This Busy Monster

When I read about the trampling death that took place at a Wal-Mart this morning, I remembered this poem:

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

E. E. Cummings

I've always liked this particular Cummings poem; my sister read it to me a long time ago, and the cadence of it was interesting even though I hadn't thought to tease out the meaning of it then.

I know that people can argue a great deal about the meaning of poetry, and I don't claim to be able to prove what Cummings meant. But to me, the poem speaks of the tragedy of the materialist, who in his focused attempt to break the world into its components, to tame and control everything in it, and even, perhaps, to conquer the powers of life and death, fails to see how he is destroying everything that made his humanity something greater than its mere fleshiness, or his existence more meaningful than the existence of a merely material being. I think the progress that is a "comfortable disease" is a progress that kills the soul, and that at his most ironic point in the poem Cummings uses the phrase "fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence" to hint at what man is losing, in his quest to prove that he already knows, or soon will grasp, everything that can be known.

This morning at the local branch of a store which, despite the fact that like most Americans I patronize on occasion, I see as a hulking symptom of exactly what's wrong with us ("New Lower Price! Smiley Face! And you don't see the fifteen-year-old factory girls in China who are coughing blood from breathing all the toxic dust from the paint the FDA will tell you next year isn't safe!"), a man who had a temp job opened the door to a surging throng of desperately greedy people and was trampled to death as they raced to be one of the first to get a ticket or be in line for the Cheapest Gadgets Ever.

They didn't even stop when the paramedics got there--they just shoved past them and headed in to shop, shop, shop, already suffering serious withdrawal over the fact that they had to sit around shopless all day yesterday. A whole day, and if they had that twitch to go spend money all they could do was pop in at a handful of grocery or convenience stores that stayed open in case people ran out of poultry seasoning or lip balm or toilet paper--but other than that, no shopping, no real shopping, no shopping of the sort that counts, the sort when your credit card melts in your hands and you stagger home to announce, triumphantly, under a mound of trinkets and trash that you saved money, really, you did. So by five a.m. on Black Friday they were eager, restless, lining up in rows outside of department stores and discount stores and other stores, coupons in hand that promised a whole fifty dollars off of something they didn't need and couldn't really afford and shouldn't be wasting money on in the first place.

So when the poor temp worker opened the door, they crushed him in their hurry, hurry, hurry to win the prize and get the savings and bring home the loot. Because when you are only a material creature, it really is every man for himself; when all you are is a temporarily animated carcass, what does it matter if a man dies so that you can get an MP3 player? He would have died sooner or later, and your pleasure is the only good you know: it is the supreme value, and nothing ought to stand in the way of it.

After all, you have to spend a great deal of time not having any fun. You have to work and you have to shop and you have to eat and you have to wash clothes and do at least some cleaning; you have to pay bills and change the oil in your car and mow your lawn and on and on, boring things and dull things and things you'd rather not be doing. None of it makes any sense, and the only way you can blunt your sensibilities about it all is to buy things and have things and own things, good things that you like to have and that you like for others to know that you have whether you can really pay for them or not.

So on Black Friday you assemble outside the Temple of Materialism of your choice and prepare to worship your god, in blood sacrifice if necessary--because time is short, short, short, and the grave is looming and incoherent in the face of what you know, which is that this is all there is, and nothing, nothing lies beyond, not a pale gray nothing of unconsciousness, but a terrifying empty black cold nothing that even that MP3 player almost can't banish to the outer edges of your random thoughts.

Because even though you are a busy monster you still aren't busy enough to forget the ancient words which haunt your idle moments: remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.

Until you crush a man to dust, and are still human enough to know regret, as some were. But the busiest of all don't even pause in their shopping to consider whether a man's life ought to be worth more than the golden allure of that rarest of all rare things, a sale, in the land of Everyday Low Prices.

Happy Wee Morning Hours After Thanksgiving!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

And because every day's a school day for homeschoolers:


Happy Thanksgiving, y'all! :)

Every Year

Every year, I make a sweet-potato puff for Thanksgiving; it's a family favorite, the "it wouldn't be Thanksgiving without it" side dish.

Every year, I follow the recipe with a few slight alterations (all cinnamon instead of part nutmeg, doubled, with marshmallows instead of the sugary praline topping). Every year I make it the day before because the need to boil the sweet potatoes ahead of time seems to make it easier to get it out of the way before the main cooking event.

Every year I carefully double the amount of butter and add it to the orange gloppy mixture whirling away in the mixer.

And every year I forget what happened the previous year, when the cold sticks of butter coat themselves with sweet potato and hit into the beater.

So every year I clean up random glops of orange sweet potato from my stove, my floor, my shirt...

...and think "Man, I forgot to melt the butter again."

Every single year.

At least my "company" are out shopping with my husband and daughters. Because every single year, I also forget that some of the marshmallows in the cabinet are supposed to be for Thanksgiving, and let the girls use them up in hot chocolate two weeks before.

Late Blogging, Again

One of the interesting things about having company is how completely the normal routine goes out the window. It's not that this is a bad thing, necessarily; but it does have some effects here and there, and for a newshound and small-time blogger like myself one of those effects tends to be that by the time I see a story and want to write about it, the clock is approaching midnight, which means that any detailed analysis is going to have to wait.

Take this story, for instance:

MIAMI (AP) — A judge on Tuesday ruled that a strict Florida law that blocks gay people from adopting children is unconstitutional, declaring there was no legal or scientific reason for sexual orientation alone to prohibit anyone from adopting.

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman said the 31-year-old law violates equal protection rights for the children and their prospective gay parents, rejecting the state's arguments that there is "a supposed dark cloud hovering over homes of homosexuals and their children."

She noted that gay people are allowed to be foster parents in Florida. "There is no rational basis to prohibit gay parents from adopting," she wrote in a 53-page ruling.

Florida is the only state with an outright ban on gay adoption. Arkansas voters last month approved a measure similar to a law in Utah that bans any unmarried straight or gay couples from adopting or fostering children. Mississippi bans gay couples, but not single gays, from adopting.

Now, you know I've got things to say about that, right? But I'll have to get back to it next week.

Then there's this one:

John Paul II High School opened in Plano four years ago with high expectations.

The first Catholic high school north of Dallas hoped to tap into Collin County's booming Catholic population and expected to see a large enrollment.

But the projected students haven't arrived yet, and the school's finances remain out of the red only because 17 area parishes have provided aid.

"I think in the very beginning they had very generous projections of growth," said Sister Gloria Cain, superintendent of schools for the Catholic Diocese of Dallas. "But they have a stable enrollment, and I think it takes a high school a little bit longer to get established."

School leaders initially projected the school would open its doors to 900 students. Instead, 316 students showed up.

Enrollment has grown to 637, but 900 is considered the number of students the school needs to no longer require parish aid. [...]

Mr. Poore said that eventually – though he won't estimate when – John Paul II will reach the enrollment it needs. Until then, he said, he keeps a close eye on expenses and is working on attracting more parents, despite the downturn in the economy. Tuition is $11,500 per year. [Emphasis added--E.M.]

Tuition at this high school costs more than my first or second year of college (though I think by the third year it was approaching that amount, and topped it by the fourth). Median income in Collin County was about $75,000 in 2004, meaning that a family with only two children in high school at the same time would only (sarcasm alert) spend about 30% of their annual income on tuition. Gee, I wonder why more Catholic families, especially those with four, five, six or more children, didn't jump at the chance to enroll their kids? Maybe we can look at this some more, next week.

Then there's this:

Traces of the industrial chemical melamine have been detected in samples of top-selling U.S. infant formula, but federal regulators insist the products are safe. The Food and Drug Administration said last month it was unable to identify any melamine exposure level as safe for infants, but a top official said it would be a "dangerous overreaction" for parents to stop feeding infant formula to babies who depend on it.

"The levels that we are detecting are extremely low," said Dr. Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. "They should not be changing the diet. If they've been feeding a particular product, they should continue to feed that product. That's in the best interest of the baby."

Melamine is the chemical found in Chinese infant formula — in far larger concentrations — that has been blamed for killing at least three babies and making at least 50,000 others ill.

Previously undisclosed tests, obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, show that the FDA has detected melamine in a sample of one popular formula and the presence of cyanuric acid, a chemical relative of melamine, in the formula of a second manufacturer.

Separately, a third major formula maker told AP that in-house tests had detected trace levels of melamine in its infant formula.

Hey, I have an idea. Let's require the FDA officials, especially Dr. Stephen Sundlof, to consume the same exact proportion of melamine by weight as infants on a formula diet would consume in the course of a day. It's totally safe, right? So prove it. Eat up, gentlemen.

Yeah, I don't think they'd go for it either. I may not wait until next week to comment on this one, especially if this story gets half the attention it deserves.

Countdown to Thanksgiving

I'm writing this late, I know; blogging will be somewhat light this week. But that's okay--you've got better things to do this week, too, than read the ramblings of a sleep-deprived redhead whose new favorite friend comes in this little box.

I want to thank everybody who made easy side-dish and other helpful suggestions for how to host Thanksgiving while recovering from an annoying winter cold. I decided to make my menu fairly simple, and had Kitten cook dinner tonight. She did an awesome job, making a chicken-spinach-rice casserole that involved a homemade white sauce, something she'd never made before, and all with only vocal direction from Mom. Okay, raspy; it would be a stretch just shy of a lie to say I've been "vocal" at all much since about last Thursday--but the point is that Kitten's casserole came out wonderfully well, so much so that my MIL enjoyed a second helping!

So my plan is to do a little bit of vegetable prep tomorrow, a little pre-cooking on Wednesday, and then the rest on Thursday. We are going slightly non-traditional, in that I'm just serving a spiral ham which only has to be heated, instead of a turkey which would have to be handled--a lot--by the person who has been a font of contagion since last week. Other than that, though, the side dishes are the usual fare, and if I take a few minor shortcuts on the way to the feast, I don't think anyone will really notice, or care, much at all.

So even though this is only Monday of Thanksgiving Week, I've got to admit that I'm thankful--yes, for this dratted cold. Why? Because without it I'd be running around like a chicken with...oh, let's avoid the insensitive poultry metaphors for the time being...anyway, I'd be stressed, and trying to out-Stewart Martha herself, all out of the kind of misplaced pride that thinks I've got something to prove about craftiness and housekeeping and cooking wizardry and perfection of hostessing (yes, Jim, that was a skilled use of the "Cooking While Wearing Pearls" maneuver, but I've got to take off points for that High Heel Wobble--clearly, she doesn't wear heels normally, and it shows in her lack of technique, and in the long black streaks on the vinyl flooring). It's time, with my 40th birthday waiting just beyond the turning of the calendar page, to realize that I don't have to prove anything to anybody but myself, and to realize further that I wouldn't trade one flawless Thanksgiving, or even a calendar full of perfectly-planned and celebrated holidays, liturgical events, family feasts, and the like, for the talents I do have and for which I am also extremely thankful.

I will always be blessed to know women who wave a magic wand and create a fairy-tale right in their own homes, where the atmosphere, the little touches, the glowing candle-light and the soft gleam of the good china and the inviting aromas from the kitchen tell you from the moment you enter that you are privileged to be a guest at one of their grand celebrations--but it's high time I stopped comparing myself to them, and trying to compete when nature and inclinations have conspired to make me a very different sort of woman. It would be easier to do that if I were indifferent to the beauty they create all around them, but I am not--and I wouldn't really want to be, because that beauty is, like all beauty, a reflection of God's presence in our world. But when I seek to create such grand echoes of loveliness around my own efforts, I'm as doomed to failure as the child who thinks he can beautify the wall by scribbling on it--he understands the principle, but is completely incapable of the execution.

So, in my Countdown to Thanksgiving list, I can now put an X in the box labeled "Adjust Attitude." Done. And that's something else I can be thankful for.

Father Said No

I apologize to anyone who read my "teaser" from last week promising to tell you the story of Father and the Pageant; it really wasn't intended to be a trick, and I had every intention of sitting down and writing the story of what happened either later that afternoon, or Saturday morning at the latest.

But the Cold of Endless Crud had other ideas; I started running a fever Friday evening, and it's been popping back up at night since then. I think I'm finally on the mend, and also that I should probably rename this virus as "The Flu-Like Illness of Endless Crud," because that would be more accurate.

Since I've been sick, and at home, all weekend, I can see even more clearly God's loving Providence in the chance encounter I had with our DRE on Thursday. Ordinarily I would not see our DRE on Thursday, or any other day except Sunday. But I happened to see her at church when my family went for choir practice (silly me, I thought the Cold of EC was almost over, and that my raspy, decidedly non-musical voice was proof of that!), and I had the opportunity of a few minutes' conversation with her.

I had just begun, as delicately as possible, to ask about this planned "pageant Gospel" reading, when she shook her head decisively. "No," she said. "Father said no."

"Father said..." I started to ask.

"We can't do it this way. The children can still bring up the pieces of the Nativity set [I hadn't realized that was what the 'pageant' was for--E.M.], but Father said we can't change the readings at Mass, not on a Sunday or a Holy Day. We can use the Christmas Gospel from St. Matthew or St. Luke [e.g., for the Vigil, as Mass is Dec. 24 at night, or for Midnight, because this Mass takes the place of Midnight Mass at our small mission which does not have its own Midnight Mass--E.M.] but we can't use the one we had on the paper, so we won't be doing that."

We talked further. It turns out she was aware of the rule regarding readings--but was given this paper of combined readings by the previous pastor who insisted and ordered that Christmas Mass had to be done this way, leaving her in the unenviable position of having to be obedient to the pastor in an area where the pastor really didn't have the authority to command that such a thing be done. I don't know exactly what is happening with the "music" idea; perhaps the choir will sing after the (much shorter) Gospel while the children build the Nativity scene--at this point, though, since Father has insisted that the one definite outright liturgical abuse would not be happening, I can understand if he wants to ease out the other things over time, instead of forbidding all of it at once.

Since I wasn't able to attend Mass this morning, as I was still running a fever, I can be truly thankful for this chance encounter earlier in the week; otherwise, it would be next week at the earliest before I would have learned of the change in plans, and trying to figure out what to do would have weighed a lot on my mind on that First Sunday of Advent.

I have a lot to reflect on, here. The first is that so often these "little heterodoxies" that creep into a parish's liturgical celebrations are not necessarily coming from the laity. Many times, instead, lay workers like the DRE are constantly having to put a "good face" on things they're really rather uncomfortable with--but many of them think, that since "Father" told them this is the way he wants things to be done, that there's really nothing wrong with it, or that "Father" must have permission, somehow, to bend the rules. On the other hand, when a new "Father" inherits an old bad situation, he may have to pick his battles, and lay down the law where there is law, but take a slower approach in rooting out things that, while perhaps inadvisable in a liturgical context, are not actually an abuse. Unfortuanately, I think a lot of the new "Fathers" coming in to these old situations may be less forceful than my new pastor was here, and actually permit what they know to be wrong with a view toward rooting it out later; I think my pastor's approach is exactly the right one, to set the example from the get-go that actual liturgical abuse will not be tolerated, not even for reasons of "pastoral sensitivity" or other noble-sounding excuses.

Another thing I've been thinking about is that my pastor, this new Father of ours, needs full-fledged support just now. He is doing the right thing, and if he permits the children of the parish to carry up pieces of the Nativity Scene during or just after the Gospel, this is not something to stamp and shout about. His priorities were clearly in the right place; he said "No" to the one thing that had to be stopped, right now, today. I think those of us who care about the integrity of the Mass will do better to let him know how happy we are with this change, and to let him know we'll be glad to support similar changes in the future, than we will if we express an ungrateful attitude that says, "Well, we like that you're not allowing the abuse, but so long as you permit the slightest irregularity that doesn't rise to the level of abuse we're going to consider ourselves the loyal (or not so loyal) opposition." I think good priests sometimes get pretty disheartened by this attitude from those who should be their friends; they're going to get plenty of grief from the other side, who are going to want to know why what was good enough for Father Yesterday isn't good enough for Young Father Today, without getting piled on by the rest of us as well.

The third thing is that it's pretty wonderful when Father says "no" to the kinds of things that should get that answer! How many of us grew up with priests who said "no" to all the old traditional things: rosaries, processions, Holy Hours, Latin even once a year in one song, and so on? This new priest of ours, who is young, and from another country, has two parishes to take care of: our tiny mission and a busy bilingual parish (English/Spanish, but Father is not from a Spanish-speaking country). He has only been with us a few months, but his first priority was to make a slight adjustment in the Mass schedule so that he himself could be with us every Sunday, instead of rotating visiting priests as was the practice of the former pastor. He said to me recently, "This parish is such a wonderful community--how could I not want to be here every week?" He has added a Wednesday evening Mass just before the religious education classes start to encourage children and their parents to come to Mass an additional time a week; he is planning to start Friday adoration, perhaps beginning on First Fridays and eventually being held weekly; he is making himself available for "office hours" at our parish on a regular basis, and is working on other issues to benefit the parish as well.

