The post below, the third article by Paul Likoudis originally published in The Wanderer which details that paper's interesting history, contains a lively account of the media's reporting--and misreporting--on the first Vatican Council. I didn't realize that the secular press had such an interest in undermining that Council's declaration on papal infallibility, but it's not all that surprising given what was at stake.
I have to keep this brief, as I'm pressed for time today, but this quote is one I'm pondering:
“Should it happen that a few people fall away from the Church as a result of the definition of the true teaching by the Vatican Council, these will be people who have for a long time already suffered shipwreck of the faith and are just looking for a pretext to make the break public inasmuch as they have left no doubt as to their interior breach…
The same thing happened after Vatican II. And upon the promulgation of Humanae Vitae. And so many other times in the Church's history.
I think that the Catholic who begins seriously to contemplate leaving the Church has, in a real sense, already left her. Should he reconsider before making that final, he has only to confess his temptation to leave--but so few, having begun to think of leaving, will reconsider; many will seize upon the first viable excuse to put into action what they have already long considered doing.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
A History of the Wanderer, 1867-1931: Article Three, by Paul Likoudis
(Note: this continues the series of articles by Paul Likoudis which I am publishing each Thursday.)
The Wanderer at 140....
BORN FOR BATTLE: DER WANDERER
FOUGHT ANTI-VATICAN I PROPAGANDA
by Paul Likoudis
(Third in a series)
Informed contemporary Catholics are aware of how the press shaped popular perceptions of what the Church Fathers were doing at Vatican II, and how disinformation, misrepresentation and outright lies distorted the teachings of the Council, sidetracking millions of Catholics worldwide.
Less well appreciated is the conspiracy on the part of the press, aided by the governments of the major European powers, to disrupt and derail Vatican I by a barrage of anti-Church propaganda aimed at preventing popular acceptance of the doctrine of the papal infallibility which the anti-Catholic rulers of states rightly understood as an assertion of the Church’s independence from secular control.
In the run-up to the Council, during the Council and in the years after, Der Wanderer, observed Fr. John Kulas, OSB, in Der Wanderer of St. Paul: The First Decade, 1867-1877), played a very important role not only in the United States but also in Europe for its staunch defense of Vatican I, papal infallibility and the independence of the Holy See at a time when much of the Catholic press and most of the secular press was aggressively attacking Vatican I and papal infallibility.
To put this newspaper’s role into perspective, it is important to recall that “the press” – almost all the major European and newspapers and journals of the time – as documented in three books by Westminster’s Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, who played a major role at the Council, opposed the convening of the Council, bitterly assailed the Council’s definition on papal infallibility, and spread the most noxious lies and distortions about the Council and its participants.
In fact, the highly-coordinated criticism of the Council by the press – especially some of the official Catholic press in Germany which fomented the opposition – was much more malignant than the popular press’ coverage of Vatican II, which adopted a different, though more sophisticated, tactic to confuse Catholics.
In The True Story of the Vatican Council, (London: Burns & Oates, 1877), Manning wrote that the major concern of Pius, and many of his cardinals and bishops, notably Bishop Emmanuel von Ketteler of Mainz, was that the modern State was putting limits on the Church’s freedom and, in fact, it was being excluded from civil society. “Modern revolutionary Liberalism,” wrote Manning, “consists in the assertion of the supremacy of the State over the spiritual jurisdiction of the Church, over education, marriage, consecrated property, and the temporal power of the head of the Church. This Liberalism, again, results in the indifferentism which equalizes all religions and gives equal rights to truth and error.”
Among the reports submitted by the cardinals to the Holy Father, Manning revealed, several raised concerns about the “infiltration of rationalistic principles” into Catholic schools, inculcating opposition to the authority of the Church, the breakdown in seminary training for priests, and the widespread disregard of ecclesiastical laws by the laity.
From the Council of Constance (1414-1418) up to the mid-19th century, Manning wrote, one of the thorniest issues for the Holy See was the “constant meddling” in the Church’s affairs by secular powers, especially Catholic rulers, by interfering in the Church’s educational institutions by appointing and protecting “unsound teachers,” especially in canon law and theology courses.
As a consequence, Manning wrote, “the public laws even of the nations in which the people are Catholic are Catholic no longer. The unity of the nations in faith and worship, as the Apostles founded, seems now to be dissolved. The unity of the Church is more compact and solid than ever, but the Christendom of Christian kingdoms is of the past. We have entered into a third period. The Church began not with kings, but with the peoples of the world, and to the peoples of the world, it may be, the Church will once more return. The princes and governments and legislatures of the world were everywhere against it at the outset; they are so again. But the hostility of the 19th century is keener than the hostility of the first. Then the world never believed in Christianity; now it is falling from it....
“Pius IX saw in the Council of the Vatican the only adequate remedy for the world-wide evils of the 19th century.”
From March 1865 over the next several years, the Holy Father queried the world’s bishops on the subjects and schema of the Council, particularly on the matters of papal infallibility and the independence of the Holy See. Due to, at least, one prelate well-placed in the Vatican, the enemies of the Church in governments and the academy were kept well-informed of these secret deliberations, leading to political plots by the major European powers to prevent the gathering of bishops in December 1869 – at a time when Rome was occupied by anti-clerical Masonic revolutionaries.
ASSAULT BY THE PRESS
In The Vatican Council and Its Definitions, a 250-page pastoral letter Cardinal Manning addressed to his clergy in 1871, Manning detailed the machinations of the secular powers, especially through the press.
The major newspapers in England, France, Italy and Germany published numerous reports spreading the belief, he wrote, “that the Council would explain away the doctrines of Trent, or give them some new or laxer meaning, or throw open some questions supposed to be closed, or come to a compromise or transaction with other religious systems; or at least that it should accommodate the dogmatic stiffness of its traditions to modern thought and modern theology.....
“But the interest excited by its preliminary skirmishing external to the Council, was nothing compared to the exultation with which the anti-Catholic opinion and anti-Catholic press of Protestant countries, and the anti-Roman opinion and press of even Catholic countries, beheld, as they believed, the formation of an organized ‘international opposition’ of more than one hundred bishops within the Council itself. The day was come at last. What the world could not do against Rome from without, its own bishops would do from within.....
“A league of newspapers, fed from a common center, diffused hope and confidence in all countries, that the science and enlightenment of the minority would save the Catholic Church from the immoderate pretensions of Rome, and the superstitious ignorance of the universal episcopate. Day after day, the newspapers teemed with the achievements and the orations of the opposition.”
Manning’s depiction of the two sides anticipates that of the major reporters who covered Vatican II:
“[B]y a wonderful disposition of things, for the good, no doubt, of the human race, and, above all, the Church itself, the Council was divided....and by an even more beneficent and admirable provisions, it was so ordered that the theology, philosophy, science, culture, intellectual power, logical acumen, eloquence, candor, nobleness of mind, independence of spirit, courage, and elevation of character in the Council, were all to be found in the minority. The majority was naturally a Dead Sea of superstition, narrowness, shallowness, ignorance, prejudice; without theology, philosophy, science, or eloquence....bigoted, tyrannical, deaf to reason....”
THE CHURCH-STATE ISSUE
Behind the press’ party line, however, were collaborators in all the governments of the great European powers, Manning showed in The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance, a series of reports he wrote for a New York newspaper, and syndicated across the United States, later published by the Catholic Publication Society in New York in 1875.
Manning reproduced a letter written in April 1867, allegedly by Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Bavaria’s foreign minister and future president and chancellor of Germany to the heads of state and the leading diplomats in Europe, urging them to a concerted effort to prevent the declaration on infallibility. The likely author, or source for Hohenlohe’s information, Manning speculated, was a dissident bishop with high sources in the Vatican intent on causing a schism, which eventually formed as the Old Catholics.
“It is evident that this pretension,” wrote the prince, “elevated into a dogma, would go far beyond the purely spiritual sphere, and would become a question eminently political, as raising the power of the Sovereign Pontiff, even in temporal matters, over all the princes and peoples of Christendom. This doctrine, therefore, is of such a nature as to arouse the attention of all those governments who rule over Catholic subjects.....It cannot be denied that it is a matter of urgency for Governments to combine....against all decisions which the Council may promulgate without the concurrence of the representatives of the secular power in questions which are at the same time of a political and religious matter....”
THE WANDERER’S COVERAGE
A sample of Der Wanderer’s reports were translated from the German for this series of articles by Fr. John Kulas of St. John’s University, Collegeville, which is one of three repositories holding complete editions of The Wanderer; the other two are the Catholic Central Union in St. Louis and the Minnesota Historical Society.
In an editorial published May 15, 1869, “Vatican Council I and Declaration of Infallibility,” editor Theo Müllenmeister advised readers:
“The Wanderer will be the only newspaper this side of Chicago which will bring complete and timely reports from correspondents covering the great Council in Rome. To this end we have engaged the services of a high-ranking prelate in Rome [Archabbot Boniface Wimmer of St. Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania] to be a correspondent. His commentaries will interest each and everyone.”
In the February 5, 1870 Wanderer, the paper’s new editor, Franz Fassbind wrote, under the heading “Papal Infallibility”: “A position paper which had already attracted signatures of more than 400 Council Fathers was presented to the assembled Council. It included a petition that infallibility be defined in the following form: [There followed here the Latin text and a German translation]
“To the Vatican Council:
“‘The undersigned Fathers of the holy Ecumenical Vatican Synod humbly and urgently insist that it be affirmed in clear and unambiguous language that the Bishop of Rome exercises the highest authority and thereby is protected from all error when in matters of faith and morals he determines and prescribes what is to be believed and accepted by all Christians or what is to be rejected and condemned.’
“The considerations guiding these conclusions take up six printed pages. The relevant resolutions of the provincial councils of Cologne, Baltimore, and Westminster are attached in the form of notes as well as the text of the allocution delivered in honor of the Holy Father by 500 Bishops on the occasion of the Centennial celebration of 1867.
“We can conclude from press reports from Rome (as is widely reported in the European daily press) that a counter memorandum circulating among the members of the Council had as yet received no signature.”
In the same issue, under the heading “Related Issues,” Fassbind wrote:
“As far as reporting on the Council goes, papers with an anti-Church bias are in a position to offer more interesting and even more scurrilous stories than Catholic journals. Consider the following:
“[Non-Catholic journals] report not only on the facts but also on what is going to happen. They know not only the facts but also know how to speculate about the most secret thoughts of individual bishops. Just seeing the demeanor of the bishops as they leave the council hall and applying other such indices allow them to describe the nature of the council debates. To this end they make things up to their heart’s content, submit very poetic pieces garnished with personal speculation, more or less graphic according to the greater or lesser talent of the author.
“At the present time it is especially the Commission which the Holy Father has chosen to be his advisory group in respect to questions which some bishops wish to present to the Council that has come in for criticism among some bishops. If it is true that some of the Council Fathers are dissatisfied with one or the other point of organization they would certainly feel free to express their feelings to the Holy Father in the liberty of the Gospel. Then their points of view would certainly be given a thorough hearing. But if one considers the size of the majority with which the members of the Commission were voted into office, there can be no doubt that the vast majority of the Council Fathers are satisfied with the composition of the body of advisors for the Pope. But it is also characteristic of our opponents to make a big deal about any difference of opinion they can discover among the bishops....”
One week later, for the February 12 issue, under the heading, “Catholics, Take Note!,” Fassbind wrote:
“The proposal to define papal authority as infallible has led to contentious debate between factions that are friendly to the Church as well those who are enemies of the Church. Obviously, it is of the highest importance to have a clear understanding of the issues involved. In its previous issue this newspaper printed the proposal as presented to the Council. In the current issue we are able to present to our readers the motivations underlying the proposal.…
“[T]he bishops too have chosen, as guardians and defenders of Catholic truth, to accept the task in these times of ascribing through synodal decrees and collegial statements the apostolic See’s highest teaching authority.
“However, the clearer Catholic truth is taught, the more vehement it has been attacked in recent times through broadsides and the daily press. The opponents of the Church are seeking to prejudice the Catholic people against sound teaching or even to intimidate the Vatican Council from proclaiming the truth…
“In the first instance, however, the Catholic people has the right to demand that the Vatican Council teach and declare precisely what is to be believed with respect to a matter of faith that is so important and one which has in recent times been so vehemently debated. This is to prevent people unversed in theology from falling prey to serious error….
“Should it happen that a few people fall away from the Church as a result of the definition of the true teaching by the Vatican Council, these will be people who have for a long time already suffered shipwreck of the faith and are just looking for a pretext to make the break public inasmuch as they have left no doubt as to their interior breach…[source Bishop Martin of Paderborn]
“Thus, there are three factions at the Council. Using political terms one could talk of the right (bishops from Spain, South America, Italy, and Belgium, etc), the center (most of the bishops from France and Germany, England, Ireland, Holland, Portugal, Austria, etc) and the left (a few bishops from Germany, France, and North America). One can assume with certainty that the views of the center will emerge victorious.”
On March 12, 1870, under the heading “German Bishops in Rome,” The Wanderer reported:
“Through a variety of communications in earlier issues of this newspaper the reader will have noticed that the position of the German bishops with respect to the resolution of certain central questions at the Council has been interpreted as a public expression of party affiliation in the press. The published declaration of war a few weeks ago by Canon Döllinger in Munich against papal infallibility was the start and it was asserted in more than one newspaper that the majority of German Bishops in Rome agreed with Döllinger. Among them was said to be Bishop von Ketteler of Mainz. This situation induced this prelate to make a public declaration that, given the circumstances, has extreme significance. For that reason we feel obliged to bring this to the attention of our readers. We print the declaration in full….
“[The signed document was dated 8 February 1870. In it Bishop Ketteler distanced himself from Döllinger’s current stand on the question of papal infallibility even as he expressed his admiration for the theological training he had received from Döllinger. Döllinger sometimes wrote under the penname ‘Janus’ and was against a declaration of papal infallibility, although he claimed his views were ‘essentially’ the same as that of the bishops.] Ketteler: ‘But I have nothing more to do with the Döllinger whom the enemies of the Church and the Holy See crown with honors.’
The Wanderer also published a declaration from the Archbishop of Cologne (dated 9 February) warning against non-factual and intemperate reporting in the secular press.
The April 30, 1870 Wanderer reported, under the heading, “Latest from Rome”:
“Telegraph reports indicate that the 3rd public session of the Council took place on April 24, 1870. It was an imposing event… The four chapters of the schema on faith were read and were approved unanimously. Then the Holy Father promulgated the decrees from his throne…. The Council fathers now turned their attention to the decree on papal infallibility....
The May 7 1870 Wanderer reported, under the heading, “Dashed Hopes”:
“The Council Fathers in Rome are subjected to intense scrutiny by the agents of European states, the gray eminences of the daily press, and especially those men who look forward to the overthrow of all order. No legislative body has ever been the object of such scrutiny. …
“The utterances of individual Council Fathers are turned into evidence of factional controversy. If the well of news seems to be drying up, a ready pen invents an audience with the Pope and attributes to the Holy Father statements which he never made, never even thought of. …
“These journalists intend to paint a picture of a Church torn apart by factions and thereby, as far as it depends on them, to give it the coup de grace. …These expectations were quickly deflated. ..
“A fruit of the freedom [of debate] is seen in the result of the vote. If some prelates had previously held differing views the final vote on the entire text showed that every doubt was removed, and when the Vicar of Christ solemnly promulgated the decree on faith the Catholic Church appeared again in the triumph of unity and indivisibility of doctrine. That is the great significance of the [unanimous decision in favor of the] decision.
The May 14, 1870 Wanderer took note of the disinformation circulating wildly in the European and American press under the heading, “Another Protest”:
“....The New York Herald reports that 21 American Bishops led by three Archbishops have lodged a protest with the Pope against papal infallibility. [There was no proof.]
“The Wisconsin Banner launches an investigation into the positions taken by American bishops and reproaches those whose names are not included in the list of names in this protest.…When the author speaks about the ‘Order of Executioners’ (Dominicans) to which the Archbishop of San Francisco is said to belong he merely convicts himself of charges similar to those made above. No further rebuttal is necessary...”
On June 11, 1870, The Wanderer published its own, unofficial, translation of the Decree on Papal Infallibility, “for which the whole Christian world has been waiting with bated breath,” and editorialized under the heading, “A Significant Pronouncement.”
In its issue of August 13, 1870, Der Wanderer published the full text of the Council’s Second Constitution, Aeternus Pastor, and on August 20, the Pope’s allocution of the day, in which Pius IX said:
“The Supreme authority of the Roman Pontiff, venerable Brothers, does not oppose, but supports; it does not destroy, rather it builds up and strengthens others in their grace; it unites in love and strengthens the bishops in their rights… Since it is only God who can do great wonders may He illuminate minds and hearts so that all may abide in the bosom of the Father…”
And that’s the message The Wanderer has been broadcasting for 140 years.
The Wanderer at 140....
