In loving (and selective) memory

Dealey Plaza, looking at the grassy knoll (left) and the former
Texas School Book Depository Building (background).

How long can a city wear sackcloth and ashes for a crime it didn’t commit?

The memorial at Dealey Plaza was rather low-key, which could have been expected even without the bone-squeezing wet cold of the day. Some conspiracy theorists and some citizens protesting police brutality tried to horn in on the solemnities. It could have been worse, however: it could have turned into an anti-conservative bashapalooza.

 The fact is, a significant number of people younger than me — depending on where you place the cutoff, I’m either at the trailing edge of the boomers or in the vanguard of Generation X — tend to view the youth of the 1960s as supremely narcissistic, and the annual spasm of grief over the assassination of John F. Kennedy as just one more symptom of their emotional retardation. And, in all candor, the constantly reiterated “death of innocence” line is not only tiresome and melodramatic but inapposite, as cynics aren’t necessarily any more objective than are idealists; cynicism is merely idealism distorted by despair.

Nevertheless, this cross-generational impatience is too brutally dismissive. Even with a proper appreciation of Kennedy’s all-too-human failings as a Catholic, a husband and a politician, there is still no known sin in his life up to that point that made his death a poetic justice. Even Abraham Lincoln’s most vociferous opponents were astonished and mortified by his death, and Lincoln was a far more controversial man who held power during a more violent, agonized period of our history. By contrast, even given some of the tensions created by the civil rights movement during the time, nobody could look objectively at the events of 1963 and say that Kennedy’s assassination was inevitable. By any reasonable evaluation, it was a tragedy and ought to be acknowledged as such.

However, in the midst of the ritualized outpouring of nostalgia and mourning for a popular president gunned down in the prime of his manhood, there has been some effort to rewrite the history surrounding Dealey Plaza so progressives can draw parallels between 1963 and 2013 — parallels that are far-fetched and, quite frankly, inane.

What do we want from our schools?

Follow the link to The Anchoress’ page, and read as people bemoan the ignorance displayed by American College Students as Rhonda Fink-Whitman, author of the historical novel 94 Maidens, pounces on them with questions about World War II, the Holocaust, and genocide today. Not only do they moan, they also point fingers, search for causes, and wonder whether a legally mandated curriculum is an appropriate remedy.

One comment, from “Patrick”, didn’t attract attention from anyone but me:

Yeah, well; I aced the advanced placement European history test and was first place in the geography bee, and got the highest grade possible in Advanced American history ... And I can’t say that I’ve led a good life and certainly not a happy one ... So, you know — it doesn’t matter a tinker’s dam to me that I can tell you, in detail, about the Boer War or something.

I’m not surprised no one engaged this bit of educational heresy. Them What Has Bin Eddicated take it for granted that Knowledge is Power^®, that those who do well in school generally do better in other areas of life, that to have letters after your name like M.Sc. or Ph.D. will open more doors for you and make you a better person than will a mere G.E.D. If you can’t leverage your education into a good, happy life — oh, well; sucks to be you.

All of which is true in general terms; yet I can’t mock Patrick for expecting knowledge of the Boer War, the Treaty of Westphalia or the bimetallism question to lead him to Elysian fields. Why? Because then he would be well within his rights to ask me, “If it’s not guaranteed to make me a better, happier person, then what’s it good for? Why bother with it?”

How do we answer?

Pope Francis and the “issues trap”

Joanne McPortland’s amusing “Parable of the Papal Interview” expressed a simple truth: orthodox Catholics who have actually read the interview Pope Francis gave Fr. Antonio Spadaro, SJ have mostly loved it. Forget what you’ve read elsewhere: Pope Francis may be unorthodox in his style, but his substance is by no means heterodox.

So I had to chuckle when a troll popped up in the combox to say, “Not at all a good parable because it is so predictable. Right wing cognitive dissonance over the Pope’s interview prevents them from really hearing what he said.”

You see, this piece of complacent snottiness popped up after the rest of the progressive world was gobsmacked by what the AP’s Nicole Winfield, in her original lede, called Francis’ “bizarre U-turn”: a speech given Thursday to Italian gynecologists, in which he slammed abortion and euthanasia as parts of a “throwaway culture”. Talk about cognitive dissonance — Matthew Balan of NewsBusters observes that Winfield’s new lede still tries to preserve the “progressive” box in which media liberals have put Papa Bergoglio by calling it an “olive branch” offered to the “more doctrine-minded, conservative wing”.

This is what comes of not paying close attention to what the Pope is saying, of trying to pigeonhole any pope — hell, any major player. My buddy Frank Weathers, for instance, points us to a 2006 speech in which Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI also spoke of the “issues trap” to Swiss bishops on their ad limina visit. And Marcel LeJeune of Aggie Catholics includes other quotes that, taken by themselves, would lead one to conclude that B16 is a liberal. Quoth the wise man Thomas L. McDonald, “There is not a hairsbreadth of difference between the theology of Francis and Benedict.” Different styles, same substance.

The passion of Dan Grieco

SK Daniel J. Grieco: Beloved husband, father,
friend and brother Knight.