The hardest thing about trying to be involved in a parish these days is having any kind of trust. From the "feel-good" spirituality to the liturgical hijacking to the parish wreckovations to the preferential option toward heretics, most parishes we've known, for those of us in my generation, have not been places we could trust; add to that the horrors of the Scandal and it's no wonder so many orthodox Catholics have become spiritual nomads, wandering from parish to parish, a little tired and a little bitter and a lot gun-shy, to the extent that we're liable to cut and run at the first sign of something that would be frowned over by the folks at Catholic Answers. It's a balm to our souls when we encounter a situation like this, and are feeling our usual sort of heartsickness and weariness, only to find out that, after all, Father said "No."

Coming Attraction

I have something to tell you about the situation in regard to the proposed Christmas pageant at my parish that I wrote about earlier this week, and I hope to get out here long enough to write about it a little later today. So many of you gave helpful and interesting advice, and I hope you'll be as interested the new development as I am--it's good news, I can tell you that.

But doing justice to the post requires a little thing called coherence. And a little thing called coherence is a little hard to come by today, because my Cold of Endless Crud that's been keeping me from getting everything I needed to get done, done, this week, took a fun detour when I woke up this morning with a mild fever and no voice to speak of (or with).

I have company, my in-laws, arriving Monday as I said before (thankfully, as I also said before, they were already planning to stay in a nearby hotel as we don't have a spare room). I have no idea what I'm feeding everyone for the days leading up to Thanksgiving, and as for Thanksgiving dinner itself, I'm seriously considering the "order a cooked turkey" or "buy and heat a spiral ham" approach, mainly because nobody wants to eat a turkey the hostess has been coughing and sneezing on while she prepares it--and at this rate, I can't count on being completely over this stupid thing by next week.

So as soon as the oldest two girls finish their weekly math test, I'm gonna crawl back in bed for a bit in the hopes of knocking this dratted virus to the ground once and for all. The story of Father and the Pageant will have to wait, though I may get it up here this evening. In the meantime, if anybody has Really Quick Easy Thanksgiving Side Dish Favorite Recipes to share or link to in the comment boxes, please please please I mean it really we'd love them thank you do so!

About Ten Minutes

Is all I have time for blog writing today. I'm printing out tons of music for our choir Christmas fund raiser, we've got an extra-long practice coming up, and courtesy of the Cold of Endless Crud I have no voice at all to speak of, so I'm going to be attending tonight's practice hoping to learn songs by listening. Or osmosis. Whatever works.

So here are a few random thoughts:

1. My in-laws are coming for Thanksgiving, and will be with us from the Monday before until the Monday after, though they are staying in a hotel as we don't have a spare bedroom. My mother-in-law's ordinary family dinners are more elaborate than my Thanksgiving ones. I don't yet have the details of what I'm cooking down, thanks to the Cold of EC, NaNoWriMo, and a little thing called denial.

2. Is there any holiday more angsty for a non-crafty Mom than Thanksgiving? Oh, sure, maybe Christmas, but by the time Christmas gets here we all want to boil in hot oil the people who hand us beautifully handcrafted gifts which they whipped up in their spare time between feeding the homeless and organizing their parish's annual Christmas food drive and teaching themselves Sanskrit, don't we? But at Thanksgiving everyone's supposed to build her own cornucopia from the gold spray-painted bones of last year's turkey, create a dazzling table, foster an ambiance redolent of pumpkin pie spice or mulled wine, and produce dozens of delicious dishes seemingly from midair, all while maintaining the unruffled, unfrazzled demeanor of a Republican First Lady who has a gazillion people to cook her turkey for her.

3. Speaking of NaNoWriMo (oh, were we?) I'm up to the 45,000 + mark. The secret to writing, I've discovered, is to have tons of other things you're actually supposed to be doing. It helps if you like your characters, too.

4. The best way not to finish a ten-minute blog post is to answer the phone at the six minute mark...but it's fun talking to this talented blogger anyway!

Later! :)

Libertines In Space

I saw the trailer for the upcoming re-imagined Star Trek movie yesterday, and at first glance it seemed moderately interesting. Plenty of sweeping panoramas of high-tech futuristic places, action, drama, and some creative explosions: what else could one want in a schlocky science-fiction movie? But then I saw some other things about the film, especially the items about steamy encounters between Kirk and Uhura; clearly, like just about all Star Trek franchises, the story line is going to have its usual tendency to devolve into the ordinary pattern of witnessing Kirk's colossal ego and endless libido boldly go where they haven't been for at least the last ten minutes.

Sigh.

It's one of the most maddening things about schlocky science-fiction. I don't mind cardboard characters and cardboard plots and cardboard action sequences and cardboard aliens with the usual assortment of unbelievable appendages and cardboard ship battles with their complete laws-of-physics violations of weaponry use and cardboard explosions complete with bass notes too low for the average human to hear and the predictable ring-pattern of the explosion which an intelligent person once explained to me would be completely and utterly impossible to see in the vacuum of space, though I've forgotten the details. But the older I get, the less tolerance I have for all the cardboard sex.

Because I can suspend my disbelief, when I'm asked to believe that two ships moving forward at relativistic speeds can outrun each other or engage each other in battle; I can overlook the impossibility of the ring-pattern explosion and appreciate the coolness factor of it instead; I can pretend that some plan of God's might have permitted the evolutionary process on some planet or other to create an intelligent centipede that for some reason only walks on two oversized legs, waving the other 98 in rippling patterns which ought to warn our heroes that the creature is getting angry and might spit some highly implausible centipedesque poison at them any second; for the sake of a reasonably well-contrived and entertaining story I'm prepared to overlook whole series of impossible things. But when it comes to how men and women interact with each other, I'm getting awfully tired of having schlocky fiction-writers pretend that the real world operates like some teenage boy's fantasy, and that a man can be a hero and also treat women like disposable playthings--and that the women actually like being treated this way.

Even in this postmodern postfeminist paradise, a funny thing has happened to women. Liberated, they tend not to remain licentious, even if they start out that way; encouraged to play the field, they find themselves coming back over and over again to some umpire who actually wants to play by the rules, and who will make a commitment to her that's not predicated on the notion that she should have to put up with a man's culturally approved polyamorous and piggish ways. Women's impulses and desires aren't wired the same way that men's are, and over time she'll find herself daydreaming not about some hunky intergalactic hero with a girl on every planet, but about the kind of man who will be a good husband, and even a good father. I've noticed this even among women who don't have a religious upbringing; a girl I worked with once at a department store between college semesters was "settling" for moving in with her boyfriend who would not marry her until some goal or other had been met, but when I came back to work there again the next summer she was married--not to the oafish boyfriend, but to a nice man who worked in the store's receiving department and who was ready to back up his considerable affection for and attraction to her with a marriage license and a couple of modest gold bands.

So aside from the Muppet variation, I just don't find "Pigs in Space" all that amusing anymore. It might have seemed like a new, fresh thing for the writers of the original Star Trek series or even some of the iterations that more closely followed it to cast off all that oppressive small-minded small-town American morality and make the Captain-hero a man of tremendous appetite and catholic tastes in women, not even finding it necessary for his amorous objects to be human, so long as they were reasonable approximations; but today it is a cliche, not only of space-fiction but of a lot of other fiction as well. I can imagine that some observers of our culture in the distant future might think, based on our television and movies and bestsellers, that every American business office, law firm, police or fire department, detective agency, and so on was a hotbed of hanky-panky, a den of dalliance, populated by the seductive and aggressive who traded beds more often than they attended meetings or solved crimes or put out fires; and that all of this coupling led to no greater complications or lasting effects than some slight awkwardness in planning the seating-charts of the company's annual "Holiday" party.

But real life is not like that, and plenty of women have awakened to the sad reality that sexual libertinism in our culture may have seemed like a step forward for man, but that it was a giant leap backward for women, relegating them back almost to the status they had in pagan times. How many women have believed that they are giving their full selves to a man, only to find out later that the man in question never really saw them as anything but a desirable and convenient collection of anatomy? How many women have found themselves struggling alone to raise a child or children their "Captain Kirk" never wanted, and whose idea of fatherhood is to assure her over the phone that the check is in the mail? How many men have been damaged by our culture's elevation of such men to "hero" status--the guy who gets every thing and every woman he wants, and walks away unscathed in pursuit of newer and younger and easier ones when he gets bored or restless or is otherwise unhappy?

Just once I'd like to see a well-developed plot wherein a casual tryst leads the main character in a science-fiction film on an inexorable path to darkness, and danger, and betrayal, and pain, and sorrow. Just once I'd like to see the "hero" man up enough to be a hero to the woman he has thought a pleasant enough companion for an evening's entertainment, but nothing more. Just once I'd like to see our cultural sickness held up in a mirror the size of a planet, and show the true results of what happens when men and women treat each other as the vehicles for meaningless and cardboard sex.

Now that would be to boldly go where no man has gone before.

What, This Old Thing?

According to AP Business Writer Dan Sewell, it's hip to be frugal again:

This behavioral shift isn't simply about spending less. The New Frugality emphasizes stretching every dollar. It means bypassing the fashion mall for the discount chain store, buying secondhand clothes and furniture, or trading down to store brands.

There's more business for repairmen and less for salesmen. Consumers are clipping more coupons and swiping their credit cards less. [...]

That kind of scrimping may be good for stressed family budgets, but it's bad for the nation's overall economy _ and that has the potential to reinforce the miserly mood. Yet with home prices, 401(k)s and job stability suffering, such frugality is likely to be more than a fad.

"It is a whole reassessment of values," said Candace Corlett, president of the consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail. "We've just been shopping until we drop and consuming and buying it all, and replenishing before things wear out. People are learning again to say 'No, not today.'"

The trend is evident in where cash registers are ringing, and where they are not.

Wal-Mart, BJ's Wholesale Club and Goodwill thrift shops are thriving, while Saks and Abercrombie & Fitch are struggling. Likewise, as casual dining chains such as O'Charley's and Red Lobster see fewer customers, McDonald's is serving more, including people who have given up $4 Starbucks drinks in favor of the fast-food chain's expanding coffee menu. Even Spam has made a comeback.

Tellingly, Wal-Mart said recently it has seen a 2 percent jump this year in shoppers from households earning at least $65,000. [...]

Economists and consumer experts say it's difficult to predict how long the pullback will last, particularly among generations of consumers who have never seen such a sharp economic downturn.

"This is scary stuff and confidence is such an elusive thing," said Larry Waldman, senior research scientist at the University of New Mexico's Bureau of Business and Economic Research.

Timothy Duy, an economics professor at the University of Oregon, is convinced "the economy is moving away from consumerism." Just how far remains to be seen, but a recent Pew Research Center survey found that more than half of Americans say they have cut back in the past year and about half agreed that people "should learn to live with less."

People are not only buying cheaper, they're buying less, said Joachim Vosgerau, an assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business who specializes in consumer behavior.

"It seems like this trend is only going to continue," Vosgerau said.

Don't you just love being a trendsetter? :-)

People with a single income who are raising children have been practicing the virtue of thrift for some time now. We avoid the mall like the plague (especially in winter, when it seems from the careless hacking of other shoppers that the plague might actually be a possibility), we rarely eat out at any place where you don't shout your order into a little speaker and get asked if you want fries with that, our "secondhand clothes" are first-hand hand-me-downs from the biggest big sister or brother, we scrutinize clearance racks for good deals on well-made items, we check out frugality tips on blogs and websites, we make do and do without.

And quite a few of us are looking for ways to tighten that belt even further, looking over our budgets to trim what wasteful spending has crept in, and reminding ourselves that just because we're standing in a used book store we still have to add up the cost of that armload of tomes before we approach the counter (yes, even if they're friendly people who give their "teacher discount" to homeschool teachers). We know that it's easy to get careless, or to pinch the pennies and forget about the dollars; we back up and reassess and plan and experiment and plan again.

It's not a trend; it's how one-income couples make it in a two-income world. And now that it's suddenly all the rage, we're in the position of the young lady being complimented on her made-over dress, who says, "What, this old thing?" And means it.

What's "Nice" Got To Do With It?

I had a fun exchange with Father Philip, OP, at Mark Shea's blog today. A reader had written to tell a heartbreaking--but all too familiar--tale of mistreatment at the hands of colleagues, one of whom was a Catholic nun who thinks the Catechism is "outdated" (which makes one wonder what in Heaven's name she thinks of the Bible, as it is a wee bit older). Father wrote:

I've had to note many times lately to my readers that I've taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

There ain't no %$#@ vow of nice.

I think the time for "being sweet" to the enemy is last past...

And I said:

Well, Father Philip, I don't think that 1 Corinthians 13 goes out of fashion (at least, one of my confessors never seems to think so).

And my experience with liberal nuns is that their protective armor of smug dissidence is pretty impenetrable.

I'd recommend that the reader tell her seriously, the next time something like this happens, "Oh, Sister, just like yours once did long, long ago, my generation is now ready to Sing A New Church Into Being! We just like to sing in Latin..."

Then retreat. Some of these ladies have claws.

Whereupon Father replied:

Red,

That's what I mean by "not being nice."

:-) :-) :-)

The truth of the matter is that Christians are supposed to love each other. 1 Corinthians 13 spells it out pretty well: love is patient, kind, not selfish, etc. I've mediated on that passage many a time--usually because a confessor or spiritual adviser recommended it. But how do we show love to people who are supposed to share our faith, but instead seem to want to contradict everything our Church teaches? How are we to be loving examples of patient Christian witness when someone begins with that predictable, telltale phrase, "Well, I'm a Catholic, but..."

And this is where I think Father Philip and I are in agreement: it is always necessary to love your enemies, even when they're the worst kind--the ones who by their baptism are supposed to be your family in Christ. But it is not always necessary to show that love by being silent under their abuse, or by adopting a syrupy sweetness that refuses to waver or to say anything stronger than, "I can see you feel strongly about this, so since we don't agree let's talk of something else. The pachysandra is coming along fine this year, isn't it?"

Don't get me wrong: there are times and places when discretion is most definitely the better part of valor, and where getting into a vocal showdown with a heretic co-worker may be inadvisable, especially if said heretic is a professed Sister and possibly one's superior in the workforce. To everything there is a season, and that includes the compulsion to speak some home truths to an erring brother in Christ; there is a time for silence, and even a time to be nice.

But too often sincere Catholics and other Christians think that "nice" is synonymous with "Christian," especially the kind of "nice" that avoids confrontation at all costs. It's hard to see how that idea got started, considering that St. Paul is frequently far from "nice" when he calls erring members of the early Church to account for various misbehaviors or misdeeds; the writings of the Church Fathers contain denunciations of heresy, and of heretics. Consider this from St. Alexander of Alexandria, on Arius:

1. The ambitious and avaricious will of wicked men is always wont to lay snares against those churches which seem greater, by various pretexts attacking the ecclesiastical piety of such. For incited by the devil who works in them, to the lust of that which is set before them, and throwing away all religious scruples, they trample under foot the fear of the judgment of God. Concerning which things, I who suffer, have thought it necessary to show to your piety, in order that you may be aware of such men, lest any of them presume to set foot in your dioceses, whether by themselves or by others; for these sorcerers know how to use hypocrisy to carry out their fraud; and to employ letters composed and dressed out with lies, which are able to deceive a man who is intent upon a simple and sincere faith. Arius, therefore, and Achilles, having lately entered into a conspiracy, emulating the ambition of Colluthus, have turned out far worse than he. For Colluthus, indeed, who reprehends these very men, found some pretext for his evil purpose; but these, beholding his battering of Christ, endured no longer to be subject to the Church; but building for themselves dens of thieves, they hold their assemblies in them unceasingly, night and day directing their calumnies against Christ and against us. For since they call in question all pious and apostolical doctrine, after the manner of the Jews, they have constructed a workshop for contending against Christ, denying the Godhead of our Saviour, and preaching that He is only the equal of all others. And having collected all the passages which speak of His plan of salvation and His humiliation for our sakes, they endeavour from these to collect the preaching of their impiety, ignoring altogether the passages in which His eternal Godhead and unutterable glory with the Father is set forth. Since, therefore, they back up the impious opinion concerning Christ, which is held by the Jews and Greeks, in every possible way they strive to gain their approval; busying themselves about all those things which they are wont to deride in us, and daily stirring up against us seditions and persecutions. And now, indeed, they drag us before the tribunals of the judges, by intercourse with silly and disorderly women, whom they have led into error; at another time they cast opprobrium and infamy upon the Christian religion, their young maidens disgracefully wandering about every village and street. Nay, even Christ's indivisible tunic, which His executioners were unwilling to divide, these wretches have dared to rend.

"Wicked men...sorcerers...den of thieves...impious opinion...silly and disorderly women...wretches..." Not exactly a hand-holding chorus of Kumbaya, is it?

The saints and Fathers of the Church took their responsibility to guard against error seriously; they did not hate the men they chastised, but loved them enough to hope that their chastisement would lead them to repentance, so that their souls would not be lost. Loving our fellow Catholics does not always mean being nice to them; sometimes the greatest love we can show them is to be clear about their errors, as we would hope others would be clear to us about ours, and by our charitably-motivated insistence on the truths which they reject help them to return to the diligent and faithful practice of our Catholic religion.

