My blog, my soapbox, my combox

Before you read any further, please refer to my comment policy.

You’ll note that there’s only one rule: Be clean and polite! But while cleanliness is pretty obvious even to the most jaded, porn-addicted libertine ever to write a rap lyric, politeness seems to be a folkway dying in the narcissistic echo chambers of the blogosphere, its parameters fading slowly away like Tom Cruise’s movie career. So I’ve taken some trouble to define the parameters for you.

Now, yesterday I wrote a post on what one wit called “the Circular Catholic Firing Squad” (I got the first two words swapped around in the title, for which I should be sorry … but it actually works better). The post was an effort to reinforce the valid and necessary distinction between dissent and other sins, as well as to remind folks that “Jesus instructed us to forgive the repentant [sinner], not to speculate on his motives for repenting or the firmness of his intent to amend his life.”

But I made a crucial mistake: I mentioned Mark Shea. In fact, my post built on a couple of others that he’d written. (Thus T. S. Eliot: “Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.”) So a couple of people left comments denigrating him. One I left up with an appropriate smackdown pour l’encourager les autres; the other’s two comments are now lost to the world, and I’ve declared that rabbit hole closed.

[Addendum: Since then, the person whose comment I left came back to show Mr. Shea, who popped in for a quick comment, some more love. This is the first person I've ever had to ban.]

The Catholic circular firing squad

Lyndon Johnson once quipped that he didn’t play favorites with any of his staff: “I treat everyone with the same general inconsideration.”

Mark Shea is fair in a similar fashion — he’s just as sarcastic towards the idiots on the right as he is towards the idiots on the left. One day he defends Michael Voris and his webmaster Simon Rafe against unjust accusations; another day he tells us what Voris’ real failings are. How can you not like him?

(Very easily; some people just can’t get past the snark to see the passionate, sincere concern that drives his incessant output. For all that, I find I like his brand of no-holds-barred apologetics much better than I like Voris’.)

But Shea believes that, to a certain extent, many of the attacks on Rafe are logical outcomes of the “inquisitorial culture Voris is fostering”; that is, many Catholic pundits are no longer drawing bright lines between fraternal correction and judgmentalism. “This sort of rubbish illustrates everything I was trying to say [in criticism of Michael Voris (see the above link)] about the tendency of this small but growing subculture in the Church to eat its young,” he huffed this morning.

One comment, by Dale Price, captured the image perfectly: “The Circular Catholic Firing Squad is an awful thing to watch.” [Alas! since The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named has moved his blog to Patheos, you can't see the comment in context — the old Blogger site forwards you to the copy on Patheos.]

Killing a public conscience

Today we observe in memorial the beheading of St. John the Baptist. For what was he beheaded? Well, the proximate cause was Herodias’ daughter, Salome, whose dance at Herod’s birthday feast was so … um, enchanting that he rashly promised her anything she wanted (Mk 6:17-29; cf. Mt 14:3-12).

But the final cause was Herodias’ desire to shut St. John up forever. Why? Because he pointed out loudly and publicly that her adulterous relationship with Herod (she was married to his brother Philip) was sinful. At her prompting, Herod had already imprisoned the Baptist; nevertheless, apparently he was still a goad to either Herod’s or her conscience.

Every now and again, this determination to squash one’s personal Jiminy Cricket gets played out on the world stage. Especially notorious are the deaths of Ss. Thomas Becket and Thomas More, both done in by kings who had been personal friends but who couldn’t stand public opposition on moral grounds. But we also have more recent examples in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and — with some qualification — Harvey Milk.

Stacy Trasancos — scientist, theologian-in-training, wife, mother of five and author of the increasingly popular blog Accepting Abundance — is undergoing a kind of martyrdom right now. So far it hasn’t led to her death (quod Deus avertat!), but it has led to death threats. Why? Because she had the temerity to express her indignation with gay PDAs.

Of clocks, toothpaste and other dumb similes

Since I wrote about the altar girl flap in Phoenix yesterday, a couple more articles have come to my attention that demonstrate something wrong with certain liberal Catholics.

