(Make your own cover here; hat tip Summa Mamas).

Bubble quote is from Tom Kreitzberg, who says of the post from which that came: "I'm beginning to think this won't be the post people have in mind when they say to my son, 'I want to shake the hand of the man whose father wrote that.'"

True Confessions - On the Deception of the Appearances

I remembered him sitting next to the altar, concelebrating occasionally with one of the other priests at our local Dominican parish. He seemed a goofy looking guy, maybe a bit slow. He'd come visit from time to time and he didn't hear confessions, despite the long lines, and rarely gave a sermon. I thought he might be considered by the other priests as 'dead weight'. (I always have sympathy for the priests at the parish. They are the James Brown's of the clerical world: the hardest working priests around. There are two or three daily masses and lengthy Confession lines every day of the week, so much so that the pastor recently asked that we limit ourselves to monthly confession assuming no grave sin.)

When he spoke at Mass it was sort of light-hearted and simple, not so grave or serious. I liked that, thinking the overly serious conservatives of the parish needed to lighten up. Of course, I also gave myself credit for being so open-minded as to like his style.

I thought it was charitable the other full-time Dominicans at the parish had him there, like allowing a slightly daft uncle to stay at your house without having him do any chores. Only it turned out this guy wasn't slightly daft. He was brilliant. I went on a retreat and he was the retreat master and realized he had what I lacked, which is a surprisingly effective way to lose any irrational condescension. Not simply book knowledge, he had the ability to see with the eyes of faith. (He teaches in D.C.)

How many times - how many times! - will it take me to not judge by appearances?

Paglia in Salon

Few write so piquantly about politics as Camille Paglia. She's the left's Peggy Noonan: insightful, lyrical, and bold enough to bare her eccentricities. Paglia and Noonan exercise both sides of their brains - the right and the left, the creative and the logical, the intuitive and the analytical. (Never trust a person who exercises only one side of their brain. Many bloggers shrink lyricisim in favor of analysis, or at least analysis in the form of opining. Blogging seems to follow the anti-lyricism trend of modernity - first poetry fell out of fashion in the early 20th century, now literary novels are losing favor...But I digress.)

Here is Paglia on Clinton:

Hillary didn't help herself with her over-the-top sermon at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Ala., two weeks ago. Her aping of a black Southern accent from the pulpit was so inept and patronizing that it should get a Razzie Award for Worst Performance of the Year. At times, it approached the Southern Gothic burlesque of Bette Davis chewing up the scenery in "Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte."

Sweet. She also seems very fair-minded for an admitted Democratic partisan:

This kind of outreach to expose and remedy injustice represents the finest spirit of leftism, a practical, compassionate activism -- not the pretentious postmodernist jargon and sanctimonious attitudinizing that still pass for leftism among too many college faculty. Capitalism, which spawned modern individualism as well as the emancipated woman who can support herself, is essentially Darwinian. It expands any society's sum total of wealth and radically raises the standard of living, but it leaves the poor and weak without a safety net. Capitalism needs the ethical counter-voice of leftism to keep it honest. But leftists must be honest in turn about what we owe to capitalism...

I like that Paglia takes risks, even ones that can leave her looking ridiculous. She opines:

The relationship between Cheney and George W. Bush is also perplexing. Despite the nearness in their ages, Cheney acts like Bush's father (no coincidence since Cheney served in George H.W. Bush's administration). There's something creepy about how Cheney, after heading the candidate search, insinuated himself into the vice presidency. He locked onto Bush like a limpet, using the more extroverted and physically dynamic president as his proxy. Bush's independent judgment was paralyzed, as if by snakebite. It's an unsavory, toxic relationship, a vampiric pseudo-marriage like that of the shadowy, Machiavellian Roger Chillingworth and the impressionable, waffling Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter."

....Which is the sort of unintended hilarity we often expect from academics. Instead of Bush wanting someone with experience and gravitas and finding it in Cheney, Paglia sees a Gothic, parasitic dysfunctional relationship. Common sense is not so common, but then it's not always as entertaining as the alternative.

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive - C. S. Lewis

The following is an excerpt from Ironic Catholic's comments on my Mass Report post last week. I think this paragraph should be required reading for anyone who is going to die:

Not that I have any control over this…but when I die, I want someone to remind me about the love of Jesus Christ. I want someone to ask me about repentance and offer reconciliation. I want someone to challenge me that the best is yet to come, that this suffering joins me with Christ, and like his suffering, it is not the last word. God is here and God will be there and has already broken my path for that journey. I want to receive the anointing of the sick, and be told that God will raise me up. I don’t want someone asking if I’m “in touch with my values.” And especially if I am weak and in pain, I hope the person helping me have a holy, joyful death will not expect me to “take the lead.”