Laws and Unintended Consequences

Time has an interesting look at the sad situation in Nebraska ever since that state's too-ambiguous child abandonment law was passed:

And not just one or two. Nebraska found itself facing an epidemic of abandoned children after the legislature passed a law in July that allowed parents to leave their children at a safe place, like a hospital, without fear of prosecution. It was one of the last states in the country to pass such legislation — but the law contained a large loophole by including children of all ages. The legislature gathered on Friday in a special session to fix the safe-haven law. The day before, three more kids were abandoned at Omaha hospitals, bringing the total to 34 since mid-September, shortly after the law was passed. A 5-year-old boy was left by his mother on Thursday night; two teenage girls, 14 and 17, were dropped off earlier the same day. The older girl ran away from the ER before authorities could arrive. And a Florida man traveled from Miami to drop off his 11-year-old boy earlier this week.

But while Nebraska can easily narrow its statute, dealing with the underlying causes of abandonment is much harder, child-welfare experts say. "These parents had to be totally overwhelmed to do something like this," says the Rev. Steven Boes, president of Boys Town — the original safe haven of Father Flanagan fame, which happens to be headquartered in Omaha. Once upon a time, Depression-battered parents would buy bus fare for their children and hand them a sign that read "Take Me to Boys Town." Their counterparts today "are parents who have tried to navigate the system for years, and this is their last resort; these are parents who ran out of patience too darn fast and gave up too early, and everything in between," says Boes. [...]

Five of the children abandoned in Nebraska have been from out of state, but most are local. A majority of the children are older than 13 and have a history of being treated for mental-health issues. Nearly every abandoned child came from a single-parent household. In September, one father walked into a hospital and left nine children, ages 1 to 17. He reportedly told hospital workers that he'd been overwhelmed since his wife died a few days after their youngest was born. [Emphasis added--E.M.]

First of all, this is truly tragic and heartbreaking. I can't imagine the pain on both sides, the parents whose children are in serious need of mental help, and the children who must come to terms with the reality that a parent has left them in the care of strangers. The article mentions that many of these kids have been in and out of foster care, as well; these are in some cases parents who have already lost custody to the state before, and are prepared to surrender custody voluntarily again.

But I get the feeling that once again we are, by and large, ignoring the wreckage left behind by the sexual revolution. Aside from the one father who left his nine children, under circumstances of grief and stress and without, apparently, any family or community support in the face of his wife's tragic death, most of these children are coming from situations where the parent was divorced, or perhaps never married in the first place--and as Matthew Archbold's excellent report today illustrates, these are the families most in crisis in our nation.

Our weakened view of marriage, our notion that adult happiness is the reason to tie the knot, our view that children are nice if you want one or two, our expectation that marriage will only last so long as the two people involved in it are blissfully happy with each other--all of these things are what I generally mean when I use the phrase "sex without consequences." Some have disliked the phrase, but when I say that ordinarily children are the consequence of human physical reproductive activity I'm not using the word "consequences" in a pejorative sense, but only a natural one. It is natural for a man and a woman to choose each other, to choose to be together--but it is equally and overwhelmingly natural for them to do so with the thought that they will be having children together, in God's time and by His will. No person who has ever suffered the pain of infertility would deny that children are both the consequence and the great blessing of marriage, and that their own inability to share in this joyful consequence for which they ardently hoped and wished is a heavy and burdensome Cross which they are asked to carry.

But people who enter into reproductive activity with each other, married or not, but who seek the activity without its most natural and expected consequence and have taken immoral action to prevent, as they think, this consequence from occurring, are the people who expect to be able to deny the arrival of a child, and are often the least prepared to accept the blessing of children. Moreover, married couples who damage their marriage by resorting to artificial contraception and the fundamental rejection of each other and this great blessing which that contraception implies often find themselves raising children they "planned" to have alone, as their spouse deserts them for someone younger, more interesting, or less demanding, and plans to satisfy his or her obligations to parenthood by the mere writing of a check--and these plans have a way of disappearing.

The reality, as that grief-stricken father of nine would probably say himself, is that it takes two parents to raise children. Not just any two parents, either: a mother and a father. And they should both, preferably, be the parents of the children, not one father and one stepmother, or vice-versa. None of this is to say that people who find themselves raising someone else's children through tragic circumstances or because of the failure of the biological parents are in any way less admirable than biological parents; in many instances they are more admirable, because they take on the roles and duties of parents without that biological tie, and do so completely voluntarily. But I think that even the most dedicated of adoptive parents would agree that in a perfect world, children would never be harmed or abandoned or neglected by the very people who ought most to protect them, and that a culture which encourages sexual activity among the unmarried and contraceptive use among everyone is going to be a culture in which the tragedies of abuse and neglect and abandonment occur. So long as children are thought of, not as the natural result of a happy marriage, but an accessory which one may choose to have if one wishes, we're going to perpetuate this situation.

Nebraska's law will be changed, and soon. But the thirty-four children dropped off at hospitals in Nebraska since September are only a symptom of a problem, one that is only going to get worse, especially in a post-gay marriage world where the notion that having a baby has anything at all to do with getting married will be proof of one's heterosexist bigotry, not of one's desire for stable marriages and strong families. Nebraska's law had a lot of unintended consequenses, and it was by no means as broad and sweeping a law as the ones designed to redefine, dismantle, and ultimately destroy marriage as a civil concept altogether.

A Little Thing Called Liberty

It appears that Eric Holder is Barack Obama's choice for Attorney General:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder has accepted President-elect Barack Obama's offer to head the Justice Department, a senior Democrat said on Tuesday.

If the appointment is confirmed by the Senate, he would be the first African American to become Attorney General.

Holder accepted the offer, pending a review to determine if he could win confirmation with broad Democratic and Republican support in the Senate, the senior Democrat said.

Michael Isikoff of Newsweek blogged about Holder earlier today:

Holder, 57, has been on Obama’s “short list” for attorney general from the outset. A partner at the D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling, Holder served as co-chief (along with Caroline Kennedy) of Obama’s vice-presidential selection process. He also actively campaigned for Obama throughout the year and grew personally close to the president-elect. Holder has not returned a call seeking comment; a spokeswoman for the Obama transition team told Newsweek in an e-mail early Tuesday afternoon that no decision has been made. [...]

The only hesitancy about Holder’s selection was that he himself had reservations about going through a confirmation process that was likely to revive questions about his role in signing off on the controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. Although there is no evidence that Holder actively pushed the pardon, he was criticized for not raising with the White House the strong objections that some Justice Department lawyers and federal prosecutors in New York had to pardoning somebody who had fled the country. But after reviewing the evidence in the case, and checking with staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Obama aides and Holder both decided the issue was highly unlikely to prove an obstacle to his confirmation, one of the sources said--especially given the Democrats’ more sizable post-election majority in the Senate.

So that's the only holdup--Holder's contribution to the Rich pardon. That, and a little thing the mainstream media is being pretty quiet about: Holder's involvement in the Elian Gonzalez case. Here's a report from the British paper The Guardian from back in 2000:

Why did Washington intervene?
"I believe that reuniting Elian with his father is not only a matter of federal law. It is not a matter of immigration law. It is simply the right thing to do," said deputy attorney general Eric Holder. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) also argued that Elian had a "close and continuous relationship" with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzales, even though his parents were divorced and he was living with his late mother.

His late mother--the one who drowned trying to bring her son to America, and to freedom.

Eric Holder's voice is the one that can be heard on this YouTube clip, too; Mr. Holder is the one saying that the raid removed Elian from his relatives' home "sensitively" and denying that a gun was used:

And a look, from before the election, at how the Gonzalez case could haunt Obama was reported at this blog, which contains many news links about the Cuban-American community's unhappiness with the involvement of Eric Holder in Obama's campaign; one wonders what this community will think over the selection of Holder to be Attorney General.

The United States Attorney General heads the Justice Department, and is the government's chief lawyer. One would think that it would be a good thing to select someone for this office who did not think that handing a helpless child over to a Communist regime when his mother died trying to get for him a little thing called liberty was, "...simply the right thing to do." But apparently, The One doesn't agree.

A Little Under the Weather

Thanks again to everyone who has posted a comment about my liturgical abuse dilemma. I plan to pray, consider, approach those in charge, and then go from there.

My apologies for not getting out here sooner today to thank all of you; we've got the Cold of Endless Crud circulating around our house. Kitten and Bookgirl had it last week, and it's my turn today; so far, Hatchick and Mr. M. haven't shown any signs of it.

I'm very hopeful that Mr. M. will be spared the cold entirely, for reasons every woman reading this can instantly find understandable. This has been shared by others, but it seems as good a time as any to share it here:

On Liturgical Abuse

First of all, I want to thank everyone who commented on my "bleg" post and gave document suggestions, etc. I found what I was looking for in Redemptionis Sacramentum, from the Congregation For Divine Worship, in the following sections:

3. The Other Parts of the Mass

[58.] All of Christ’s faithful likewise have the right to a celebration of the Eucharist that has been so carefully prepared in all its parts that the word of God is properly and efficaciously proclaimed and explained in it; that the faculty for selecting the liturgical texts and rites is carried out with care according to the norms; and that their faith is duly safeguarded and nourished by the words that are sung in the celebration of the Liturgy.

[59.] The reprobated practice by which Priests, Deacons or the faithful here and there alter or vary at will the texts of the Sacred Liturgy that they are charged to pronounce, must cease. For in doing thus, they render the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy unstable, and not infrequently distort the authentic meaning of the Liturgy.

[61.] In selecting the biblical readings for proclamation in the celebration of Mass, the norms found in the liturgical books are to be followed,[136] so that indeed “a richer table of the word of God will be prepared for the faithful, and the biblical treasures opened up for them”.[137]

[62.] It is also illicit to omit or to substitute the prescribed biblical readings on one’s own initiative, and especially “to substitute other, non-biblical texts for the readings and responsorial Psalm, which contain the word of God”.[138]

[63.] “Within the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy, the reading of the Gospel, which is “the high point of the Liturgy of the Word”,[139] is reserved by the Church’s tradition to an ordained minister.[140] Thus it is not permitted for a layperson, even a religious, to proclaim the Gospel reading in the celebration of Holy Mass, nor in other cases in which the norms do not explicitly permit it.[141]

The biggest problems to me are these: first, that the Gospel reading is not taken from the Lectionary readings for Christmas Mass but is made up of a blended, "cut and paste" set of readings from the Gospels of St. Luke and St. Matthew; some of the readings are from the Gospel for Epiphany, and not for Christmas at all! Moreover, since this pageant has apparently been done for years, the words from St. Luke's Gospel are not from the current Lectionary and do not match the approved texts for the Mass. Second, the interruption of the Gospel readings by no less than five Christmas carols is a serious disruption of the Mass, and fosters a spirit of entertainment instead of worship, and my family, being in the choir, would be expected to help lead in the singing of these carols.

Thus, while I appreciate everyone's comments, those who indicated that perhaps this was no big deal and should be overlooked for the sake of the community etc. are, I think, not looking at the whole situation. This isn't a case of possible "rule-bending" which my family would simply witness; it is a case of outright liturgical abuse in which my family would be expected to participate in the fullest sense (e.g., singing the songs between the "Gospel" reading/play-acting).

I realize the truth of several things which get said when these issues are brought up: that each of us individually is quite probably the gravest liturgical abuse at any given Mass; that a spirit of charity and assuming people don't know better is healthier spiritually than a critical spirit that jots down the slightest faltering as if it were deliberate abuse; that a priest may "ad-lib" a prayer or phrase here or there under the completely mistaken notion that he is permitted to do so; that focusing on all the possible errors at Mass (and this is true whether you attend an N.O. or a TLM) will rob you of the joy and peace which should attend you when you are worshiping God in this perfect prayer of the Church, and so on. Certainly I have left my "liturgical nit-picking" days far behind me, and am inclined toward charity even in this instance--that the people planning it do not know any better. The problem is that I do know better, and will be held accountable for that knowledge even if no one else is so held.

At the same time, being a member of a parish is not an arbitrary thing, and as some have justly pointed out, it is not really fair for me to put the whole choir in a bad situation by refusing to be present at this Christmas Mass, instead going elsewhere and leaving a much smaller choir to provide the legitimate music needed for the Mass. What I'll ultimately decide to do isn't clear at this point, because I have yet to communicate my concerns through the proper channels. Brief discussion at Mass with some other choir members leads me to believe that the community in general isn't uniformly thrilled with this way of doing things, but that because the parish has been doing it in this way for so long they don't see a possibility of change--even though we have a new pastor who may be more receptive to concerns, as well as a relatively new bishop who may not yet be aware that situations like these exist in the diocese.

So, at this point, I think my course of action is as follows:

1. Write a clear, brief, extremely diplomatic letter to the DRE who organizes the pageant, sharing the relevant quotes from Redemptionis Sacramentum and asking why unapproved texts, blended texts, and the Gospel for a wholly different feast are being planned for Christmas Mass; I think my real concerns can be expressed in a non-hostile, non-threatening way, and by writing to the DRE first I am not "attacking" her personally, but giving her the chance to respond.

2. If necessary, share a copy of this first letter with the pastor, asking politely if there is some provision I am unaware of that makes it permissible for the Gospel at Christmas Mass to be replaced by an assortment of texts including the Gospel for Epiphany, and to be interrupted by the singing of carols.

3. If necessary, share any correspondence I have had with the DRE and the pastor with the bishop or other chancery officials.

At that point, if the blended Gospel/pageant is going forward as planned, decide on what level of participation if any is possible for me and for my family. (One option would be to be present for and sing for the other parts of the Mass but to ask to be excused from the "mid-Gospel caroling" on the grounds of my serious disagreement with this practice.)

Now, I know from some of the responses I received in person, there are people who are simply scratching their heads. Why care? Why bother? Let the kiddies have their fun--it's Christmas, after all, and who would be such a Grinch as to insist on some dull liturgical rules instead of getting with the spirit of things? seems to be the gist of a lot of it.

The fact is that despite what a terrible series of events has caused us to believe for the past forty years or so, the Mass is not our property, to do with as we wish. It's not about "inclusion" or "community" or "making people feel happy" or any similar things, even if those things are a part of it. The Mass is our highest and most solemn act of public worship, the unbloody re-presentation of Christ's sacrifice on Calvary. The priest offers this sacrifice to the Father on our behalf, while we participate by uniting ourselves to this most holy prayer, whether silently or by speaking and singing the various prayers the people may join in saying or singing. Anything which adds to this worship, such as periods of silence at the appropriate times, reverence for the Sacred Body and Blood as evidenced by careful purification of the vessels after Communion, newer and more accurate English translations of the Latin prayers, etc. is the sort of "innovation" we should appreciate even if these things are "new" where we are.

But welcoming innovations for the sake of novelty or insising on "old customs" which were never appropriate in the first place, especially when these things detract from the solemnity of the Mass, ought not to be appreciated or clung to stubbornly. We need to be evalutating these extraneous customs that have crept in to examine whether they were ever permitted, whether they are desirable, whether they ought to be part of the Holy Mass or belong quite properly in devotional practices outside of it, and the like. And this is true whether the practice is one we actually like or not--I recall hearing about a priest who for a while had added a "Hail Mary" in at a quiet part of the Mass out of his deep devotion to the Blessed Mother, but who eventually realized that Our Lady was not honored by his decision to add a prayer to the Mass which is not a part of it.

Many of us speak about the "reform of the reform," and are glad to be living in a time when this concept is beginning to bear fruit. But it is frustrating to me that so many (though not my readers, necessarily!) seem, even in the face of verifiable liturgical abuse, and serious abuse at that, to counsel silence, even though silence may seem to give consent (Qui tacet consentire vidétur). It is not a small thing to wish for the integrity of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to be preserved and respected, and the example we give to our children, including the ones who are in the pageant, is not a small thing either. When I remember the dubious liturgical celebrations of my youth, and the free and easy way in which the Mass was often "re-imagined" for the sake of us children, I do not feel gratitude towards those presumably well-meaning devastators, but a deep unhappiness that they consipired to rob me and my contemporaries of our Catholic birthright, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, untainted by modern tampering, limited political/social agendas (e.g., the Mass I attended in high school where the "readings" and "Gospel" were from the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.) and a personal axe or two to grind with the Church in regards to women's ordination, lay overreaching, and other misguided fantasies of what some of them thought the Church ought to be. And I doubt that those of today's "Christmas pageant children" who haven't left the Church by their adulthood will think fondly of their coerced involvement in heterodox practices, either.

A Bleg To My Highly Intelligent And Resourceful Readers!

Help!!

I just found out our little church does a children's Christmas pageant at the one Christmas Mass. We're in the choir, of course, and had planned to attend that Mass--but now I find out that the pageant takes place during the Gospel reading. It goes something like this: priest reads a little of the Gospel. Pauses. Children act out part he just read. A Christmas carol is sung. Priest reads the next part of the Gospel. Children act out, carol is sung, etc. This happens a total of six times.

