Our Hyde Jeckyl Government

...is the government passive/agressive? I mean it's not a single entity but composed of millions but it's willing to exercise eminent domain in draconian power grabs, to enfranchise the right of mothers to kill their unborn children, and to tax us to the point where we work until May before we can begin working for ourselves. And yet there's a rebate program in order to pay for the conversion of televison signals from analog to digital? Am I missing something here? Is television our soma?

Last Week in Review

Cockiness will not be tolerated: the week before last was so easy, so short-lived, compared to the plains of this past one. I’d misunderestimated it. It started with the shock of supra-high blood pressure, which alerted me to a new wakefulness on dietary matters. Diet never matters until it hurts someone, and it was evidentally hurting me given the challenge of fitting into pants and blood pressure cuffs.

On Tuesday I engaged in what might be a budding tradition in in my coffers: the weekly movie, although it would’ve been better to have read instead. This week it was Jim Carrey’s “Yes Man”. I found it only moderately entertaining. Nothing as exhilarating as last week’s “Valkeries”, and it had one nauseating scene involving a fornicating old lady. Naturally that is what lingers in memory.
___

The week was a one-two punch of a half-foot of snow and brutal cold. The cold is as nothing to the snow but still... Our garage door doesn’t work when it's this cold; we have to “help” it along. Which means on the coldest days of the year we have to leave the car. Which sort of defeats the purpose of garage door openers as you want them most when it’s minus 10 degrees and one nanosecond outside freezes your nose hairs and short hairs. I whine therefore I am.
____

But tis all moot now because I’m looking at a fine stretch of pony. Monday is MLK day, an off-day the positive result of our corporation’s political correctness (not meant to disparage Martin Luther King who was a great American leader, but we don't get off President's Day, for example. If you give MLK, you have to give GW & AL.) We’re always behind the times, which is why we only started getting the day off two years ago, but hey at least we get the day off so I shan't complain. Black activists may not have gotten reparations for slavery but they've gotten this honkey a day off work and for that I am grateful.

I have the gimlet eye of McDonald’s coffee and breakfast in my reptile brain, as well as the prospect of the filling prose of Updike (for lyrcisim) or Dean Koontz (for story). Then there’s “The Education of Henry Adams” for an autobiographical break.

I began Friday late afternoon by taking a short nap in the sun under the coincierge of the south window in our family room after devouring Max & Erma’s tasty filets of fish. Before dozing, I read of the exploits involving the story of a US Air jetliner that landed in the Hudson river yesterday. 155 passengers, no deaths. A fine respite from bad news.

Vortex..Can't Avoid...Help Me...

Hep me, hep me, I'm being sucked into the vortex of politics! I made the mistake of watching This Week today and I'll never understand how journalists over the age of 18 can be surprised by the phenomenon of volatile presidential approval ratings.

There was much lamentation and beating of breasts on the panel over the fact that GWB had a rating of 90%+ after 9/11, and now leaves office with the lowest in history. Matthew Dowd thought it tragic but how could it be otherwise? Just as housing bubbles and oil speculation bubbles eventually burst leaving foreclosures and $40 a barrel oil in its place, so too do high presidential ratings. Does anyone else recall that George Herbert Walker Bush had an approval rating of 90% after the conclusion of the Gulf War and then lost the election a year later? Did #41 change, or did the media coverage and people's perception of him change? For a media type like Dowd to lament Bush's low approval ratings is sort of like a wife abuser being shocked at the sight of his wife's bruises.

George Will pointed to two names as the cause of Bush's unpopularity: Terri Schiavo and Harriet Miers. Which perfectly explains the cause of Bush's unpopularity with George Will, but I'm doubtful of its universal applicability. The Miers blip was something all of five people now remember, a misstep that GWB quickly fixed. (Apparently the blame GWB crowd thinks he is to be blamed not only for real blunders but potential ones.) With Schiavo, for the life of me I don't understand how GWB's signing a bill that was passed by the Senate by unanimous consent was somehow controversial, other than media types took offense that he interrupted his vacation to do so.

What Bush's low popularity ratings reflect are three things:

an unpopular war

a very hostile media

an unwillingness to defend himself and/or go directly to the American people

The fact that the panel on This Week (with the exception of Gwen Ifill), didn't get that shows why the only institution with the same low approval ratings as George Bush is....(drumroll)... the media.