BORN FOR BATTLE: DER WANDERER
FOUGHT ANTI-VATICAN I PROPAGANDA
by Paul Likoudis
(Third in a series)
Informed contemporary Catholics are aware of how the press shaped popular perceptions of what the Church Fathers were doing at Vatican II, and how disinformation, misrepresentation and outright lies distorted the teachings of the Council, sidetracking millions of Catholics worldwide.
Less well appreciated is the conspiracy on the part of the press, aided by the governments of the major European powers, to disrupt and derail Vatican I by a barrage of anti-Church propaganda aimed at preventing popular acceptance of the doctrine of the papal infallibility which the anti-Catholic rulers of states rightly understood as an assertion of the Church’s independence from secular control.
In the run-up to the Council, during the Council and in the years after, Der Wanderer, observed Fr. John Kulas, OSB, in Der Wanderer of St. Paul: The First Decade, 1867-1877), played a very important role not only in the United States but also in Europe for its staunch defense of Vatican I, papal infallibility and the independence of the Holy See at a time when much of the Catholic press and most of the secular press was aggressively attacking Vatican I and papal infallibility.
To put this newspaper’s role into perspective, it is important to recall that “the press” – almost all the major European and newspapers and journals of the time – as documented in three books by Westminster’s Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, who played a major role at the Council, opposed the convening of the Council, bitterly assailed the Council’s definition on papal infallibility, and spread the most noxious lies and distortions about the Council and its participants.
In fact, the highly-coordinated criticism of the Council by the press – especially some of the official Catholic press in Germany which fomented the opposition – was much more malignant than the popular press’ coverage of Vatican II, which adopted a different, though more sophisticated, tactic to confuse Catholics.
In The True Story of the Vatican Council, (London: Burns & Oates, 1877), Manning wrote that the major concern of Pius, and many of his cardinals and bishops, notably Bishop Emmanuel von Ketteler of Mainz, was that the modern State was putting limits on the Church’s freedom and, in fact, it was being excluded from civil society. “Modern revolutionary Liberalism,” wrote Manning, “consists in the assertion of the supremacy of the State over the spiritual jurisdiction of the Church, over education, marriage, consecrated property, and the temporal power of the head of the Church. This Liberalism, again, results in the indifferentism which equalizes all religions and gives equal rights to truth and error.”
Among the reports submitted by the cardinals to the Holy Father, Manning revealed, several raised concerns about the “infiltration of rationalistic principles” into Catholic schools, inculcating opposition to the authority of the Church, the breakdown in seminary training for priests, and the widespread disregard of ecclesiastical laws by the laity.
From the Council of Constance (1414-1418) up to the mid-19th century, Manning wrote, one of the thorniest issues for the Holy See was the “constant meddling” in the Church’s affairs by secular powers, especially Catholic rulers, by interfering in the Church’s educational institutions by appointing and protecting “unsound teachers,” especially in canon law and theology courses.
As a consequence, Manning wrote, “the public laws even of the nations in which the people are Catholic are Catholic no longer. The unity of the nations in faith and worship, as the Apostles founded, seems now to be dissolved. The unity of the Church is more compact and solid than ever, but the Christendom of Christian kingdoms is of the past. We have entered into a third period. The Church began not with kings, but with the peoples of the world, and to the peoples of the world, it may be, the Church will once more return. The princes and governments and legislatures of the world were everywhere against it at the outset; they are so again. But the hostility of the 19th century is keener than the hostility of the first. Then the world never believed in Christianity; now it is falling from it....
“Pius IX saw in the Council of the Vatican the only adequate remedy for the world-wide evils of the 19th century.”
From March 1865 over the next several years, the Holy Father queried the world’s bishops on the subjects and schema of the Council, particularly on the matters of papal infallibility and the independence of the Holy See. Due to, at least, one prelate well-placed in the Vatican, the enemies of the Church in governments and the academy were kept well-informed of these secret deliberations, leading to political plots by the major European powers to prevent the gathering of bishops in December 1869 – at a time when Rome was occupied by anti-clerical Masonic revolutionaries.
ASSAULT BY THE PRESS
In The Vatican Council and Its Definitions, a 250-page pastoral letter Cardinal Manning addressed to his clergy in 1871, Manning detailed the machinations of the secular powers, especially through the press.
The major newspapers in England, France, Italy and Germany published numerous reports spreading the belief, he wrote, “that the Council would explain away the doctrines of Trent, or give them some new or laxer meaning, or throw open some questions supposed to be closed, or come to a compromise or transaction with other religious systems; or at least that it should accommodate the dogmatic stiffness of its traditions to modern thought and modern theology.....
“But the interest excited by its preliminary skirmishing external to the Council, was nothing compared to the exultation with which the anti-Catholic opinion and anti-Catholic press of Protestant countries, and the anti-Roman opinion and press of even Catholic countries, beheld, as they believed, the formation of an organized ‘international opposition’ of more than one hundred bishops within the Council itself. The day was come at last. What the world could not do against Rome from without, its own bishops would do from within.....
“A league of newspapers, fed from a common center, diffused hope and confidence in all countries, that the science and enlightenment of the minority would save the Catholic Church from the immoderate pretensions of Rome, and the superstitious ignorance of the universal episcopate. Day after day, the newspapers teemed with the achievements and the orations of the opposition.”
Manning’s depiction of the two sides anticipates that of the major reporters who covered Vatican II:
“[B]y a wonderful disposition of things, for the good, no doubt, of the human race, and, above all, the Church itself, the Council was divided....and by an even more beneficent and admirable provisions, it was so ordered that the theology, philosophy, science, culture, intellectual power, logical acumen, eloquence, candor, nobleness of mind, independence of spirit, courage, and elevation of character in the Council, were all to be found in the minority. The majority was naturally a Dead Sea of superstition, narrowness, shallowness, ignorance, prejudice; without theology, philosophy, science, or eloquence....bigoted, tyrannical, deaf to reason....”
THE CHURCH-STATE ISSUE
Behind the press’ party line, however, were collaborators in all the governments of the great European powers, Manning showed in The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance, a series of reports he wrote for a New York newspaper, and syndicated across the United States, later published by the Catholic Publication Society in New York in 1875.
Manning reproduced a letter written in April 1867, allegedly by Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Bavaria’s foreign minister and future president and chancellor of Germany to the heads of state and the leading diplomats in Europe, urging them to a concerted effort to prevent the declaration on infallibility. The likely author, or source for Hohenlohe’s information, Manning speculated, was a dissident bishop with high sources in the Vatican intent on causing a schism, which eventually formed as the Old Catholics.
“It is evident that this pretension,” wrote the prince, “elevated into a dogma, would go far beyond the purely spiritual sphere, and would become a question eminently political, as raising the power of the Sovereign Pontiff, even in temporal matters, over all the princes and peoples of Christendom. This doctrine, therefore, is of such a nature as to arouse the attention of all those governments who rule over Catholic subjects.....It cannot be denied that it is a matter of urgency for Governments to combine....against all decisions which the Council may promulgate without the concurrence of the representatives of the secular power in questions which are at the same time of a political and religious matter....”
THE WANDERER’S COVERAGE
A sample of Der Wanderer’s reports were translated from the German for this series of articles by Fr. John Kulas of St. John’s University, Collegeville, which is one of three repositories holding complete editions of The Wanderer; the other two are the Catholic Central Union in St. Louis and the Minnesota Historical Society.
In an editorial published May 15, 1869, “Vatican Council I and Declaration of Infallibility,” editor Theo Müllenmeister advised readers:
“The Wanderer will be the only newspaper this side of Chicago which will bring complete and timely reports from correspondents covering the great Council in Rome. To this end we have engaged the services of a high-ranking prelate in Rome [Archabbot Boniface Wimmer of St. Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania] to be a correspondent. His commentaries will interest each and everyone.”
In the February 5, 1870 Wanderer, the paper’s new editor, Franz Fassbind wrote, under the heading “Papal Infallibility”: “A position paper which had already attracted signatures of more than 400 Council Fathers was presented to the assembled Council. It included a petition that infallibility be defined in the following form: [There followed here the Latin text and a German translation]
“To the Vatican Council:
“‘The undersigned Fathers of the holy Ecumenical Vatican Synod humbly and urgently insist that it be affirmed in clear and unambiguous language that the Bishop of Rome exercises the highest authority and thereby is protected from all error when in matters of faith and morals he determines and prescribes what is to be believed and accepted by all Christians or what is to be rejected and condemned.’
“The considerations guiding these conclusions take up six printed pages. The relevant resolutions of the provincial councils of Cologne, Baltimore, and Westminster are attached in the form of notes as well as the text of the allocution delivered in honor of the Holy Father by 500 Bishops on the occasion of the Centennial celebration of 1867.
“We can conclude from press reports from Rome (as is widely reported in the European daily press) that a counter memorandum circulating among the members of the Council had as yet received no signature.”
In the same issue, under the heading “Related Issues,” Fassbind wrote:
“As far as reporting on the Council goes, papers with an anti-Church bias are in a position to offer more interesting and even more scurrilous stories than Catholic journals. Consider the following:
“[Non-Catholic journals] report not only on the facts but also on what is going to happen. They know not only the facts but also know how to speculate about the most secret thoughts of individual bishops. Just seeing the demeanor of the bishops as they leave the council hall and applying other such indices allow them to describe the nature of the council debates. To this end they make things up to their heart’s content, submit very poetic pieces garnished with personal speculation, more or less graphic according to the greater or lesser talent of the author.
“At the present time it is especially the Commission which the Holy Father has chosen to be his advisory group in respect to questions which some bishops wish to present to the Council that has come in for criticism among some bishops. If it is true that some of the Council Fathers are dissatisfied with one or the other point of organization they would certainly feel free to express their feelings to the Holy Father in the liberty of the Gospel. Then their points of view would certainly be given a thorough hearing. But if one considers the size of the majority with which the members of the Commission were voted into office, there can be no doubt that the vast majority of the Council Fathers are satisfied with the composition of the body of advisors for the Pope. But it is also characteristic of our opponents to make a big deal about any difference of opinion they can discover among the bishops....”
One week later, for the February 12 issue, under the heading, “Catholics, Take Note!,” Fassbind wrote:
“The proposal to define papal authority as infallible has led to contentious debate between factions that are friendly to the Church as well those who are enemies of the Church. Obviously, it is of the highest importance to have a clear understanding of the issues involved. In its previous issue this newspaper printed the proposal as presented to the Council. In the current issue we are able to present to our readers the motivations underlying the proposal.…
“[T]he bishops too have chosen, as guardians and defenders of Catholic truth, to accept the task in these times of ascribing through synodal decrees and collegial statements the apostolic See’s highest teaching authority.
“However, the clearer Catholic truth is taught, the more vehement it has been attacked in recent times through broadsides and the daily press. The opponents of the Church are seeking to prejudice the Catholic people against sound teaching or even to intimidate the Vatican Council from proclaiming the truth…
“In the first instance, however, the Catholic people has the right to demand that the Vatican Council teach and declare precisely what is to be believed with respect to a matter of faith that is so important and one which has in recent times been so vehemently debated. This is to prevent people unversed in theology from falling prey to serious error….
“Should it happen that a few people fall away from the Church as a result of the definition of the true teaching by the Vatican Council, these will be people who have for a long time already suffered shipwreck of the faith and are just looking for a pretext to make the break public inasmuch as they have left no doubt as to their interior breach…[source Bishop Martin of Paderborn]
“Thus, there are three factions at the Council. Using political terms one could talk of the right (bishops from Spain, South America, Italy, and Belgium, etc), the center (most of the bishops from France and Germany, England, Ireland, Holland, Portugal, Austria, etc) and the left (a few bishops from Germany, France, and North America). One can assume with certainty that the views of the center will emerge victorious.”
On March 12, 1870, under the heading “German Bishops in Rome,” The Wanderer reported:
“Through a variety of communications in earlier issues of this newspaper the reader will have noticed that the position of the German bishops with respect to the resolution of certain central questions at the Council has been interpreted as a public expression of party affiliation in the press. The published declaration of war a few weeks ago by Canon Döllinger in Munich against papal infallibility was the start and it was asserted in more than one newspaper that the majority of German Bishops in Rome agreed with Döllinger. Among them was said to be Bishop von Ketteler of Mainz. This situation induced this prelate to make a public declaration that, given the circumstances, has extreme significance. For that reason we feel obliged to bring this to the attention of our readers. We print the declaration in full….
“[The signed document was dated 8 February 1870. In it Bishop Ketteler distanced himself from Döllinger’s current stand on the question of papal infallibility even as he expressed his admiration for the theological training he had received from Döllinger. Döllinger sometimes wrote under the penname ‘Janus’ and was against a declaration of papal infallibility, although he claimed his views were ‘essentially’ the same as that of the bishops.] Ketteler: ‘But I have nothing more to do with the Döllinger whom the enemies of the Church and the Holy See crown with honors.’
The Wanderer also published a declaration from the Archbishop of Cologne (dated 9 February) warning against non-factual and intemperate reporting in the secular press.
The April 30, 1870 Wanderer reported, under the heading, “Latest from Rome”:
“Telegraph reports indicate that the 3rd public session of the Council took place on April 24, 1870. It was an imposing event… The four chapters of the schema on faith were read and were approved unanimously. Then the Holy Father promulgated the decrees from his throne…. The Council fathers now turned their attention to the decree on papal infallibility....
The May 7 1870 Wanderer reported, under the heading, “Dashed Hopes”:
“The Council Fathers in Rome are subjected to intense scrutiny by the agents of European states, the gray eminences of the daily press, and especially those men who look forward to the overthrow of all order. No legislative body has ever been the object of such scrutiny. …
“The utterances of individual Council Fathers are turned into evidence of factional controversy. If the well of news seems to be drying up, a ready pen invents an audience with the Pope and attributes to the Holy Father statements which he never made, never even thought of. …
“These journalists intend to paint a picture of a Church torn apart by factions and thereby, as far as it depends on them, to give it the coup de grace. …These expectations were quickly deflated. ..
“A fruit of the freedom [of debate] is seen in the result of the vote. If some prelates had previously held differing views the final vote on the entire text showed that every doubt was removed, and when the Vicar of Christ solemnly promulgated the decree on faith the Catholic Church appeared again in the triumph of unity and indivisibility of doctrine. That is the great significance of the [unanimous decision in favor of the] decision.
The May 14, 1870 Wanderer took note of the disinformation circulating wildly in the European and American press under the heading, “Another Protest”:
“....The New York Herald reports that 21 American Bishops led by three Archbishops have lodged a protest with the Pope against papal infallibility. [There was no proof.]
“The Wisconsin Banner launches an investigation into the positions taken by American bishops and reproaches those whose names are not included in the list of names in this protest.…When the author speaks about the ‘Order of Executioners’ (Dominicans) to which the Archbishop of San Francisco is said to belong he merely convicts himself of charges similar to those made above. No further rebuttal is necessary...”
On June 11, 1870, The Wanderer published its own, unofficial, translation of the Decree on Papal Infallibility, “for which the whole Christian world has been waiting with bated breath,” and editorialized under the heading, “A Significant Pronouncement.”
In its issue of August 13, 1870, Der Wanderer published the full text of the Council’s Second Constitution, Aeternus Pastor, and on August 20, the Pope’s allocution of the day, in which Pius IX said:
“The Supreme authority of the Roman Pontiff, venerable Brothers, does not oppose, but supports; it does not destroy, rather it builds up and strengthens others in their grace; it unites in love and strengthens the bishops in their rights… Since it is only God who can do great wonders may He illuminate minds and hearts so that all may abide in the bosom of the Father…”
And that’s the message The Wanderer has been broadcasting for 140 years.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Why Waterboarding Is Torture
I've heard many Catholics claim that what we've done to terrorists really doesn't fall under the definition of torture, because torture is only torture if it causes serious and lasting physical harm to the person being hurt. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, cold cells--sure, these things are uncomfortable and unpleasant--but they're not torture, because they don't cause any permanent damage.
Setting aside the reality that permanent mental or psychological damage may occur even with these forms of coercive tactics, I think it's important that we Catholics repudiate firmly and unequivocally the idea that torture is only torture if it causes significant and/or permanent injury to the person being tortured. It is possible to cause severe, even excruciating pain, both mental and physical, without leaving any marks, let alone any permanent injury; and the Catechism of the Catholic Church says the following:
The intent of doing this is clearly to cause pain and terror. It is done to force someone's cooperation, to coerce their will, and to frighten them into compliance with the torturers' demands. It is not a legitimate act of restraint or punishment, such as might be said of incarceration and its trappings (e.g. bland food, tiny accommodations, boredom, restriction of movement, etc.). It is done wholly to cause suffering on the grounds that this suffering will then lead to the "good" results the torturer desires.