Not only that, but the Gospel is a mishmash of two Christmas Gospels, one from Saint Luke and the other from Saint Matthew.

Now, I am almost 100% sure this is not even remotely allowed to happen during the Mass. It would be fine if they wanted to do it before the Mass, or afterward in the parish hall, but interrupting the Gospel reading for a show seems to be the height of liturgical abuse. But I can't find anything official that says so, and instead seem to be finding evidence that other parishes do the same thing.

Please, please, please, if you know or can find something definitive from the Church's rubrics that will make it clear this is not even remotely permitted, send it to me at once, or post it in the comment boxes! As it is, my family, who makes up roughly 1/3 of the choir, is going to have to tell the rest of the choir that we won't be attending Christmas Mass at our parish if this goes forward, but will celebrate Christmas Mass elsewhere--but it would be a lot easier if I had some way to prove that this kind of disrespect for the Gospel and for the integrity of the Holy Mass was not allowed by the Church.

Anything you can discover will be most helpful; thank you in advance!

Post-Election Posting Fatigue

Just a couple of weeks ago, I felt like I was blogging practically everything I was thinking. In the days leading up to the election it seemed like America couldn't possibly do what I feared we were about to, and elect the most pro-abortion candidate ever to be our president. Like many of you I wrote, talked, argued and discussed, pouring energy into every word, hoping that enough people, especially enough Catholics, would re-think their support of a person so terribly committed to the Culture of Death.

But it happened, and many of us wrote and talked about that too, from the standpoint of our heartsick disappointment and grave fears for the future.

That disappointment is still palpable, and those fears no less grave. But in the intervening days I admit to feeling a somewhat depressed frustration, a sense that we're going to have four years of nonstop agony over the rolling back of all the protection of the unborn thus far enacted and of a growing movement in our nature to dismantle traditional marriage to the point of nonsense, and similar social evils--and that we'd be better off finding a "nice safe cage" to hide in than to bother trying to reach our fellow citizens or convert our fellow Catholics or otherwise do anything to stop the inevitable onslaught.

And that's a temptation, of course. God doesn't let us run away and hide and let evil triumph. He will have work for us to do, and some of it will be writing, and some of it will be action. He will lead us when the time is right to stand in opposition to the cruel and bloodthirsty spirit of the age, that preys on unborn children and the disabled and the elderly with all the hatred the Enemy has for God's image in us.

But now the way ahead is dark, and like short-legged hobbits on a snowy path that seems to be leading nowhere at all we can't seem to see what lies before us, or how any good can come from the evil that oppresses us.

I've started a few times this week to write about this news article or that blog post someone else put together, only to wonder if there's any point. Before the election I was shouting; now I'm huddled at a corner table in a deserted pub with a handful of friends, talking in hushed voices about the election of an opponent who hates just about everything we stand for; it's dispiriting, and I've let it get to me.

I still find myself thinking "President Obama? Really?? What were they thinking?" from time to time. I read about the growing and worsening economic crisis and think gloomily that the one good thing about not having much saved is not having much to lose; I doubt seriously that the inexperienced Obama will have a clue what to do about any of it, and worry that his solutions are going to sound a lot like this. But when I sit down to write about it, I think of the throngs of people chanting "Yes We Can!" and thinking Obama was going to pay for their gas and mortgages and everything else, all for free, just like magic--and I shrug and go do something else instead.

So, while I have been busy in other ways, and have had other obligations, the truth is that I always seem to find time to write blog posts, so that's not entirely behind my slacking this week. In all honesty, I still feel rather lost whenever I think about what the next four years are going to bring, in terms of more unborn children dying, doctors and other health care workers losing their freedom to refuse to participate in the killing, a greater push for euthanasia (especially if universal health care is passed), and the drive to destroy marriage.

I know that things will get better, but I think they'll get a lot worse, first. It's made it hard to get back into that rhythm of reading and commenting on news events and other things, this worry and the wish to hide in Custard's cage with him, and let Ink, Blink, Mustard and Belinda handle things for the next four years. But I'll get there--it helps to have this blog, and to hear from so many like-minded people who aren't ready to enshrine the Culture of Death as our inevitable way of life--and I'm grateful to all of you for keeping me from just giving up and moving to some other country where I won't know the language and won't have any idea how bad things are getting. :)

Some Friday Fun

I saw this cute quiz at Nutmeg's blog, and decided to try it. Amazingly, it picked out one of my favorite games:

You Are Chess

You are brilliant and shrewd. You can often predict what people will do in the future. You thrive in complex situations. You deal with contradictions well. You can have many streams of though going on at your mind at once. You keep track of things well. You are very patient. You have lots of endurance, even when your energy dwindles

What Board Game Are You?

And since that was fun, and since my blogging brain is pretty well fried this afternoon, I did these as well:

You Are a Lemon Poppy Seed Muffin

You are smart, sophisticated, and savvy. You love taking risks, and you are the first to know about new trends. You are curious about the world and tend to have many interests. You also are very talented. It sometimes seems like you are good at everything. You are very social and inclusive. You'll be friends with anyone. Even though you're very cultured, you're not a snob.

What Kind of Muffin Are You?

What Your Height Says About You

You are a very vulnerable and spiritual person. Your emotions run deep. You have a philosophical and poetic soul. You think things through and are a bit of a skeptic. You tend to be very opinionated. You are a perfectionist with high standards. You prefer to work alone. You work hard, and you don't like interruptions. You are about as tall as the average Japanese woman.

What Does Your Height Say About You?

So there you have it. ;-)

In all honesty, I know I've been a slacker this week. It seems a bit like post-election fatigue--which is a post I'm working on for later.

Oh, No. Not This Again.

From the "Dan Brown made an awful lot of moolah and I can too" files comes the latest bit of nonsense about Vatican art and secret messages:

Never mind the Da Vinci Code -- what about Michelangelo's secret messages? On the 500th anniversary of the artist's first climb up the ladder in 1508 to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a new book claims he embedded subversive messages in his spectacular frescoes -- not only Jewish, Kabbalistic and pagan symbols but also insults directed at Pope Julius II, who commissioned the work, and references to his own sexuality.

First published in an English version in May by Harper One, "The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican," coauthored by Vatican docent Roy Doliner and Rabbi Benjamin Blech, is already in its second edition in Italy. It will be translated into 16 languages and released in the coming months in Spain, Portugal, France, Poland, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands.

And it will probably be a Major Motion Picture soon, if past history of this sort of thing is any indication. Dan Brown is probably kicking himself for not doing a Michaelangelo tie-in back when he still had the chance.

It takes a special kind of arrogance, characteristic of the modern mind, to decide that an artist who lived hundreds of years ago buried a secret message so carefully and so skillfully that his own contemporaries and everyone since then was completely blind to it, and that it took you, you yourself, the first ever to come along who was intelligent and complex and thoughtful and worthy enough, to discover the master's message. Sadly, this arrogance, which is as foolish as it is blind, is all too prevalent in our modern age.

Because it's not possible for us to travel back in time and spend time with contemporaries of Michaelangelo, and ask them what they think of this latest theory. None of them, and none of those patrons of the arts who lived just after he did, ever wrote anything like what the authors of this new book did, after all; and if we could go back in time to present these theories it is quite likely that the contemporary witnesses would shrug, and laugh, and dismiss them out of hand.

Which, interestingly enough, is an argument in favor of apostolic Churches.

I don't mean to harm the sensibilities of any of my Protestant readers, but just consider a moment. In some ways, don't many of the forms of Protestantism depend on just the same sort of thing--perhaps not an arrogance, not in the spiritual sense, but still a conviction that Christianity has had it all wrong from very near the beginning? Isn't there still a kind of insistence that the Master's true meaning has been covered over by the extraneous paint of ritual, or carefully kept hidden by a conspiracy of the ordained, eager to keep their own power? Were not many of the founders of Protestant branches of Christianity saying, in effect, "See! I can tell you the true meaning of the Master, His secret message that has been hidden."

And we can't get into a time machine to speak directly to Saint Peter or the other Apostles, and ask them which of the many people to say this since their time has been right. We can't ask them to clarify the hidden meanings or interpretations that led the original Protestant leaders and thinkers to conclude that Rome had gotten it all wrong, and was now teaching error--we can't ask anyone who was a living witness to Christ's life and ministry on Earth, or who lived just after His death and resurrection, whether they can identify in any particular sect of the Protestant world the one true Christian Church.

But if we believe in the idea of apostolic succession, we don't have to. We can trust that those ordained by Saint Peter and the other Apostles kept the faith entire and intact, and handed it on thus to those who followed, in that unbroken line from their day to ours.

I am sure that the modern mind will continue to play the "find the hidden meaning" game with all sorts of antiquities: art, music, literature, and the like. The modern mind plays this game with Christianity, too; I have been assured recently that the Bible really does approve of homosexuality and same-sex marriage, and only a bigoted interpretation could possibly see otherwise. But Christ did not establish His Church to be a secret, a hidden catacomb of meaning only accessible to the few; nor did He intend for His Church to be a den of relativism, where "Christian" means whatever one wants it to mean. He gave us His Church to shine as a clear, steady light of truth against the tendency of men to think that they, and they alone, know what is really true; He gave us the Apostles, and their successors who trace their line of ordination back unbroken to Saint Peter and the others, so that we know that we are practicing the same faith as they did, and may remain undisturbed by those who claim to have discovered, upon shaking the Bible vigorously one day in prayer, that Christians went wrong in the year 34 A.D. and have never gotten Christianity right since then.

Sorry For the Light Blogging

This time of year is usually a "calm before the storm" season, a time to catch our breaths and pause as we approach Thanksgiving, Advent, and then Christmas. But this year it seems more like a storm before the tempest.

I don't know if it's the recent election and associated overblogging, the usual increase in schoolwork, test grading, etc. that seems to hit about this time, the choir fundraiser that's in the works, or the fact that I just found out a few days ago that both my parents and my in-laws will be in town for Thanksgiving, but for some reason I've been finding it pretty difficult to keep to my usual two-to-four blog posts a day pace. (Of course, the fact that I've already passed the 25,000 word count on my NaNoWriMo novel could possibly have something to do with it.) :)

Anyway, I'll try to get back up to speed. My readership has more than doubled this year, and I value every one of you and the fact that you find my ramblings enjoyable enough to keep coming over. So thanks for being patient this week, and I hope to do better in the near future!

The Tyranny of Tolerance

Got plans to do business anywhere near a courthouse this weekend? You may want to postpone it; protests like this one are in the planning stages:

In the Upper West Side of Manhattan, demonstrators chanted "Shame on you!" outside the temple. Leaders of the Mormon church had encouraged members to support passage of California's Proposition 8, a referendum banning same-sex marriage.

"I'm fed up and disgusted with religious institutions taking political stances and calling them moral when it's nothing but politics," said Dennis Williams, 36. "Meanwhile they enjoy tax-free status while trying to deny me rights that should be mine at the state and federal level."

Church spokesman Michael Otterson said that while citizens have the right to protest, he was "puzzled" and "disturbed" by the gathering since the majority of California's voters had approved the amendment.

"This was a very broad-based coalition that defended traditional marriage in a free and democratic election," Otterson said, referring to the numerous religious and social conservative groups that sponsored Proposition 8. [...]

Gay-marriage advocates said they were planning nationwide demonstrations this weekend in more than 175 cities and outside the U.S. Capitol. A Seattle blogger was trying to organize simultaneous protests outside statehouses and city halls in every state Saturday.

Earlier in Connecticut, Jody Mock and Elizabeth Kerrigan emerged from Town Hall in West Hartford to the cheers of about 150 people and waved their marriage license high. The couple led the lawsuit that overturned the state law.

"We feel very fortunate to live in the state of Connecticut, where marriage equality is valued, and hopefully other states will also do what is fair," Kerrigan said.

It's pretty clear that to same-sex marriage [redefinition of marriage] advocates, the only acceptable sort of "tolerance" for their depraved and sinful lifestyles is the sort that lets them have everything they demand, while simultaneously redefining all traditional sexual moralities as bigotry and intolerance.

The reality is that there are things which, based on natural law, a healthy society does not tolerate. Societal approval and encouragement of sexually deviant behaviors is not something that has ever characterized a healthy society; usually it is a sign that the barbarians are at the gate, and that the forces of destruction embedded within the dying culture are simply aiding in the hastening of that society's eventual demise.

PrObama Catholics--Still Think Your Guy Will Reduce Abortion?

From U.S. News and World Report comes this list of things relating to women's ability to kill their babies and render themselves chemically sterile which Planned Parenthood's President and Chief Monster Cecile Richards thinks we'll see during an Obama administration; my comments are in red:

Women's health activists [translation: people who think women's health is all about killing babies] are fist-bumping each other over Obama's slam-dunk win, and they're hoping that he'll reverse some of the policies put in place by Bush. Yesterday, I had a chance to catch up with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards in between her strategy meetings and blogging for the Huffington Post. She predicted seven things that would change in the new administration.

1. No more federal funds for abstinence-only education. Two years ago Obama told a conservative Christian audience that abstinence-only education was not enough to prevent teen pregnancy and that he "respectfully but unequivocally" disagrees with those who oppose condom distribution to prevent HIV transmission, [because God--oh, excuse me, Saul Alinsky--forbid that children should ever learn about morality or virtue in school, or be taught in any way that doesn't assume they're all the moral equivalent of prostitutes and gigolos] according to the reproductive health blog Reality Check. He's also an original co-sponsor of the Prevention First Act, [does anybody remember hearing about this during the election season, from either the mainstream media or from prObama Catholics? Nope, me neither.] which mandates that all federal sex-education programs be medically accurate and include information about contraception. That legislation could be resurrected in the new Congress.

2. No more global gag rule. On Bush's first day in office in 2001, he reinstituted the "global gag rule" that restricted federally funded health clinics in foreign countries from performing abortions or even providing referrals or medical counseling on abortion. "We think there's going to be a change in that approach and that these clinics will be allowed once again to offer a full range of family planning services," Richards says. [Translation: there are too many poor people in the world, so let's kill as many as we can in utero, and decrease the surplus population before they start to interfere with our hedonistic selfish consumeristic morally depraved lifestyles.]

3. Better coverage for contraception and pregnancy. While Richards says women's health activists had to "battle the current administration to get emergency contraception approved over the counter," they're now hoping that Obama's proposed health plan will make contraception more affordable to women. [Cause if America isn't the land of the cheap pill and the quickie abortion, then what is it? My goodness, without cheapie contraceptives people might have to go back to behaving with moral decency--and we can't have that.] It could force drug plans to cover birth control pills as they would any other drug. (Many still do not.) [Because forcing people who don't believe in contraception for religious or moral reasons to help pay for it may be reprehensible, but we'll do it anyway.] And it could include more comprehensive prenatal coverage; some women shell out $5,000 or more to have a baby. [Obligatory lip service paid to the notion that some people actually don't kill the little critters.] I'm also curious to see whether Obama reverses a Medicaid rule that last year stopped allowing discounted birth control pills to be dispensed on college campuses. [Yes, by all means, let's up the male and female slut factor at colleges across our nation. Why don't we just import cheap pills from China? They may be risky for women, but in the goal of making sure everybody's a tramp no price is too high to pay.]

4. Reversal of the "conscience" regulation that threatens women's access to birth control. Obama will probably reverse a new rule, opposed by most medical organizations including the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that's slated to be enacted in the next few weeks by the Department of Health and Human Services. It allows doctors and other healthcare workers to opt out of certain practices that some of them find morally objectionable—like prescribing birth control pills, inserting IUDs, or dispensing emergency contraception (a.k.a. the morning-after pill) to rape victims—without fear of losing their jobs. Read more about this here. [And this is the big one, and some of us Catholic bloggers, big, small, and tiny-insignificant, have been warning about this from day one. It's not a "token gesture" for the Republicans to want to protect pro-life doctors and nurses and pharmacists from being forced to kill babies--and it's truly frightening to live in a country where pretty soon "medical professional" will mean "someone who assists in killing babies whether he wants to or not." But that's what Richards and her ilk want--and what Obama has promised to do.]

5. Increases in funding for reproductive health clinics serving uninsured. While Title X federal funds were recently increased for Planned Parenthood and other family planning clinics, Richards hopes an Obama administration will provide further increases. "We're currently meeting the needs of 3 million women," she says, "but an additional 14 million who need our services aren't getting them." [In other words, your tax dollars and mine must pay for women to kill their babies or commit the sin of contraception. Our beliefs are unimportant: it's seen as a public good to fund such things.]

6. Fixing gender disparities in health insurance premiums. While Obama's proposed health plan is probably a pipedream in this economic climate, it could (if ever enacted) ensure that women who buy individual policies aren't discriminated against because of their gender. A recent analysis of 3,500 health plans from the National Women's Law Center found that insurers charged 40-year-old women anywhere from 4 percent to 48 percent more than they charged men of the same age. "The average woman uses healthcare more because she spends an average of 5 years getting pregnant and 30 years trying not to," explains Richards. "It's certainly not fair that she pays more, and this is the kind of issue that Obama wants to address." [Of course, feminists like Richards have only themselves to blame for convincing insurance companies that pregnancy is a disease. And abstinence is cheap: one reason why money-hungry PP hates it so much.]