A Compassionate Look at Elvis

...here.

Yo Comments are Whack

My commenters are witty and smart. But elsewhere it applies; this post is dedicated to Professor Luse and Dylan of More Last than First, who are the grammaticians in the Catlick blogosphere.

Another Example...

...from Paragraph Farmer, of the most unfairly maligned president of modern times: GWB. He takes an honest look at GWB's legacy here.

Book Lists

I'm always interested in lists of "must reads" ...in this case from a Georgia newspaper. It's akin to looking over and seeing what your neighbor is reading.

(Photo credit: David Robert Brooks)

This & That

When I recently learned I have online privileges with my local library card to the Oxford English Dictionary I've been looking for excuses to look up etymologies. I read in "The Secret History of Words" that "wife" was one of the oldest of English words (while, oddly, husband was more of a newcomer):

wife - n. 1. a. A woman: formerly in general sense; in later use restricted to a woman of humble rank or ‘of low employment’ (J.), esp. one engaged in the sale of some commodity. Now dial., exc. with prefixed descriptive word, esp. in compounds such as ALE-WIFE1, APPLE-wife, FISHWIFE, OLD WIFE, OYSTER-wife, etc.

The earliest reference in the OED is from 725, the third oldest is this one from 950 (I assume uif is wife):

c950 Lindisf. Gosp. John iv. 7 Cuom uif of ær byri to ladanne uæter.

....which gives the sense of the John 4:7 verse concerning the Samaritan woman at the well: "Woman, give me to drink."
_______

I pretty much agree with this guy. How stupid is buying insurance against U.S. Treasury bonds? I think it indicates a deep-seated human need for reassurance even where none exists, apart from God.

_______
Ah the audacity of Nigerian scammers and business website operators. Spam attempting to disguise itself as other than spam inevitably appeals to intimacy, like the kiss of Judas. A Toronto real estate claims a connection with Fr. Benedict Groeschel's "Good Counsel Homes", which can't be easily verified, but said they added a link to my site on their home page, which can.

Hello,

Recently I visited your website; while visiting your site I noticed that you link to http://www.goodcounselhomes.org at this address: http://poncer.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_poncer_archive.html. As we are closely related to them, I would love to exchange links with your website, currently there are about 5,000 - 7,000 people per day that goto my site and search for information, Therefore I would to link to an excellent site like yours.

I have taken the liberty of adding your site to my home page: [link removed] to determine if it is of any benefit to you, if you have a stats program you can check it and let me know...

_______

Speaking of Judas, MaryH has a good post here about the subject of Judas and Hell.

I looked up what the Church Fathers said concerning Jesus telling Judas it would be better than he'd never have been born. From Origen:

"Or, [Christ] spoke generally, to prove the nature of each of their hearts, and to evince the wickedness of Judas, who would not believe in One who knew his heart. I suppose that at first he supposed that the thing was hid from Him, deeming Him man, which was of unbelief; but when he saw that his heart was known, he embraced the concealment offered by this general way of speaking, which was shamelessness. This also shows the goodness of the disciples, that they believed Christ's words more than their own consciences, they began each to say, Lord, is it I? For they knew by what Jesus had taught them that human nature is readily turned to evil, and is in continual struggle with the rulers of the darkness of this world; whence they ask as in fear, for by reason of our weakness the future is an object of dread to us."

It's also interesting to see the spin Origen uses: Jesus said not "by whom I have been betrayed" but "through him" - through the Devil, the true instigator of Judas's betrayal. None of my bible translations say through him, so I assume Origen was looking at a different early manuscript.
________
I love the Catholic blog search engine, which presumably checks untold numbers of Catholic blogs upon entering a search key. But I'm a bit suprised by how often the subjects/links I'm interested in are uncovered in the Catlick blogosphere. The New Yorker article on Samuel Johnson is one example, but even the Gopnik piece on Chesterton had relatively few mentions ("Gopnik" + "Chesterton" gets only 4 hits).

