reno in First Things

R.R. Reno in First Things senses the end of conservative accommodation to the longstanding attitude of “keep the church together at all costs by sweeping disagreements and corruption under any available rug".  Seems the McCarrick mess followed by the Vigano letter has been a permission slip for conservatives to stop kowtowing to the status quo, or to emperor-bishops wearing no robes.

It reminds me of the Trump nomination, how Republican primary voters finally got exhausted with the long project of trying to go along by getting along by buying into the Democrat premise that Republicans needed to do better on diversity, racial accord, political correctness.  Like how Romney could scarcely defend himself from charges he was involved in a war against women which later was “confirmed” by stray comment showing his dedication to the Democrat ideal of patronizing women and minorities by saying he had “binders full of women” on his short list for some office.

There comes a time when even conservationists no longer want to conserve the current environment. I thought Trump was a mistake but I began to marvel at a world in which a Republican president felt free enough to speak his mind with such candor (if limited truthfulness). It was a modest revelation and a guilty pleasure. Trump reminds me of the citizen legislator who isn’t there for a career and is wiling to be unpopular.

And I have to feel like Pope Francis didn't sign up for this when he was made pope some 5 years ago, that he'd have to deal with gay clerics engaging in clericalism, or more accurately fornication.  For the pope to be blindsided by Viagno is just movie-script-like drama that would be almost too unbelievable to make the celluloid. 

I’ve been reading the book Conspiracy about how Peter Thiel secretly kept his powder dry against Gawker for outing his being gay, and how over years of picking the time and place for battle ended up backing Hulk Hogan and bankrupting a malicious outfit.  While Viagno, unlike Thiel, went about it in a much more slipshod and emotional way, he too planted this bombshell such that it upstaged the papal visit to Ireland and elicited the famous “no comment” from the pontiff.  I imagined, rightly or wrongly, that the image cagey Francis was forced to do something difficult for him - to not retaliate verbally perhaps because he thought Viagno might have something and that he could get caught in a thicket.  Francis seems to have weathered it well from a PR standpoint since the press was on his side to begin with and the lack of comment seemed to make a non-issue, ginned up by angry conservatives.

Trying to Make Sense of Absurdistan

I've been lately wandering lost in a haze of information overload, the scandal du jour that begets and begets and begets and just keeps on begetting. From the '16 election that lifted a reality TV star and insult champion to the presidency, to the now very non-rhetorical query: "Is the pope Catholic?" -- the last few years have been, uh, attention-getting.

So a few disjointed thoughts. (Are there any other kind?)

The sentimental view of religion is certainly taking a hit.  Oxymorons abound: "Catholic Ireland", "Holy Father", "pope resigns", "World Meeting of [Hetero?] Families", "hush money".  It's a world in which a cardinal tweets to his sister "Nighty-night baby, I love you."  It's a world where politicians object to bishops being called "politicians" since no politician could be so tone deaf.  It's a world in which the bishops talk about national boundaries but not the protection of the physical boundaries of seminarians. It's a world in which the flock is called upon to direct the shepherds (ala M. B. Doughtery: "I’m not looking for a perfect Church, I’d appreciate one in which bishops demonstrated anger at rapists and some determination to stop them before proceeding to try and guilt the the laity for being scandalized by it" and "Imagine the Apostle Andrew reacting to Judas’ betrayal, 'We should write up some bylaws against betraying our Lord unto death'”).

Weird sh-t is happening everywhere, like Catholic author Taylor Marshall inexplicably retweeting Alex Jones. Twice.

Well interesting times and all that jazz.
 _

Baylor professor Alan Jacobs describes the parallels of Trump and Francis:

Like Donald Trump, Francis makes dramatic and apparently extreme pronouncements which send the world into interpretative tizzies. When he says things like “Who am I to judge?” Catholics who support him effectively say that he should be taken “seriously but not literally” — just as Trump supporters say about their man. Both men generate massive, thick fogs of uncertainty.

Like Donald Trump, Francis cuts through political complications by issuing executive orders and blunt power grabs, as when he dismissed the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta and is seeking to replace him with a “papal delegate” under his own personal control, a move of questionable legality.

Like Donald Trump, Francis is an authoritarian populist: he bypasses institutional structures and governs by executive order, but believes that there can be nothing tyrannical about this because he is acting in the name of the people and is committed to “draining the swamp” of his institution’s internal corruption.

Norms are created by institutions, and we live in an age of week and despised institutions. This is how populist leaders arise: when a great many people believe that institutions exist merely to serve themselves, they come to despise not just those institutions but also the norms associated with them, and applaud leaders who scorn and seek to tear down the whole edifice.