7. Improved access to morning after pills and abortions for U.S. military women serving overseas. Women who become pregnant while serving overseas are immediately shipped home. They aren't allowed to get surgical abortions in military hospitals, nor do they have access to medical abortions early in the pregnancy using Mifeprex, a combination of two medications. [Because of course a woman who is in the military must want to kill her child; surely they're all rampant die-hard feminists just waiting to be allowed to go into combat, which Richards also probably hopes Obama will allow.] Obama's health plan includes coverage for abortions, and he could join with the Democrat-led Congress to enact legislation that ensures that soldiers get the same health benefits [Because killing your baby is a health benefit--though not for the baby, of course, for whom it's just a form of execution] as the rest of us.

Catholics like myself who did not vote for Obama knew that all of this was coming; we expected that this sort of thing was what his followers wanted, and what they would demand that he do. But Catholics who voted for Obama--prObama Catholics, I've started calling them--assured us that none of this would really happen, or if it did, it wouldn't be that meaningful, or that Obama's solutions to war and poverty would shrink abortion almost into oblivion. They claimed, in effect, that Obama would not increase abortions. It's pretty hard to read that list of the seven things Cecile Richards expects to see and keep making that argument with a straight face.

Spines of the Times

The Catholic bishops made an unprecedented effort this past election season to remind their flock about the importance of the abortion issue. And they're not finished:

Nov 11th, 2008 | BALTIMORE -- The nation's Roman Catholic bishops vowed Tuesday to forcefully confront the Obama administration over its support for abortion rights, saying the church and religious freedom could be under attack in the new presidential administration.

In an impassioned discussion on Catholics in public life, several bishops said they would accept no compromise on abortion policy. Many condemned Catholics who had argued it was morally acceptable to back President-elect Obama because he pledged to reduce abortion rates.

And several prelates promised to call out Catholic policy makers on their failures to follow church teaching. Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, Pa., said he planned to counter Vice President-elect Biden, a Catholic, Scranton native who supports abortion rights.

"I cannot have a vice president-elect coming to Scranton to say he's learned his values there when those values are utterly against the teachings of the Catholic Church," Martino said. The Obama-Biden press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Archbishop Joseph Naumann of the Diocese of Kansas City in Kansas said politicians "can't check your principles at the door of the legislature."

Naumann has said repeatedly that Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic Democrat who supports abortion rights, should stop taking Holy Communion until she changes her stance.

"They cannot call themselves Catholic when they violate such a core belief as the dignity of the unborn," Naumann said Tuesday.

Predictably, the usual suspects are griping:

But Dr. Patrick Whelan, a pediatrician and president of Catholic Democrats, said angry statements from church leaders were counterproductive and would only alienate Catholics.

"We're calling on the bishops to move away from the more vicious language," Whelan said. He said the church needs to act "in a more creative, constructive way," to end abortion.

Catholics United was among the groups that argued in direct mail and TV ads during the campaign that taking the "pro-life" position means more than opposing abortion rights.

Chris Korzen, the group's executive director, said, "we honestly want to move past the deadlock" on abortion. He said church leaders were making that task harder.

"What are the bishops going to do now?" Korzen said. "'They have burned a lot of bridges with the Democrats and the new administration."

Pro-Democrat Catholics are almost becoming a self-parody. The "more vicious" language? Oh, please--as if pointing out that unborn humans in utero are alive, human, and deserving of our protection is a "vicious" thing to say; no, the vice involved would be the cruel killing of those humans, not the protest against the practice, Dr. Whelan.

And Mr. Korzen makes it sound as though the bishops ought to play nicey-nice so they can keep getting such goodies as inauguration tickets and access to the White House. Newsflash: keeping the Church's teachings on abortion on the q.t. for such meaningless secular goods is a prime example of the "What profits a man..." question; nobody with a grain of sense would trade his immortal soul for five minutes in the Rose Garden.

I think the "Episcopal Spine Alert" is becoming the rule more often than the exception. Times change; and the bishops of America are numbering more and more courageous shepherds among their company. The bleating of the sheep who want to go their own way, mindless of the precipice that lies ahead, will give way to the sound of the shepherds' voices, and Catholics in America will be presented at long last with a clear and unwavering message about the importance of the lives of the unborn, and the impossibility of accepting dubious compromises with those who have sworn enmity to their right to live and to be born.

Conjugating Catholic Comboxes

Years ago, a newspaper held a contest for people to send in creative verb "conjugations" illustrating, humorously, how differently we view our own actions from the way we view the actions of others. While I can't remember the exact examples chosen as winners, the idea was something like this:

I am a wise and thrifty shopper; you are a little extravagant, dear; she is a spendthrift.

or

I am a witty conversationalist; you ramble, rather; he is a prosaic bore.

You get the idea; the notion was that we always make our own thoughts, impulses, or actions seem more palatable than we do the thoughts, impulses, and actions of others.

I thought of that when I read this, on Mark Shea's blog:

I am in the midst of several massive projects with pressing deadlines, in addition to the normal pressures about the bills and, now, trying to figure out a way to get some health/dental insurance since my employer (such as it is) no longer covers it.

All this adds up to a lot of stress. So when, for instance, somebody waltzes on to my blog, looks around for something for a second, can't find it, and then uses his ignorance as a basis for charging me with hypocrisy, I get short-tempered. When they guy writes you back, full of fine wounded feelings because, hey!, he said he was *sorry* in advance before he demanded you drop everything and prove your innocence, that doesn't help either. And when various others are likewise writing to accuse you of betraying the unborn to death, or make snotty comments, or offer improving advice, or to sadly observe what a terrible person you've become, or to sneer at you for being one of those dumb converts who is oblivious to the fact that the Church taught stuff before John Paul II, or to prophetically announce that God has personally revealed to them that the earth is 6000 years old and I am deluded by Satan because I refuse to love this truth, it gets rather old.

Most days, I'm generally able to, well, ignore the buzzing cloud of people all clamoring to tell me off about this and that. Yesterday was not one of those days. I responded rather sharply on a number of occasions, sometimes to people who deserved a sharp reply and sometimes to people who didn't. In particular, I think I was unfair to Jeff Culbreath, who rightly complained that I should not have said six day, young earth creationists are "fundamentalists who think they are Catholic". It's not my business to read people out of the Catholic communion as a small but determined cadre of my readers regularly read me out of it. Mea culpa. In addition, I apologize to Ben and Mary Margaret for being snippy when they were trying to be helpful.

To all: There's an awful lot of you and just one of me. Do take that into account when I don't
a) see the devastating rebuttal a reader has written that he assumes I'm too cowardly to answer;
b) drop everything and answer a reader's demands to do a Google search for him on some elementary problem or stand guilty of whatever he is charging me with;
c) appreciate it when a reader demand I reply right this very second to some heinous charge that exists only in his mind like "You are only a Catholic writer because of the immense wealth, power, and prestige that accrues to the job";
d) immediately grant that the matter about which I know nothing that is consuming a reader's soul needs to henceforth become the become the focus of my life;
e) think that some casual expression of mine that more or less gets a minor quip across is a crime against humanity if it is not written with precision sufficient to satisfy a battery of scientists and lawyers;
f) feel that I need to listen to a reader ever again when you call me a liar for some honest opinion;
g) appreciate it when readers accuse me of suppressing free speech because I don't give them a forum to insult me in my comboxes;
h) welcome free psychological advice or diagnostics on my standing with Almighty God today;
i) hail the insight of those who locate the source of McCain's defeat with me;
j) welcome pinheads who accuse me of secretly rejoicing in Obama's victory and wanting more destruction of human life;
k) feel the need to refight the merits of voting third party for the next four years and listen to people explain to me that Obama is really pro-abortion, you know;
l) feel the need to be told that my contentment with the Mass in whatever form it is given me by Holy Church is a sign of the desperate plight of my protestantized half-breed unconverted soul;

and so forth. I run a fairly loose ship in the comboxes and people actually have rather a lot of room to talk about a lot of stuff. Just show some consideration for my limitations is all I ask. There's only one of me and there's not much of me to go around at this point. Prayers, rather than griping, accusation, criticism and soul diagnostics would be appreciated. I won't be stressed out forever, but right now I'm under the gun.

I've noticed the rise in sharp-tempered host-gunning at CAEI since the election. I realize that many, myself included, are sincerely disappointed about the election results, and some of us disagree with Mark's view that the Republican party has never done anything but throw token gestures at the pro-life contingent, so their loss isn't anything to be particularly sorry about; but this sincere disagreement does not need to produce a disagreeable attitude. If it has on my part, then I sincerely apologize.

I find it especially sad that a certain contingent of cradle Catholics finds it necessary, when they disagree with something Mark has said or written, to throw his convert status in his face, as if converts are to be condemned to live their whole lives under the suspicion that they might at any second fling off the mantle of Rome and high-tail it back to the denomination of their youths, and as if it's perfectly proper for sour-faced cradle Catholics to congregate at a convert's funeral and pay the grudging encomium, "Well, he was almost one of us."

Christ Himself, we are told in Scripture, warned the Pharisees that God the Father could raise up sons of Abraham out of the stones of the earth, when they were unduly prideful of that connection. God is not at all pleased by the insistence of some cradle Catholics that a Protestant convert has nothing to teach us, and should, instead, sit with his mouth shut at the feet of cradle Catholics listening to their wise and noble discourses in abject humility for a couple of decades before venturing a timid opinion; the zeal for the Lord's house that consumes a person and prompts him to speak is not even remotely the sole prerogative of cradle Catholics, and those among us whose formative years were spent singing "Hi, God! How are you doing today?" should really avoid creating the false impression that wisdom and nobility of Catholic discourse is our birthright.

But of course, I think that few cradle Catholics really believe that. It's just a way to get in a cheap shot, an ignoble dig, at a fellow Catholic who disagrees with them on something they think is a matter of almost doctrine, like the notion that the Earth really is exactly six thousand three hundred twenty seven years, seven months, eleven days, five hours and sixteen minutes old, which they can prove by virtue of their cradle Catholic status and reference to out-of-context quotes from various papal writings. It's the playground equivalent to referring to the wealth or strength or status of one's father to prove that one is right in some obscure childish argument; it doesn't mean anything in favor of the argument, and is designed to be hurtful and provocative.

And I think, deep down, cradle Catholic commenters know this quite well; it's just an example of that "conjugating" thing I show above: I am a wise and intelligent cradle Catholic who by virtue of my special connection to God and His Church is pretty much always right on matters of faith and morals; you are a less intelligent cradle Catholic who sometimes has the temerity to disagree with me despite the mortal danger into which this puts your soul; he is a convert, who can't be trusted in any way, because his Protestant ways of thinking are hard-wired into his brain and cause him to make all sorts of errors, chiefly the error of pointing out magisterial writings which disagree with my profound personal wisdom and prove me wrong.

And that, of course, is baloney--dangerous, prideful baloney, at that, the sort that's turning greenish around the edges and is a bad deal even at $1.99 a pound.

In our lifetimes the Church has been so richly blessed by the spiritual and intellectual gifts of converts to Catholicism that only a profound ingratitude to God for His gentle drawing of these magnanimous souls to His Church could ever prompt such a dangerous spirit of hostility toward them. Resorting to playground taunts in comboxes is hardly a way to bolster respect for one's arguments, and insisting that a cradle Catholic somehow has special wisdom ignores Scripture, history, and human nature.

A Prayer Request

I received the following e-mail from a reader of this blog:

I am trying to get the story of our youngest son out as we are asking for miraculous healing. On Oct 15th, Michael suffered a near-drowning in a family swimming pool while myself, my sister and most of our children where near-by. We began mouth-to mouth and CPR, the EMT's continued and Michael was revived in the ER. He has made great progress, is stable and not on life-support but his medical prognosis is bleak. He suffered significant brain injury and we are told not to expect anything more than brain stem function from him. I am sure that is not God's plan for Michael and until He tells me otherwise, I will continue to pray for healing and ask others to join us.

Luke 11:5-10 is constant source of comfort. We will be the friend who keeps asking for the bread! Please join us in our prayers for Michael and share his story with anyone. We've set up a caring bridge site to keep people updated. www.caringbridge.org/visit/lovemichael

God bless you,

Sabine Summerville

As I wrote back to Sabine, I'm honored to post her family's prayer request and to pray for her son. I am fond of the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, which is posted on the sidebar of this blog. I would ask those who wish to join me in praying for little Michael to ask his great patron saint, St. Michael the Archangel, to beseech God for Michael's swift and miraculous healing:

Saint Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle;
be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray:
and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits
who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.

Dear St. Michael, chosen by God to protect us in our frailty against the snares of the devil, I humbly implore you to ask Him on our behalf for the swift and miraculous healing of a little one who bears your name, Michael Summerville, that this healing may give glory to God and that Michael may be raised up to follow your great example and serve Our Lord Jesus Christ in whatever way God has chosen. Amen.

That Letter to my Bishop...

...is in progress; I hope to send it out tomorrow, following a final edit. My goal is to get it down to a single page, which is difficult considering the complexity of the situation.

But I know that the chances of the bishop ever seeing the letter will be increased exponentially if the letter is no more than a single page in length, so I'm going to try to employ the few editing skills I have to trim as much as I can without losing any of what really needs to be said.

I do plan on sharing the full letter here eventually, but I'd rather send it and wait for some sort of response first. My general belief is that the most likely response is to receive a form letter of sorts from an office or committee to which the letter has been forwarded; it's actually less often the case that a letter receives no response at all, from my own and other people's experiences, provided the letter is polite and respectful.

What I have written can be summed up in some bullet points:

• My children and other home schooled children have received the sacraments thanks to individual, pastoral priests;
• Most Catholic home schooled children must take parish religious ed. to receive the sacraments;
• These parish religious ed. and other requirements can be burdensome to home school families;
• religious education leaders have a difficult task and must prepare children who receive no regular religious education as part of their normal schooling;
• there are only two paths to the sacraments in the diocese of Fort Worth: one for children attending diocesan schools, and one for children who attend schools where religious instruction is not offered at all;
• forcing children who attend Catholic home schools to take the second path is unjust, as it does not recognize that they are in fact Catholic school students who receive daily religious instruction just like their counterparts in the diocesan schools, in addition to devotional practices and so on;
• adhering to the "two paths" approach sends a message to Catholic home school parent/teachers that their commitment to the religious education of their children means nothing at all as far as the parish is concerned;
• other dioceses in America have developed a "third path" for Catholic students taught at home which respects the parents' commitment to their children's Catholic upbringing and sets only a handful of reasonable provisions for pastoral oversight, such as a brief interview with a child before a sacrament is administered, some access to parish materials to be used at home, and/or a volunteer home schooling liaison who helps coordinate the involvement of home schooled children in parish sacramental celebrations;
• Since I am sure the Fort Worth Diocese does respect Catholic home schooling I am hopeful that some consideration will be given to these options to create a third path to the sacraments for Catholic school students whose Catholic school happens to be located in the home.

I think that this covers the basic aspects of the problem. Granted, I think that parents of public school students could also complain quite legitimately about some of the specific requirements their children must complete, but while I'm very willing to stand in solidarity with them the real problem here for Catholic home school parents is that we are, by and large, founding and operating Catholic schools. Catholic home schooling may be a less traditional method of providing a Catholic education to Catholic children than enrollment in a diocesan parochial school, but the reality is that now that such schools are seldom run by women religious who have taken a vow of poverty their costs have skyrocketed, making them out of the reach of many Catholic families especially those who have decided that living on a single income is a necessary part of their vocation (unless severe financial hardship were to strike the family).

And so the question isn't, at its root, whether every parish requirement for sacramental preparation is necessary and good, or bureaucratic and discouraging, or somewhere in between, though that would be, I think, an interesting discussion to have. Rather, the question for Catholic home school families is whether it is just or unjust for the parish, and the diocese, to insist that their children are not Catholic school students at all, and that far from trusting the parents to provide religious instruction the parish is acting properly in insisting that the children must repeat what they do at home in order to "prove" that they are ready for the sacraments.

Although it is, possibly, sad to admit this, the Catholic dioceses of America are never going to see a blissful return to the halcyon days of the glory of the diocesan-run Catholic school--at least, not in the lifetimes of anyone reading this today. According to this article, at the peak of Catholic education there were 5.7 million students, the majority of them Catholic, enrolled in parochial schools, but today, with a Catholic population of nearly 70 million, about 2.6 million students are enrolled in diocesan schools--and anecdotal evidence suggests that the proportion of non-Catholic students whose parents see the schools as a lower-cost alternative to extremely expensive private schools has risen as well.

It may well be that the best and brightest future of Catholic education in America, especially an education that is completely free from government entanglement and the pressures for increased secularization that accompany such entanglements, is going to feature the Catholic home school. It is, therefore, crucial that these schools be recognized as truly Catholic schools despite their non-traditional location in the homes of parents acting as teachers and catechists. And a vital component of that recognition is the development of sacramental paths for these children that more closely reflect the requirements placed on students in traditional diocesan parochial schools, not on the requirements placed on students whose regular school hours do not contain any Catholic religious instruction at all.