Waterboarding, like deliberate and extended sleep deprivation done for its own sake (as opposed to the sleep deprivation which can sometimes occur in a prison setting when unruly or noisy prisoners keep others from their rest) and cold cells in which the temperature is significantly reduced in order to cause the pains of hypothermia, treats the prisoner as an object. His human dignity is stripped from him because he is seen to be possessed of some useful information; whether that is true or not does not matter to those who are certain that he will be useful if he can only be broken. He may be guilty of acts of terror and deserve a trial and some just punishment, but the decision to torture him is made whether his guilt can be or has been proven; there is no such thing as "innocent until proven guilty or until we decide to waterboard you," and so torture is an offense against justice as well as against mercy.
I have heard some argue that since we train our military to withstand waterboarding, waterboarding must not be torture. However, this is a misunderstanding which fails to give the proper credit to the notion of free will and of trust; the military member understands that he has consented to the training by the fact of his military position, and he also trusts those training him not to injure or kill him in the course of the training. No such free will or trust is possible to the person being tortured, as he does not consent to the waterboard, cannot escape it, may even break his limbs trying desperately to get away from his restraints, and cannot trust the people pouring the water in his nose and mouth to stop choking and drowning him if he is too close to death.
The question, "Is waterboarding torture?" must be answered, "Yes--if the intent in strapping someone to a board and pouring water over him is to make him feel as if he is drowning, to cause him pain and terror, to coerce his will for some purpose, and to do so in a context in which free will and trust are wholly absent." Catholics must reject the idea that waterboarding isn't torture just because the victim is left in one piece and is usually left alive; that's not good enough to erase the clear intent of those who employ this tactic, when their intent is to do exactly what the Catechism calls "torture."
Setting aside the reality that permanent mental or psychological damage may occur even with these forms of coercive tactics, I think it's important that we Catholics repudiate firmly and unequivocally the idea that torture is only torture if it causes significant and/or permanent injury to the person being tortured. It is possible to cause severe, even excruciating pain, both mental and physical, without leaving any marks, let alone any permanent injury; and the Catechism of the Catholic Church says the following:
2297 Kidnapping and hostage taking bring on a reign of terror; by means of threats they subject their victims to intolerable pressures. They are morally wrong. Terrorism threatens, wounds, and kills indiscriminately; it is gravely against justice and charity. Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity. Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law.91So, what is waterboarding? It is an act of physical violence. The person being waterboarded is strapped to a board without his consent; he is helpless, and can't move. Often plastic is put over his face to increase the sensations that he is drowning and can't breathe. Water is then poured into his nose and mouth; his body reacts to this as if he really were drowning, even if in his mind he realizes that this is not the case--but few people are capable of remaining mentally calm when their bodies are straining at bonds trying to escape death by drowning. This physical reaction can, indeed, cause extreme pain, unconsciousness, and suffocation; it is possible to kill someone using this technique.
The intent of doing this is clearly to cause pain and terror. It is done to force someone's cooperation, to coerce their will, and to frighten them into compliance with the torturers' demands. It is not a legitimate act of restraint or punishment, such as might be said of incarceration and its trappings (e.g. bland food, tiny accommodations, boredom, restriction of movement, etc.). It is done wholly to cause suffering on the grounds that this suffering will then lead to the "good" results the torturer desires.
Waterboarding, like deliberate and extended sleep deprivation done for its own sake (as opposed to the sleep deprivation which can sometimes occur in a prison setting when unruly or noisy prisoners keep others from their rest) and cold cells in which the temperature is significantly reduced in order to cause the pains of hypothermia, treats the prisoner as an object. His human dignity is stripped from him because he is seen to be possessed of some useful information; whether that is true or not does not matter to those who are certain that he will be useful if he can only be broken. He may be guilty of acts of terror and deserve a trial and some just punishment, but the decision to torture him is made whether his guilt can be or has been proven; there is no such thing as "innocent until proven guilty or until we decide to waterboard you," and so torture is an offense against justice as well as against mercy.
I have heard some argue that since we train our military to withstand waterboarding, waterboarding must not be torture. However, this is a misunderstanding which fails to give the proper credit to the notion of free will and of trust; the military member understands that he has consented to the training by the fact of his military position, and he also trusts those training him not to injure or kill him in the course of the training. No such free will or trust is possible to the person being tortured, as he does not consent to the waterboard, cannot escape it, may even break his limbs trying desperately to get away from his restraints, and cannot trust the people pouring the water in his nose and mouth to stop choking and drowning him if he is too close to death.
The question, "Is waterboarding torture?" must be answered, "Yes--if the intent in strapping someone to a board and pouring water over him is to make him feel as if he is drowning, to cause him pain and terror, to coerce his will for some purpose, and to do so in a context in which free will and trust are wholly absent." Catholics must reject the idea that waterboarding isn't torture just because the victim is left in one piece and is usually left alive; that's not good enough to erase the clear intent of those who employ this tactic, when their intent is to do exactly what the Catechism calls "torture."
Catholics and the Flu
Yesterday Mark Shea linked to this letter from Austin Bishop Gregory Aymond, as posted on the Aggie Catholics blog; the bishop has decided that Holy Communion should be distributed under just one species for the present time due to the risk of transmitting swine flu through the common chalices used by the laity to receive the Blood of Christ at Mass.
Today, the Diocese of Dallas has issued its own guidelines:
Thus far my bishop, Bishop Kevin Vann, has not issued any guidelines for the Catholics of the Fort Worth diocese; I'll update this post later if he does.
For now, though, I have several observations to make about these guidelines.
In the first place, the direction to stay at home if you feel ill is the most important thing Catholics can do to minimize the spread of the flu. I've had to stay home on Sundays due to illnesses far more this year than in any other recent year I can remember, and it's never fun to miss Mass--we Catholics almost have this tendency to think that Mass just can't go on without us, and that it's better to drag ourselves, feverish and shivering, to church on Sunday than to stay in bed and try to get well. Unfortunately when we do that, we often cause a ripple effect in church, as family after family contracts the bug we were carrying and spreads it further. Until enough people stay home to recover, these darned viruses have a tendency to keep circulating through a congregation, often affecting our pastors themselves, not to mention the elderly and infant members of the parish who will be far more seriously affected by our viruses. And since this is certainly true for the ordinary run of winter cold and flu bugs, it will be just as true for swine flu; should the virus actually take hold in our communities, we will do no one any favors by continuing to take ourselves to Mass when we are feeling ill out of some misplaced sense of obligation, piety, or martyrdom.
In the second place, I've heard the line from Catholics before that they don't think illnesses spread through the common reception of the Precious Blood; there is a pious thought expressed, that He Whom we are receiving protects us from all harm, or at the very least the alcohol content of the accidents of the wine is good enough to wipe out ordinary viruses. But as someone pointed out in the comboxes at Mark Shea's, the alcohol content of rubbing alcohol is significantly greater than the alcohol content of the wine which becomes the Precious Blood; and rubbing alcohol itself is not an instant disinfectant, requiring a couple of minutes to kill germs, from what I understand. While our Lord can, if He wishes, protect from harm those who receive Him in the Precious Blood, there is no requirement upon Him to act in this miraculous way; if viruses aren't known to spread frequently in this way, it is hopefully because those who are actually ill will refrain from receiving under both species. In the presence of a significant viral threat, however, relying on the average Catholic to understand that he ought not receive from the chalice since he is achy and tired and possibly a little feverish may be imprudent, and suggesting instead that the ancient practice of receiving only the Body of Christ would be a more charitable practice for the time being is to be commended.
In the third place, the practice of Catholics seizing each others' hands at Mass is probably not the best one for times like these. I don't have a huge problem with the Sign of Peace, except for its placement, but it should be noted that in the rubrics no command exists to shake hands; in many cultures a simple bow to one's nearest neighbors suffices to express this moment of reconciliation, and I would strongly support American Catholics adopting this custom not only for the sake of not spreading swine flu (or other illnesses) but to retain the sense of reverence proper to the Mass. As for the other "custom" of grabbing hands to pray the Our Father, this custom is completely outside the rubrics, and is not one I am happy about (though I generally put up with it rather than make a scene out of my refusal; it isn't liturgically correct to draw attention to yourself, either, most of the time). Even absent swine flu concerns I would be happy for a correct posture to be assumed for the praying of the "Our Father" which remembers that we're addressing God, not each other, in this prayer; but the threat of the spread of swine flu is a good time for pastors to remind the congregation that all this extra hand-holding isn't the best idea during a time of illness.
While the World Health Organization may be acting prematurely in raising the pandemic level to a "5," and while it may yet be that the approach of warm weather will hold off this threat of a spreading flu virus for now, I still think it's a good time for Catholics to consider our duty to our neighbor when we, or some in our families, are ill. The best rule of all here is the Golden Rule; if you or someone in your family is sick, and you wouldn't want someone as sick as you or your husband or child is to sit beside you at Mass, hold your hand or shake it, and drink in front of you from the chalice of the Precious Blood, perhaps you should reconsider whether the sick person in your family should be coming to Mass in the first place.
Today, the Diocese of Dallas has issued its own guidelines:
The letter from Bishop Farrell is here. For the most part the recommendations are good, except the one about receiving communion in the hand if you are sick; the hands are no less likely to be a vector for the spread of the flu than the mouth, especially after the Sign of Peace, the obligatory but liturgically-incorrect practice of holding hands during the Our Father, etc.The swine flu scare has prompted a number of recommendations from the Catholic Diocese of Dallas, including a big one about attendance at Mass.
"If you are not feeling well, especially during this time of concern, please stay at home and do not risk spreading infection to others," said the Rev. Michael Dugan, the diocese's director of the Office of Liturgy, in a statement posted on the diocese Web site.
Dugan added that parishioners who do attend Mass while feeling under the weather should bow or wave during the "passing of the peace" rather than shake hands with pew neighbors. Those who extend a hand and have it refused should not be offended, given the circumstances, he said.
The diocese also posted on its Web site a letter from Bishop Kevin Farrell, who said he has encouraged priests to consider suspending the use of wine during communion, because it's offered from a common cup. Farrell also said he has asked the priests to be sure that all Eucharistic ministers use "proper hygiene" when distributing the bread or host during communion.
Thus far my bishop, Bishop Kevin Vann, has not issued any guidelines for the Catholics of the Fort Worth diocese; I'll update this post later if he does.
For now, though, I have several observations to make about these guidelines.
In the first place, the direction to stay at home if you feel ill is the most important thing Catholics can do to minimize the spread of the flu. I've had to stay home on Sundays due to illnesses far more this year than in any other recent year I can remember, and it's never fun to miss Mass--we Catholics almost have this tendency to think that Mass just can't go on without us, and that it's better to drag ourselves, feverish and shivering, to church on Sunday than to stay in bed and try to get well. Unfortunately when we do that, we often cause a ripple effect in church, as family after family contracts the bug we were carrying and spreads it further. Until enough people stay home to recover, these darned viruses have a tendency to keep circulating through a congregation, often affecting our pastors themselves, not to mention the elderly and infant members of the parish who will be far more seriously affected by our viruses. And since this is certainly true for the ordinary run of winter cold and flu bugs, it will be just as true for swine flu; should the virus actually take hold in our communities, we will do no one any favors by continuing to take ourselves to Mass when we are feeling ill out of some misplaced sense of obligation, piety, or martyrdom.
In the second place, I've heard the line from Catholics before that they don't think illnesses spread through the common reception of the Precious Blood; there is a pious thought expressed, that He Whom we are receiving protects us from all harm, or at the very least the alcohol content of the accidents of the wine is good enough to wipe out ordinary viruses. But as someone pointed out in the comboxes at Mark Shea's, the alcohol content of rubbing alcohol is significantly greater than the alcohol content of the wine which becomes the Precious Blood; and rubbing alcohol itself is not an instant disinfectant, requiring a couple of minutes to kill germs, from what I understand. While our Lord can, if He wishes, protect from harm those who receive Him in the Precious Blood, there is no requirement upon Him to act in this miraculous way; if viruses aren't known to spread frequently in this way, it is hopefully because those who are actually ill will refrain from receiving under both species. In the presence of a significant viral threat, however, relying on the average Catholic to understand that he ought not receive from the chalice since he is achy and tired and possibly a little feverish may be imprudent, and suggesting instead that the ancient practice of receiving only the Body of Christ would be a more charitable practice for the time being is to be commended.
In the third place, the practice of Catholics seizing each others' hands at Mass is probably not the best one for times like these. I don't have a huge problem with the Sign of Peace, except for its placement, but it should be noted that in the rubrics no command exists to shake hands; in many cultures a simple bow to one's nearest neighbors suffices to express this moment of reconciliation, and I would strongly support American Catholics adopting this custom not only for the sake of not spreading swine flu (or other illnesses) but to retain the sense of reverence proper to the Mass. As for the other "custom" of grabbing hands to pray the Our Father, this custom is completely outside the rubrics, and is not one I am happy about (though I generally put up with it rather than make a scene out of my refusal; it isn't liturgically correct to draw attention to yourself, either, most of the time). Even absent swine flu concerns I would be happy for a correct posture to be assumed for the praying of the "Our Father" which remembers that we're addressing God, not each other, in this prayer; but the threat of the spread of swine flu is a good time for pastors to remind the congregation that all this extra hand-holding isn't the best idea during a time of illness.
While the World Health Organization may be acting prematurely in raising the pandemic level to a "5," and while it may yet be that the approach of warm weather will hold off this threat of a spreading flu virus for now, I still think it's a good time for Catholics to consider our duty to our neighbor when we, or some in our families, are ill. The best rule of all here is the Golden Rule; if you or someone in your family is sick, and you wouldn't want someone as sick as you or your husband or child is to sit beside you at Mass, hold your hand or shake it, and drink in front of you from the chalice of the Precious Blood, perhaps you should reconsider whether the sick person in your family should be coming to Mass in the first place.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Irrelevance of Time
By now you've heard about the Pew Forum's recent report on switching one's religious faith. No surprises, really; I think there are a handful of categories that crop up, which I'd put this way:
It may be a bit much to accuse the Pew Forum of that; but it's not at all too much to consider the egregiously smarmy Time article on the subject in that light:
- Protestants who switch denominations, but remain Protestant, when they marry, or find a church that "speaks" to them, etc.
- Protestants who become Catholic, usually for excellent reasons involving scholarship and pursuit of the truth.
- Catholics who get around to admitting that they're really Protestants, having elected themselves pope, and who finally leave for a church that marries gays or ordains women or blesses abortion or whatnot.
- Protestants, Catholics, and others not raised in a strong religious family who are more or less perpetually between churches, though they believe in God and would like to find a spiritual home.
It may be a bit much to accuse the Pew Forum of that; but it's not at all too much to consider the egregiously smarmy Time article on the subject in that light:
Forty-three years ago, this magazine published a stark cover with the words "Is God Dead?" stamped in red against an inky black background. The accompanying article predicted that secularization, science and urbanization would eliminate the need for religious belief and institutions before long; in modern society, only the weak and uneducated would persist in their faith. Yet rumors of religion's demise turned out to be premature. Over the past few years, neo-atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have taken up the cry again, encouraged by studies showing that the percentage of Americans who report no religious affiliation has more than doubled since 1990. But as a new report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows, it is a mistake to conclude that more Americans are rejecting religion. Leaving church, it turns out, doesn't mean losing faith. [...]Perhaps most surprising to the Pew researchers was that of the 7% of Americans who were raised unaffiliated, only half remained unaffiliated as adults. "Only Jehovah's Witness has a lower retention rate," says Pew analyst Gregory Smith. Unlike the disillusioned Catholics and Protestants who fled organized religion, these new adherents tend to see the positive aspects of being affiliated with a religious institution. When asked for the main reason they joined their current religion, 33% of the formerly unaffiliated cited the benefits of being spiritually and socially connected to a community, and 20% said it was a choice driven by personal spirituality and a sense that something was missing from their life.
These findings won't be music to the ears of Sam Harris or fans of his best seller The End of Faith. But they do confirm that a stubborn, insistent strain of religiosity continues to infuse Americans — even those who claim they've left organized religion behind.
It is interesting to note that Time's paid subscriptions have declined by roughly a million subscribers in the last decade alone; given the way things are going for the publishing industry, I'd be willing to guess that Time will be dead long before religion is.
The surprised tone of the article shows nothing so much as the cluelessness of the media elite when it comes to religion. The notion that there are still people who actually accept the basic tenets of Christianity and seek to worship God according to some form of Christian tradition seems to be a notion that the in-crowd at Time has a hard time accepting. The companion reality, though, that liberalism, especially agnostic/atheistic secularism, is a completely uninspiring set of ideas that, however exciting they may have been in 1966, are now increasingly seen as a philosophical dead end to those who take the study of such ideas seriously is probably one they have never considered--but the increasing irrelevance of their own magazine ought to wake them up to the possibility that perhaps cheerless liberal gloom isn't what people intuitively seek at the heart of their being when they search for truth.
A Torturous Equivalence
Here and there in the Catholic blogosphere, the discussion about Mary Ann Glendon's decision to refuse the Latare Medal from Notre Dame continues.