General contempt for our institutions, government and church alike, makes them too weak to enforce their norms, which first enables corruption — the kind of corruption American Catholic bishops and members of the Congress of the United States are guilty of — and then produces populist figures who appear to want to undo that corruption. But the institutions are too weak to control the leaders either, so those leaders are empowered to do more or less whatever they want to do. This is the case with Trump, who will surely last at least until the 2020 election, and also, I think, with Francis, who will probably last until he dies or chooses like his predecessor to resign.

Moreover, since neither Trump nor Francis is interested in doing the work needed to repair their corrupt institutions — they don’t even have any incentive to do so: the ongoing presence of ‘swamps’ is what lends them such legitimacy as they possess — all the products and enablers of corruption are safe. This is why the American bishops who spent decades enabling and hiding sexual abuse are probably feeling pretty good about their prospects right now.

This past Sunday the homilist said the problem is that many clergy live “soft lives” attentive to luxuries and this encourages others to become priests who want not only softness but outright infidelity. A slippery slope. The beach houses and grand homes of the hierarchy attract the wrong element.

It reminds me of how many say that Washington D.C. was ruined by air-conditioning. Once a/c came to the city, it became desirable. Once it became desirable it started attracting hacks who wanted to live there forever and thus made re-election their goal instead of improving the country, so they didn't have to go back to their godforsaken home districts that lacked the sizzle and glitter of the ever-growing capitol.

At least I have full closure on Pope Francis now. I unfollowed him on Twitter, lol as the kids say. The Viganò memo without the backdrop of what we already know about Francis would've felt out of left field. As it was, for me, it seems right down 2nd base. Smoke, meet fire.

But some on Twitter reminded me that the proper response to the scandals is not primarily anger but repentance on behalf of those who need it.  Sobering. The Christian response is not to weep not out of a sense of betrayal, but for the victims and Pope Francis and the enablers of abuse.
_

One priest tweeted:

The effect of a what has been going on in the Church will be to make the Church effectively congregationalist in its polity. The laity will attend a parish of their choice, and network with other like-minded Catholics through organizations (both on- and offline) to which bishops are marginal. In the Church today, all of the exciting things are happening outside of the management of chanceries, and all of the things under the purview of chanceries (e.g. Catholic schools) are failed institutions, which in some cases actively undermine people's faith. Note: I am not saying that this is *desirable*, I'm just saying that it is the case.

_

Amy Welborn provides historical perspective:

There have always – always, people – been terrible problems in the Church. It’s unfortunate that general historical illiteracy, combined with contemporary experiences of faith that are mostly determined by which party you happen to fall into, work to hide this plain fact from most people...

What is consistent, it seems, is the overarching instinct to throw your lot in with the prevailing culture and its values – power, success, money, sex, a particular social system – and be formed by that instead of the Gospel, instead of the Cross of Jesus Christ.

I thought of that in how it juxtaposes with Jeff C's FB post*. One could say, with Amy, that history teaches over and over that corruption even at the highest levels has always been. But perhaps it’s like being robbed - you know the statistics, that there is a lot of crime, but until it happens to you personally it still feels distant. And for the current pope to be implicated feels “more real” than centuries ago.

Perhaps part of the surprise of some to the degeneracy of many of these leaders is due simply to what a priest sermonized recently about, how there seems to be an ignorance that the grace of the sacraments - including obviously Holy orders - cannot penetrate without the proper disposition. There’s no such thing as osmosis or magic, he said. Disposition is crucial and that’s standard Catholic teaching. A rock in a stream of water won't absorb much water. As George MacDonald wrote, "Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it."

* - “Tonight, many excellent Catholics are grieving due to Archbishop Vigano's devastating revelations about Pope Francis - the grief and tears of betrayal. Perhaps you and I grieved much earlier, for different reasons, and have now moved on to a cold cynicism, but that's no advantage. Remember what that grieving was like and grieve again.”

Shepherds as the '62 Mets

As a FB friend put it, it would be darkly comic if it wasn't so serious. I'm not sure what's preferable: silence from bishops or the insulting responses, the latter a sordid mix of blaming the victim and claiming an ignorance that conjures the spirit and morality of Sgt. Schultz.   Such as Cardinal Farrell, head of the Vatican office for laity and family, who said he was "shocked" when he heard the allegations against Cardinal McCarrick.

From a Catholic News Agency article:

"[Cardinal O'Malley] added that the U.S. bishops are all 'anxious to understand' how McCarrick became a bishop, archbishop, and cardinal if there were known allegations against him, given the vetting process that bishops have to go through before they are appointed to such positions."

A FB friend nails it:

"Really? I, for one, think we're getting to understand this pretty damn well. McCarrick was made a bishop because he a) had stellar fundraising and self promotion abilities, b) had the support of other powerful clerics whose favorite sport was sleeping with other clerics and c) benefited from the chosen blindness of other clerics who chose not to see even what was shoved under their noses as O'Malley did in this case.