This stirs up a lot of thoughts and emotions for me. How in the past I may have had the opportunity to deliver this message to a dying friend and how I failed, how embarrassing death is and how tongue-tied it can make us, what a bastard death is but how radically and profoundly our faith in Christ confronts it. I'm reminded of how Walker Percy shined the light on this in his fiction -- recall Lonnie's death in The Moviegoer and how Binx responded to questions from Lonnie's siblings about the hope of the resurrection, and recall the deathbed baptism scene in The Last Gentleman, how matter-of-fact and therefore how good the priest was -- and of how Percy approached his own death. Percy himself often pointed to the witness of Flannery O'Connor and how she confronted death with courage and a clear vision of God's grace. - blogger at Korrektiv

2 Things You Only See on PBS Pledge Week ... Frank Sinatra, singing "America the Beautiful." - "The Corner"

Shortly after Rowan Williams was named to Becket’s chair, we spent a cordial ninety minutes together at Lambeth Palace, Canterbury’s London headquarters. I gave him a copy of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II; we spoke of John Paul’s theology of the body, and then fell to discussing the difference between “sacramental” and “gnostic” understandings of the human condition. The former insists that the stuff of the world – including maleness, femaleness, and their complementarity — has truths built into it; gnostics say it’s all plastic, all malleable, all changeable. The sacramentalists believe that the extraordinary reveals itself through the ordinary: bread, wine, water, salt, marital love and fidelity; the gnostics say it’s a matter of superior wisdom, available to the enlightened (which can mean, the politically correct). Dr. Williams seemed convinced that the gnosticism of a lot of western high culture posed a great danger to historic Christianity and the truths it must proclaim. He was right. The gnosticism that infects the Episcopal Church USA has just about driven the Anglican Communion over the cliff. - George Weigel, though at the beginning he sounded Thirsten Howell-the-Third-ish

I think the imprecision of the word "love" is preferable to going about saying things like, "I apprehend donuts as pleasurable." - Tom of Disputations

The fact is that until fairly recently the Arab/Muslim world didn't have a giant chip on its shoulder about the Crusades. After all, they won. And it wasn't as central an event in their historical narrative as it is today. It's only with the export of Marxist notions of European colonialism and exploitation to the Middle East that the radicals started harping on it. In other words, Bin Laden's whole emphasis on "Crusaders" and the knee-jerk response to the word is tied up in the Westernization of the Middle East. Alas, it's the wrong kind of Westernization but Westernization nonetheless. We saw similar dynamics in places like Vietnam, where French Marxism was appropriated by nationalist movements and therefore deemed "authentic" by leftist observers. This is one reason, it seems to me, why the whole post-colonial studies crowd (or whatever they're called today) seems to think that Marxism is an authentic third world doctrine, even though it couldn't be more European.... - Jonah Goldberg

I've looked at the new Benedictine book but I have the same NRSV allergy. I'm trying to get over that, though, in light of Augustine's comment in the Confessions about the artless Hebrew Psalms and how their lack of Roman class revolted him til years later when he returned to them with humility and discovered their infinite depth. It irks me to admit it, but the Word comes to life even in the lumpy wet cardboard English of the RNAB.I've looked at the new Benedictine book but I have the same NRSV allergy. I'm trying to get over that, though, in light of Augustine's comment in the Confessions about the artless Hebrew Psalms and how their lack of Roman class revolted him til years later when he returned to them with humility and discovered their infinite depth. It irks me to admit it, but the Word comes to life even in the lumpy wet cardboard English of the RNAB. - Bill White of "Summa Minutiae"

I was thinking about the relationship between the bishop and the people of his diocese, and trying to come up with a way of saying that yes, he is their servant, but no, they aren't his masters. After testing several analogies, all of which failed, I finally hit on one that I think works pretty well: The Bishop is the shepherd of his Church....All this works reasonably well (I presume) for a reasonably competent shepherd herding ordinary sheep. It's considerably more difficult when the sheep are baptized Catholics. And when those baptized Catholics are educated in the Faith to the point where they have strong opinions about what the bishop should do, forget about it. And yet, the relationship remains one of shepherd and sheep, even when the sheep are smarter and wiser and holier than the shepherd. It's certainly not easy, and it can be positively lousy, for a sheep to know better than its shepherd, but the promises of Christ don't include ease in this life. And however smart and wise and holy they may be, sheep without a shepherd are lost. - Tom of Disputations