One theme that has sprung into being keeps cropping up rather regularly, almost as if left-leaning Catholics were receiving talking points from somewhere--but as everyone knows, only right-wing conservatives get talking points; liberals are all highly independent thinkers who just happen to reach the same conclusions within moments of each other, which makes it convenient for them to post the same thoughts on multiple Internet conversations all at once. This theme goes as follows:
That said, however, this notion that the fact that Glendon didn't resign as ambassador sometime during the Bush administration removes her credibility to object to ND's choice to honor the most pro-abortion president this country has ever had is pernicious nonsense. If we are going to claim that only those who wholeheartedly and enthusiastically accept every action of a presidential administration, even actions which for a long time were kept secret or outright lied about, may serve in that administration, then I think we've pretty much made it impossible for any Catholic at any time to serve in any high-level government position. And if we're going to insist that Glendon must have approved of torture, or else she would have resigned her post, then what are we to make of all those "personally opposed, buts..." serving presently in this administration--should we now insist that if they don't resign their positions they must necessarily accept the president's views on infanticide?
Moreover, as some have pointed out already, there is a difference between the Bush administration on torture and this current administration on abortion. If Bush had been elected on the strength of his promise to torture our enemies, if a strong "pro-torture" faction existed which pumped countless thousands of dollars into his campaign, if Glendon in order to serve in the administration had to quell any moral qualms she had about torture and come up with some kind of, "Well, I'm personally opposed to torture, but..." formulation in order to get the post, if her job required her to gloss over Catholic teaching on torture on a constant basis, then perhaps the comparison might be valid. But there is not (as of yet, anyway) a strong, vocal "pro-torture" movement; even in the Republican party itself there are plenty of people who abhor it. There is no such thing as the "National Enhanced Interrogation Rights Action League (NEIRAL);" there is no "Planned Bauerhood" group which celebrates torture as a right and raises money to support it. President Bush did not campaign on a pro-torture platform; the tactic used was to deny torture was happening, and when that didn't work anymore to quibble about "enhanced interrogation" and insist firmly that whatever was going on, if something were going on which they didn't admit, it wasn't torture, because we don't torture people, etc.
So it is perfectly possible to suppose that many Catholics who worked in positions in the Bush administration do not now, and never did, approve of torture, because it is a fact that the Bush administration did not commit itself openly to torture or insist that its appointees pass a "pro-torture litmus test" as a condition of their employment. Similarly, it is theoretically possible for a Catholic to hold a post within the Obama administration and yet to be vocally and openly pro-life (though thus far Obama hasn't even tried to appoint such a person, not even to Glendon's former post as ambassador to the Holy See). But it is not possible to claim that a Catholic university can honor the most pro-abortion president America has ever had with an honorary degree while simultaneously showing in a clear and unequivocal way their disapproval of abortion; and it was beyond disingenuous for Father Jenkins to claim that awarding the Latare Medal to Mary Ann Glendon was a sufficient act of "equal time" that would provide that unequivocal clarity.
To her credit, Glendon recognized both this reality and the clear fact that Notre Dame was ignoring the bishops' instructions in their 2004 letter, Catholics in Political Life, and thus declined the honor. People who think that this is a partisan act, or that her former position as ambassador to the Holy See somehow makes her a torture apologist, are the ones guilty of a partisanship which won't allow them to see the naked evil of Barack Obama's views and actions on abortion for what they really are.
One theme that has sprung into being keeps cropping up rather regularly, almost as if left-leaning Catholics were receiving talking points from somewhere--but as everyone knows, only right-wing conservatives get talking points; liberals are all highly independent thinkers who just happen to reach the same conclusions within moments of each other, which makes it convenient for them to post the same thoughts on multiple Internet conversations all at once. This theme goes as follows:
- Mary Ann Glendon was ambassador to the Holy See during the Bush administration.
- The Bush administration condoned torture.
- Mary Ann Glendon did not resign her position.
- Therefore, Mary Ann Glendon wholeheartedly approves of the intrinsic evil of torture, and her refusal to accept the award from Notre Dame is a purely partisan act.
- Thus, Catholics who were already inclined to applaud ND for honoring Obama may continue to do so in perfectly good conscience.
That said, however, this notion that the fact that Glendon didn't resign as ambassador sometime during the Bush administration removes her credibility to object to ND's choice to honor the most pro-abortion president this country has ever had is pernicious nonsense. If we are going to claim that only those who wholeheartedly and enthusiastically accept every action of a presidential administration, even actions which for a long time were kept secret or outright lied about, may serve in that administration, then I think we've pretty much made it impossible for any Catholic at any time to serve in any high-level government position. And if we're going to insist that Glendon must have approved of torture, or else she would have resigned her post, then what are we to make of all those "personally opposed, buts..." serving presently in this administration--should we now insist that if they don't resign their positions they must necessarily accept the president's views on infanticide?
Moreover, as some have pointed out already, there is a difference between the Bush administration on torture and this current administration on abortion. If Bush had been elected on the strength of his promise to torture our enemies, if a strong "pro-torture" faction existed which pumped countless thousands of dollars into his campaign, if Glendon in order to serve in the administration had to quell any moral qualms she had about torture and come up with some kind of, "Well, I'm personally opposed to torture, but..." formulation in order to get the post, if her job required her to gloss over Catholic teaching on torture on a constant basis, then perhaps the comparison might be valid. But there is not (as of yet, anyway) a strong, vocal "pro-torture" movement; even in the Republican party itself there are plenty of people who abhor it. There is no such thing as the "National Enhanced Interrogation Rights Action League (NEIRAL);" there is no "Planned Bauerhood" group which celebrates torture as a right and raises money to support it. President Bush did not campaign on a pro-torture platform; the tactic used was to deny torture was happening, and when that didn't work anymore to quibble about "enhanced interrogation" and insist firmly that whatever was going on, if something were going on which they didn't admit, it wasn't torture, because we don't torture people, etc.
So it is perfectly possible to suppose that many Catholics who worked in positions in the Bush administration do not now, and never did, approve of torture, because it is a fact that the Bush administration did not commit itself openly to torture or insist that its appointees pass a "pro-torture litmus test" as a condition of their employment. Similarly, it is theoretically possible for a Catholic to hold a post within the Obama administration and yet to be vocally and openly pro-life (though thus far Obama hasn't even tried to appoint such a person, not even to Glendon's former post as ambassador to the Holy See). But it is not possible to claim that a Catholic university can honor the most pro-abortion president America has ever had with an honorary degree while simultaneously showing in a clear and unequivocal way their disapproval of abortion; and it was beyond disingenuous for Father Jenkins to claim that awarding the Latare Medal to Mary Ann Glendon was a sufficient act of "equal time" that would provide that unequivocal clarity.
To her credit, Glendon recognized both this reality and the clear fact that Notre Dame was ignoring the bishops' instructions in their 2004 letter, Catholics in Political Life, and thus declined the honor. People who think that this is a partisan act, or that her former position as ambassador to the Holy See somehow makes her a torture apologist, are the ones guilty of a partisanship which won't allow them to see the naked evil of Barack Obama's views and actions on abortion for what they really are.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Good For Mary Ann Glendon
By now everyone has heard about Mary Ann Glendon's decision to decline the Latare Medal, which Notre Dame had planned to award her.
I think that Glendon has made an excellent decision, one that I hope her fellow pro-life Catholics will support to the fullest degree. It is one thing to be given an award at the same time that the University makes a disgraceful decision to bestow an honorary degree upon a man who believes that children who survive their own abortions don't deserve to live; it's quite another to have that University point to the award they're giving you as proof that, now, really, they're not so blind to the impropriety of celebrating pro-abortion politicians as all that.
Mary Ann Glendon was being used, and from her polite but firm letter to Fr. Jenkins it's clear that she realized that. It was an unconscionable thing for Notre Dame to do to her, to award her an honor and then claim that she could be "equal time" to balance out the appearance of the nation's Abortionist-In-Chief; the best thing for her to do is what she has done--withdraw, and make it clear to everyone just why she is choosing to do that.
There is a battle being waged for the soul of the Church in America, that goes far beyond our usual Catholic spats about Latin vs. vernacular, ad orientem vs. versus populum, Haugen/Haas hooting vs. Adoremus hymns, etc. It's not that these things aren't important; in a way they relate to the larger battle, which can be summed up as: must we, to be Catholic, accept everything the Church teaches, or can we consider ourselves perfectly good Catholics en route to Heaven while dissenting from any number of important Catholic teachings? The dividing line between the two sides is clear, and hot-button issues like abortion end up being flashpoints for a lot of the associated skirmishes.
Notre Dame, like a lot of other so-called Catholic universities, has come down on the "dissent" side of the equation. Universities like these take an agnostic approach to the truth, whatever their religious "traditions" may be--and however much they like to talk about these "traditions" when they send out fund-raising materials to wealthy, elderly alumni who don't know that things have changed drastically for the worse since their own college days. These sorts of universities don't officially believe in the truth, particularly not as taught by the Church; they are always much more interested in exploring different "faith traditions" and seeking "truths" in the plural; they tend to argue that serious scholarship demands that students not give any sort of pride of place to revealed truth, to Church teachings, or to the Catholic philosophical tradition that has developed over the centuries since the death and resurrection of Our Lord. Faced with some Catholic students who are pro-life, vocally so, and others who are not, such universities tend to chide the former for their "stridency" or for not being inclusive or respectful of the journeys of others, or some such rot--but the latter are almost never called to account for their openly heretical opinions, and are instead considered courageous for "daring" to think outside the Catechism, so to speak.
I don't think we've ever had a president who would so clearly take sides in what ought to be an internal Catholic battle, but President Obama is doing exactly that. He has surrounded himself with American "Catholic" dissenters, ranging from those who make a pious show of their Mass attendance and their reception of Holy Communion despite their slavering enthusiasm for the dismemberment and death of innocent babies in utero, to those who have been informed by their bishops that it isn't seemly for Death Eaters to snack on the Bread of Life. He will now bolster his association with weakling and quisling Catholics by showing off at Notre Dame, and add to his collection of photos of himself being fawned over and toadied to by priests who ought to know better. And he will do so to try to advance even further the big lie being told by American Catholics to themselves--that it is possible to be a good, pious, devout Catholic, in love with the Lord and His Church, while still thinking that abortion is a really terrific idea, a way of keeping the whole "sex without consequences" thing going, a fully acceptable kind of "collateral damage" in which helpless children pay with their very lives for the selfish hedonism of their parents.
Obama and Fr. Jenkins were both perfectly willing to use Mary Ann Glendon's appearance at Notre Dame to further this lie. Good for her, for seeing through them and refusing to play this very evil game.
I think that Glendon has made an excellent decision, one that I hope her fellow pro-life Catholics will support to the fullest degree. It is one thing to be given an award at the same time that the University makes a disgraceful decision to bestow an honorary degree upon a man who believes that children who survive their own abortions don't deserve to live; it's quite another to have that University point to the award they're giving you as proof that, now, really, they're not so blind to the impropriety of celebrating pro-abortion politicians as all that.
Mary Ann Glendon was being used, and from her polite but firm letter to Fr. Jenkins it's clear that she realized that. It was an unconscionable thing for Notre Dame to do to her, to award her an honor and then claim that she could be "equal time" to balance out the appearance of the nation's Abortionist-In-Chief; the best thing for her to do is what she has done--withdraw, and make it clear to everyone just why she is choosing to do that.
There is a battle being waged for the soul of the Church in America, that goes far beyond our usual Catholic spats about Latin vs. vernacular, ad orientem vs. versus populum, Haugen/Haas hooting vs. Adoremus hymns, etc. It's not that these things aren't important; in a way they relate to the larger battle, which can be summed up as: must we, to be Catholic, accept everything the Church teaches, or can we consider ourselves perfectly good Catholics en route to Heaven while dissenting from any number of important Catholic teachings? The dividing line between the two sides is clear, and hot-button issues like abortion end up being flashpoints for a lot of the associated skirmishes.
Notre Dame, like a lot of other so-called Catholic universities, has come down on the "dissent" side of the equation. Universities like these take an agnostic approach to the truth, whatever their religious "traditions" may be--and however much they like to talk about these "traditions" when they send out fund-raising materials to wealthy, elderly alumni who don't know that things have changed drastically for the worse since their own college days. These sorts of universities don't officially believe in the truth, particularly not as taught by the Church; they are always much more interested in exploring different "faith traditions" and seeking "truths" in the plural; they tend to argue that serious scholarship demands that students not give any sort of pride of place to revealed truth, to Church teachings, or to the Catholic philosophical tradition that has developed over the centuries since the death and resurrection of Our Lord. Faced with some Catholic students who are pro-life, vocally so, and others who are not, such universities tend to chide the former for their "stridency" or for not being inclusive or respectful of the journeys of others, or some such rot--but the latter are almost never called to account for their openly heretical opinions, and are instead considered courageous for "daring" to think outside the Catechism, so to speak.
I don't think we've ever had a president who would so clearly take sides in what ought to be an internal Catholic battle, but President Obama is doing exactly that. He has surrounded himself with American "Catholic" dissenters, ranging from those who make a pious show of their Mass attendance and their reception of Holy Communion despite their slavering enthusiasm for the dismemberment and death of innocent babies in utero, to those who have been informed by their bishops that it isn't seemly for Death Eaters to snack on the Bread of Life. He will now bolster his association with weakling and quisling Catholics by showing off at Notre Dame, and add to his collection of photos of himself being fawned over and toadied to by priests who ought to know better. And he will do so to try to advance even further the big lie being told by American Catholics to themselves--that it is possible to be a good, pious, devout Catholic, in love with the Lord and His Church, while still thinking that abortion is a really terrific idea, a way of keeping the whole "sex without consequences" thing going, a fully acceptable kind of "collateral damage" in which helpless children pay with their very lives for the selfish hedonism of their parents.
Obama and Fr. Jenkins were both perfectly willing to use Mary Ann Glendon's appearance at Notre Dame to further this lie. Good for her, for seeing through them and refusing to play this very evil game.
He Stops
Anyone who reads my husband's blog knows that Thad has an eclectic taste in music; he's especially fond of small, unknown singers or groups, both in America and overseas.
One band he's been following is a local Christian band called Addison Road. I'm not in any way qualified to opine about their music; I'm a classical music geek, and don't really get into much else, except for a handful of tunes to use when I'm exercising. But I have enjoyed reading the blog written by their female vocalist, Jenny Simmons. Jenny and her husband (also in the band) have just had their first child, a girl, and Jenny has been writing about her pregnancy and the recent birth of their baby (induced labor, unexpected C-section, etc.) with her usual down to earth humor and illuminating faith in God.
In the midst of this post detailing it all, though, she just about made me cry when she wrote about life, death, and hospitals--and I'm not the sort of person who gets weepy when I read things on the Internet, believe me. But she writes with great beauty and wisdom (italics in original):
I was thinking about this, about the loveliness of it, and I suddenly thought about what we Catholics call the works of mercy in a new and different way.
The corporal and spiritual works of mercy are, of course, as follows:
It's easy to see the works of mercy as "to-do" lists which are ultimately for our benefit, but to do this is to miss the point, I think. We should see them as a call to stop, for a minute, to come to someone else's aid because we see Christ in the other person, and because we know that He has already stopped to be with him in his hour of need. The Good Samaritan was the one who stopped to help his neighbor; the beloved disciple was the one who stopped at the foot of the Cross, setting aside his own fear of the authorities when the other disciples could not.
At the hour of our deaths, when we face judgment, Christ is going to ask us if we stopped. Did we stop to feed Him, to clothe Him, to shelter Him? Did we visit Him when He was sick or in prison? Because He was there--He stopped to be with His children. Did we stop? Did we see Him in them, and stop to help?
One band he's been following is a local Christian band called Addison Road. I'm not in any way qualified to opine about their music; I'm a classical music geek, and don't really get into much else, except for a handful of tunes to use when I'm exercising. But I have enjoyed reading the blog written by their female vocalist, Jenny Simmons. Jenny and her husband (also in the band) have just had their first child, a girl, and Jenny has been writing about her pregnancy and the recent birth of their baby (induced labor, unexpected C-section, etc.) with her usual down to earth humor and illuminating faith in God.
