Another Planet

“It's like another planet." That was the only way one diplomat could describe North Korea. Consider a visit from the Great Leader to a foreign dignitary living in Pyongyang: It would first be determined which particular salon in the forty-room guest palace the Great Leader would visit. Next, just before the appointed meeting, an army truck would arrive. A specially trained team of soldiers would then strip the salon of all furniture, rugs, and wall hangings — right down to the bare floor. A second truck would arrive with replacement furnishings. Among these would be the Great Leader's own desk as well as his personal items and baskets of flowers. In this salon, the Great Leader would exchange ten minutes of pleasantries with the foreign dignitary and then depart. Afterwards, the two trucks would come back in reverse order so that the salon would be returned to its original condition.

--William C. Triplett

Day to Go



I'll be posting pictures this week in honor of me heritage. I embarrassed myself by getting only 14 of 20 on this Irish quiz. I got overconfident when they started out with "What day is St. Patrick's Day?" Also, get yer St. Patrick's Day postcards here.

Grapes, Soured?

It seems to me the blessing and the curse of blogs is their amateurism. Blessing because we can show more personality and daring than the local paper does. We can be silly, profound, humorous, pious. We're less guarded, less worried about offending readers. There is a purity in doing something without monetary compensation.

It's also a curse because obviously the content is uneven, the production values suspect, the writing unedited, etc...

Chesterton had many wonderful things to say about the amateur. I think he would've loved blogs. But for me these web awards violate the spirit of blogdom. Doth I smell a sneaking professionalism? I began to read the winner of "Best Article or Post About Weblogs", a long, laborious piece that seemed to say in the first two pages what anyone could say in five sentences. This tendency to say obvious things in a very lengthy way is a hallmark of academia, which I think killeth the spirit. (Or, more likely, I have ADHD.)

Combing the Catacombs

Jimmy Akin makes a good point: "[Jack] Chick’s material is weirdly compelling. It’s amateurish, paranoid, lurid, garish, ham-fisted, and viciously hateful at times. It’s incredibly intense, and something about that intensity makes people want to read them. They generate a kind of bizarre fascination."

I've recently fallen for a Trad blog (--and I can't get up! rimshot) for similar reasons. For beleagured culture-war'd Catholics, his blog acts as a sort of salve since you suddenly regain all the sensations of being mainstream. Finding someone more conservative than yourself is like finding a Buffalo nickel, you just look at it with a sort of wonderment.
His blog reads like a parody - and well it might be, for who knows on the 'net? But what a wonderous handle he goes by! Sulpicius Severus is so agreeably medieval, the blogname equivalent of the labyrinthal monastery in "The Name of the Rose".

His latest post is titled "Lenten Meditation -- Invalidity of the Novus Ordo Missae". I liked the marriage of "Lenten Meditation", which sets you up for something more...well...meditative, and "Invalidity of the Novus Ordo Missae", which strikes the Trad's polemical one-note note. In the end I love the self-confidence of fundamentalists, be they Trads or Protestant. Of course my affection is for the person and not the doctrine. Fundies do tremendous damage to the Church, as schisms and heresies do by definition, but the fundamentalist is like the pal in the foxhole who goes daft - one looks upon them with pity, not anger - while the liberal pro-choice Christian is the guy in the foxhole who runs to the enemy's side. (Of course, they all see me similarly.)

Mr. Severus goes on: "This Lent let us remind ourselves that fidelity to Catholic Worship -- to the Traditional Latin Mass -- is essential to our salvation. The novus ordo missae is an invalid act of blasphemy, hoisted onto the world by the protestant periti and modernist malefactors of the Vatican II robber council."

So well-written. I'm a sucker for alliteration and "protestant periti" and "modernist malefactors" please the ear and eye. I also liked use of the word "hoisted" even though I think he wanted "foisted".

He comments on why he deigns to comment on our blogs (from Jeff Miller's blog): "Corporal works of mercy can involve picking your way through the dingy back alleys of blighted urban streets to bring comfort and guidance to the homeless and the drug-addicted, so too I slog my way through the rip-roaring, joking, oh-isn't-it-so-funny-how-far-the-modernists-have-destroyed-our-religion dregs of "St. Blogs" to nudge souls towards the bread of Truth."

Good writing covers a multitude of sins and this guy's got the goods.

PS: Do I, a member of the dregs of St. Blog's, get credit for a work of mercy in passing his URL along?

Lots of Manure in "Moo"?