First, we have a quick blurb from Bryan Cones of US Catholic, a magazine destined to enter the Hall of Shame along with America and other “Catholic Lite” publications:

The main problem here, though, is baptismal: Does that baptism of girls and women not configure them for service among the people of God[?] So far Rome has said that it doesn’t for the ministries of priest and bishop—deacon still being an open question [no, not really]. But altar server? And just for practical purposes, how much longer will the parents of girls keep taking them to a church that now won’t even let them serve at the altar, much less eventually become priests?

If you’re not serving at the altar, you’re not doing jack squat for the People of God … is that it, Mr. Cones? I’m sure a lot of people, both men and women, working in non-liturgical ministries will be enchanted by your appraisal of their efforts’ worth. Think before you write, please.

As to your second question: A lot longer than you think. Like the women of the Women’s Ordination Conference, you’ve bought into the second-wave feminist premiss that “boys’ stuff is better than girls’ stuff”.

Spoiling the boys' fun

Those of you who follow Fr. John Zuhlsdorf’s blog What Does The Prayer Really Say are probably fully informed of the altar server flap taking place down at the Cathedral of SS. Simon and Jude in Phoenix, where reigns the notable Defensor Fidei Bp. Thomas Olmstead. Apparently the issue has grown enough that Telegraph.co.uk’s Dr. William Oddie has noticed it.

If you’re not aware of what’s going on, then let me fill you in:

Altar servers, for the non-Catholic, assist the celebrant at the altar during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, providing the priest with liturgical vessels such as the cruets, the lavabo and finger towels, holding candles or the cross during the processional and recessional, and other minor duties. Prior to the formation of seminaries and the professional training of priests, the role of altar server acted as a kind of apprenticeship; even today, the vast majority of seminarians have been altar boys.

On August 21, The Arizona Republic released the story that Fr. John Lankeit, rector of SS. Simon and Jude, had decided that girls would no longer be permitted to be altar servers. The next day, Erin Saiz Hanna, executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, blasted the decision, saying:

If young women in the Phoenix diocese want to grow up to work for the Church — or even aspire to the priesthood — I, and the vast majority of U.S. Catholics, don’t see the harm in that. … Around the country, young women have been lawfully serving at the altar for well over a decade.

Pod pedophiles and a culture fit to live

One of the oddest phenomena I witness as I grow older is that certain changes suddenly start cropping up everywhere like the “pod people” in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. For example, when Walgreen’s started building stand-alone stores in the 1990s, it seemed I couldn’t drive anywhere in Omaha without seeing yet a new Walgreen’s being thrown up; it was as if the corporation were trying to make up overnight for all the years the stores had filled bays in strip malls.

Cue the sinister music: The same thing seems to be happening with pedophilia.

Just last week I wrote a couple of pieces on new efforts to “normalize” pedophiles and pedophilia. The first, posted on The Impractical Catholic (“How do you normalize pedophilia?”), jumped off from a Daily Caller news story about a conference in Baltimore sponsored by B4U-ACT, a group of pro-pedophile mental health professionals and sympathetic activists. The other (“Pedophilia: the one boundary progressives can’t push?”), started from the recent flap over Vogue Paris using ten year old Thylane Blondeau as a “cover girl”.

You’d think more than a week would go by before the subject would have a chance to come up again. But no-ooo-o! Now, according to Susan Brinkman OCDS at Women of Grace, a French lingerie designer — what is it with the French, anyway? — has a new line of age-inappropriate underwear called Jours Après Lunes (Days After Moons), supposedly aimed at the four-to-twelve bracket, featuring “a range of very adult-looking panties, bras, camisoles and lace-edged t-shirts.”

Can freedom of religion survive?

Yesterday presented two news stories that, at first glance, could almost bookend each other.

The first story concerned a ruling in the Sangamon (Ill.) County Circuit Court — ironically, Abraham Lincoln’s old stomping grounds — that the State of Illinois could refuse to renew its child foster care and adoption contracts with Catholic Charities over the latter’s refusal to place children with homosexual couples. The second concerns the proliferation of “no-go” zones in Europe as a growing Islamic minority starts flexing its muscles and imposing Shariah in Moslem neighborhoods.