I'd expected an avalanche of hits concerning Philip Jenkins' latest "The Lost History of Christianity", on the controversial subject of where and why Christianity died out, and yet there was only a thimbleful. (Although the book did just come out...) The best single comment I'd seen was from Western Confucian who said:

I was a bit surprised to read the author of The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice to write, "Over the past 30 years, the Roman Catholic Church has faced repeated battles over this question of Christ's uniqueness, and has cracked down on thinkers who have made daring efforts to accommodate other world religions." The author says that "the church refuses to give up its fundamental belief in the unique role of Christ." Would we expect Buddhists to question Buddha's uniqueness or Muslims Mohammed's?

On amazon.com reviews, one solitary warrior proclaimed:

I started the book and realize that what is in front of me is a not very convincing apologetic for a sort of Christian relativism. I can see why Mr Jenkins is an ex Catholic in his extolling of the heresies of Nestorianism, Gnosticism, Monophysites and the like. It seems that, for Jenkins, anyone who was dissatisfied with proclamations or rulings on the faith vis a vis Church councils is, well, heroic in breaking off and setting up pseudo churches with bishops, priests, monks, etc. that just make up their own dogmas and doctrines.

Predictably, he was heckled by those intolerant of intolerance. But that said, Jenkins' book does look like a fascinating glimpse of a subject well-deserving of study. Of course, studies like this tend to tempt one to trade empiricism for faith. History is always shrouded in mystery since the facts we have are incomplete, while God Himself is infinitely more mysterious than history.

The O'Rama Guide to Potential Weight LossTM

As a service to readers, I occasionally provide diet and exercise advice. Sometimes even cooking recipes. I give and I give. As always, your (and my) results may vary:

Exercise, but only moderately

Too much exercise is a metabolism killer. What does it profit a man if he exercises intensely for an hour and then spends the other 23 slumped in a chair, semi-comatose? Likewise sore muscles tend to result in a decrease in activity during the day and the law of inertia asserts that whatever is at rest will tend to remain at rest and anything in motion will tend to remain in motion. So exercise, like alcohol, is best used in moderation. I leave the reader to define moderation in these matters.

Drink Water like a Mo' Fo'

It's an article of faith in the dieting world that drinking water displaces food somehow. Or that if you are semi-dehydrated you'll unconsciously seek the water in food rather than drinking it. I don't know how it works but I pass along the advice of those who know.

My tip is to drink 8-16 ounces of water first thing in the morning. Pretend it's beer and you're at college and people are yelling, "chug! chug! chug!"

It's easy, by the way, to tell if you're semi-dehydrated because your urine will be darker than it should. And it's easier for guys to tell this sort of thing since we pee standing up, facing the bowl. Thought you might want to know that. (Could that be called an unhelpful digression?)

Scale Down with Baby Steps

If you normally have a milkshake with dinner every night, have a chocolate milk instead. If you normally have a chocolate milk, try a white milk. If you normally have a white milk, try skim milk. If you normally have skim milk then you should be skinny and I should be reading your guide to weight loss.

Listen to Your Body

If you have a craving for chocolate cake, as I did yesterday, then your body is telling you it needs chocolate cake. Listen to it. It does no good to eat five salads and two hamburgers for lunch when all you really wanted was a bit of chocolate cake and a half a hamburger. I had two pieces of it yesterday and now, today (voila!) I don't want chocolate cake, so the problem is solved and I can move along to raw carrots.

Never Eat Carbs w/out Protein

Carbs are not your friend. Or at least they need to be chaperoned by protein. Never allow carbs to enter your bloodstream without being accompanied by protein. There are deeply complex biological reasons for this. Man has not evolved to live on processed sugars alone.

Let's Play....

...why's my bookbag (or e-reader equivalent) so heavy?

My lack of having anything to say is your gain because that is the impetus for going to my handy, dandy amazon Kindle and copying from its "Save Page as Clipping" feature:

...as a rule the New Englander's strength was his poise which almost amounted to a defect. He offered no more target for love than for hate; he attracted as little as he repelled; even as a machine, his motion seemed never accelerated. - Henry Adams stereotyping a swath of the country, which you could do in those days. From "The Education of Henry Adams"

In the cave at Bethlehem, God shows himself to us as a humble “infant” to overcome our pride. Perhaps we would have submitted more easily before power, before pride; but he does not want our submission. He appeals, rather, to our heart and to our free decision to accept his love. He has made himself little to free us from this human pretension of greatness that arises from pride; he has incarnated himself freely to make us truly free, free to love him. - Pope Benedict XVI