Dan Grieco (1948 – 2013) was in many ways the man I want to be when I grow up.

Dan was one of the first people I met when my brother Bob and I joined our parish’s Knights of Columbus council in 2007. If you met him only once, you might just write him off as a “nice guy”. As you got to know him, however, you learned just how shallow such an assessment could be.

Dan was singularly passionate about everything, from the Church and the pro-life movement to hardwood floors. Whatever he was doing, he was excited about it, and he did his level best to get you excited about it too. Commitment was not a dirty word to Dan; it was almost his motto. If there was a project, he would be the first person to arrive — ready to work — and the last person to leave.

So far as Dan was “nice”, it wasn’t just a general air of bonhomie: he took avid interest in other people’s lives, was warm, engaging and funny, and had no hesitation about telling other people — even other men — “I love you”. If you were in the hospital, you could pretty much count on a visit from Dan. His love for his wife and children was boundless, a shining constant in his life.

But the reason I write of Dan here is because that same vital combination of passion and commitment showed through in his religiosity. Dan’s love of God and the Church was just as fierce, devoted and fully committed as his love for his family and friends. You could almost use the word zealous, except that the idea of zealotry has been spoiled by violent nutjobs; Dan was disgustingly sane. Of all the people I’ve known, he was the best at “walking the talk”.

Things I should have said about traditionalism

Not shown: a real, honest-to-goodness altar rail.

What’s wrong with the word radical? On the surface, nothing; to say someone is a radical X is to say he favors fundamental or thoroughgoing change.

However, the dictionary definition doesn’t always capture the emotive content of a word. In this respect, radical suffers from too long association with the more offensive and disturbing manifestations of political activism. To many people, the radical is a fellow traveler of the extremist, the kind of person who won’t go so far as to throw bombs but who will gladly inconvenience others by taking over school buildings or parks in the name of X. The extremist is a wild-eyed nutjob, while the radical is merely a pain in the ass.

On Thursday, Catholic Stand published “Tradition vs. traditionalism” (don’t read it just yet), in which Your Humble Blogger wrote of a tendency within a segment of the traditionalist community to conflate the traditional Latin Mass with the apostolic tradition. To try to isolate this segment from the rest of the traditionalist community, I used the term “radical traditionalist”. Twice.

It was a risky choice, because some people, especially liberal dissidents, speak of “radical traditionalists” as if all traditionalists were part of a lunatic fringe group. So, as could be reasonably expected, it blew up in my face.

Spirit Daily picked up the piece and drove a lot of traffic to the post, where traditionalists chastised me for painting them with a broad brush; one woman claimed I had “politely defecated” [?] on the traditionalist movement. While one or two couldn’t help but illustrate my point much better than I did, for the most part the combox left me feeling a bit like a bush-league Joseph Bottum: “Waitaminnit, that’s not what I meant!”

A family quarrel

Catholic Circular Firing Squad Redux. And, perhaps not that strangely, Michael Voris is once again the mainspring of the matter. Fortunately, Mark Shea is not involved, having avoided the controversy neatly by hieing himself and his brood to his vaunted hidden island redoubt, so this is the only time I’ll mention him.

Fraternal correction is a difficult enough task for any Catholic to undertake, especially when the brother to be corrected is a person whom you really don’t know. Even in the relative goldfish bowl of the Catholic blogosphere, we may have each other on Facebook and Google Plus, but we’re still mostly strangers to one another. But it can be done, and even result in some good dialogue.

However, when it’s done on the Internet, the correcting party has automatically invited everyone to participate. And when it’s one “celebrity” (we have celebrities?) correcting another, fans get partisan very quickly. Lest you doubt, let me say two words: John Corapi.

It started Thursday with an episode of “The Vortex”, in which Voris accused Catholic Relief Services of kicking AKA Printing Services to the curb because of its connection to the American Life League (here’s the story in LifeSiteNews). In the process, Voris revealed that several major figures in Catholic media, particularly Karl Keating, Jimmy Akin and Tim Staples of Catholic Answers, pull down salaries of over $100k per year; “in the interests of transparency”, Voris said his own salary was about $40k. The substance of his charge was that the big names were wary of going after corruption in Catholic Relief Services and the USCCB because their ministries (and salaries) depend to a certain extent on recognition and support from the bishops.

Bottum, Zmirak and the battle of Verdun

French Gen. Robert Nivelle

If Joseph Bottum’s 6,000-word Commonweal ramble, “The Things We Share,” doesn’t read or feel like a structured argument for Catholic acceptance of same-sex marriages, that’s because it’s not — the subtitle (“A Catholic Case for Same-Sex Marriage”) notwithstanding. Rather, it’s the erstwhile First Things editor’s story of how and why he came to strike the flag of opposition. Some of his statements of fact are so wrong, you can’t help but howl with either rage or laughter. But you can’t fault as an argument that which never pretended to be an argument.