On the surface, both appear to be issues of religious liberty. For on the one hand, a person might argue, the Islamic communities of Europe want no more and no less than what the Catholic Church wants — to obey the moral dictates of their religion. Isn’t Catholic Charities claiming an exemption from anti-discrimination laws on the basis of religion? Well, then, what relevant difference could there be?

Very simple: Catholic organizations are mostly content to work within the framework of the relevant community, state and national laws. If Catholic Charities can’t afford to run without the state contract and they lose all relevant legal action, why, then their state adoption services will simply shut up shop … which may or may not be a loss, depending on what perspective you come from.

But Catholic Charities won’t simply ignore the law. Nor will the Church.

News flash! HuffPo (almost) gets a religious concept right!

Yes, folks, you read that right. I would sooner expect for Ann Coulter to sing the praises of Norman Lear than for me to agree with anything a HuffPo writer scribbled about Christ and Christianity. But Maria Mayo, a Masters of Divinity from Vanderbilt, wrote a piece on forgiveness in Scripture the other day that bears thoughtful attention.

Why is this so stunning? The Huffington Post, to put it as charitably as possible, is a mouthpiece for leftist progressivism. As such, its writers tend to plunk for a vision of Christ's teachings that lean very heavily towards "Buddy Christ": so tolerant that repentance, even basic recognition of sin, is unnecessary … in fact, a Christianity-and-water that exists solely to affirm the believer's basic goodness, not call her to sainthood.

Mayo's piece, "5 Myths About Forgiveness in the Bible", takes this stance apart. (Indeed, it also undermines "once saved always saved".) So to find in a progressivist broadsheet an explanation that tends more towards Christian orthodoxy is much like finding an old issue of Pravda asserting an absolute individual right of property.

Overheard at a Denny's - V

“Isn’t it nice just to have a couple of hours to yourself, Denise? No kids, no husband, no boss ….”

“Every once in a while. Though Derek isn’t tough to manage. He’s pretty neat, though he’s not Adrian Monk obsessive about it. Just every once in a while, he misses the dirty clothes hamper.” Chuckle. “In fact, sometimes he irritates me. You know, Damian’s at that stage where if he’s not careful, he’ll get food in his mouth instead of on the floor. But I’ll bet you that when I walk in the door tonight, the kitchen will look like we’ve never had a kid inside the house, Damian will be asleep in his crib and Derek will be reading a book on the couch like a monument to Patience. When he comes home after a night out with Dan or Mark, the kitchen still looks like an explosion in the Gerber factory.”

Laugh. “Oh, my God! How does he do it?”

“He just shrugs and says, ‘Clean as you go.’ That gets me even worse.”

“Was he always like that?”

“I have to assume so. We never talked about house chores before we got married, and there was no period of him getting used to cleaning ….”

“Well, wait. Didn’t you live together before you got married?”

“Oh, Lord no! Why would any woman want to do that to herself?”

The sound of one hand clapping

In his marvelous book The Joys of Yiddish, the late Leo Rosten tells a joke about Josef Goebbels demanding that a rabbi teach him about Talmud. The rabbi runs him through a test given to children before they go to yeshiva to see if they can understand Talmud. The test consists of the same question asked three times: “Two men fall through a chimney. One comes out clean, and the other comes out dirty. Which one washes?”

The first answer is that the clean one washes, because he sees the dirty one and believes he came out dirty too. The second answer is that the dirty one washes, because the dirty one looks at the clean one, then looks at himself and realizes he didn’t come out clean. The third answer “is that this is a silly question. How can two men fall through a chimney and only one come out dirty? Anyone who doesn’t understand that will never understand Talmud.”

This story came to my mind while reading William Saletan’s post “Half Aborted”, a think piece on “reductions”. I’ve written before about the cognitive dissonance now making its way through the pro-abortion ranks, the reluctantly growing realization of the moral wrong even as they maintain the necessity of the legal right. “Half Aborted” not only confirms the dissonance but confronts head-on pro-abortion rationalizations about the life and humanity of the unborn.