Dissident Catholics are more worrying than atheists. - Cardinal Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, via "Spirit & Life"

It is ironic that in the almost 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the focus of many American commentators has been fixed not on the crimes of the socialist bloc, but on the supposed "silence" of Pius XII... Writers such as Sartre (and in America, Lillian Hellman) who backed Josef Stalin all through his purges and genocides are still considered respectable, and Marxism is still treated as a legitimate analytical tool in universities — even as the last traces of Christian influence are systematically purged from public life. ...And yet, as a Christian, I find something comforting in this fact. The Nazis and the Communists knew deep down that the Church was their most implacable foe. Stalin’s famous sneer “How many divisions does the pope have?” has been answered. The silent artillery of time will in the end reduce all heresies and expose all falsehoods. - Paul Cella via Bill Luse

"I can walk in the rose garden, watch the joyful capering of my dog, and see the indisputable work of God. The key is beauty,” says Koontz, who converted to the Catholic faith while in college. “If the world is merely a complex and efficient machine, beauty is not required. Beauty is in fact superfluous. Therefore beauty is a gift to us. If we were soulless machines of meat, the survival instinct would be all we needed to motivate us. The pleasures of the senses — such as taste and smell — are superfluous to machines in a godless world. Therefore, they are gifts to us, and evidence of divine grace. The older I’ve gotten, the more beauty, wonder, and mystery I see in the world, which is why there are ever more of those three things in my books." - author Dean Koontz, via Tim Drake on NCR

Thoughts Beyond My Paygrade

An email correspondent wondered aloud: "I have heard it said that it is harder being a monk than a Priest. But if one gets the call from God to that vocation is it still hard?"

An interesting question. On the one hand, most callings we have a natural aptitude for. It is said that God builds on our nature. If our nature is for solitude, for example, it might be part of a calling for the monastic life. But there's also grace and as one saint whose name escapes me wrote, "The more you progress in the spiritual life the more you have need of God's grace." I think the life Mother Theresa led was often hard for her, but it would be absolutely impossible for the average person. Grace made the difference, though that doesn't appear to make it "easy" for us, no matter what our calling.

Short Story Tuesday...titled "Narcissistic Tendencies"

"He looks like James," he said. "Same eyes and forehead."

Every new birth is greeted in the Rodgers family by a ritualistic weighing in on which side had won the genetic lottery. He'd thought that by confirming the obvious - that he looked like their side - he was giving her a small gift.

"Yes he sure does," she said wistfully. He could tell she considered this no victory for her; even her husband was still other. Outer Mongolia to him, he was still Mongolia to her and they suddenly became insiders, conspirators in their mutual outsiderness.

Sean Hannity & Mario Cuomo - Not So Different?

An interesting part of the Hannity shoot-out with Fr. E was how he (Hannity) said several times that he understands the whole country is not Catholic. (Implying apparently that Fr. E missed that newsflash.)

In a sense the pundit and the politician are not so different. Both rely on popularity; the pundit's elections are his ratings. Hannity cannot be "too Catholic" else he would offend his non-Catholic listeners, and he walked close to the "personally opposed" language we hear so often with politicians like Mario Cuomo who don't want to impose their beliefs on others, but then Hannity walked away from it by stating that he doesn't have a problem with artificial birth control.

Sr. Lorraine on Amy's blog said that Fr. E should've said that rather than judging Sean's soul, he should've just pointed out that Hannity was advocating the violation of church teaching. But Sean probably would've repeated that the whole country isn't Catholic and in that reveals he's a pragmatist (hence his "what's worse, abortion or birth control?" query to Fr. E).

* * *
While on the subject of ratings...Bill O'Reilly occasionally does stories he absolutely loathes, such as the Anna Nicole Smith story. The Other Paper recently wrote: "Did you know that Anna Nicole Smith is responsible for a higher percentage of our national GDP than housing construction?" From what I've seen, them's true words.

First Communion Keepsake

Thirty-six years after all the Communion money was spent, I still have the plaque my uncle gave me for my First Holy Communion. It goes beyond mere sentimental value. I have been given various religious articles by people closer to me than my uncle but none meant as much to me.