It is not a matter of wishing for special treatment or pats on the back or extraordinary praise for home schooling. It is a matter of justice, to expect that all Catholic school students, whose schools are faithful to the Magisterium and conducted with diligent and conscientious care for the religious education of the children taught there, will be allowed the same or a similar path of access to the sacraments, regardless of the location or size of the school.

Things I Love About Texas

Five Things I Love About Living In Texas:

1. Not having to shovel snow.
2. Not needing bed socks or flannel pajamas until late November.
3. Not needing a real winter coat much at all, except for a couple of unkind weeks in January and February.
4. Being able to enjoy ice cream pretty much all year.
5. Paying for items 1-4 with weather that includes tornado watches in November. Sigh.
   

Has Obama Been Influened by DREs?

You have to see this to believe it: this is what Obama's "Change.gov" says about student service:

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start. (Emphasis added--E.M.).

Good grief. Has the Obama campaign hired on a bunch of disgruntled DREs from Catholic parishes who think the idea of making kids clean up roadside litter or chat with prisoners in order to prove to the DRE that they are worthy enough to be confirmed was working out so well that the whole country ought to get on board?

Sheesh.

The religious education question is for another time; I'm currently in the process of composing a letter to my bishop explaining why the two-tier system (one set of requirements for diocesan parochial students which is simply "Show up, pay $$$$ tuition, get sacraments, lather, rinse, repeat" and another set for public school students who presumably are not receiving regular religious instruction in school, which is "attend weekly classes at the parish from the time you can hold a pencil until you marry or leave the church, whichever comes first; fill such added requirements as community service and anything else we feel like asking you to do, beg us for the sacraments, get told your parents missed a single mandatory meeting which puts you off the list for this year, repeat ad nauseum") is inherently unjust to Catholic homeschooling families, who have made the Catholic education of their children a personal and sacrificial priority, and whose children should not (as a friend of mine reports) have to take two years of Confirmation classes (pre-Confirmation and Confirmation) after a year and a half of which the students have not yet learned anything about the Holy Spirit, His gifts, or His fruits, but have memorized the Mass times of two parishes and are now just starting to talk about Creation and the Ten Commandments. (At this rate, by the time they reach Our Lord's discussion of the Paraclete my young friend will be in her eighties.)

But I digress. The real question at hand is this notion by Barack Obama that schoolchildren ought to be required to do community service as a condition of their public education.

I can see some people saying, in effect, "What's wrong with it? Children ought to learn about service, and since they're receiving a public education there's nothing wrong with asking them to give back to the community."

The problem with that reasoning is that it ignores the most fundamental aspect of the situation: Children do not belong to the state, but to their parents. No one has the right to require anything of children except their parents.

We're not talking about children being required to do their homework, or some other thing which their teachers acting in loco parentis may reasonably be expected to ask of them, such as ordinary obedience and the following of regular rules. We're talking about the state, through the school system, usurping something that fundamentally belongs to the parents: the right to direct their children's civic activities in such a way that supports, and does not contradict, the deeply held beliefs and values of the family.

For instance, a family of devout Muslims might not like their child being asked to serve meals in a soup kitchen where the child might have to handle pork, would they? A strictly observant Jewish family might complain if their child was assigned to clean up roadside litter on a Saturday morning, right? A Christian family wouldn't want their children assigned to stuff envelopes for Planned Parenthood, of course, and a Christian Scientist might object to his children being asked to assist in a public health clinic; a Quaker wouldn't want his child answering phones at a local Army recruitment center. There are countless other examples.

But, one might object, families might be given that choice; and besides, it's only fifty hours. What could be the harm?

The harm is in letting the government intrude even further into your family. The harm is letting the government assume, for one moment, that its rights to direct your children are greater than your own, that your children really belong to the state, and while you are responsible for them in every way until they reach maturity you must bear this responsibility without any corresponding rights to raise them as you see fit.

We must fight this while we still can. Or else fifty hours will become a hundred, and parental choice over the assigned community service will be removed, and the government will "require" more and more from "its" children without any reference to parents whatsoever.

On the Seemliness of Catholics Celebrating the Election of a Death-Eater

Sorry for the provocative title, but I have it on excellent authority that I am a pot-stirrer and a chaos junkie, which is actually one of the more interesting and colorful descriptions of my character I've encountered (save only the occasional bursts of creative euphemism employed by my opponents in my anti-gay marriage posts or comments, which beggar description). The fact that I was given this description by one of the members of a Catholic homeschooling forum for pointing out (somewhat mildly, for me, considering) that people who decided after seeing photos of her celebratory Obama cookie party that they'd rather not read her blog anymore were not being partisan hacks or overly political, but were merely uncomfortable at the notion that a fellow pro-life Catholic would find the election of the most pro-abortion candidate ever to run for the presidency to be something worth celebrating, is especially interesting.

To me, as I wrote over there, it would be just barely possible for a Catholic to conclude with much prayer, great sorrow, and deep regret that they ought to vote for Obama--I still think they would be wrong, but I can see how such a decision might possibly be reached. I honestly can't see how any sincere, pro-life Catholic would see Barack Obama's election as something to celebrate with a party, though; I find the whole idea completely unfathomable.

But we must be realistic; after all, as I wrote earlier, forty-five percent of the Catholics who described themselves as weekly Mass attendees did indeed vote for Obama, and many of them did more--they campaigned for him, they canvassed for him, they contributed and/or raised money for him, and they invested their time and talent into his campaign.

And quite frankly, this is scandalous.

It is one thing, as I said, for a Catholic voter to conclude sorrowfully that the pro-abortion, pro-partial birth abortion, pro-infanticide candidate will get his vote. It is another thing entirely for a Catholic voter to give open, public support, praise, and even celebration of the results in such a way that observers will conclude that Catholics really don't mean what they say about abortion, or are quite willing to pay lip-service to the idea of ending abortion while simultaneously working in complete opposition to that goal.

Moreover, for those engaged in such celebration to accuse the people who are uncomfortable with it of pure partisanship is as insulting as it is wrong. People, especially Catholic people, who are uncomfortable with celebrations and parties being held by ostensibly pro-life Catholics in honor of Barack Obama are quite right to be uncomfortable. There is little to celebrate in the fact that America has turned her back on the innocent unborn, and elected one of their declared enemies to be her leader. There is little to rejoice over in the elevation to the presidency of a man who thinks that those who become pregnant out of wedlock ought not be, in his words, "punished with a baby." There is little to smile about, and much to fear, from a man who has promised to overturn every state regulation of abortion, to override doctors' conscience exemptions and force them to participate in abortions, to force taxpayers to pay for abortions both here and abroad, and to take similar actions designed to ensure that more and more babies will be killed under his watch.

Yet the reality is that just slightly less than half of the people who will kneel near you at Mass this Sunday voted for this man, and may have celebrated--may yet be celebrating, convinced despite the inconvenient fact of the fall of Man that Obama is going to end poverty, stop war, provide everybody with free health care and other goodies, and otherwise usher in the kingdom of Heaven on Earth--well, except for his abortion ambitions, but we can overlook that, because it's not important at all, or at least not important enough to withhold our votes and celebrations.

It was widely repeated during the campaign season that we didn't need to bother voting for the Republican, because Republicans have had years to end abortion and have completely failed to do so, proving that they don't have the will to do it. That's a discussion for another time--but the sobering thought that I can't help but ponder is that perhaps the reason we still have abortion in America is because Catholics, even pro-life weekly Mass-attending ones, don't, when all is said and done, have the will to end it; or at least, they don't have the will to make ending it the slightest political priority.

It's hard to avoid coming to that conclusion when fellow Catholics write about and post pictures of their Obama victory parties. The sorrow in our hearts for our unborn brothers and sisters makes the sight of such things as jarring and unpleasant as balloons and streamers at a funeral.

Just Say No to Globalization

Ramesh Ponnuru at NRO's The Corner has an interesting post up:

In developing an agenda, Republicans and conservatives need to figure out what the top challenges facing the country are and how to meet them. But it would be pointless to devise an agenda that could not possibly win over a majority of the voters. And of course the same type of politics that might attract one group of voters will repel another. To generalize wildly: Upper-middle-class, college-educated voters tend to find the Republican party's economics attractive and its social positions less so; vice versa for lower-middle-class voters without college degrees. Which group should the builders of a center-right coalition try hardest to get? I largely agree with Ross Douthat's take on this question, but I would make an additional point.

I don't think many people are arguing that if Republicans just emphasized their social conservatism more, they would attract enough additional lower-middle-class voters to win a majority. The argument that Douthat, his co-author Reihan Salam, and I (among others!) are making is that it is possible to craft conservative economic policies that would serve the interests of this group. These policies need not drive away upper-middle-class voters. The Democrats' promises to help downscale voters have been compatible with an increased appeal to upper-middle-class voters, after all.

And if Republicans can appeal to lower-middle-class voters on domestic policy—health care, taxes, etc.—then they will have less need to make the type of cultural appeals to these voters (we disdain arugula, wave the flag a lot, etc.) that seem to drive some upper-middle-class voters batty. Such an economic agenda might thus help the party directly with the lower middle and indirectly with the upper middle. So I think the party's best bet is to keep, while doubtless modifying in some respects, its social conservatism while searching for free-market economic policies that would help lower-middle-class voters. I am doubtless biased by the fact that this approach would also be best for the country.

I agree with Mr. Ponnuru for the most part. The fact that Catholics and others who share our pro-life views (generally) voted so overwhelmingly for Obama is discouraging and disheartening. I think, though, that the Republican party does need to do a better job of selling economic conservatism to the non-country-club set, and to explain, as Reagan once did, how certain kinds of measures designed to free up capital could help not only huge corporations, but small buisness and family business/family farm owners as well.

Unfortunately, from my perspective--and admittedly economics is not my strong suit--it seems like the recent past has seen economic policies that only rewarded huge corporations, leaving small businesses struggling against what has often seemed like unfair competition just to stay afloat. Mom & Pop businesses have been replaced by chain stores or branches of giant companies, in large part because the cost of doing business has gotten so big, with only the giants able to negotiate with overseas vendors to get the kind of prices that will allow them to make a profit; service industries, too, have seen their small shops or operations closed down by the globalization trends that let the big guys hire twenty-four hour phone coverage in India or China at pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of employing Americans to do the same work.

To put it bluntly, the lower-middle class (and the middle-middle class) American is unlikely to be a cheerleader for globalization. It's because of the growing impact the global marketplace has had on American jobs and American businesses that so many have lost work, or seen small businesses fail. The American worker shouldn't have to compete with a sixteen-year-old girl in China for his livelihood, and many of us are discovering that the cost savings of owning mostly overseas-manufactured goods isn't really worth it in the long run.

When treaties like NAFTA were first passed, the cheerleaders for it spoke derisively of "buggy whip" industries that would, of course, have to relocate to foreign countries. But the American worker would be just fine, because he could always make high-tech goods that couldn't be churned out of sweatshops in Asia, right? Wrong: today, most high-tech goods like computers, televisions, iPods and MP3 players, and the like are also made in Asia or in other third-world nations, while the American manufacturing sector has shrunk further and further.

But knowledge workers--they'd be fine, yes? No: all sorts of programming and technology work has also been outsourced overseas, as have call centers, service jobs, and even newspaper copy editing. In America today a college degree is no guarantee that you'll get a job in any "knowledge" occupation.

Medical workers, then--surely doctors and nurses have no trouble being employed, right? Again, not quite: the number of medical employees brought in on H1-b visas and other programs is staggering.

I could go on, but you get the point.

The thing is, the Republicans have all kinds of reasons why people shouldn't be worried--unemployement is down, the economy is--er, was--sound, and if we're going through some post-Industrial age globalization growing pains, well, that's only to be expected. But the blithe explanations and detailed flow-charts and scholarly articles do not address the truly deep and nightmarish fear many low-to-middle middle class workers face, as they wonder if they'll be able to provide the basics for their families, or if they, too, will see a pink slip barrage laid down at work as their company decides to increase the profit margin by replacing them all with foreign workers.

These people, by and large, hate globalization, and everything associated with it. They see it as destroying their communities, draining their bank accounts, depriving them of decent employemnt and good wages, and making it harder and harder for them to stay afloat in a sea of rising costs and dwindling hope for the future.

And Obama promised them hope.

You may think he's lying; I may be pretty sure he is, and that he can't deliver on even a tenth of his promises to make people's lives better. But Republicans who brushed aside the economic worries of the middle class often gave a "let them eat cake" impression about it all, and insisted that once the kinks were worked out, why, globalization would mean more money for everybody! And if the crowds heard them murmur "especially the CEOs and those already wealthy," well, it might be that they slipped here and there, and actually said that sort of thing a time or two.

If the Republicans ever want to win a presidential election again, they need to step back and take a good, long, hard look at the costs of globalization--not the bottom line profit costs, but the human costs. Because telling a man who now works at Wal-mart that it's really a good thing that the candy factory or furniture factory or steel mill where he used to earn good money and keep his dignity is now located in Guadalajara just isn't going to cut it, anymore.

Doomed Quixotic Opposition Efforts

Now that all the fun and games of the election are over, it's time to start figuring out what to do about all those things Obama promised, that you don't like, didn't want, and didn't vote for (especially if you're a Catholic who voted for Obama in the serene belief that he wasn't actually going to do all those terrible things he promised to do to make it cheaper and easier than ever to kill the unborn).

Fortunately, there's no lack of ways to stand up and fight against every single pro-abortion or socialist promise Obama has made. You can start by taking part in a doomed quixotic petition drive, to collect signatures of people who oppose FOCA (Hat tip: Mark Shea).

And that's not all! As part of your doomed quixotic opposition efforts, which shall henceforth be referred to by the initials dqoe, you can:

• start your very own "Impeach Obama" Facebook page,
• Hang out on the "Nobama" website,
• sport anti-Obama wear like these examples,
• protest against the effects of Obama's tax hikes on professional sports,
• insist that Obama not be called "president of the world,"
• lobby for increased taxes on MSNBC,
• express your vexation in blog posts and comment boxes,
  
• and too many other things to mention.

None of these things is likely to do anything at all, but they wouldn't be "doomed quixotic" opposition efforts if they had any likelihood of having positive practical results--but of course, by the same logic as the dq3 voter logic, just because none of these things is likely to do any good doesn't mean you shouldn't do them.

I'm being facetious, of course.

Fortunately, there is one form of opposition (also HT: Mark) that is likely to be more efficacious: the "Rosaries for Life" initiative:

The ultimate goal is a lofty one - 68,000,000 rosaries said for the triumph of the Culture of Life in our country. Why 68,000,000? 68 million is roughly the number of Catholics in our country, and it’s also very close to the number of people who voted for Barack Obama in the recent election. Therefore, there are at least 68 million reasons to do penance. If Catholics would pray and act as they should, the Culture of Death would be put to rout in our country. This battle is primarily spiritual warfare, and it’s time we finally get organized as an army.

The first initiative of Rosaries for Life is going to be the Inauguration Day Rosary Novena. This Novena is going to last for 72 days - it consists of 4 sets of mysteries 9 times for the intentions, followed by 4 sets of mysteries 9 times in thanksgiving = 72 days of praying 5 decades). The novena will begin on November 10th, the feast of St. Leo the Great (as well as the first day of the USCCB meeting) and end on January 20th, Inauguration Day.

See the website for more.

We should be praying for our nation, and yes, even for Obama. I'm afraid I can't join those who would pray that God either "opens his eyes or closes them forever," because that's not a prayer I can make in good conscience. But I see no problem with this Irish prayer:

May those that love us, love us.
And those that don't love us,
May God turn their hearts.
And if He doesn't turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles
So we will know them by their limping.

Summing It Up

The So-Called Catholic Vote

The Curt Jester's Mandatory post-election rant is well worth reading. I especially liked this section:

Now we will also have a culture of death Catholic Vice President who will be putting the vice into Vice President with his support of many forms of abortion. I bet the media can hardly wait to snap a picture of him receiving Communion to gloat. The USCCB meets soon to discuss "practical and pastoral implications of political support for abortion." Will the scandal of Sen. Biden be addressed? Probably not, but I would love to be wrong.

I hear that Sen. Obama will be FedExing 30 pieces of silver to Doug Kmiec. Moloch is quite happy with all of the Catholics that voted for Sen. Obama. According to Catholic Culture "Among Catholic voters who attend Mass weekly, McCain won majority support: 54- 45%. Among those who do not attend weekly Mass, the margin for Obama was an overwhelming 61- 37%. Thus Obama drew his support from inactive Catholics." So 45 percent of Mass going Catholics supported the most extreme supporter of abortion ever in a Presidential race. The unborn chopped up via scalpels will be glad to hear about hope and change.