And remember, O'Malley is 'one of the good ones' in terms of bothering to deal with clerical abuse. Many others are WORSE."

Cartoon Diversity

Well it's mighty nice to see political cartoons in the Dispatch and elsewhere taking a non-leftist point of view. Startling even.  May their tribe increase.

 

Irish Fest 2018

Irish festival in Dublin, Ohio was a few weekends back. Dublin Ohio, incidentally, is more Catholic and thus more Irish than Dublin, Ireland. Who could've known?

Started with the Hooligans band after long drive from work. The to “Jiggy”, direct from the olde sod, a various-influenced band. Not too bad - at least not overly familiar. Female singer like a lounge singer. Short gold dress that hugged, with lots of cleavage for those who aren’t leg men.

Moved by a song that spike of an Irish legend, how a man lost his dear wife and after her death she reappeared to him in the guise of a beautiful woman (a stranger to him) and he refused to make love to her as he was still in love with his wife. Poignant. And intriguing as it touches on the male’s weakest point, his concupiscent sex drive, which is precisely what makes the story go, the nature of sacrifice. It would’ve been less impressive by a half if the sexes in question were flipped. It’s precisely that God became man that gives the story of the Incarnation likewise it’s juice.

Then headed over to meet up with Mark and Sandy to catch Bridget’s Cross. Again it felt overly familiar and I was losing steam.

 

 

Irish mass Sunday morning with Fr Stephen Hayes. A rousing homily as usual. He said our relationship with Christ is like a marriage, it takes work and that Jesus is sometimes prickly, and “feral”., in Father’s interesting choice of word. You can’t put Jesus in a box.

He said he recalled an old Irish lady who offered Father tea before he was to hear her Confession. As she walked by a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus she gave a stare that “would’ve killed Christ again had he not already rose.” He asked what was the matter and she said she was mad at him for failing to answer a prayer of hers but, she added, it’s “just a lover’s tiff.” Father could tell by that she had a close relationship to Jesus and that He was real to her, in all His prickliness.

Bright white-hot day, swelteringly authentic August heat. Watched the battle of the pipe and drum bands and got chills hearing the bagpipes playing the Marine hymn.

Heard interesting Spoken Word character (re-enactors) giving tips on the unsavory practice of stealing bodies for medical research back in the 1800s. Surprisingly well done! Costumes were priceless and toothless savage dude perfect. They must have had stage acting experience.

Later hit a bit of Drowsy Lads with Mark and Sandy and then The Town Pants at Celtic rock. With a name like that they gotta be good.And yes, a nice quench of amplified Irish! I drank in the wall of sound to the tune of a Guinness. Resilience is a beautiful song.

Seven to Twelve Quick Takes

Went down the “distraction wormhole”. Started reading a Mark Helprin novel, which mentioned the old buildings of a university. That led me to download a free book on Miami U., full of historical photos, and a mention of 1953 missing student Ron Tammen, which led me to blog of a gal who was determined to crack that cold case (she thinks government involved and he was placed in witness protection), which led me to google what she’s up to now -- a professional dancer for the Chicago Bulls! Well now, putting her journalism degree to good use, I think snidely.

She mentions her favorite quote, by Samuel Beckett: “Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.” Which in context was meant by Beckett in a disparaging way, how humans do things impulsively and repent later.

But she took it literally, and I like it too in the sense that it reminds me of the quote from Samuel Johnson, approving of exercise’s impact on mental health, way back in the 1700s: “The necessity of action is not only demonstrable from the fabric of the body, but evident from ... how much happiness is gained, and how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body.”

So yes, run first and ask questions later.

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So on this anniversary of my brother-in-law's untimely death (who was a Pelatonia participant), I rode a couple hours down to Plain City and back. Enjoyable romp that began in the sun and ended in clouds. The trail was nearly empty as I rode down that elegant tree-and-farm-lined lane into the quietest of quiet country near trail’s end. It made me think of the London house we almost bought and how loud I-70 was despite being almost a mile away. We should have thought of house-buying as something requiring the patience of years, not a couple months.

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Last eve I drank in some baseball, which was surely tonic-ful. Got to hear Joe Morgan talk during an A’s game. Man technology is beautiful.

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Read some of McCarrick’s book of columns. He mostly skates around the sexual issues; perhaps because he felt like he’s okay since he didn’t prey on children (too much), or, that he had been forgiven his sins and thus had a right to lead the anti-abuse parade. Happy the man for whom God has buried his sins.

Read some of Romans, chapter 4, and that’s just a goldmine of a chapter. Certainly I must keep uppermost in mind how God *forgives*, it’s what he does most of all. A saint said he wants to forgive us like a mother wants to save her child from a burning building.