In the midst of this post detailing it all, though, she just about made me cry when she wrote about life, death, and hospitals--and I'm not the sort of person who gets weepy when I read things on the Internet, believe me. But she writes with great beauty and wisdom (italics in original):
But my floor of the hospital was about life. Little babies everywhere. And I found myself slightly annoyed that there were so many babies. Because in that moment everything came down to this one child I was bringing into the world. And I wanted everyone to stop and be in awe. I wanted everyone to act as though this were the first child ever born. That this was a big deal. That the world would never be the same because this little girl came quietly into its midst.But the world kept going on around me. The construction workers out my window kept drilling. The cars kept driving. The nurse kept coming in and giving me shots in my butt (as if she did not understand that my body was a holy vessel that had just accomplished something miraculous) and even my friends who came to visit left and went home to their normal lives. The world just kept going.And I thought about that a lot in the hospital. The life. The death. And the desire we as humans have to want to scream, "STOP! Something big is happening to me here!"Why can't everyone just stop for a minute? Why does the world keep going even though you and I are facing mountains or valleys? Won't someone stop with me?Even though the world keeps going during those intense moments of joy and pain, there is a God who is ever-present and mindful, and He stops. He stops with us. He cries in the pre-op room with the couple who are staring death in the eyes. He stops to comfort them. He stops to be there in that moment when everyone else keeps going as if nothing life-changing is happening. He stops.He stops to be present in that surgery room watching with delight as His little daughter Anniston sees the world for the first time. I am convinced He smiles. He tears up. He is overwhelmed with her beauty and gentle spirit. He stops with me when I am looking at her trying to comprehend this little miracle. He lets me know that He is there. That he is amazed. He stops.He stops with us. He creates space that the world does not give us. And He rejoices and mourns in those moments with us as if we were the only people on the universe with Him. He stops.
I was thinking about this, about the loveliness of it, and I suddenly thought about what we Catholics call the works of mercy in a new and different way.
The corporal and spiritual works of mercy are, of course, as follows:
- Feed the hungry
- Give drink to the thirsty
- Clothe the naked
- Shelter the Homeless
- Visit the sick
- Visit the imprisoned
- Bury the dead
- Instruct the ignorant
- Counsel the doubtful
- Admonish the sinner
- Bear wrongs patiently
- Forgive offenses willingly
- Comfort the sorrowful
- Pray for the living and the dead
It's easy to see the works of mercy as "to-do" lists which are ultimately for our benefit, but to do this is to miss the point, I think. We should see them as a call to stop, for a minute, to come to someone else's aid because we see Christ in the other person, and because we know that He has already stopped to be with him in his hour of need. The Good Samaritan was the one who stopped to help his neighbor; the beloved disciple was the one who stopped at the foot of the Cross, setting aside his own fear of the authorities when the other disciples could not.
At the hour of our deaths, when we face judgment, Christ is going to ask us if we stopped. Did we stop to feed Him, to clothe Him, to shelter Him? Did we visit Him when He was sick or in prison? Because He was there--He stopped to be with His children. Did we stop? Did we see Him in them, and stop to help?
Friday, April 24, 2009
Town Fights Mormon Crickets With Rock Music
Okay, the crickets in this story have to be the country's second scariest looking crickets:
TUSCARORA, Nev. -- The residents of this tiny town, anticipating an imminent attack, will be ready with a perimeter defense. They'll position their best weapons at regular intervals, faced out toward the desert to repel the assault.
Then they'll turn up the volume.
Rock music blaring from boomboxes has proved one of the best defenses against an annual invasion of Mormon crickets. The huge flightless insects are a fearsome sight as they advance across the desert in armies of millions that march over, under or into anything in their way.
But the crickets don't much fancy Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones, the townspeople figured out three years ago. So next month, Tuscarorans are preparing once again to get out their extension cords, array their stereos in a quarter-circle and tune them to rock station KHIX, full blast, from dawn to dusk. "It is part of our arsenal," says Laura Moore, an unemployed college professor and one of the town's 13 residents.
In flyspeck villages like Tuscarora, crickets are a serious matter. The critters hatch in April in the barren soil of northern Nevada, western Utah and other parts of the Great Basin, quickly growing into blood-red, ravenous insects more than 2 inches long.
Then they march. In columns that in peak years can be two miles long and a mile across, swarms move across the badlands in search of food. Starting in about May, they march through August or so, before stopping to lay eggs for next year and die.
In between, they make an awful mess. They destroy crops and lots of the other leafy vegetation. They crawl all over houses, and some get inside. "You'll wake up and there'll be one sitting on your forehead, looking at you," says Ms. Moore.
I can't imagine how horrible that is.
More:
Following an unseasonably warm winter, some in Elko County fear a big crop this year of Mormon crickets, known more precisely as shield-backed katydids, or Anabrus simplex. State entomologist Jeff Knight is using computer models to document when the crickets will hatch, and "once they have hatched, we will start going in and mapping where all the crickets are," he says.
Towns in their path aren't waiting to find out. Elko County officials have stored tons of poison bait, which they'll soon start handing out. Placed properly, it can help. In 2003, which was a bad year, residents organized a bucket brigade to lay poison bait in the countryside, luring many bugs to their doom.
But last year Diana Bunitsky sprinkled the bait too close -- right outside the rural diner she runs, Lone Mountain Station -- and crickets swarmed onto her property to gobble it. Ms. Bunitsky ran outside and sprayed them with a garden hose, "but when I looked back, they had gone around and were all over my walls," she says.
How did the townspeople figure out how to fight off these horrifying pests? History:
But when a throng of crickets began to advance ominously on Tuscarora in the spring of 2006, Ms. Parks, the artist, dug up a 1934 article in the Elko Free Press about a woman who had used a Chinese gong to drive them away. That led to the modern adaptation of a boombox perimeter. [...]
The theory was they'd hate heavy metal," Ms. Parks says. Indeed, locals report, in 2006, at least, many of the bugs stopped in their tracks. Says Mr. Knight, the entomologist: "The vibrations may deter the bugs, but I don't know of any research that says yes or no."
For those who think fighting off hordes of crickets would be no big deal, here's a picture of the Mormon cricket:
Why do I call it the second scariest cricket in America? Well, I know it's a matter of opinion, but I still think these guys, whom I encountered in North Carolina, are scarier:
Entomologists give it the popular name "camel cricket." I call it "hideous mutant cricket-spider bug." If the townspeople of Nevada feel the same way about their Mormon crickets, I'm amazed at their restraint in limiting their weapons to bug poison and rock music; by now I'd be going for boiling oil or flamethrowers. Or both, used together. Or, more likely, moving to a place far, far away from the hideous invaders.
TwitterThink
I know I've been a little harsh on social networking technology. I guess that's because I don't have any use for it myself, and have a sneaking suspicion that it was invented by men as a way of ending forever the complaint of millions of women to their husbands: "Are you on that computer again????" Which, if I'm right, was a devious strategy that has worked all too well.
But here, at last, is a good reason for Twitter to exist:
But here, at last, is a good reason for Twitter to exist:
Twitter messages are so short — a 140-character limit — that you have to really think about what you want to say.For Adam Wilson, thinking is all he has to do.
Earlier this month, Wilson thought of a tweet (the name for a post to the social networking site) and poof, his computer read his mind and sent the darn thing. At just 23 characters, Wilson's message, "using EEG to send tweet," was done with a computer setup that interprets brain waves.
The technology could one day help patients who otherwise can't communicate finally talk to the outside world. Among them are people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), brain-stem stroke or high spinal cord injury.
Of course, it's not quite as easy as it sounds; users are looking at a "keypad" screen:
"All the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," Williams explained. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."
So for now, this is a slow process; the researchers liken it to having to press a phone keypad up to four times for each letter you want to text. Still, the idea that some communications-impaired people might be able to use Twitter to keep family and friends informed about their health and lives is something it's hard to oppose.
Unfortunately, given our government's increasingly totalitarian approach toward the lives and freedom of its citizens, I could imagine this technology eventually being put to the wrong use. After all, "You have the right to remain silent" doesn't necessarily mean you have the right not to look at a flashing screen of letters while the arresting officers monitor you from their Tweet Decks, or some such thing. And if you refuse to do it--why, surely no one who is innocent would refuse such a thing, right? What are you hiding, that you don't want to tweet your thoughts to law enforcement?
So we'll have to be careful that some futuristic version of Twitter that promises to save us all the hassle of sitting down and actually typing those 140 characters each time we have an urgent need to tell the world that we just had the theme song from a show we watched twenty years ago pop into our head for no reason doesn't ever catch on. Because we're still human, and TwitterThink! would be an unmitigated disaster.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The More Things Change
I'll keep today's reflection on Paul Likoudis' article, below, brief, as this article is a bit longer than the last one. But I am struck by some thoughts about the newspaper business in general.
I'm not enough of a student of history to comment on the tensions between those Catholics who had what Mr. Likoudis calls "Americanist" leanings, and those who did not; clearly we know that assimilation has its dangers as well as its benefits, and adopting an obsequious attitude toward secularism, which we can still see today in the Notre Dame scandal, is never a good idea. But, like last week, what I find most inspiring is that The Wanderer at its beginnings was hardly a "professional" newspaper; most of its contributors and founders were not highly educated professional writers, and a great deal of homespun wisdom seems to have been a feature of the paper from the start.
One hundred and forty years later, traditional newspapers are faltering. Major papers like the New York Times are not immune; circulation keeps dropping, money keeps disappearing, and newspaper editors across the country are at a loss to explain it all.
I think that what really has happened is that newspapers got too big to succeed. Combined with the Internet's capacity to make news feeds available to all without the medium of the paper, the lack of local, small-town, focused coverage makes newspapers less and less relevant to a lot of people's lives. The small, specialty newspapers and magazines, provided they figure out how to make the best use of the Internet, will continue, because the voices they publish are, like the early Wanderer's team, the unadulterated voices of the community itself.
I'm not enough of a student of history to comment on the tensions between those Catholics who had what Mr. Likoudis calls "Americanist" leanings, and those who did not; clearly we know that assimilation has its dangers as well as its benefits, and adopting an obsequious attitude toward secularism, which we can still see today in the Notre Dame scandal, is never a good idea. But, like last week, what I find most inspiring is that The Wanderer at its beginnings was hardly a "professional" newspaper; most of its contributors and founders were not highly educated professional writers, and a great deal of homespun wisdom seems to have been a feature of the paper from the start.
One hundred and forty years later, traditional newspapers are faltering. Major papers like the New York Times are not immune; circulation keeps dropping, money keeps disappearing, and newspaper editors across the country are at a loss to explain it all.
I think that what really has happened is that newspapers got too big to succeed. Combined with the Internet's capacity to make news feeds available to all without the medium of the paper, the lack of local, small-town, focused coverage makes newspapers less and less relevant to a lot of people's lives. The small, specialty newspapers and magazines, provided they figure out how to make the best use of the Internet, will continue, because the voices they publish are, like the early Wanderer's team, the unadulterated voices of the community itself.
A History of the Wanderer, 1867-1931: Article Two, by Paul Likoudis
(Note: this continues the series of articles by Paul Likoudis which I am publishing each Thursday.)
The Wanderer at 140....
Der Wanderer Debuted At A Time
Of A Sharply Divided U.S. Church
by Paul Likoudis
When Der Wanderer debuted on November 16, 1867, the Church in the United States was sharply divided, not only along ethnic lines, but along ideological ones, and the debate that played out in the Church mirrored a larger cultural debate on whether the United States was to be a “melting pot” where all the various ethnic and immigrant groups were “fired” into a new American, or whether peoples would be allowed to maintain their ethnic traditions.
“The division among American Catholics in the last third of the 19th century was not only a struggle between traditionalists and modernists, but a conflict between the ‘accommodationist’ spirit and an ‘assimilationist’ ethic and the tradition of cultural conformity represented by Irish and Irish-American churchmen,” explains C. Joseph Doyle, executive director of the Massachusetts Catholic Action League, “who inherited that from post-Reformation English Catholicism.
“The mostly German bishops and priests of the American mid-west in the ‘German Triangle’ running from Cincinnati to St. Louis to Milwaukee wanted to maintain their own ethnic nationalism and separatism from the dominant Anglophone culture.
“If one looks at the threads of this Irish-dominated Church,” Doyle added, “represented by such prelates as St. Paul’s ‘Americanist’ Archbishop John Ireland, Baltimore’s James Cardinal Gibbons, Bishop John J. Keane, the first rector of the Catholic University of America (and later Archbishop of Dubuque) and Monsignor Dennis O’Connell (first rector of the North American College in Rome and later Keane’s successor at CUA), one sees the corporate spirit of 18th century English Catholicism, which sought toleration and practiced appeasement toward the Protestant majority and which was careful to affirm its loyalty to the governing elites.”
This was the spirit of America’s first bishop, John Carroll, who had close relations with the founders of the American Republic, and wanted to minimize papal control over the Church and even sought a vernacular liturgy for the United States. Another early “Americanist” was Charleston’s Bishop, Irish-born John England, who famously told a joint session of Congress that the Pope would never tell him, as an American citizen, how to vote.
At the time of Der Wanderer’s founding in 1867 and Vatican I, 1869-1870, the Americanist bishops were largely opposed to the declaration on papal infallibility championed by England’s Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, Paul Cardinal Cullen of Dublin and St. Anthony Mary Claret, Archbishop of Santiago in exile.
This opposition was rooted in either theological reservations regarding its expediency or, as it was called at the time, “inopportunism,” or on political grounds that it would force Catholics to choose between allegiance to the Church or loyalty to the state. Among the two prelates at Vatican I who voted against Pastor Aeternus, defining papal infallibility, was the Bishop of Little Rock, Ark., Edward Fitzgerald.
“This was sadly consistent with the previous practices of the American hierarchy who were reluctant to defend the temporal power of the papacy, especially when it came to raising funds, subscribing to bonds or calling for volunteers to support the papal states from rampaging Garibaldian anti-clerical revolutionaries and Freemasons hiding under the guise of Italian nationalism,” Doyle said.
Issues that divided “Americanists” from integralists or papal loyalists have endured: debates over the exclusive use of a vernacular liturgy and popular or sacred music at Mass; aversion versus affection to ultramontane devotions, such as recitation of the Rosary, wearing the scapular, veneration of relics, invocation of the saints, Eucharistic Adoration and Marian piety. Another major issue dividing U.S. Catholics a century ago was the American notion of “manifest destiny”: the Americanists – bishops, priests and laity – applauded the U.S. invasion of Cuba and the Philippines, which President McKinley said was done to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos – a country that was Catholic long before the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock. Later, Americanists supported American involvement in World War I (which led directly to the demise of the last great Catholic power in Europe, Austria-Hungary, ruled by a saint, the Venerable Karl von Habsburg, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, who never lifted a finger against the United States).
NO MORE SAUERKRAUT
Americanist Catholic support for the war against Germany – despite the fact that 25 million Americans had relatives in Germany or Austria – also led to a radical propaganda war against German-Americans, and their customs and traditions were demonized. Sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage” and nativist bigots Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson declaimed against “hyphenated Americans.”
Opposed to the “Americanists” were such German bishops as Michael Heiss, Bishop of LaCrosse and later Archbishop of Milwaukee (1818-1890), who was called to Rome by Pope Leo XIII to discuss the growing problem of “Americanism,” and which resulted in the encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae which condemned the notion that “the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions.”
Another contentious issue when Der Wanderer debuted was German complaints that German priests were not advancing into the hierarchy in proportion to their numbers, and that the Irish dominated hierarchy was practicing secrecy and showing favoritism in advancing the careers of Irish-American clerics, whose personal relations skills helped shape American politics, which the Irish soon came to dominate in the late 19th century.
(As an aside, an assessment of the Irish-dominated American hierarchy is provided by Fr. James Hennessey, SJ, in his book American Catholics. He quotes Bishop George Conroy, an Irish prelate from Ardagh, sent by the Holy See to investigate the American hierarchy:
“Conroy reported to Rome in 1878,” wrote Hennessey, “that hardly ten in 68 American bishops were distinguished for any kind of talent. The rest ‘hardly reach a decent mediocrity, and in theological knowledge they do not even reach mediocrity.’”
(In fairness to the Irish, it must be pointed out there were prominent Irish opponents of Americanism, such as Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York, Rochester’s Bishop Bernard McQuaid, and, of course, Rafael Merry Cardinal Del Val’s close confident, Boston’s William Cardinal O’Connell, all of whom served a large number of German Catholics.)
In the post-Civil War era, when German migration to the United States was at its peak, the Germans were firmly convinced that the most efficacious way of preserving the Catholic faith of German-American immigrants was to preserve their German language and culture, and to resist the tendency towards assimilation into WASP America.
From its founding, observed Fr. John Kulas, author of an academic study on Der Wanderer’s first ten years, Der Wanderer of St. Paul: The First Decade, 1867-1877) this newspaper played an important national role in building the German-American community. This newspaper not only emphasized Church and political news, but also devoted separate pages to art, music, theater and literature reviews. The Germans understood that a strong Catholic faith needs a support system, and could not merely be a private conviction afloat in a hostile sea of Protestantism and secularism.
THE EARLY YEARS
Der Wanderer was the inspiration of Benedictine Father Clemens Staub and a group of German laymen of his Assumption parish in St. Paul, who offered the initial funding to launch the paper, which debuted on the same day as the Minneapolis Tribune and the Minnesota Newspaper Association, under the editorship of Eugen L. Ehrhardt, who had recently arrived in St. Paul from the Rhineland.