It is special because it communicates the relationship, the key relationship in life. Catholics are often said not to have a personal relationship with Christ, but what could be more personal than the Eucharist? And I recalled that every time I looked at that plaque because it featured me (or a boy stand-in) and Jesus, and Jesus is appropriately featured more prominently. Instead of not figuring at all. (And who's the star of this show I ask you?) No wheat and grapes either please. Nor even words.

My plaque

(The platelet at bottom that said "Remembrance of My First Holy Communion" fell off yrs ago.)

It would be a nice symmetry if I could find something similar for my nephew, who makes his First Communion in May. But alas I can't. At the risk of sounding like an ol' curmudgeon, they don't make Communion plaques like they used to.

Congrats...

...to the Ohio State Buckeyes and Miami Redskins who escaped the mortal coil of the regular season and now enter the purgatio of March Madness, hoping to end up in Final Four paradiso. (O'er the weekend watched the Big Ten & MAC finals and also heard friend Bone discuss his Dante purchase.)

Public Service Announcement

Blog-city has decided that they will no longer be in the bidness of providing free bloghosting services. Which means News You Can Use has been ported to parodyistherapy.blogspot.com.

Miraculous Properties of Unassuming Household Products

You've probably received those chain emails that ascribe wonderful properties to banal household products. I recently got one that went like this:

Wesson Oil eliminates ear mites. All it takes is a few drops of Wesson corn oil in your cat's ear...Massage it in, then clean with a cotton ball. Repeat daily for 3 days. The oil soothes the cat's skin, smothers the mites, and accelerates healing.

Dawn kills fleas instantly...Dawn dishwashing liquid does the trick. Add a few drops to your dog's bath and shampoo the animal thoroughly. Rinse well to avoid skin irritations. Good-bye fleas.

Bounce is a rainy day cure for dog odor ...Next time your dog comes in from the rain, simply wipe down the animal with Bounce or any dryer sheet, instantly making your dog smell springtime fresh.

Natch, this seemed ripe for parody. Click to enlarge:

AOH! AOH!

Another AOH (Ancient Order of Hibernians) outing with Ham o’ Bone in the books and I’m always taken aback about how good a time it is despite past experiences of similar good times. It’s simply unrecreatable in the normal ebb & flow of daily existence. I became lost almost immediately in the psychedelic glow of lights off the old man singer’s thick glasses though I’m chagrined to report that Bone missed the fabled “dead set” in which the Hooligans sing “Finnegan’s Wake” (during which the crowd retorts “Lunch!”), but he was gathering valuable intelligence during a smoke break from a former AOH president concerning the current state of AOH affairs. You know those smokers always do get good intel.

This year it was held at the Germania Club, which was sorta funny. It’s a measure of how far AOH has fallen that they’re reduced to hosting their big event at a German club. But how ecumenical and fun, and me being a German afficiando as well as part German, I felt quite at home. An odd moment occurred when an elderly German lady attempted to sing one of our Irish songs at the end of the night with a German accent & all. Since Ham o’ Bone & I speak (between us) at least fifty words of Deutsch, we felt it our duty to be ambassadors to this lady by yelling out “Wie geht es ihnen!” and “Danke Schon!” at odd intervals. Can’t take us anywhere.

The seating at this event could not have been better. Picture perfect, despite early reservations. As the table immediate stage left, I wasn’t sure if our boisterous behavior (just singing) would sit well with our neighbors (the table seated 8). But lo & behold the guys we sat near had far more acquaintance with Mr. Bud Weiser than we had of Mr. Guinness or Mr. Jameson. I also learned to never tease der Bone about his slow drinking. He bought me an extra shot and finished his pronto while I was humbled: "No más!"

It was startling, later in the night, to be five to ten feet from Bill O’Reilly’s bete noir, the tux-wearing Judge Connor who O’Reilly judged “the worst judge in America” for allowing a child molester to get off with probation. To think I was only two degrees of separation from the Factor.

In the wee hours, post-“God Save Ireland”, we discussed religion and Ham’s difficulties with “Mariology”. Ham is an evangelical but said that his non-denominational pastor was celebrating Lent for the first time, including Ash Wednesday. It was heart-warming to hear that. If Catholics have become more Protestant since Vatican II, Protestants are becoming more Catholic.

You Become What You Hate?

An Imagined Word Association Game with Bill Mahrer

"Theocrat"

"George Bush!"

"Global warming"

"George Bush"

"War"

"George Bush"

"Stupidity"

"George Bush"

"BIll Mahrer"

"George B--, er, ?!"