The desire to pass is loaded territory and can lead to the ugliest sort of argument there is. “You want to be French, Mary Frances, that’s your problem, but instead you’re just another American.” I went to the window for that one and saw a marriage disintegrate before my eyes. Poor Mary Frances in her beige beret. Back at the hotel it had probably seemed like a good idea, but now it was ruined and ridiculous, a cheap felt pancake sliding off the back of her head. She’d done the little scarf thing, too, not caring that it was summer. It could have been worse, I thought. She could have been wearing one of those striped boater’s shirts, but, as it was, it was pretty bad, a costume, really. Some vacationers raise the roof — they don’t care who hears them — but Mary Frances spoke in a whisper. This, too, was seen as pretension and made her husband even angrier. “Americans,” he repeated. - David Sedaris, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames"

It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it. 'Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?' This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality. - G.K. Chesterton

The driver recited into his mike, “One of the commonest questions we get is ‘Why is the ice so dirty?’ Well, glacier ice is made of snow, meters of it compressed to a centimeter or two of ice. As you may already know, every snowflake and raindrop has to form around a tiny piece of dirt in the air. The snow melts, but the dirt stays there.” Had Alexandra known that? That snowflakes and raindrops each need a germ of dirt? Does the sky hold enough dirt to supply them all? - John Updike, "Widows of Eastwick"

At the four corners of a child's bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone. For the devils, alas, we have always believed in. The hopeful element in the universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted; but the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied. As I told "H. N. B." (whom I pause to wish a Happy Christmas in its most superstitious sense), the one thing modern people really do believe in is damnation. The greatest of purely modern poets summed up the really modern attitude in that fine Agnostic line-- "There may be Heaven; there must be Hell." The gloomy view of the universe has been a continuous tradition; and the new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin by being gloomy. -G.K. Chesterton

The lesson of Garibaldi, as education, seemed to teach the extreme complexity of extreme simplicity; but one could have learned this from a glow-worm. One did not need the vivid recollection of the low-voiced, simple-mannered, seafaring captain of Genoese adventurers and Sicilian brigands, supping in the July heat and Sicilian dirt and revolutionary clamor, among the barricaded streets of insurgent Palermo, merely in order to remember that simplicity is complex. -The Education of Henry Adams

[David Foster] Wallace was especially concerned that certain theoretical paradigms — the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever trickery of postmodernism — too casually dispense with what he once called “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” He called for a more forthright, engaged treatment of these basic truths. Yet he himself attended to them with his own fractured, often-esoteric methods. It was a defining tension: the very conceptual tools with which he pursued life’s most desperate questions threatened to keep him forever at a distance from the connections he struggled to make. - NY Times column

My favorite Onion headline was '95% of Americans Support Public Transit for Other People.'" - Peggy Noonan

Henri Bergson once said that the motive power of democracy is love. For many years I didn’t understand what he meant. So much of democratic life is filled with conflict, hyperbole, theatrics, and bad taste. But I think I know now. We serve our democratic institutions best when we love our country; when we nourish its greatest ideals through our own courage, honesty, and active political engagement... There isn’t one “right” answer here. Committed Catholics can make very different but equally valid choices: to vote for the major candidate who most closely fits the moral ideal, to vote for an acceptable third-party candidate who is unlikely to win, or to not vote at all. All of these choices can be legitimate. This is a matter for personal decision, not church policy. -Archbishop Chaput, "Render Under Caesar"

When we arrived in the chapel the following morning, the Pope [John Paul II] was already before the altar, hunched over in a chair, bent nearly double. He had been praying for an hour, a nun explained in a whisper. He seemed to me then such an extraordinary symbol. In spite of his frailty, he was still Pope, and I sensed no diminishing of his power, as if within his weakness lay his strength. -Cherie Blair "Speaking for Myself"

Context of Blog Title

Found here, emphasis mine:

The Story of Medea and Jason

The Argonauts now stemm'd the foaming tide,
And to Arcadia's shore their course apply'd;
Where sightless Phineus spent his age in grief,
But Boreas' sons engage in his relief;
And those unwelcome guests, the odious race
Of Harpyes, from the monarch's table chase.
With Jason then they greater toils sustain,
And Phasis' slimy banks at last they gain,
Here boldly they demand the golden prize
Of Scythia's king, who sternly thus replies:
That mighty labours they must first o'ercome,
Or sail their Argo thence unfreighted home.
Meanwhile Medea, seiz'd with fierce desire,
By reason strives to quench the raging fire;
But strives in vain!- Some God (she said) withstands,
And reason's baffl'd council countermands.
What unseen Pow'r does this disorder move?
'Tis love,- at least 'tis like, what men call love.
Else wherefore shou'd the king's commands appear
To me too hard?- But so indeed they are.
Why shou'd I for a stranger fear, lest he
Shou'd perish, whom I did but lately see?
His death, or safety, what are they to me?
Wretch, from thy virgin-breast this flame expel,
And soon- Oh cou'd I, all wou'd then be well!
But love, resistless love, my soul invades;
Discretion this, affection that perswades.
I see the right, and I approve it too,
Condemn the wrong- and yet the wrong pursue.
Why, royal maid, shou'dst thou desire to wed
A wanderer, and court a foreign bed?
Thy native land, tho' barb'rous, can present
A bridegroom worth a royal bride's content:
And whether this advent'rer lives, or dies,
In Fate, and Fortune's fickle pleasure lies.
Yet may be live! for to the Pow'rs above,
A virgin, led by no impulse of love,
So just a suit may, for the guiltless, move.
Whom wou'd not Jason's valour, youth and blood
Invite? or cou'd these merits be withstood,
At least his charming person must encline
The hardest heart- I'm sure 'tis so with mine!
Yet, if I help him not, the flaming breath
Of bulls, and earth-born foes, must be his death.

This, That, and the Other Thing

I'm vaguely disconcerted by the fact that my blood pressure has crept up again, surely the result of the annual winter weight gain. Color it winter as walking catch-22: eat more and drink more because there's less opportunity to exercise.

Yesterday our secretary brought in the most delectable chocolate cake in the world and tells me about it, obligating me to consume two large pieces. In summer, it's as nothing to wolf that down while in winter there's a return to the zero-sum game.
_____
"Walk-bys, we get walk-bys, we get lots and lots of walk-bys...." The move from office to cubical has occasioned shorter walls and since I'm in a main artery there is the constant deflection. But I say: "why have walls at all if they discourage someone 5'8'' but not six foot from invading your space?" Call it discrimination against short people, who surely have a right to distract you too. Someone should sue. I'm too tall else I would. I demand that someone call Esquires Berres or Scheske about this!

One guy recently walked by and asked me who the olden time figure in my cube was. Oh felix distractio! I told him the Cure de Ars because I couldn't remember "St. John Vianney" (or even the correct century he was a priest). Saying "Cure de Ars" must've sounded like saying "Homer Simpson" in response to a query about the weather: that is, completely non-sequitorial. He thought the picture was one of the American Founding Fathers.

_____
Had lunch at an exotic restaurant as compared to the usual cafeteria, aka "Ted's" as in Ted Turner, a bison eatery. On the wall was mounted a bison head, a serious-looking animal of so much tusk and hair as to be a prime example of Godavagance (God + extravagance). I was cheered by the news that our local park is considering the re-introduction of bison. Now that's what I'm talking about! I hope someone will create a woolly mammoth from the DNA found on fossils such that we could re-introduce those dudes too. Talk about adding interest to a hike.

I've written about the park before in these virtual pages and how I especially like the little things, like how they left old barns up just off the path. It's clearly marked as not on park property, which, of course, doesn't mean we'll not explore these old weathering hulks. There's a tangy bit of history in these piquant relics of the past. I'm greatly cheered by the fact that our city hasn't yet become so paralyzed by Fear of Lawsuit that it feels comfortable leaving up ancient barns near the prairie paths. Thank God that life isn't completely antiseptic yet.

RJN Photo

From here. More links and remembrances here.

News You Can Use

"Doctor, I've been shot. Can you find the bullet?"