In fact, if there were just one fault (there are more, I promise), it’s precisely that it is Bottum’s personal conversion story, as it were, and not a real case against further resistance. For by the time he actually gets down to the meat of his contentions, he’s lost half his audience through lack of interest. In the combox for Matthew J. Franck’s rather impatient takedown in First Things, “Joseph Bottum, Weary and Wearisome,” at least two or three people admit they couldn’t get all the way through it.

Sorry, Jody, either your life or the way you wrote about it is just not that gripping. Next time, cut to the chase.

Moreover, throughout Bottum’s essay you can pick up strains that tell us he isn’t comfortable with the idea of surrender. For instance, in discussing David Blankenhorn’s New York Times flip-flop,  Bottum muses that it’s “not enough for a Catholic to say that legal fairness and social niceness compel us.” And of the anti-Christian element who use SSM as a stick to bash the Church with, he snarls, “if that’s what the same-sex marriage movement is really about … then to hell with it.”

Dennis Moore and a tale of two mothers

If you’re a computer nerd of a certain age, you’ll remember Dennis Moore.

If you’re not, here goes: Dennis Moore is the central figure of a skit from the third season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Moore, played by John Cleese, is an 18th-century highwayman who models himself after Robin Hood, although his redistribution of wealth eventually backfires. You see, having defined one group as “rich” (and therefore to be robbed from) and another as “poor” (and therefore to be given to), he continues to transfer goods from one set to the other until the Fred Tomlinson Singers, who sing his theme song, startle him by changing the last two lines:

He robs from the poor, and gives to the rich.

Stupid b****!

The last scene of the episode shows Moore, having completely lost sight of his mission, stopping a carriage and forcing the passengers to swap various pieces of wealth with each other to make them equal. His crusade against economic injustice has devolved into an obsessively fussy Redistributionism.

Karla A. Erickson’s guest opinion in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, “Explaining why, next time, I won’t breastfeed”, reminds me very much of that final scene. How so? Because her rationale for bottle-feeding her next child is to correct an apparent inequity of parental attachment that breastfeeding her firstborn supposedly created. Simply put, her son prefers her to her husband for many things; Erickson, an associate professor of — wait for it! — sociology at Grinnell College, will not tolerate any form of gender inequality in her life.

Sometimes we have to do a runaround our bodies to ensure equity. Sometimes we have to do some social engineering to help dislodge our social aspirations from the dictates of our glands and gonads.

What’s wrong with “What’s Wrong with Distributism”?—UPDATED

The nice thing is, David Deavel has some good things to say about distributism … in a previous post. However, Deavel’s understanding of distributism stops at about 1927.

Specifically, Deavel identifies four “areas of thought” where distributists’ critiques of the capitalist model strike tellingly: 1) the divorce of economics and ethics, 2) the collusion of large business and government and the resultant concentration of power, 3) the effect of the concentration of capital (Deavel says “wealth”, which is not the same thing) on entrepreneurship, and 4) the effect of the welfare state on the citizen’s relationship to the government. “Sadly,” Deavel moans, “distributist thinkers don’t stop at these solid insights. They offer concrete solutions to these social problems — solutions which betray grave misunderstandings of economics and even theology.”

From such a statement, you would expect at minimum a detailed economic critique illustrating distributist assumptions and contrasting them with How the Real World Works. On the theological side, Deavel, an associate editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, might be expected to have an equally sound understanding of distributists’ reference to Catholic social theory.

What Deavel gives us, however, is a collection of straw men, attributing beliefs and statements (“Distributists like to say that …”) without pulling direct quotes to support his claims, and even stooping to smear tactics by implying admiration for fascism. The farthest Deavel goes toward naming names is to mention G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Arthur J. Penty, men long dead, while saying nothing of living distributists such as John C. Médaille, Thomas Storck and Race Matthews. It’s as if one were to critique modern psychiatry by analyzing only the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and B. F. Skinner.

An angel in Missouri — UPDATED

Until you watch the news footage on the “mystery priest” incident, you don’t really realize how improbable the story is.

Rural Catholicism means driving long distances for Mass and religious instruction. In some parts of Texas, one priest will have charge of three or four parishes, and will spend more time in his car than any place else except — maybe — his bed.

The only Catholic church in Center, Missouri is on the National Register of Historic Places but not on the Diocese of Jefferson City’s list of active parishes; it’s an eight-mile drive to St. Stephen in Indian Creek near Monroe City. There’s no active parish in New London, just up State Highway 19 from Center; the closest parish, Holy Family in Hannibal, is almost ten miles in the opposite direction from Center. Sacred Heart in Vandalia is over twenty miles south of Highway 19.

That stretch of Highway 19, where all you can see from horizon to horizon are farmsteads and long rows of corn, is where an (allegedly) drunk driver plowed into 19-year-old Katie Lentz’s older-model Mercedes convertible. To intensify the improbability, first responders had blocked off access by road to the scene. So it’s not as though some Blackie Ryan-like character innocuously emerged from, and melted back into, a crowd of urban gawkers who had all inconveniently misplaced their iPhones or had them focused elsewhere; it was just Katie and the New London Fire Department — and lots and lots of cornfields.

And yet, there he was.