Terry of Summa Mommas reviews Jane Smiley's funny "Moo". I read it about seven years ago (before my reversion) and I doubt I would like it now as much as I did then. I've become thinner-skinned regarding bias against Christians and conservatives. The environment has become so polarized that "I see bias" (say like "I see dead people" in "The Sixth Sense") everywhere, and often enough there is bias. The NY Times, for example, has changed radically. Nostalgia creeps in when you read the Times praising Pius XII.

Recent books have convincingly made the case for liberal bias in the mainstream media, so we're more knowledgeable in how bias is exercised. Ignorance may not be bliss but being unaware does allow you to read without blood pressure fluctuations.

Repent of Our Repentings

Our pastor annually sends us a Lenten meditational book. Last year's was more of a "feel good" type. This year's is drawn from John Henry Newman's sermons and books, and he is unsparing in telling it how it is:

An ordinary man thinks it enough to do as is done to him; he will think it fair to resent insults, to repay injuries, to show a becoming pride, to insist on his rights, to be jealous for his honor, when in the wrong to refuse to confess it, to seek to be rich, to desire to do well with the world, to fear what his neighbors will say. He seldom thinks of the Day of Judgment, seldom thinks of sins past. Such is the ordinary Christian - and such is not among God's elect.

*
This is the highest excellence to which we ordinarily attain: to understand our own hypocrisy, insincerity, and shallowness of mind - to own that, while we pray, we cannot pray aright, to repent of our repentings, and to submit ourselves wholly to his judgment, who could indeed be extreme with us, but has already shown his loving kindness in bidding us to pray.

Thank God for Nuns

Times article on poverty and Haiti:

There once were many millions for Haiti from the World Bank, but the bank says the money bought almost nothing, and it says it will exercise "extreme caution" before it resumes trying to help Haiti.

"Of course the World Bank and the international community gives, but who to?" said the Rev. Willy Romélus, the pro-Aristide bishop of Jérémie. "To the government and to groups that invest a lot of money in bureaucracy, cars and logistics, leaving nothing for the people."...

The United States Agency for International Development and the United Nations plan to spend millions more for Haiti — but there is a sense that it comes with the weariness attached to large-scale, long-running failure.

A smaller scale may work. The Agency for International Development provides roughly 30 percent of the Haitian Health Foundation's $1.2 million operating budget, covering the salaries of three managers and 80 workers like Mrs. Delille, who makes $100 a month.

Two agency officials met Tuesday with Sister Maryann Bérard, a Franciscan nun who runs the foundation, which also builds houses and latrines and runs the only home for expectant mothers in Haiti.
They may have absorbed a lesson Sister Maryann says she learned from her 15 years in Haiti: aid works when it flows from the ground up, not the top down.

Terrorism Works...

....else it wouldn't be the grisly "growth industry" it appears to be. If al Qaeda did influence the Spanish elections, then the incomprehensible (i.e. 9/11) sadly becomes more comprehensible.

Hymns and Prayers from the Byzantine Catholic Divine Liturgy

St. Patrick's Day Celebration(s)

It’s our Dodge City at the end of a long cattle drive; we count the days like desperados and feast on the music of our favorite Irish band ‘The Hooligans’ every St. Patrick's Day. The annual celebration was on Saturday the 13th since the 17th falls on a Wednesday.

We started at the Blarney Bash and ended at the Ancient Order of Hibernian's party. Today was a rare duo Hooligan set since we'd hear them at both parties. At the Blarney Bash, as can happen between aficionados and less-than-aficionados, our enthusiasm seemed to annoy the neighbors (which meant we were doing something right).
The Bash went absurdly fast and I checked thru the Kubler-Ross stages of death and dying – denial the Hooligans had finished, anger, and finally acceptance. Fortunately we’d see them again in an hour or two so there was healing in that.

We arrived at the little school gym that feels of home, the AOH gig being the soothing antidote to the huge and impersonal Blarney Bash. To join AOH you must be of Irish heritage and a Roman Catholic, which makes it the most exclusive club I could belong to. I feel the love in the room.

Here we were welcomed, if only in our minds. As is our wont we yelled the request “John Paul Polka”, an obscurse song in homage to the Pontiff that the band played once two or three years ago and had never played again. Amazingly they played it; it had the feel of the miraculous about it and in a way it was because the older woman who sat next to us and endured our singing turned out to be the spouse of one of the band members. Bone saw her go up and relay our request.

We sang to hoarseness all the old chestnuts including, "Come Out Ye Black and Tans" and “Give Ireland back to the Irish”...