Five months later, Ehrhardt “suddenly disappeared,” Fr. Kulas discovered, and the newspaper named no editor until the following September, when Theodor Mullenmeister, a recent immigrant from Prussia was hired to take the helm. It is likely that in the interim Fr. Staub edited the paper.
Mullenmeister, writes Fr. Kulas, brought “a more intense political orientation and an impassioned editorial style.” He was, moreover, “a complex, restless, driven man with powerful convictions often expressed in vehement, intemperate language, a man who seemed to attract controversy and to delight in it, a man who apparently could not hold any job for long.” He left after a year at the post.
Der Wanderer’s third editor was Franz Fassbind, 45, a Swiss-born doctor who came to the United States in 1864 to assume the editorship of Der Wahrheits-Freund of Cincinnati, the first German Catholic newspaper in the United States. Fr. Kulas described him: “Quite the opposite in temperament and character of his predecessor, with his tenure of fourteen years, he finally brought stability to the newspaper. He was milder, more amicable, less belligerent than the flamboyant and caustic Mullenmeister and possessed a more reflective, more literary style, though he was not lacking in convictions and firmness in expressing them.”
Der Wanderer was incorporated in May 1868 as the Deutsch-Katholische Druckgellschaft, with 50 shareholders, an arrangement which lasted ten years until five of the original members bought the others out. Of these 50, Fr. Kulas informs, about half had arrived from Germany in the 1850s, and were well-established professionals or tradesmen, the other half more recent immigrants. Only two were native born.
“Many of these immigrants were skilled practitioners of various trades, and a number of them were already operating their own small businesses. They included six blacksmiths and wagon makers as well as smaller numbers of shoemakers, printers and one brewer. Others provided merchandise – there were seven engaged in the grocery business – and two were saloon keepers. A few might be described as professional people, and these included six priests, three teachers, a lawyer, a coroner, a druggist and a musician. Two were engaged in agricultural pursuits, and three were listed as laborers....
“These men seemed to have had no particular expertise for an undertaking of this kind. Some of them had received a basic education in their homeland, but none, apart from editor Fassbind and the clerics, had any higher education before emigrating. The centennial edition of The Wanderer includes an article on the beginnings of the paper which emphasizes that it was a group of ‘little men’ who met to organize this enterprise, although in a similar story ten years earlier they are referred to as ‘prominent Catholic laymen.’ Both assessments are undoubtedly accurate, for it was these ordinary men, successful in their own way, who emerged as community leaders, willing to labor and commit their resources to the success of a notable endeavor. They were clearly not men of erudition, but if the priests among them were probably the best educated, it was the lay leaders who provided the means and kept the paper in touch with the community....
“These were all pioneers, and not surprisingly they were a generally young lot. The age of these men when the stock association was formed is known for less than half of them, but of these none exceed 50 and twelve and not yet reached 40. They were thus able to communicate the vitality of the frontier to this undertaking and exhibited the pioneer’s willingness to accept challenges and to reject defeat....
“The Catholic readers of Der Wanderer were undoubtedly not any better educated than these leaders, and they were probably on the whole less well situated. It can be assumed that they were typical of the German-Catholic settlers of the region. Like most of their fellow German immigrants of the period they were most likely members of the lower middle class, poor though not indigent, artisans, laborers, farmers and merchants.”
Der Wanderer, in those early years, always printed the names and residences of its readers when they subscribed or renewed, and from that Fr. Kulas determined that one in seven readers came from St. Paul, 70 percent were from elsewhere in the state, and the remainder came from Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Louisiana, “a tribute to the paper’s aspirations of becoming a national journal.”
The inherent conservatism of German Catholics was obvious in the newspaper’s editorials, but the news content was vast. Each issue had news on national and European events, both political and Church-related, and city and state news, and Der Wanderer regularly informed its readers news came via “Cable Dispatches” and “By Telegraph, which “underscored the fact that the telegraph had only lately reached St. Paul,” noted Fr. Kulas.
Der Wanderer had much more, Fr. Kulas revealed: “articles on household and agricultural topics appeared regularly with an abundance of helpful hints ranging from how to can crab apples and how to treat frozen feet to better ways of fertilizing. For their leisure hours readers could turn to the literary page which presented serialized fiction and poetry, and the latter sometimes by local writers. An increasing amount of space was devoted to advertising, and no paper was complete without its column or two of humor....”
THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE
Among the advertisements Der Wanderer carried were City of St. Paul legal notices, and State of Minnesota appeals to its readership in Germany and Austria to immigrate to Minnesota. In its early years, an average of 130,000 Germans annually were crossing the Atlantic to settle in Minnesota, and Der Wanderer played a major role in welcoming these immigrants as well as informing its readers of the often-times desperate plight they were in. One early article, Fr. Kulas reports, told of the hardships of single women who traveled in steerage and had no job prospects upon arriving, and advised single women not to take the risk. In another article, the same writer says that there were two million fewer Catholics practicing their faith in the United States than there should be because “of the unfavorable conditions for the practice of the faith to be found in North America.”
One early initiative Der Wanderer engaged in, with others to support German immigrants, was promoting Der Deutsche Romisch-Katholische Central-Verein von Nord America, or Central Union, founded by German professionals, bankers and insurance agents to greet and assist German immigrants, and one of its leaders, Joseph Kolble in New York, was a regular correspondent for the paper.
The Central-Verein, or Catholic Central Union was founded in Buffalo, N.Y., as a mutual-aid society in 1855, but only had about 62 branches in 1865. By 1875, it had grown to 302, a number which nearly doubled over the next 20 years, no doubt due the efforts of Der Wanderer’s Franz Fassbind.
In fact, writes Fr. Kulas, the “immigrant experience” formed Der Wanderer. “Like its contemporaries, it developed its own personality through the lively interaction of editor, community and community concerns.”
Has much changed at all over the past 140 years, despite appearances?
The Wanderer at 140....
Der Wanderer Debuted At A Time
Of A Sharply Divided U.S. Church
by Paul Likoudis
When Der Wanderer debuted on November 16, 1867, the Church in the United States was sharply divided, not only along ethnic lines, but along ideological ones, and the debate that played out in the Church mirrored a larger cultural debate on whether the United States was to be a “melting pot” where all the various ethnic and immigrant groups were “fired” into a new American, or whether peoples would be allowed to maintain their ethnic traditions.
“The division among American Catholics in the last third of the 19th century was not only a struggle between traditionalists and modernists, but a conflict between the ‘accommodationist’ spirit and an ‘assimilationist’ ethic and the tradition of cultural conformity represented by Irish and Irish-American churchmen,” explains C. Joseph Doyle, executive director of the Massachusetts Catholic Action League, “who inherited that from post-Reformation English Catholicism.
“The mostly German bishops and priests of the American mid-west in the ‘German Triangle’ running from Cincinnati to St. Louis to Milwaukee wanted to maintain their own ethnic nationalism and separatism from the dominant Anglophone culture.
“If one looks at the threads of this Irish-dominated Church,” Doyle added, “represented by such prelates as St. Paul’s ‘Americanist’ Archbishop John Ireland, Baltimore’s James Cardinal Gibbons, Bishop John J. Keane, the first rector of the Catholic University of America (and later Archbishop of Dubuque) and Monsignor Dennis O’Connell (first rector of the North American College in Rome and later Keane’s successor at CUA), one sees the corporate spirit of 18th century English Catholicism, which sought toleration and practiced appeasement toward the Protestant majority and which was careful to affirm its loyalty to the governing elites.”
This was the spirit of America’s first bishop, John Carroll, who had close relations with the founders of the American Republic, and wanted to minimize papal control over the Church and even sought a vernacular liturgy for the United States. Another early “Americanist” was Charleston’s Bishop, Irish-born John England, who famously told a joint session of Congress that the Pope would never tell him, as an American citizen, how to vote.
At the time of Der Wanderer’s founding in 1867 and Vatican I, 1869-1870, the Americanist bishops were largely opposed to the declaration on papal infallibility championed by England’s Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, Paul Cardinal Cullen of Dublin and St. Anthony Mary Claret, Archbishop of Santiago in exile.
This opposition was rooted in either theological reservations regarding its expediency or, as it was called at the time, “inopportunism,” or on political grounds that it would force Catholics to choose between allegiance to the Church or loyalty to the state. Among the two prelates at Vatican I who voted against Pastor Aeternus, defining papal infallibility, was the Bishop of Little Rock, Ark., Edward Fitzgerald.
“This was sadly consistent with the previous practices of the American hierarchy who were reluctant to defend the temporal power of the papacy, especially when it came to raising funds, subscribing to bonds or calling for volunteers to support the papal states from rampaging Garibaldian anti-clerical revolutionaries and Freemasons hiding under the guise of Italian nationalism,” Doyle said.
Issues that divided “Americanists” from integralists or papal loyalists have endured: debates over the exclusive use of a vernacular liturgy and popular or sacred music at Mass; aversion versus affection to ultramontane devotions, such as recitation of the Rosary, wearing the scapular, veneration of relics, invocation of the saints, Eucharistic Adoration and Marian piety. Another major issue dividing U.S. Catholics a century ago was the American notion of “manifest destiny”: the Americanists – bishops, priests and laity – applauded the U.S. invasion of Cuba and the Philippines, which President McKinley said was done to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos – a country that was Catholic long before the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock. Later, Americanists supported American involvement in World War I (which led directly to the demise of the last great Catholic power in Europe, Austria-Hungary, ruled by a saint, the Venerable Karl von Habsburg, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, who never lifted a finger against the United States).
NO MORE SAUERKRAUT
Americanist Catholic support for the war against Germany – despite the fact that 25 million Americans had relatives in Germany or Austria – also led to a radical propaganda war against German-Americans, and their customs and traditions were demonized. Sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage” and nativist bigots Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson declaimed against “hyphenated Americans.”
Opposed to the “Americanists” were such German bishops as Michael Heiss, Bishop of LaCrosse and later Archbishop of Milwaukee (1818-1890), who was called to Rome by Pope Leo XIII to discuss the growing problem of “Americanism,” and which resulted in the encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae which condemned the notion that “the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions.”
Another contentious issue when Der Wanderer debuted was German complaints that German priests were not advancing into the hierarchy in proportion to their numbers, and that the Irish dominated hierarchy was practicing secrecy and showing favoritism in advancing the careers of Irish-American clerics, whose personal relations skills helped shape American politics, which the Irish soon came to dominate in the late 19th century.
(As an aside, an assessment of the Irish-dominated American hierarchy is provided by Fr. James Hennessey, SJ, in his book American Catholics. He quotes Bishop George Conroy, an Irish prelate from Ardagh, sent by the Holy See to investigate the American hierarchy:
“Conroy reported to Rome in 1878,” wrote Hennessey, “that hardly ten in 68 American bishops were distinguished for any kind of talent. The rest ‘hardly reach a decent mediocrity, and in theological knowledge they do not even reach mediocrity.’”
(In fairness to the Irish, it must be pointed out there were prominent Irish opponents of Americanism, such as Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York, Rochester’s Bishop Bernard McQuaid, and, of course, Rafael Merry Cardinal Del Val’s close confident, Boston’s William Cardinal O’Connell, all of whom served a large number of German Catholics.)
In the post-Civil War era, when German migration to the United States was at its peak, the Germans were firmly convinced that the most efficacious way of preserving the Catholic faith of German-American immigrants was to preserve their German language and culture, and to resist the tendency towards assimilation into WASP America.
From its founding, observed Fr. John Kulas, author of an academic study on Der Wanderer’s first ten years, Der Wanderer of St. Paul: The First Decade, 1867-1877) this newspaper played an important national role in building the German-American community. This newspaper not only emphasized Church and political news, but also devoted separate pages to art, music, theater and literature reviews. The Germans understood that a strong Catholic faith needs a support system, and could not merely be a private conviction afloat in a hostile sea of Protestantism and secularism.
THE EARLY YEARS
Der Wanderer was the inspiration of Benedictine Father Clemens Staub and a group of German laymen of his Assumption parish in St. Paul, who offered the initial funding to launch the paper, which debuted on the same day as the Minneapolis Tribune and the Minnesota Newspaper Association, under the editorship of Eugen L. Ehrhardt, who had recently arrived in St. Paul from the Rhineland.
Five months later, Ehrhardt “suddenly disappeared,” Fr. Kulas discovered, and the newspaper named no editor until the following September, when Theodor Mullenmeister, a recent immigrant from Prussia was hired to take the helm. It is likely that in the interim Fr. Staub edited the paper.
Mullenmeister, writes Fr. Kulas, brought “a more intense political orientation and an impassioned editorial style.” He was, moreover, “a complex, restless, driven man with powerful convictions often expressed in vehement, intemperate language, a man who seemed to attract controversy and to delight in it, a man who apparently could not hold any job for long.” He left after a year at the post.
Der Wanderer’s third editor was Franz Fassbind, 45, a Swiss-born doctor who came to the United States in 1864 to assume the editorship of Der Wahrheits-Freund of Cincinnati, the first German Catholic newspaper in the United States. Fr. Kulas described him: “Quite the opposite in temperament and character of his predecessor, with his tenure of fourteen years, he finally brought stability to the newspaper. He was milder, more amicable, less belligerent than the flamboyant and caustic Mullenmeister and possessed a more reflective, more literary style, though he was not lacking in convictions and firmness in expressing them.”
Der Wanderer was incorporated in May 1868 as the Deutsch-Katholische Druckgellschaft, with 50 shareholders, an arrangement which lasted ten years until five of the original members bought the others out. Of these 50, Fr. Kulas informs, about half had arrived from Germany in the 1850s, and were well-established professionals or tradesmen, the other half more recent immigrants. Only two were native born.
“Many of these immigrants were skilled practitioners of various trades, and a number of them were already operating their own small businesses. They included six blacksmiths and wagon makers as well as smaller numbers of shoemakers, printers and one brewer. Others provided merchandise – there were seven engaged in the grocery business – and two were saloon keepers. A few might be described as professional people, and these included six priests, three teachers, a lawyer, a coroner, a druggist and a musician. Two were engaged in agricultural pursuits, and three were listed as laborers....
“These men seemed to have had no particular expertise for an undertaking of this kind. Some of them had received a basic education in their homeland, but none, apart from editor Fassbind and the clerics, had any higher education before emigrating. The centennial edition of The Wanderer includes an article on the beginnings of the paper which emphasizes that it was a group of ‘little men’ who met to organize this enterprise, although in a similar story ten years earlier they are referred to as ‘prominent Catholic laymen.’ Both assessments are undoubtedly accurate, for it was these ordinary men, successful in their own way, who emerged as community leaders, willing to labor and commit their resources to the success of a notable endeavor. They were clearly not men of erudition, but if the priests among them were probably the best educated, it was the lay leaders who provided the means and kept the paper in touch with the community....
“These were all pioneers, and not surprisingly they were a generally young lot. The age of these men when the stock association was formed is known for less than half of them, but of these none exceed 50 and twelve and not yet reached 40. They were thus able to communicate the vitality of the frontier to this undertaking and exhibited the pioneer’s willingness to accept challenges and to reject defeat....
“The Catholic readers of Der Wanderer were undoubtedly not any better educated than these leaders, and they were probably on the whole less well situated. It can be assumed that they were typical of the German-Catholic settlers of the region. Like most of their fellow German immigrants of the period they were most likely members of the lower middle class, poor though not indigent, artisans, laborers, farmers and merchants.”
Der Wanderer, in those early years, always printed the names and residences of its readers when they subscribed or renewed, and from that Fr. Kulas determined that one in seven readers came from St. Paul, 70 percent were from elsewhere in the state, and the remainder came from Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Louisiana, “a tribute to the paper’s aspirations of becoming a national journal.”
The inherent conservatism of German Catholics was obvious in the newspaper’s editorials, but the news content was vast. Each issue had news on national and European events, both political and Church-related, and city and state news, and Der Wanderer regularly informed its readers news came via “Cable Dispatches” and “By Telegraph, which “underscored the fact that the telegraph had only lately reached St. Paul,” noted Fr. Kulas.
Der Wanderer had much more, Fr. Kulas revealed: “articles on household and agricultural topics appeared regularly with an abundance of helpful hints ranging from how to can crab apples and how to treat frozen feet to better ways of fertilizing. For their leisure hours readers could turn to the literary page which presented serialized fiction and poetry, and the latter sometimes by local writers. An increasing amount of space was devoted to advertising, and no paper was complete without its column or two of humor....”
THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE
Among the advertisements Der Wanderer carried were City of St. Paul legal notices, and State of Minnesota appeals to its readership in Germany and Austria to immigrate to Minnesota. In its early years, an average of 130,000 Germans annually were crossing the Atlantic to settle in Minnesota, and Der Wanderer played a major role in welcoming these immigrants as well as informing its readers of the often-times desperate plight they were in. One early article, Fr. Kulas reports, told of the hardships of single women who traveled in steerage and had no job prospects upon arriving, and advised single women not to take the risk. In another article, the same writer says that there were two million fewer Catholics practicing their faith in the United States than there should be because “of the unfavorable conditions for the practice of the faith to be found in North America.”