There's been a lot of talk in the past about "the Catholic vote." But let's get one thing straight: there is no longer any such thing as a Catholic vote. Here's why:

1. Much is made over the notion that America is about twenty-five percent Catholic, but all that means is that twenty-five percent of the people who answer various surveys say they are Catholic. The estimated number of Catholics in America, both from this source and from various official figures, is just under seventy million.

2. Since McCain lost yesterday's election by about 7.5 million votes (with two states not tabulated yet), and there are almost ten times that number of Catholics in America, it would seem that Catholics overwhelmingly voted for Obama.

3. However, only 23% of the 70 million Catholics in America attend Mass weekly--which means that only about that number are "practicing" Catholics (a small number may be genuinely impeded from attending Mass for a serious reason, but the vast majority of the 77% of Catholics who go to Mass only occasionally or not at all are not in any sense of the word "practicing" Catholics). So the number of practicing Catholics who might reasonably be expected to consider the Church's teachings seriously and avoid voting for the most pro-abortion presidential candidate ever to be elected is no more than about sixteen million; the others would vote more like all other lukewarm "religious" voters, and would probably tilt toward Obama as the statistics the Curt Jester posted suggest.

4. Even if 100% of those sixteen million practicing Catholics voted, according to the statistics the Curt Jester posted, 7.2 million would have voted for Obama (which is disconcertingly close to the exact number of votes Obama needed to win). However, it is unlikely that 100% of those sixteen million voted, for three simple reasons: a) not all of those Catholics are old enough to vote, b) not all of those Catholics are eligible to vote [esp. recent immigrants], and c) not all of those are otherwise capable of voting [sudden illness, inability to get to polls, etc.].

5. In the general population only about half of those eligible to vote do so in any election. Even if more than half of the eligible practicing Catholics voted, there is no way of knowing the exact number, other than to assume that it was somewhat less than the total sixteen million. So the maximum impact the Church could have in any given election even if all sixteen million weekly Mass attendees were eligible voters would be roughly 8.8 million votes--because that represents the 55% of weekly Mass-going Catholics actually willing to take seriously all of the bishops' various statements about the need to consider a candidates position on the abortion issue as the most important aspect when deciding for whom to vote. However, it can't be denied that the number of eligible voters among weekly Mass attendees is probably significantly less than sixteen million, which means that the number of Catholics who take the Church's teachings about abortion seriously enough to vote accordingly is probably a great deal less than 8.8 million, too.

6. Can eight or nine million voters be said to have enough "clout" on their own to constitute a formidable "Catholic vote?" Hardly. As an example, consider the Democrat primary--Hillary Clinton received somewhere around eighteen million votes, but that wasn't enough to win her the primary; and the disenchanted "Hillary voters" or PUMAs weren't enough of a percent of that eighteen million votes to throw yesterday's election to McCain.

So unless the bishops start really focusing on catechesis and stop letting many of those 77% of occasional Mass-goers treat the Church like a warm fuzzy place to celebrate Christmas and Easter and a sacrament factory that dispenses all the sacraments to anyone willing to show up and go through a labyrinthine and rules-oriented DRE-run "sacramental prep" program for the appropriate number of years and/or classes, only to watch three-quarters of these people disappear until they want to marry their live-in boyfriend or girlfriend in one of the pretty churches in town, we're not going to have anything even remotely approximating a "Catholic vote" in America. Sadly, the numbers above show that even the weekly pew-sitters don't seem to get it; years of terrible homilies about the importance of being nice to everybody hasn't done a whole lot for the Church Militant, many of whom seem to think that if we just invite Evil in for a nice cup of tea and a good long chat, and maybe get him to sign on for a felt-banner project or a homeless animal awareness drive, that Evil will turn out to be not such a bad fellow after all--even if Evil does insist we overlook his terrible presence in the deaths of the innocent unborn.

Reletivism's Unintended Consequences

With all of the bad news emanating from the penumbras of last night's election results, it's easy to overlook the one bit of good news: for now, marriage is still between a man and a woman, and has returned to being that in California. Excerpt:

Of the three measures to ban gay marriages, California's was the most closely watched as the state is the most populous and is perceived as a political and cultural leader.

With 96.4 percent of precincts reporting, the California proposition -- which came about half a year after the state's highest court opened the way to gay marriage -- was ahead by more than 4 percentage points.

In San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom initiated gay marriages in City Hall and launched the legal battle resulting in recognition of same-sex unions, Obama's victory and message of change consoled proposition opponents.

"We have Obama," Noelle Skool, 29, said as she checked identification at a popular lesbian bar in San Francisco's Mission district. "It's small steps. Eventually they'll warm up to the fact that, hey, we're all equal."

Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred said she planned a lawsuit to challenge California's new gay-marriage ban on behalf of two lesbian clients involved in the earlier suit that reached the California Supreme Court.

Sadly, the pro-life amendments on the ballot in various states didn't fare so well:

Meanwhile, in one of the most emotionally-fought U.S. social issues, abortion rights advocates declared victory in two states.

Colorado voters rejected a measure that would have made abortion the legal equivalent of murder by defining human life as beginning at conception.

South Dakota defeated a ban on abortion that, if passed, had been expected to spark a court battle leading to the Supreme Court.

"We defeated it here, and it won't spread to other states," said Sarah Stoesz, president of the local Planned Parenthood chapter. "And now we've started a counter movement in a very conservative part of the country."

In other state ballots, Michigan voted to allow medical use of marijuana, Nebraska ended affirmative action, or policies to help minorities, and Washington voted to allow doctor-assisted suicide.

There's probably going to be a lot of analysis over this: why was gay marriage defeated, while pro-life measures were also defeated? Why did assisted suicide pass in Washington? What does it mean that traditional marriage was defended, while other traditional and life-affirming measures went down in defeat?

Sadly, I think it just illustrates that relativism is the underpinning of our national philosophy.

There isn't a coherent idea of what is right and what is wrong beneath two such dissimilar actions on two similar (from the moral perspective) questions. The only coherent reason to oppose gay marriage is that one recognizes that is profoundly and fundamentally wrong to redefine an institution almost as old as humanity itself to extend in ways and to people who were never described by it; the only coherent reason to oppose abortion and assisted suicide is because one recognizes that it is profoundly and fundamentally wrong to kill innocent human beings. They are radically linked, these two questions, and the answers to them are going to define who we are, what it means to be a twenty-first century American, whether we are still swayed in any way by the moral traditions and understandings of countless generations before us, or whether we have thrown all of that away and are deliberately seeking new definitions of our foundational relationships that depend on nothing more than what it is materially convenient for us to believe at any given moment.

I don't think the rejection of the one set of questions and the acceptance of the others means that Americans have become so self-aware that they seek formally and deliberately to redefine their relationship to the universe, to their historical ancestry, or to anything else, for that matter; I think all it means is that Americans have now elevated momentary subjective "feelings" to the level of rational thought, and use nothing more than this to guide them when they are asked to weigh in on questions of such awful import.

So enough Americans still "feel" that there is something a bit off about same-sex marriages to vote accordingly, while some of these same Americans "feel" that abortion is more or less a good idea, or "feel" that they don't want to be the ones restricting it, and so forth. Of course there are people who are opposed on principle to both, and their efforts and contributions to preventing same-sex marriage and protecting the unborn should never be overlooked; but we couldn't have the results we do, of prevention of gay marriage but failure to protect the unborn, without a lot of people voting not on principle, but on how they feel about it all, on what feels right to them at this given moment.

I know that liberals encourage this kind of thinking--or feeling--because they believe that more often than not they will be able to encourage the correct sort of feeling that will result in people voting the way the liberals want them to. Yesterday's results, though, show that this is by no means the case; people's feelings are capricious and unreliable, and while the Left has had decades now to make people "feel" happy about abortion, they haven't had as much time to create the correct sort of "feeling" about same-sex marriage.

But if your philosophy is relativism, and you sincerely believe that everyone's "truth" is equally valid, then how can you possibly complain when some people's truth isn't what yours is? Isn't the feeling that we'd rather not have same-sex marriage just as valid as the feeling that it ought to be allowed? How can you elevate one feeling to a level of greater importance than another?

You can't--you can only unilaterally impose your will and force everyone else to accept it, with greater and greater use of force to do so. That's when the illusion that relativism is willing to accept all ideas equally dissolves into the mush that it really is, and when the pope's phrase, "the dictatorship of relativism," illuminates the truth about what relativism will always eventually become.

The Morning Brings Reflection

I was pretty angry last night, as I'm sure you can tell from the post below this one. It seemed to me a cruel and ugly thing that so many of my fellow citizens could so blindly select a man who is so great a partisan of the evil that is abortion to be our leader; truth be told, it still does, but in keeping with my desire to put as charitable an interpretation on yesterday's election as possible I've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of those who voted for Obama do not necessarily accept this evil in its fullest, but are instead lamentably unintelligent, easily deluded, seriously and negligently misinformed, or, most likely, some combination of all of these things.

I remember feeling much the same way when Bill Clinton was first elected president. How could Americans have been so utterly thoughtless as to elect a supremely unprincipled pro-abortion crooked politician as Mr. Clinton to lead the nation? But they had; there was no getting over it.

I was in college at the time, and my fellow pro-life Catholic classmates were, most of them, as stunned and horrified as I was. But there wasn't any of the leftist nonsense that proclaimed "He's not my president!" It would have been easier then if we could say that; it would be easier now, too.

I was studying English literature at the time, and I couldn't help but think of The Tempest, and Prospero's heartbreaking words about Caliban: "...this thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine." No, I wasn't calling Clinton a "thing of darkness," but I was recognizing that the cultural forces which had propelled him into office lay like a foul cancer at the roots of our nation: self-interest, class warfare, greed and envy, the ultimate act of murderous selfishness that is abortion, the desire to move beyond our common Christian values to a post-Christian secular materialist basis on which to build our completely material and individualistic existence, and so on.

And so, like it or not, Obama is our president, even if he reflects a deep chasm of immoral relativism and blind selfishness that has always been our nation's ame damne, in a manner of speaking. His emergence is proof that that "thing of darkness" which haunts us is still present: our worst natures, our ugliest realities, our most unprepossessing faces, our most unworthy ambitions, all of them conspiring together to create the stereotypical twenty-first century American: proud, selfish, greedy, materialistic, lazy, gluttonous and vain; and these faults are responsible for the election of a man who promises to take from the rich and give to you so long as you bow down, to make sure life is easy and pleasant for you, so long as you overlook the death of the unborn, to help you, so long as you don't mind surrendering more and more of your freedom to the nanny-state.

There's a youtube clip out there showing Obama laughing (as he speaks to Planned Parenthood) about how the culture war is "so nineties;" and we've all seen the "bitter--cling to God, guns, religion" statement repeated ad nauseum. Someone like Obama sees everything in terms of a power struggle: people fought the culture war not because they believed in objective good or evil, but because it was their way of lashing out at the people in power they disagreed with; people cling to religion not because they believe it's true, but because it gives them refuge at a time when their livelihoods are threatened by globalism and they are constantly reminded that they are racist oppressors--even if they've never personally been racists or oppressed anyone. Such a man is inherently a materialist, no matter what faith he claims to profess--and sadly, many, many Americans who call themselves Christian are just as much materialists; they go to church on a Sunday here and there, perhaps, but they believe they are responsible for their prosperity and that the single-minded and focused pursuit of wealth and material goods is a fitting occupation for a Christian. Such a Christian is quite likely to believe we can bring about heaven on earth by adopting this plan to end poverty and that program to end war; such a Christian is willing to take the devil's trade of "overlooking" abortion in pursuit of these seemingly-worthy goals--for after all, they reason, without any war or any poverty or any racism or any oppression who will want an abortion?

It is tragic, really, that they forget the Fall, that they forget that our greatest battles have never been fought in the realm of the material. It is tragic that they forget the Cross, that they forget that Jesus disappointed many of His followers by not overthrowing the Roman government and filling the homes of the faithful with endless miracle-bread that cost them nothing, so that they could enjoy an earthy paradise of ease and pleasure. It is tragic that they are still looking for such an earthly savior--it is tragic, too, that so many think they have found one.

We will always have war so long as one man wants what another has. We will always have poverty so long as one man cheats another out of what is rightfully his. We are likely to have more of both when we are led by people who forget these things, who forget that the evils that lurk within men's souls are not solved by a five-point plan or addressed by a socialist world-view. We will always be capable of being in the grip of evil, so long as we are willing to compromise with evil or accept evil instead of remaining resolute in our fight against it; we can't trade the mirage of a "solution" for poverty or war for the reality of the evil of the slaughter of the innocent unborn.

But the fatal weakness that lies at the heart of America has been this belief that a utopia is possible--if only we accept this evil or overlook that one. For our ancestors, the evil was slavery, and every effort was made to work with it, overlook it, restrict it, permit it to spread, and so on, until the abolitionists began to touch the hearts of their fellow-men and enlighten them to the cruel and unjust reality that slavery was, awakening in their better natures the desire to do away with this great wrong. For us, today, that evil is abortion, with its associated evils of contraception, divorce, and sex outside of marriage--the poison fruits of the sexual revolution that have made our nation weak and our families' security precarious. So banal and omnipresent is this evil that we expect our children to be corrupted by the very adults who should protect their innocence; so ugly are the consequences of this evil that we speak and act as though virtue and chastity are impossible and idealistic goals with no basis in reality, instead of the signs of a truly healthy and free culture.

The evil that permeates our culture has chosen Obama to be its fitting representative. He is everything they want in a president, and his involvement in and acceptance of the Culture of Death is, at at the heart of it, the very thing they want. Because what they want, in addition to easy living and free goodies provided by the work of others, is sex without consequences--and Obama has promised them that above all.

When Bill Clinton was elected, some of my college professors held an informal seminar for the students to discuss the question on everyone's minds: What now? I recall that one professor spoke movingly about our need for prayer, for getting down on our knees and turning to God. The next professor to speak applauded his colleague's sentiments, but added, "Sure, we've got to get down on our knees. But when we get back up again, we've got to do something." I think that this professor was right.

We do have to do something. We have to target this evil at the heart of American culture, this evil that will destroy us. We have to fight it in our families, our churches, our communities, our towns and cities, and so on. We have to shine the light of truth on the lie that is the sexual revolution, and show it for the sick and hopeless evil that it is. The culture war is not a thing of the past; it's only just beginning. And the election of our Abortion President illustrates as almost nothing else could just how right and just and necessary this battle is.

The Prayer of Reverend Wright

Do you remember when the Jeremiah Wright story first broke, and the Reverend Wright's inflammatory preaching made the news? Excerpt:

An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Today, Rev. Wright's prayer has been answered.

Never before in the history of America have the nation's citizens selected as their leader a man so steeped in the support of evil as Barack Obama. Never before has America so sullenly turned her back on God and on His laws as she did this day; never before has America so unquestioningly played the harlot to the new false gods of modernity and relativism. Never before have Americans so blindly chanted slogans while secretly lusting after their neighbor's goods; never before have Americans been so naked in their covetousness, their demand that the federal government feed them and clothe them and wipe their snotty noses in times of illness--all to be paid for by the open theft of the honest incomes of other men, who now have no incentive to work hard and strive for success, since that success will be stolen from them and used to line the public coffers.

America was once a great nation, conceived in liberty, forged in the belief that all men were deserving of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now America stands for nothing but materialism, bread and circuses, and the notion that only lives that we decide are worth protecting shall be protected--all others may be dispatched the moment they're no longer convenient to us. And our fellow citizens have worked for this, and hoped for this, and even--God spare them!--prayed for this.

There is no turning back from this evil hour. There will be no hope, now or ever, that a truly great America will return. I fully expect to see our borders opened, our sovereignty derided as unimportant and given away or sold to the highest bidder; I fully expect to see Christian values defined as "bigotry" and hatred of Christianity mainstreamed as "normal."

Abortion will be ubiquitous; the avenues of dissent will slowly be closed, and pro-life citizens marginalized and silenced. Gay marriage will become the law of the land, and will be made into a weapon to be used against all religious people who don't agree that our children must believe that Bob and Bill are "married" or that Sue and Liz are "married." Slowly it will become impossible for us to interact in any way in this brave new society, because we will have to hide our beliefs and even deny them in order to have access to jobs or businesses or any livelihoods whatsoever.

I don't know what God thought of Rev. Wright's prayer, but to all intents and purposes He has answered it. America is, if not damned, at least doomed. Perhaps someday on some distant shore we will teach our children's children about the great nation we once knew; but the slide into total degradation has begun, and unless God chooses to provide us with some miracle or other, there is nothing we can do to stop our once-great nation from becoming a rotting corpse, a whited sepulcher, a ghoulish and licentious shadow of her once noble self.

It's a cold comfort to me at this hour that I did do the one thing I could have done to prevent this evil from taking place; that is, I voted for McCain--but it is a comfort. I can say before God and man that I rejected this evil to the fullest extent possible to me, and I know that many of you can say the same. Perhaps together we can find a way to survive the coming onslaught against our liberties and our religious freedoms, or at least to help each other to minimize the worst effects of these things. We will no longer be at peace in the land of our birth, though, and the efforts made to end our two-hundred-plus years of religious liberty will be unrelenting and vile. It's time to start preparing for that reality now--there is nothing else left for us to do.