Sean & Me

I recall that very early in the blogging game I had a very high opinion of my level of book savvy. This was to some extent natural because I was more bookish and well-read than anyone I knew - in the "real", i.e. non-virtual, world - and it's natural to compare oneself to others after all. So I wrote and posted a little quiz about "how to tell if you're a bibliophile". What interests me now is how two people who were tremendously better read than me received it. One wrote a blistering post calling me a middlebrow and worse. The other (Thomas of ER) responded with a nice post of which books he had. In other words, one called me an idiot while the other didn't lord his superiority over me. Who was more Christlike?

I'm just thinking aloud here, so I could be all wet, but perhaps this is not unlike the Catholic ignorance of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and yes maybe even [swallows hard] John Kerry. They are often excoriated for their bad public examples, though I'm not sure they should all be in the same camp. But there's a chance a lot of that ignorance is due to, well, ignorance. They probably compare themselves to the people they know and they seem comparatively well-catechized.

But, as I type this, it seems there's a difference in that there is no "Book Authority" from whom we ought take our cues. I don't have to give up my personal title as Mr. Book Authority to Mz. Know-it-all. But with the Faith, it's different. We are given the great gift of sight via our shepherds. To knowingly reject that sight (as Kerry, Hannity & O'Reilly do) is to what? To lack faith? Lack apologetic/catechetical knowledge? Lack humility? Ahh, but there's the rub. There's no way to separate in ourselves where pride begins and ignorance ends let alone in another person. But the pride factor is huge, as Amy Welborn notes:

The larger point is that, as I've noted before, "We are all good Catholics now," good Catholics whose status as Good Catholics we wear as a badge and hold as a ticket no matter what we happen to believe. Which stands in opposition to the traditional stance of a Christian through a couple of thousand years, which has been the acknowledgment that we are all Bad Catholics in some sense, but uttered in the deep hope and trust that God is merciful and that filled with new life in Christ, we are redeemed, not by our own power or by our own wisdom, standing in judgment of what we think should be true, but by the love of God, the medicine in which we sinners stand in deep need.

I very much doubt that Tom of Disputations, when he wrote what follows, was thinking of the Hannity & company - since they have the whiff of being way too spiritually full of themselves - but it bears repeating in this context, concerning "cultural Catholics":

They will be there because there is where they go on Easter. They will be variously smiled at, cursed at, and tolerated, but generally dismissed as "Christmas and Easter Catholics" who do little more than clog the parking lot and mess up poll results (remember, 70% of Catholics don't believe in the Real Presence).

Here, though, I'm not talking about the C&E Catholics too spiritually full of themselves to go to Mass on lesser feasts. I'm talking about those people, maybe not even baptized, who are too spiritually empty to go to Mass, except when it will be crowded enough that no one will notice their emptiness.

And maybe this will be the year when a word or a gesture reveals to them that the Man they were looking for is here, in this church, on this altar, with these people. Maybe the prayer that makes it so will be yours.

I try often, without success, to pinpoint the time during the '90s when I became convinced the Catholic Church offered not just good suggestions but was the Authority. I suspect it was around the time I became deeply convinced about the truth of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. If the Church was right about the great gifts of the sacraments, it seemed she was right about everything since so few churches were right about sacraments. But I can't pinpoint it.

The D Word

It's sort of depressing to read about how this blogging nun is so allergic to the word 'docile'. Docile has become a persona non grata among the family of words. And yet the dictionary definition is not so terrible: "easily managed; readily trained or taught; teachable." Lord help us, I know we don't want to be teachable or easily managed, but must we see a lack of docility as a virtue?

You see the same taste in this article about the St. Patrick's Parade in '08. Come hell or high water, the Shamrock Club wants their parade even though the bishop has asked that it not happen, at least on the 17th, since it falls during Holy Week. In fairness, Dempsey, apparently the man in charge, doesn't want to "buck the bishop."

An antidote to these articles was seeing the film Into Great Silence last night, as recommended here and as noted here on Open Book.

The filmmaker was determined to slow us down, and slow us down he did, with agonizingly long looks at monks in prayer and nature scenes (adding up to 160+ minutes of film). But by the end you got a taste of their serenity. Perhaps even a smidgeon of their docility will rub off. The rhythms of the natural world and the monks seemed the same - I watched with interest the way the Carthusians worked - neither too fast nor too slow, seemingly in sync with their Maker. Over and over a message was repeated (literally, via a subtitle) on the screen: "unless you give up everything you cannot be my disciples." In tone, a different message indeed than what was contained in the links above.