One early initiative Der Wanderer engaged in, with others to support German immigrants, was promoting Der Deutsche Romisch-Katholische Central-Verein von Nord America, or Central Union, founded by German professionals, bankers and insurance agents to greet and assist German immigrants, and one of its leaders, Joseph Kolble in New York, was a regular correspondent for the paper.
The Central-Verein, or Catholic Central Union was founded in Buffalo, N.Y., as a mutual-aid society in 1855, but only had about 62 branches in 1865. By 1875, it had grown to 302, a number which nearly doubled over the next 20 years, no doubt due the efforts of Der Wanderer’s Franz Fassbind.
In fact, writes Fr. Kulas, the “immigrant experience” formed Der Wanderer. “Like its contemporaries, it developed its own personality through the lively interaction of editor, community and community concerns.”
Has much changed at all over the past 140 years, despite appearances?
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Celebrating
Thad and I are celebrating our 14th wedding anniversary today--well, celebrating as well as we can on a mid-week work-day/school-day sort of anniversary. We may do some actual celebrating on the weekend; in the meantime, I've been smiling a lot today as I remember our wedding day and so many special days since then.
In honor of the day, I'm going to share these thoughts from Christian comedian Tim Hawkins, with the disclaimer that Thad never, ever says anything even remotely like these things to me: :-)
In honor of the day, I'm going to share these thoughts from Christian comedian Tim Hawkins, with the disclaimer that Thad never, ever says anything even remotely like these things to me: :-)
What? Science Can Be Misused?
I'm almost having to stifle my irony-detector on this one:
Ha.
If anything ought to drive the lesson home to our liberal opponents that science is quite capable of being used politically to drive things one group likes (abortion, ESCR) and also to drive things another group likes (torture) it ought to be this. But I'm sure they won't make the connection; they'll read this Time article as proof that science is strictly neutral, except when right-wing extremists use it to tweak their torture techniques. Because to be "strictly neutral" means to agree with the Left; it means to see the ripping apart of unborn children as moral, but the use of sleep-deprivation studies to foster torture in interrogation as immoral.
Both are immoral, and science has nothing to say about that, because science is not capable of any sort of internal morality or ethics. That the scientists objecting to the CIA's use of their work have ethical objections is laudable and honorable; but they don't get those objections from science itself, because science itself has none.
I found the remarks of one scientist quoted by Time to be particularly insightful:
Speaking from Germany, Kundermann said he was powerless to stop others from misusing his scientific work. "There's nothing we can do to defend ourselves against this kind of thing. There have always been people that were nonexperts and would take results out of context and use them for their political objectives," he said. "Information has always been misused."
Indeed it has. And ESCR is a misuse of scientific information, too, even if some scientists, and even the federal government, are perfectly fine with it. Ethics isn't a matter of consensus, and declaring that science is free from politics when it happens to fit your political goals is the height of hubris.
German and French researchers whose work has been cited by the CIA and the Justice Department to help justify the legality of harsh interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, condemned the Bush Administration on Tuesday for misusing their scientific findings.Wait...you mean that it's possible for politics to pervert science? It's possible for politics to use science to further its own ends, regardless of ethics? Oh, my. And here I thought that Obama's brand new brave new world pro-science declaration in favor of slicing and dicing embryos to get at all those tasty and lucrative stem-cells proved once and for all that science is always above politics or ethics!"It is total nonsense to cite our study in this context," said Dr. Bernd Kundermann, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Marburg.
"I'm disappointed, upset, consternated and even hurt at seeing this," said Dr. S. Hakki Onen, a sleep specialist and geriatrician with the Hôpital Gériatrique A. Charial, part of the Hospices Civils de Lyon in France. "To see [the research] used in this manner is upsetting because [the CIA's] goals run counter to the therapeutic intent of our effort ... In publishing clinical findings like this, you're aware you lose control of them, because they can be read and even abused by people who may have other objectives in mind."
Kundermann and Onen are the second and third European sleep scientists to speak out this week against the CIA's use of published academic literature on sleep deprivation. On Monday, James Horne, a British researcher who was also cited by CIA medical experts in recently declassified memos, called the agency's medical reasoning "nonsense."
Ha.
If anything ought to drive the lesson home to our liberal opponents that science is quite capable of being used politically to drive things one group likes (abortion, ESCR) and also to drive things another group likes (torture) it ought to be this. But I'm sure they won't make the connection; they'll read this Time article as proof that science is strictly neutral, except when right-wing extremists use it to tweak their torture techniques. Because to be "strictly neutral" means to agree with the Left; it means to see the ripping apart of unborn children as moral, but the use of sleep-deprivation studies to foster torture in interrogation as immoral.
Both are immoral, and science has nothing to say about that, because science is not capable of any sort of internal morality or ethics. That the scientists objecting to the CIA's use of their work have ethical objections is laudable and honorable; but they don't get those objections from science itself, because science itself has none.
I found the remarks of one scientist quoted by Time to be particularly insightful:
Speaking from Germany, Kundermann said he was powerless to stop others from misusing his scientific work. "There's nothing we can do to defend ourselves against this kind of thing. There have always been people that were nonexperts and would take results out of context and use them for their political objectives," he said. "Information has always been misused."
Indeed it has. And ESCR is a misuse of scientific information, too, even if some scientists, and even the federal government, are perfectly fine with it. Ethics isn't a matter of consensus, and declaring that science is free from politics when it happens to fit your political goals is the height of hubris.
Idiocy on Parade
In one of yesterday's blog posts, we learned that thirteen-year-olds suspected of concealing ibuprofen are at risk of being strip-searched in school. Today, though, we learn that, as anticipated here, the FDA is allowing Plan B to be sold to 17-year-olds, and may soon remove age restrictions altogether:
WASHINGTON -- Seventeen-year-olds will soon be able to buy the "morning after" emergency contraceptive without a doctor's prescription, after the Food and Drug Administration bowed to a federal judge's order Wednesday.
Reversing a contentious policy of the Bush administration, the FDA said in a brief statement it will not appeal a judge's order that overturns restrictions limiting over-the-counter sales of "Plan B" to women 18 and older.
Conservatives called the decision a blow to parental supervision of teens. But women's groups said the FDA's action was long overdue, since the agency's own medical reviewers had initially recommended that the contraceptive be made available without any age restrictions.
U.S. District Judge Edward Korman ruled last month in a lawsuit filed in New York that Bush administration appointees let politics, not science, drive their decision to restrict over-the-counter access.
Korman ordered the FDA to let 17-year-olds get the birth control pills. He also directed the agency to evaluate whether all age restrictions should be lifted.
Parents, take note: if you are held liable for anything your seventeen-year-old child does, from now on, as I said before, you should point to Judge Korman's decision as a reason why you should be free from legal responsibility for anything your children do.
A seventeen-year-old in many states cannot, without parental permission, have her ears pierced, get a tattoo, or take aspirin in school. But now she can ingest a potentially dangerous high dose of artificial hormones designed to prevent pregnancy (or possibly keep a fertilized ovum from implanting in her uterus) without her parents even knowing about it. And this is considered to be something worth applauding by the bitter agenda-driven feminists who hate our children so much that they want them to grow up to be equally bitter agenda-driven feminists, and are willing to poison them with birth control and "Plan B" to achieve that goal.
When the first minor is seriously injured or even dies (yes, it can happen; these drugs have not been studied in minors, and hypersensitivity to the ingredients--an unknown factor for many young girls who will take the drug--is a contraindication) because of Plan B use, I hope her parents sue everybody connected with this ludicrous decision. Common sense would indicate that we not hand powerful drugs out to children without their parents' knowledge--but common sense, as usual, takes a back seat to the sex-pushers in our government, who won't rest until all our kids are the same degenerate immoral wastrels that they revel in being.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
What She Learned In School
So, the US Supreme Court is being asked to decide a really tough case. I mean it. It's going to be hard. It could so easily go either way: should they side with the school district who on the flimsiest of suspicion strip-searched a vulnerable thirteen-year-old, or in favor of the girl?
Administrators at an Arizona middle school are asking the US Supreme Court to rule that they did not violate the privacy rights of an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched in a fruitless attempt to find suspected drugs.
At issue in the case, set for argument Tuesday morning, is whether the strip search of a 13-year-old girl by school officials is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
Lawyers for the girl and her mother say it was an unconstitutional invasion of the girl's privacy. School officials say their actions were justified because they were trying to protect the student population from a risk to their health and safety.
The case could set a national standard for how far school officials can go in conducting searches of students' property – and even their bodies – while investigating alleged violations of school policies and rules.
"This is the case where the Supreme Court is likely to decide how easy it is for your child to be strip-searched," says Graham Boyd, one of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyers representing the girl and her mother.
In addition, the high court is being asked to decide whether the assistant principal who authorized the strip search can be shielded by qualified immunity from a lawsuit filed against him by the girl's mother.
Boyd and ACLU lawyer Adam Wolf say the search was based on just one unreliable accusation by a fellow student, which is not sufficient reason to justify such an intrusive search.
"A child's 'private parts' are not subject to observation by school officials without significant justification," said Mr. Wolf, in the brief for the schoolgirl and her mother.
You'll excuse me if I don't link to the rest of this; just file it under the latest reason to homeschool.
In my opinion, Mr. Wolf, the lawyer, is being very understated. I think that a child's private parts are not subject to observation by school officials ever, for any reason. Schools aren't prisons; what's next, body cavity searches in kindergarten? ("I know you took that tube of glue, Timmy, and I'm going to find it!") Good grief.
The girl was accused of sneaking ibuprofen into school and distributing it--on the word of one other girl. The nightmare of humiliation she endured next was wholly unjustified. For heaven's sake, whatever happened to calling a parent or sending the child home, even if you suspect she's concealing a prescription-strength version of an over-the-counter painkiller? Wouldn't you be protecting the "health and safety" of the student body just as well, if not better, than making the girl remove her clothing in front of adults she barely knows?
But this isn't really about protecting the health and safety of the student body. It's about what it always is about with petty school bureaucrats: power. There were plenty of ways to keep this girl from "harming" others, even if she had been concealing drugs--which she was not. There was only one way to degrade her, shame her, and make her an example to the rest of the student body, to flex their authoritarian muscle while making it clear to the young lady that she had no recourse whatsoever to get away from them except to do exactly what they told her to do without argument or complaint. And, sadly, far too many people who end up in positions of authority at schools are all too willing to become little dictators at the slightest opportunity.
SCOTUS should rule in favor of the girl, overwhelmingly and a bit snarkily, if you ask me. The school didn't just strip her of her clothing; they stripped her of her dignity. What she learned in school is that it's okay for people in power to do that whenever they like, with no notion of justice or respect for her as a person at all. And that's one lesson no one should ever have to learn.
Remaking this Nation?
Continuing on the theme of our new secular religion, I notice Barack Obama's activities today in regard to the call for national service:
More:
Excuse me--"remaking" this nation? Since when does America need to be "remade?"Calling on Americans to volunteer, President Barack Obama signed a $5.7 billion national service bill Tuesday that triples the size of the AmeriCorps service program over the next eight years and expands ways for students to earn money for college.
"What this legislation does, then, is to help harness this patriotism and connect deeds to needs," said Obama, a former community organizer in Chicago.
"It creates opportunities to serve for students, seniors and everyone in between," he said. "And it is just the beginning of a sustained, collaborative and focused effort to involve our greatest resource — our citizens — in the work of remaking this nation."
More:
The service law expands ways for students and seniors to earn money for college through their volunteer work. It aims to foster and fulfill people's desire to make a difference, such as by mentoring children, cleaning up parks or buildings and weatherizing homes for the poor.
"I'm asking you to help change history's course, put your shoulder up against the wheel," Obama said. "And if you do, I promise you your life will be richer, our country will be stronger, and someday, years from now, you may remember it as the moment when your own story and the American story converged, when they came together, and we met the challenges of our new century."
Bolstering voluntary public service programs has been a priority of Obama, who credits his work as a community organizer in his early 20s for giving him direction in life. The president cited his work in Chicago as an example of how one person can make a difference.
Ah, yes. Obama making a difference. Of course, he's remembered for failing to achieve the goal of getting his community-led group to get the asbestos out of their housing complex, but whatever; it's how you feel about it all that's important, says our secular religion.
Still more:
Obama on Tuesday also nominated Nike Inc. vice president Maria Eitel to lead the federal agency that oversees the country's national service programs. Eitel, who's also president of the Nike Foundation, would have to be confirmed by the Senate to become CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Congress passed the bill last month with largely bipartisan support and Obama is seeking $1.1 billion to fund it next year. Some Republicans complain it is too costly and is an unnecessary intrusion by government into something Americans already do eagerly and in great numbers — helping their neighbors and communities. Those silly Republicans! You can't help neighbors and communities without government-funded community activism. Why, you might actually get something done! And, what is much, much worse, you might feel free to witness the Gospel to these neighbors and communities without the promise of government funding to make you sign away your right to freedom of speech--and we can't have that. I mean, you religious people might make those who disagree with your values way too uncomfortable to come eat a free meal in your soup kitchen, or to let you build them a house. I am beginning to believe that Barack Obama and the Democrats intend a two-pronged attack on religion in America. The first prong is to marginalize and exclude people for holding "Christianist" views on subjects like abortion, gay marriage, ESCR, and the like (note how cleverly Obama conflated opposition to the last with "anti-science" views, a code for those of our Christian brothers and sisters who are skeptics about Darwinian evolutionary theory). The second prong is to build a parallel government-structured "church" which allows people volunteer opportunities, the chance to get involved, the positives that come with knowing you are helping people--without all that messy uncomfortable judgmental stuff about sin and forgiveness and redemption and so on. Obama betrayed more than he meant to with his "...they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion..." comment during the campaign. If religion is something destructive that bitter people cling to, why not replace it with a new secular faith? Why not replace "Alleluia!" with "Yes, we can!"? And why not replace religious-based volunteerism, which leaves people free to express their Christian faith to those they are helping, with a secular variety that has all the feel-good benefits and none of the "bitter religion" drawbacks? Americans ought to remind the president that we've been doing fine working in our communities without the help of billions of dollars of federal money, and that we don't need the federal government telling us who to help and how to help them. And there's no need to "remake" America; but I'm starting to think there's a need to protect her from the people who think that the religious beliefs of Americans are some sort of undesirable character flaw.
Monday, April 20, 2009
And So It Begins
I'm not, as you might guess, a big believer in beauty pageants. There are so many things wrong with them: exploitation of women, the sexualized nature of much of the pageantry, the reinforcing of the stereotype that to be beautiful one must be tall, extremely thin, yet still built like a Barbie doll, the inanity of much of the competition, and so on. Sure, I've heard women defend them because of the scholarship opportunities and the confidence-building that can be a part of the process, but these aren't terribly convincing arguments to me to retain such spectacles, which probably inspire more sins against the sixth commandment than they inspire anything else.
So I missed the whole fuss that occurred when Miss California, Carrie Prejean, openly acknowledged that she is a knuckle-dragging bigot of the first order--or heroically proclaimed an uncomfortable truth, depending on how you look at it:
Notice the way the opposition to Miss Prejean and her beliefs (to which she is as much entitled as anyone) was expressed: gay blogger Perez Hilton declares that such a woman can't possibly represent all Americans (never mind the fact that those of us who oppose same-sex marriage aren't in the least represented by all those who clamor for it), and the executive director of California's Miss USA group sneers that religious beliefs have no place in politics--not if you want to be a Miss California pageant contestant, that is.
Even though the venue for this particular moment in history leaves much to be desired, we can't overlook what these statements mean. They are a declaration of war--a newer, uglier, more horrific engagement in the culture war than anything we've ever seen before.
What happened to all the rhetoric that gets dragged out mendaciously when someone publicly admits to being (gasp) pro-life? The words and phrases which claim that "good people can disagree," that "this is a complex issue," that "we can respect our opponents' beliefs even if we can never reach a consensus?" With such words the pro-aborts have tried to pretend a tolerance and respect for the other side, however far they are from feeling it; but on the issue of gay marriage, take note: no dissent will be tolerated, now or ever. You can't, according to these totalitarian thugs, be a good person and disagree that two men or two women are a marriage. You can't, according to these perfidious practicioners of perversion and their vicious enablers, think that there is anything complex about tearing down and destroying traditional marriage and replacing it with state-endorsed sodomy. You are not, according to these spiteful dictators and scurrilous tyrants, allowed to express your "religious" beliefs in public; "religion" has become a synonym for "bigotry," and it must be crushed.
The same-sex marriage agitators and their pet useful idiots who support them have been saying all along that no one will get hurt in a post-same-sex pseudo-marriage world. It shouldn't be any surprise that they've been lying. They're willing to destroy anyone who opposes them; and it begins with a beauty-pageant contestant who dared to go off-script and admit that she's not too keen on the lunacy and demonic idiocy called "gay marriage."