The commentaries: “The Law remains in force, but the keeping of the Law does not sanctify us; rather, God’s grace enables us to go beyond the Law through a life of charity.”

The money quote from the Knox translation:

When a man’s faith is reckoned virtue in him, according to God’s gracious plan, it is not because of anything he does; it is because he has faith, faith in the God who makes a just man of the sinner.

I also thought of Fr Hayes calling Christ “feral”. It has a negative, or at best neutral, connotation, but part of what makes our dog Max “wild”, at least in his utter unpredictability, is he knows no boundaries in his affections. He’s scarcely trained at all - he peed in sunroom and barked till midnight (God calls for us incessantly, if extremely quietly), but there’s also a tenderness and gentleness that I’ve not seen in our other more well-behaved dogs. A feral God doesn't equate to a demanding God, those are unrelated non-sequitors. Wildness in God is simply that He's larger than life, especially tame life.

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Simcha Fisher:

"You think you want to run away from the church. You think you will find a place where there is not so much hypocrisy, so much entrenched evil, a place that isn’t built from layer upon layer of guilt and shame and depravity. You may find such a place; I don’t know. But you will not find in it a God who weeps and bleeds and dies, who has taken sin into His bosom, swallowed it whole, let it burn in his belly until it finally burns out. You will only find this God in the Holy Roman Rotten Catholic Church, where the depraved teach young men how to confect God.

It is a rotten church. But it is not rotten to the heart because Jesus is the heart. There is more bloodshed there than I expected to see. But Jesus is there. He knew about Uncle Ted, and he knew about everything else we’re about to find out. That is why he came. Remember this, whatever else we do."

Decent rebuttal to the Rod Drehers of the world.

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Interesting WSJ piece on favorite 100 novels on how people thirst for story over lyricism (me the opposite!):

Perhaps, for many readers, it does not make much difference whether a story is told in print or images on a screen. The narrative itself is what matters. In fact, the Great American Read list confirms that there is a great hunger in our culture for grand, mythic narratives. The adoration of the Harry Potter books, like the nearly scriptural status of the Star Wars movies, involves more than just fandom. These are comprehensive universes, complete with their own laws and histories, heroes and villains, morals and meanings. They serve the purpose that was once served by epic poems like “The Iliad” or “The Odyssey,” or even by biblical stories: They dramatize the spiritual truths and longings that shape our world.

Indeed, while there are some books on the top 100 list that could be categorized as strictly escapist entertainment, what’s striking is how many of them have a serious, didactic purpose. Americans are a moralistic people—that’s one reason why we argue so bitterly about politics—and our books reflect our love of sermons. “Atlas Shrugged” is a sermon on individualism and capitalism, just as “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a sermon on feminism and patriarchy. “The Catcher in the Rye” and “ Siddhartha ” are books that help young people, in particular, formulate a whole philosophy of life.

Then there are tales of good fighting against evil, whether they take the form of teen fantasies like “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” or use an explicitly Christian vocabulary, such as Frank E. Peretti’s “This Present Darkness” and the “Left Behind” series, which is set in a post-Rapture world. In a sense, you could say that the most influential book on the list is John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” from 1678, which helped to pioneer the combination of religious moralizing and fantastic adventure.

The need for such epic stories predates printed or even written literature and will survive even if books disappear, as many writers and readers now fear. In fact, the most interesting thing about the Great American Read list is the way it reminds us that stories are something separate from, and more fundamental than, what we call fiction, which is a fairly recent category, historically speaking. After all, it wasn’t until the 18th century that the novel became a dominant literary form, first in Europe and then around the world.

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From Helprin novel: "It is possible to have eyes that are carelessly unobservant, that in failing their task they betray a listless soul." Well that’s a positive spin on lack of custody of the eyes.

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This, from the sociologist author of Cheap Sex:

he end result [of porn] is spiritual passivity. And the empirical evidence supports this claim. Using two waves of survey data collected from the same people, University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel Perry notes that pornography use predicted subsequent growth in religious doubts and declining personal importance of religion. Even being prompted to recall sexual experiences was found to diminish subsequent religious/spiritual aspirations in a series of controlled experiments conducted by researchers at a Belgium university.

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Q & A from Peter Thiel on potential for lifespan to be 150 years:

Q: You don’t fear that at some point life is getting boring?
A: A couple of years ago, I was talking to a former math professor in his early 70s. He said “I don’t know if there is an afterlife, but I hope not because I don’t want to run into my exwife.” The mentality we should have instead: We want to treat the people around us, we want to be doing things, so that every day is such that you want it to go on forever. If you have a 5 year old kid around you who is bored, you don’t say: Hopefully you will die soon. You say: There are a lot of things to do. So there is no reason to be bored.