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

If you’re a Latin Rite Catholic and have never experienced worship in one of these other [Eastern] Catholic churches, go. It will open your eyes to what worship is, and help you grasp what people are saying, even in the Latin context of “singing the Mass” instead of “singing at Mass,” for almost every bit of the liturgy is chanted by presbyter, deacon and people, mostly facing in the same direction. It puts staring at each other and mumbling back and forth in a whole new light. - Amy Welborn

Fr. George Rutler, a former Anglican priest, was the one to give last rites to Fr. Neuhaus who was a former Lutheran priest which invokes to me Fr. Neuhaus line about having many ironies in the fire. - Curt Jester

He bore with grace the charge of having become “neo-conservative,” when the term was intended as an insult, and even turned that charge into a positive advantage, carving out a new blend of Christian orthodoxy and political realism. Increasingly, he regained his love for the nobility of the American experiment, a term he understood with all its attendant ironies. He was a great friend to Martin Luther King, William F. Buckley, Jr., Peter Berger and many other great public spirits of our time. In fact, few people in the world have shown his talent for friendship. - Michael Novak

I remember the first time Father Neuhaus attacked me in print: I felt on top of the world. For a left-of-center person like me, being attacked by Father Neuhaus was a badge of honor. To gain the notice of someone with whom you disagree is much more flattering than to gain the praise of a mentor or an acolyte. - Michael Paulson via "Get Religion"

the words “abortion,” “Roe v. Wade,” or “pro-life” are nowhere to be found. - "Get Religion" commenting on lengthy NY Times obit

Already this new marvel of technology has proven the saying, true even of so-called labor-saving devices: the more you have, the more time you have to spend taking care of it. - Jim of Bethune Catholic on his wife getting a digital camera for Christmas

There is much happy buzz about The Raving Atheist's becoming The Raving Theist. So I dropped by to check it out and left a brief comment expressing my gladness. I was amazed to receive a lovely reply, including some background on how I came to be a Saint of the Week. What pulled me up short in this note, besides the fact that I was remembered after all this time, was being told, "but you were so darned nice." That couldn't have come at a better time. Ready to declare war on the USPS (and our postman in particular), the phone company, the dogs and various members of my family, I was feeling anything but nice. - Ellyn of "Oblique House"

Never tell anyone that you're writing a book, going on a diet, exercising, taking a course, or quitting smoking. They'll encourage you to death. - Lynn Johnston

[I'm] annoyed that the Feast of the Circumcision was cut. - - a Facebook commenter

Have you ever had those moments where you feel like God has blessed you with an incredible word of knowledge, only to realize (sometimes only seconds later) that people have been telling you this for years? I had one today during adoration. Deep in meditation, I came to the sudden realization that we should be good in order to please God, whom we love as children love a Father. This was a huge insight to me ... for about seven seconds. "Well, duh," I said to myself. - Eric Pavlat of "Inside Catholic" via Jim Curley

One could say Philip [Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP, PhD] doesn’t really give a yes or no answer to the question of whether there is a right or wrong way to argue as a Dominican... - William Cork at A Twitch Upon the Thread via Terrence Berres

Only after discovering Jesus do we realize “this is what I was waiting for”...You will not be afraid any longer to lose your freedom, because you will live it fully by giving it away in love. You will no longer be attached to material goods, because you will feel within you the joy of sharing them. You will cease to be sad with the sadness of the world, but you will feel sorrow at evil and rejoice at goodness, especially for mercy and forgiveness. - Pope Benedict XVI

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one. - Joan Baez

Often you get the impression that some people think that Marian devotion was invented by ignorant medieval peasants so distant from God and the Gospel that they turned to the primeval Mother Figure instead and just started mumbling random prayers to her out of the blue. Well, no. Of course, Marian devotion began in the East mostly because, well, CHRISTIANITY began in the East. I’m not going to do some big historical survey here, but I’ll just say that any Protestant thinking that the Easterners will make them more comfortable in terms of Mary than the Romans, might want to take a look at this portion of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom...If anything, honoring and asking for Mary’s intercession is even more deeply integrated into normal Eastern liturgical life than it is in the West, because it is a part of the Sunday liturgy in a way that it is not in the West. - Amy of "Charlotte was Both"

It is strange that some theologians have difficulty accepting the precise and limited doctrine of papal infallibility, but see no problem in granting de facto infallibility to everyone who has a conscience. - Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, via Bill Luse who got it from Zippy