The Future

I Have A Feeling...

....it's...
...going...
...to...
...be...
...a...
...long...
...night...


...sigh.

Something Else

Okay, it's going to be a long afternoon, and possibly a long night. So I'm going to post about something not related to the election for a minute.

Saturday, Nov. 1, I started writing my third novel during the National Novel Writing Month's annual event. In 2006 and 2007 I successfully wrote 50,000 words in one month; in fact, the first year I joined late (Nov. 9) and finished the whole book (about 65,000 words) in nineteen days.

Last year's novel didn't go quite as well. I still think the concept was workable, but the main character ran away with the story, adamantly refusing to fall in love with the guy I had created for that purpose, pointing out that his notable character flaws and defects were in no way the sort of thing someone like her would either find admirable or be blind enough to overlook, and insisting on rewriting things to her satisfaction generally. This was a wholly new experience for me, and a frustrating one given that during the whole Nanowrimo event I was also undertaking my first-ever substitute blogging venture over at Crunchy Cons, writing multiple and lengthy blog posts each day and generally loving the experience. Somehow I managed to pass the 50,000 word benchmark, but I had at least two chapters to finish, and a year later I have yet to go back and straighten things out; to tell you the truth, that character still intimidates me rather, and I have no idea if I'll ever be able to write a believable ending for the story that will satisfy her.

This year I'm off to a good start: over eight thousand words so far, and a completed first chapter that went pretty well. I have yet to experience that rush of enjoyment that came on with the first novel, though, and I think that part of the reason for that is that the first novel was a concept I'd been mulling for a long time with a character I genuinely liked--that book is still the only completed manuscript I have that has publishing potential, especially given the dearth of material available for ten-to-twelve year olds (especially boys) who like space adventures, but whose parents prefer a thoroughly moral tale compatible with Christian thought (though the book isn't overtly Catholic or Christian--just ethical, so to speak).

This year's novel is more in the young adult fantasy realm than the sci-fi realm, just like last year's was (though last year's is more properly a fantasy/sci-fi crossover). Which is funny, because I prefer to write young adult science fiction, but every now and then a fantasy concept--really more like an elaborate fairy tale--will tease at my brain until I pretty much have to write the thing. I like the main characters so far, and am finding the writing easier than last time, so with any luck this will be a novel I actually finish this month--first draft, anyway; one of the cardinal rules of Nanowrimo is that one must stifle one's inner editor, and that editing is for December.

It's only November 4. If you've ever hankered after the idea of writing a whole book, start to finish, why not sign up and join Nanowrimo? If I could finish a book the year I started on the ninth, I'm sure you could finish your book--or at least get to that 50,000 word mark--by November 30, too. The point isn't to write the Great American Novel--the point is just to get started on writing, to experience what it's like to write something significant by a certain deadline, and to enjoy the process without being overly critical as to the results.

If you do sign up, I'm "Red Cardigan" over there, too. In fact, my blogging nickname originated with National Novel Writing Month, and this blog started just a couple of months after my first Nanowrimo experience; I knew I wanted to keep writing, and blogging seemed like a good way to do that. There's no telling what can happen when you take up the writing habit.

Open Election Day Thread

In light of the fact that some places on the web (particularly a certain homeschooling board) don't allow open political discussion, I wanted to offer a spot for those who don't read the more political blogs (and those who do, too--all are welcome!) to talk about anything at all relating to today's election, to the voting experience, to candidates, to ranting generally and so on. The rules are simple:

1. Please give yourself a nickname (if you don't already use one here) to facilitate conversation with other commenters; there's a space for it, or you can simply "sign" your post.
2. Please avoid obscene language or abusive comments. If you think people who vote for one candidate or another are acting unintelligently, say so, and say why; "You're stupid!" isn't an argument, and will be deleted.
3. Please be respectful of people even if you disagree with them. Pro-life Catholic Obama supporters are people I strongly disagree with, but they're still created in the image and likeness of God no matter how sadly and blindly wrong their opinions in this election seem to me; let's remember that regardless of where you fall on this.
4. Other than these mild restrictions, say whatever is on your mind! This is a huge election, a hotly-contested one, and we'll probably be talking about the results for a long time. So please feel free to express your honest opinions about any facet of it whatsoever.

I'll be monitoring the comments here, but will be as permissive as possible provided the rules above are followed. Let's all join in prayer that whatever the outcome of today's election, God's will for our nation will be done.

Update: C'mon, now, don't be shy. Dozens of you have clicked over from that forum I mentioned--go ahead, tell us how you voted or why you're worried or what you hope will happen! I know you've got opinions. :)

I'm Not Sure What To Make Of This...

...but I've had multiple people find my blog today by searching for "blank ballot," or "leave president blank on ballot" or some combination of those words.

Good news for Obama? Good news for McCain? Or bad news for both of them?

Election Eve

In the last few days, I received emails from two different presidential campaigns.

One, from the McCain campaign, was a simple reminder to get out and vote. They had my address because I contacted them months ago to ask for a clarification about McCain's ESCR support, a clarification I never actually got, sadly.

The second came from the Baldwin campaign, a little too late since I already voted for McCain. I had asked whether their party's pro-life position included opposition to federally-funded abortifacient contraception through programs such as Medicaid etc. The answer read as follows:

You asked about our abortion position. This is a position that is fundamental to the Constitution Party, which has, since it's creation, been the only 100% pro-life party. It is not a political ploy, nor merely words only, like the Republican Party. We see protection of human life one of the primary roles of government, and human life must be protected in all forms, from conception of a child to even the elderly and infirm. To make exceptions is to be inconsistent, to not truly be pro-life, for it would only be pro-life IF this or IF that condition. Life is life, and life must not be taken without due process of law, as our Bill of Rights, which applies to every American, says so clearly. Medicaid would not continue to expand: those on it currently would be continued to be provided for, since a promise had been made. But no more would be added, as it is NOT the federal government's authority to provide healthcare: nowehere is this something given to them in the Constitution.

Now, this doesn't really answer my question in its entirety, though I think the person writing the email is trying to stress the 100% pro-life party position and also mentions the plan eventually to eliminate Medicaid. But since I posted the response to this question which I received earlier from the Joe Schriner campaign, I thought it would be only fair to include the Baldwin response as well.

I recognize that this election is a tough one. People of good will, Catholics included, have disagreed with each other as to the best way to vote. While I sympathize with those who are voting third-party or leaving the ballot blank, I still can't fathom the notion that a vote for Obama in any way coincides with Catholic teaching, though; I think the Catholics who are voting for Obama see him as somehow above "normal" politics, so much so that his rabid and distasteful support for partial birth abortion, his opposition to BAIPA, and his vow to sign FOCA are all overlooked as unimportant compared to their belief that this man really will heal the planet, end division, stop war, eliminate poverty, and usher in a kind of Heaven-on-earth.

I was born in Illinois, and have relatives who are all too familiar with Chicago-style politics; the phrase "vote early and often" was coined in Chicago, though three different people are credited with saying it. Maybe that's why it's so easy for me to be cynical about the "Lightworker," who is promising the sun, the moon, and the stars to his supporters--but who has never accomplished anything of note during his relatively brief political career, and who seems to have made "style over substance" a personal creed. I don't see a planet-healing, consensus-building, superstar of the political world; I see a typical Chicago politician, with dubious allies and few friends, whose past is still relatively unknown thanks to a media willing to roll over and play dead and get their collective tummies scratched by the Obama campaign--or at least, to get to say "Nyah, nyah" to the less fortunate reporters kicked off the campaign plane with only days to go before the election. Instead of a man with great humility and potential, I see a man hubristic enough to take his presidential campaign overseas in the middle of the election year, and to adopt a mock presidential "seal of the candidate" until the outcry from the right-wing media made him remove it. Instead of a man who plans to help our country move past its divisions, I see a man who plans to eliminate division by stifling dissent, through laws like FOCA and the soon-to-be resurrected Fairness Doctrine; instead of a man who will eliminate poverty, I see a man who will eliminate the incentive for hard work, by taking more and more of the income of those who earn between $50,000 and $100,000 and giving it to those who earn nothing at all.

If tomorrow's election really does go the way the media so blatantly hopes it will, then I think that the rest of the country--or most of it--will come to see Barack Obama as I see him. I'm still not sure that he will be our next president, but if he is, I think he will be a one-term president, because I don't think it will take the rest of the country more than four years to realize that he can't, in fact, walk on water, feed crowds of people with only a handful of food, or singlehandedly end war and poverty and division--no matter how grandiose his promises have been.

A Public Service Announcement

Note to the anonymous Obamabots who left messages on the post below this one: get a life. Really.

I'm going to be critical of your "messiah." Grow up and deal with it.

If he's elected I'm going to write a lot of negative things about him. If you can't stand that, find lots of echo-chamber blogs to visit that will reinforce you in your okayness, and don't bother stopping by this one.

My policy as to comments is simple: I welcome them, and I don't particularly mind disagreement, especially intelligent disagreement. I do not, however, consider comments which simply announce that I am wrong without giving any explanation as to why you think so to be intelligent disagreement; I consider them to be the equivalent of a teenage rant against the adult world.

And if you're too cowardly even to pick a nickname, choosing instead to post as "anonymous" and from that safe vantage point to fling mud, then I think you're really about ten to twelve, and are probably posting without your mother's knowledge or approval.

So I delete those, as I did on the post below this one. Because if you really are ten to twelve years old you shouldn't be posting drive-by mud-flinging without your mother's approval; and if you're older than that then you should know better.

Regular readers and commenters, I'm sorry you had to read so many of those childish comments before I got back out here to deal with them; bearing in mind that liberals think of "fairness" as "nobody ever ever ever gets to say anything we don't like or that hurts our feelings in any way" I'll be more vigilant over the next couple of days.

She Should Have Died Hereafter

Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died this morning of cancer. She was 86 years old.

Many are expressing sympathy for Obama at the tragic timing of this loss: this woman who practically raised him should not have died at this moment, not when he's on the eve of what may very possibly be his historic victory in tomorrow's presidential race.

I've come to the inescapable conclusion that I'm just not as nice as some people are.

I can't forget that Barack Obama threw this woman under the bus when he was defending himself for having spent twenty years listening to the hate-speech of Jeremiah Wright. It's okay--I was raised by a racist," seemed to be the subtext of that supremely ugly moment.

Nor can I forget that Dunham, frequently described as a "feminist," probably helped shape Barack's extremely liberal pro-abortion views.

I also can't help but wonder if perhaps losing his grandmother at this moment might temper down some of the unbelievable hubris of Obama's campaign, which has been running around crowing about the "righteous wind" at their backs. Sorry, but anyone who all but salivates over the possibility of more and more abortion, all of it paid for by US taxpayers, doesn't have anything righteous at his back; maybe a realization that God is still the author of life and death and can choose to take life away even at inopportune moments will ultimately be beneficial to Obama's immortal soul, if not to his planned victory party in Chicago.

Shakespeare knew this better than anyone. In Macbeth, when Macbeth is informed that his wife had died, Shakespeare has him reply with this famous speech:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Time will tell whether tomorrow will see the election of the nation's first Abortionist-in-Chief, or whether Birnam Wood is even now moving toward Dunsinane; it would take almost as strange a circumstance for McCain to pull a victory out of such a widely-forecast defeat.

I have, of course, offered a prayer for the repose of the soul of Madelyn Dunham; it is my custom to say such a prayer when I hear of any death. But I can't see as tragic the expected and peaceful death of an elderly woman who was granted by God time to prepare for it; the real tragedy will be the deaths of the millions of unborn children who will die should her grandson become our leader, and should he, as he has promised, elevate only pro-abortion judges to the Supreme Court. We are poised on the edge of that much greater tragedy, so my failure to see Mrs. Dunham's natural and expected death as a significantly tragic (though naturally sad, of course) thing is probably due to some defect or other in my character.

Update: Readers from the "Instaputz" blog, please read here before leaving the sort of comment that I will delete.

The Last Day

Today marks the end of the 40 Days for Life campaign; there have been at least 441 children saved from abortion over the last forty days:

There have been at least 441 turnarounds, where women seeking abortion changed their minds.
Several people have quit their jobs in the abortion industry, and clinics have advertised immediate openings on their staffs.
A number of abortion centers have been closed on days when abortions are usually performed.
Tens of thousands of people have taken part in 40 Days for Life events, many engaging in pro-life activities for the first time in their lives.

Each of these children will now have a future, instead of being a cruel statistic and a painful memory for their mothers. God's great love for these babies and their mothers has been evident in the loving witness of the prayerful protesters who helped so many to choose life.

I know that not all of us could be out there, praying and protesting in front of the clinics, present physically to be a witness of Christ's forgiving love.

But we were still present with our prayers, our thoughts, and our desire to see the unborn protected by our society, despite the grave danger we face of having a true cheerleader for abortion, a man who clearly wants abortion to be not only settled law, but preferential public policy, as our next president.

Whatever happens on Tuesday, we can't give up the fight for the unborn--because we're not just fighting for the lives of these precious children--we're fighting for the future of America.

No culture has ever stood long when its laws and policies excluded some humans from their protection, making some of them less than human in the law's eyes, and making it legal to kill or abuse or oppress them.

Ancient Rome fell. Sparta fell before her. The history of the ancient world is full of examples.

But we needn't look to ancient history to see this unfailing rule. The American South fell to the North when the South decided that slave ownership was more important than unity. Nazi Germany fell when the nations of the world rose up against the evils of the Third Reich. The Soviet Union was cracking apart long before the Berlin Wall fell in shards of shattered tyranny.

And if America doesn't learn this lesson, we, too, will be supplanted someday by people who welcome their children, and find any other course of action morally abhorrent.

When the Day of Judgment comes, the souls of the innocent unborn will accuse their killers and cry out to heaven against the evil done to them; but they will also accuse those who stood by and did nothing, said nothing, tried nothing to return to them the protection of the law which was so unjustly ripped away from them in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. These souls will point to America with particular sorrow--for was not our nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal? that all are endowed by their Creator with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? How awful an irony will it seem on that last day that a nation so conceived and so nobly born could forget her own beginnings and define a whole class of human persons as being unworthy of that life, that liberty, that just pursuit of happiness.

We must not wait until the last day. We must not wait until the hour when there is no longer any turning back, when there is no longer an America to preserve, when our children's children face the same dreadful need to flee their homeland for her crimes as so many of our ancestors once did. We must speak up for the rights of the unborn while we are still free to speak.

The 40 Days for Life campaign may be at an end for this present year, but there is never an end to the pursuit of the rights of the oppressed. There is no greater injustice than the death of the innocent, and we must continue to cry out with all our strength against it, that we may be counted as neither the oppressors, nor the silent, but the friends of those we fought to save, even when we fought in vain. It will matter a lot which side of this debate and fight we were on--on the last day.

Side Effects of FOCA

I think that it's a shame that there hasn't been more discussion of the implications of FOCA and Obama's promise to sign it. This article shows one possible danger that hasn't been discussed at all:

Both sides of the abortion debate readily admit the measure makes unlimited abortions throughout pregnancy a national law and legal right, and that it would invalidate virtually all abortion limits approved by state legislatures in all 50 states.

But the bill could have the affect of closing down Catholic hospitals that refuse to do abortions. Here's how:

As Cardinal Justin Rigali of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia warned in September, the FOCA bill "forbids government at all levels to 'discriminate' against the exercise of this [abortion] right 'in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.'"

"For the first time, abortion on demand would be a national entitlement that government must condone and promote in all public programs affecting pregnant women," the Catholic official explained.

Michael Moses, a top attorney for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, adds that the language of FOCA is so far-reaching that it will remove any conscience clause measures from state laws that protect doctors, hospitals and medical professionals who don't want to be involved in abortions.

Moses' reading of the proposed legislation is that if abortion is a fundamental right that can't ever be infringed, then every hospital and medical center must do abortions -- including Catholic and other religious or private hospitals that object to do them.

John Vennari, the editor of the Catholic Family News publication, points out that the measure could easily put Catholics hospitals out of business that want to continue opting out of doing abortions rather than violate their religious beliefs.

"This aspect of Obama's candidacy has been eclipsed by endless talk about the economy," Vennari writes.

Think this can't happen? Catholic Charities in Massachusetts stopped placing children for adoption when the law demanded that they place children with same-sex couples. If Catholic hospitals are required under FOCA to perform abortions then the Church will have no choice but to get out of the health-care business altogether.

I really can't see how any Catholic can think for a moment that it will be a good thing, or even an okay thing, for Obama to become president. It will be a horrible time for pro-life Americans, Catholics and others.

Congratulations, Foss Family!

I want to join in the congratulations going forth to Elizabeth Foss and her family who welcomed their newest little addition, Sarah Anne, who just didn't want to miss the Halloween party! Elizabeth has been in our prayers, and I'm so happy to hear of Sarah Anne's safe arrival. Now we'll pray for a speedy recovery for Mom and a quick discharge from the hospital!