Rev. P.J. Michel Excerpt

God, who is the tender Father of all His creatures, has taken every means to remove that excessive fear which would draw them from Him. To prevent the soul that has become sensible of its ingratitude and terrified at the view of its repeated relapses into sin, after so often obtaining pardon for them --to prevent such a soul from losing all hope and daring no longer cry out to Him from the abyss into which it has again fallen, not only does He assure it, by the mouth of the Psalmist, "That those who hope in Him shall never be confounded," but He expressly declares the positive law of His mercy, and commands us to hope in Him.

Ah! we little know the boundless tenderness of that divine Heart, if we judge of it by our own, or if we imagine that it ever ceases to care for us. So long as we are in this life we are under the law of mercy, and of that mercy we can ever avail ourselves.

Let us then never fear to have recourse to the merits of Jesus Christ. We honor them when we make use of them to obtain that which helps which we need, since it was for this that Jesus Christ vouchsafed to acquire them and to give them over to us...It would be a singular way of honoring them, the not daring to make use of them; it would be going directly against the end which our divine Savior proposed to Himself. In turning from His gifts as useless, we should not be evincing our esteem for them, but only proving our indifference.

Belloc "Path to Rome" Excerpt

The Ballon d'Alsace is the knot of Europe, and from that gathering up and ending of the Vosges you look down upon three divisions of men. To the right of you are the Gauls. I do not mean that mixed breed of Lorraine, silent, among the best of people, but I mean the tree Gauls, who are hot, ready, and born in the plains and in the vineyards. They stand in their old entrenchments on either side of the Saone and are vivacious in battle; from time to time a spirit urges them, and they go out conquering eastward in the Germanics, or in Asia, or down the peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then they suck back like a tide homewards, having accomplished nothing but an epic.

Then on the left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain apart from visions...

....though cold by race, [through] her politeness ran a sense of what Teutons called Duty, which would once have repelled me; but I have wandered over a great part of the world, and I know it now to be a distorted kind of virtue.

She was of a very different sort from that good tribe of the Moselle valley beyond the hill; yet she also was Catholic?(she had a little tree set up before her door for the Corpus Christi: see what religion is, that makes people of utterly different races understand each other; for when I saw that tree I knew precisely where I stood. So once all we Europeans understood each other, but now we are divided by the worst malignancies of nations and classes, and a man does not so much love his own nation as hate his neighbours...

Reason to Worry

Kevin Miller quotes a pundit who says that 4-to-6 weeks is all Kerry needs...

From the Corner:

Nice detail from Bruce Feirstein's column in this week's New York Observer. Feirstein, who is a screenwriter, describes having lunch in a Santa Monica restaurant with ten Hollywood friends. None of them "had actually seen the film, despite offering vociferous opinions about it. Then the Hispanic waiter spoke up. 'I loved it. I usually don't go to movies, but I went to a matinee, on the second day.'"

Non Nihil Obstat Musings

The Law in the OT seemed to serve the function of making it apparent to men that they are not God. In other words, to help them to humility by offering a Law they could not keep perfectly. (St. Augustine said that the law was necessary so that we see the necessity of grace.) Unfortunately the scribes and Pharisees circumvented this by seeming to keep the Law, and worse, by making it impossible for non-scribes and Pharisees from keeping the Law. (There is a nice reversal of this in the Church today -- our priests have heavier burdens placed on them - in the form of chastity, poverty and obedience - than lay people.)

Enter Jesus. He not only fulfilled the Law but blew by it - by erasing the distinction between thoughts with actions. By creating an equivalency between harboring anger against our brother and killing him, Jesus effectively laid an unbearable burden on the Pharisees, as if to say, "okay, so you thought you could keep the Law, 'eh. Try this on for size!" In the eternal war between presumption and despair, Christ battled against presumption by asking us to be perfect. He battled despair by reminding that "what is impossible for man is possible for God" and by giving us the Holy Spirit.

In a way, Jesus is to the Old Testament what the Holy Spirit is to Jesus, with the apostles playing the part of the anti-Pharisees. In other words, Jesus seemed to re-enact the bible in the sense that his teachings were Old Testament, and the post-Pentecost was the New. Christ's Law is a perfected one, which caused his apostles to stumble, unlike the Pharisees who felt they weren't stumbling under the imperfect Law.

My sense is that the bible is well-balanced between instruction on what pleases God and instruction on the remedy for doing that which seems impossible.