So I missed the whole fuss that occurred when Miss California, Carrie Prejean, openly acknowledged that she is a knuckle-dragging bigot of the first order--or heroically proclaimed an uncomfortable truth, depending on how you look at it:
Miss California says candor cost her the crown in Sunday's Miss USA competition.This is probably the first time that an American has been publicly punished for "wrongthink" for daring to express that marriage ought to be between a man and a woman. It won't be the last--and there will come a time when we will look back with nostalgic fondness on the days when only having the wrong opinion on abortion would cost you anything. In fact, I think that in future years "Prejeaning" will be defined as "A process of punishing people for having the wrong opinions about same-sex marriage; similar to Borking but expressed with greater violence and followed by the total shunning of the offender."
Carrie Prejean, 21, probably knew she was in trouble when she acknowledged her opposition to same-sex marriages in response to a question from openly gay judge Perez Hilton, the celebrity blogger.
"In my country, and in my family, I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman," Prejean replied. Later, she lost to Miss North Carolina.
"It did cost me my crown," Prejean said of her response, on Monday's "Billy Bush Show." "I wouldn't have had it any other way. I said what I feel. I stated an opinion that was true to myself and that's all I can do."
In an appearance Monday on MSNBC, Hilton said he was absolutely "shocked and incredibly frustrated and disappointed" with Prejean's stance.
"That's not the kind of woman I want to be Miss USA," he said. "Miss USA should represent all Americans and, with her answer, she instantly alienated millions of gays and lesbians and their friends."
Earlier, Hilton had said on his video blog he would have run onstage and ripped the tiara off Prejean's head had she won the title.
And the blogger would not have been the only member of the Miss USA family to go apoplectic had Prejean advanced in the competition. Keith Lewis, executive director of California's Miss USA operations, said in a statement released to Hilton that "religious beliefs have no place in politics in the Miss CA family."
Notice the way the opposition to Miss Prejean and her beliefs (to which she is as much entitled as anyone) was expressed: gay blogger Perez Hilton declares that such a woman can't possibly represent all Americans (never mind the fact that those of us who oppose same-sex marriage aren't in the least represented by all those who clamor for it), and the executive director of California's Miss USA group sneers that religious beliefs have no place in politics--not if you want to be a Miss California pageant contestant, that is.
Even though the venue for this particular moment in history leaves much to be desired, we can't overlook what these statements mean. They are a declaration of war--a newer, uglier, more horrific engagement in the culture war than anything we've ever seen before.
What happened to all the rhetoric that gets dragged out mendaciously when someone publicly admits to being (gasp) pro-life? The words and phrases which claim that "good people can disagree," that "this is a complex issue," that "we can respect our opponents' beliefs even if we can never reach a consensus?" With such words the pro-aborts have tried to pretend a tolerance and respect for the other side, however far they are from feeling it; but on the issue of gay marriage, take note: no dissent will be tolerated, now or ever. You can't, according to these totalitarian thugs, be a good person and disagree that two men or two women are a marriage. You can't, according to these perfidious practicioners of perversion and their vicious enablers, think that there is anything complex about tearing down and destroying traditional marriage and replacing it with state-endorsed sodomy. You are not, according to these spiteful dictators and scurrilous tyrants, allowed to express your "religious" beliefs in public; "religion" has become a synonym for "bigotry," and it must be crushed.
The same-sex marriage agitators and their pet useful idiots who support them have been saying all along that no one will get hurt in a post-same-sex pseudo-marriage world. It shouldn't be any surprise that they've been lying. They're willing to destroy anyone who opposes them; and it begins with a beauty-pageant contestant who dared to go off-script and admit that she's not too keen on the lunacy and demonic idiocy called "gay marriage."
Friday, April 17, 2009
On Beyond Jesus
Many people have already posted excerpts from this, reported by the Catholic Key, which helps explain why some women religious are being investigated:
On Beyond Jesus (with apologies to Dr. Seuss)
Said Sister Androgina Guevara Mao,
(An old friend of mine who worships the Tao):
You start out by studying Adam and Eve
(Though I find that story too hard to believe)
Then you go through the prophets; you study the kings
Who all hated women (misogynist things!)
Some poems called psalms, and some proverbs, and then--
You get to the Gospels; and that's where it ends.
You read about Jesus, you learn His whole story,
With good bits with women, and other parts gory,
And then you should know, from the very Creation,
The whole of the story of humans' salvation.
I was nodding--because that is how it should go--
When she frowned and said sternly: No. Oh, dear, no!
That's what they tell you, that's what they try
To make you believe while you live till you die.
But some of us know this is no place to stop!
I could keep finding prophets and myths till I drop!
You can stop, if you want, with the Lord Jesus Christ.
But not me!
I won't stop here, not at any price!
If you stop here with Jesus, you'll never explore
The non-androcentric religions galore:
The ones that have goddesses, holy and wise
With perhaps a bit more than their fair share of eyes,
The one around Buddha--you really should try it!
If nothing else Buddhism's good for your diet.
And then there are legends of spirits that come
When you carve a big totem or beat a big drum.
So, on beyond Jesus! To Zeus and to Hera!
Don't let a word like "heretic" scare ya.
There's so much empowerment you'll never know
If you stop at Jesus. So go, go, go, go!
Go on to the Norse Gods, to Freya or Thor
You'll learn so much more than you could have before.
Cosmology, circles, spell-casting and chant--
But not the old sort. No, that kind we can't.
We've forgotten the words, if we ever did know them,
Besides, we worked hard so we could overthrow them.
On beyond Jesus! There's so much beside Him!
The gods of the Romans, (though they crucified Him)
Are interesting sorts, like the two-headed Janus.
We'd put up an altar to him, but they'd ban us,
Those narrow suspicious ones coming to check--
They've seen our free writings, but called them all dreck.
They stopped at Jesus, and now you can see,
Just what would happen to you--and to me!
If we stopped at Jesus, and never went past Him.
We'd be just like them--but we will outlast them!
Oh, maybe some orders are doing quite well,
Who stopped at Jesus. It's hard to tell.
They have new members, and growth, and much joy.
But what we have is better. Oh boy, yes, oh boy,
We went beyond Jesus! Our convents are empty,
Young Catholics avoid us, or say things contempt-y.
We have no future, we turned from our past,
We built nothing permanent, nothing that lasts.
But we did explore all the gods ever prayed to!
Except the real God, unless we were paid to.
So what if our convents are left now in tatters?
We went beyond Jesus. And that's all that matters.
I shook my head sadly as she finished talking,
Said my goodbyes, and quickly left, walking
Straight through the big labyrinth inside her foyer,
She shouted at me, but I just ignored her.
When religious communities embraced the spirit of renewal in the 1970s, they took seriously that the world was no longer the enemy, that a sense of ecumenism required encountering the holy “other,” and that the God of Jesus might well be the God of Moses and the God of Mohammed. The works of Thomas Merton encouraged an exploration of the nexus between Eastern and Western religious practices. The emergence of the women’s movement with is concomitant critique of religion invited women everywhere to use a hermeneutical lens of suspicion when reading the androcentric Scriptures and the texts of the Tradition. With a new lens, women also began to see the divine within nature, the value and importance of the cosmos, and that the emerging new cosmology encouraged their spirituality and fed their souls.I couldn't help but be reminded of a story:
As one sister described it, “I was rooted in the story of Jesus, and it remains at my core, but I’ve also moved beyond Jesus.” The Jesus narrative is not the only or the most important narrative for these women. They still hold up and reverence the values of the Gospel, but they also recognize that these same values are not solely the property of Christianity. Buddhism, Native American spirituality, Judaism, Islam and others hold similar tenets for right behavior within the community, right relationship with the earth and right relationship with the Divine. With these insights come a shattering or freeing realization—depending on where you stand. Jesus is not the only son of God. Salvation is not limited to Christians. Wisdom is found in the traditions of the Church as well as beyond it.
On Beyond Jesus (with apologies to Dr. Seuss)
Said Sister Androgina Guevara Mao,
(An old friend of mine who worships the Tao):
You start out by studying Adam and Eve
(Though I find that story too hard to believe)
Then you go through the prophets; you study the kings
Who all hated women (misogynist things!)
Some poems called psalms, and some proverbs, and then--
You get to the Gospels; and that's where it ends.
You read about Jesus, you learn His whole story,
With good bits with women, and other parts gory,
And then you should know, from the very Creation,
The whole of the story of humans' salvation.
I was nodding--because that is how it should go--
When she frowned and said sternly: No. Oh, dear, no!
That's what they tell you, that's what they try
To make you believe while you live till you die.
But some of us know this is no place to stop!
I could keep finding prophets and myths till I drop!
You can stop, if you want, with the Lord Jesus Christ.
But not me!
I won't stop here, not at any price!
If you stop here with Jesus, you'll never explore
The non-androcentric religions galore:
The ones that have goddesses, holy and wise
With perhaps a bit more than their fair share of eyes,
The one around Buddha--you really should try it!
If nothing else Buddhism's good for your diet.
And then there are legends of spirits that come
When you carve a big totem or beat a big drum.
So, on beyond Jesus! To Zeus and to Hera!
Don't let a word like "heretic" scare ya.
There's so much empowerment you'll never know
If you stop at Jesus. So go, go, go, go!
Go on to the Norse Gods, to Freya or Thor
You'll learn so much more than you could have before.
Cosmology, circles, spell-casting and chant--
But not the old sort. No, that kind we can't.
We've forgotten the words, if we ever did know them,
Besides, we worked hard so we could overthrow them.
On beyond Jesus! There's so much beside Him!
The gods of the Romans, (though they crucified Him)
Are interesting sorts, like the two-headed Janus.
We'd put up an altar to him, but they'd ban us,
Those narrow suspicious ones coming to check--
They've seen our free writings, but called them all dreck.
They stopped at Jesus, and now you can see,
Just what would happen to you--and to me!
If we stopped at Jesus, and never went past Him.
We'd be just like them--but we will outlast them!
Oh, maybe some orders are doing quite well,
Who stopped at Jesus. It's hard to tell.
They have new members, and growth, and much joy.
But what we have is better. Oh boy, yes, oh boy,
We went beyond Jesus! Our convents are empty,
Young Catholics avoid us, or say things contempt-y.
We have no future, we turned from our past,
We built nothing permanent, nothing that lasts.
But we did explore all the gods ever prayed to!
Except the real God, unless we were paid to.
So what if our convents are left now in tatters?
We went beyond Jesus. And that's all that matters.
I shook my head sadly as she finished talking,
Said my goodbyes, and quickly left, walking
Straight through the big labyrinth inside her foyer,
She shouted at me, but I just ignored her.
On Civic Virtue
Sorry I haven't posted here today; I've been a bit busy over at Crunchy Cons.
Rod Dreher put up a post about the torture memos. It was followed by heartening comments from left and right (a crunchy coalition, of sorts), saying that torture is bad, the US shouldn't do it, and generally condemning torture on a strictly bipartisan basis.
So I raised a bit of an objection--oh, not defending torture; nobody sic Mark on me. I was just pointing out the irony: it's okay in our secular society, apparently, to say that torture is wrong, immoral, and that it should not be done for those reasons--but the minute you say that abortion or gay marriage is wrong or immoral and shouldn't be done for those reasons suddenly you're a religious bigot, trying to impose your morality on others who don't share that morality.
It's been interesting, to say the least, to read the responses.
What I'm trying to say, what I'm not skilled enough in philosophy to say properly, is that either a society has some notion of civic virtue, or it doesn't. If it does have some notion of civic virtue there have to be some discernible standards for that virtue, or else what is virtue is really just a sort of dressed-up pragmatism or emotionalism: e.g., we condemn torture because we say it is "wrong," but what we really mean by "wrong" is that it doesn't fit with some concept we have of ourselves and some vague idea of our goodness, not that it violates some specific standard of rightness or wrongness that have developed out of a long-standing philosophical tradition. In other words, torture is wrong because it feels wrong, on some emotional level.
One person over at Rod's made the "intrinsic human dignity" argument--but then explained that he didn't think the unborn were covered by this argument, and that the intrinsic dignity of same-sex attracted people meant that they should get to marry each other. All I can say is that I don't think "intrinsic" means what he thinks it means.
But that, again, is one of the problems of engaging in arguments with postmodern thinkers. Words don't seem to have fixed meanings. One day "marriage" means one man and one woman, and the next day "marriage" means one man and one woman, two men, two women, numbers greater than two, and so on. But it's funny how this, too, is an extremely arbitrary concept; most people refuse to call torture "enhanced interrogation" or to define torture in such a way that waterboarding and similar acts are excluded from the definition.
It's easy for traditional Christians--Catholic, Orthodox, and others--to say "These things are wrong, because they all violate the natural law, the natural order of things." There are some traditional people who are not Christian who can agree with us, because they've taken the time to think deeply about these topics and to discover the natural law on their own. This is why it is possible to find very rational people from all religious traditions, and even from none at all, who have discovered moral truths very much like what the Church teaches in all sorts of areas, and can defend these ideas using reason and logic, not mere emotions.
It's much harder for the postmodern secularist. What is "right" and what is "wrong" is a purely arbitrary, purely personal decision. There are no philosophical underpinnings, because people's philosophies differ, and pluralism means that all philosophies must be treated as equal. There are no truths, no absolute ones, anyway, from which abstract discussions about virtue, about good and evil, may flow. If the secularist says that human life has intrinsic value, he must immediately start adding the footnotes: except for the unborn, the elderly who want to commit suicide, people like Terri Schiavo who are in the way, and so on. What he really means is that the lives of prisoners or torture victims are valuable because he feels that they are, but the lives of children ripped apart in their mothers' wombs are not, because he feels that they aren't. There is no thinking behind it; the conversations and arguments circle round and round like dingy bathwater down a sluggish drain, with no agreement on first principles ("The unborn may be human, but they're not people! The mother's right to remove them from her body is absolute, and it wouldn't matter if they were people anyway!" etc. ad infinitum).
But if truth is unknown and unknowable, and if feelings are all that matter, then why is it so important to the secularist to crush the opposition to such things as abortion and gay marriage on the grounds that these are only private religious opinions, but welcome the opposition to torture on the grounds that while these may be religious opinions, they happen to coincide with the feelings the secularists have on these matters and are therefore valuable?
One possible explanation is that the secularists don't realize how much their opposition to torture is drawing from the natural law, from the natural order of things--in other words, from God Himself. There has never been some kind of "human consensus" on the morality of torture--far from it. It is no more possible to prove empirically that torture is wrong than it is to prove empirically that love is a many-splendored thing. There can be no purely secular opposition to torture on moral grounds; there can only be opposition on pragmatic grounds, such as that torture might not work, or that torture might eventually be used against us by our own government.
But those kinds of pragmatic grounds are rejected every time they are used to oppose abortion or gay marriage. The secularist insists that all arguments against either must not be religious, but then they reject pragmatic arguments out of hand, saying that unless anyone can show, in the case of abortion, how outlawing it would stop all abortions, for instance, or in the case of gay marriage, how a person's gay "marriage" causes specific, immediate, known harm to those who oppose it. When those opposing either on philosophical grounds can't answer these questions to the satisfaction of their secular opponents (who will never be satisfied), the secularist rejects the pragmatic arguments too, and claims victory on the grounds of inevitability, the perceived coolness of his side's position, or some such thing.
The poor secularists don't seem to realize that they've opened the door for the "irreligious right" to come along and approve torture and other things they don't like, in exactly the same way, and using exactly the same arguments, they have used to support abortion or gay marriage. The demand to couch an anti-torture argument in purely secular terms, the rejection of the notion of "right" and "wrong" as having anything to do with torture, and the dismissal of any pragmatic arguments the "irreligious right" arbitrarily decides are valueless is going to put the secularists in the position of knowing that torture is wrong, but being completely unable to articulate why according to the parameters of the conversation. But when your expression of civic virtue finds its fullest voice in the saying "If it feels good, do it," it's pretty hard to imagine any other outcome.
Rod Dreher put up a post about the torture memos. It was followed by heartening comments from left and right (a crunchy coalition, of sorts), saying that torture is bad, the US shouldn't do it, and generally condemning torture on a strictly bipartisan basis.
So I raised a bit of an objection--oh, not defending torture; nobody sic Mark on me. I was just pointing out the irony: it's okay in our secular society, apparently, to say that torture is wrong, immoral, and that it should not be done for those reasons--but the minute you say that abortion or gay marriage is wrong or immoral and shouldn't be done for those reasons suddenly you're a religious bigot, trying to impose your morality on others who don't share that morality.
It's been interesting, to say the least, to read the responses.
What I'm trying to say, what I'm not skilled enough in philosophy to say properly, is that either a society has some notion of civic virtue, or it doesn't. If it does have some notion of civic virtue there have to be some discernible standards for that virtue, or else what is virtue is really just a sort of dressed-up pragmatism or emotionalism: e.g., we condemn torture because we say it is "wrong," but what we really mean by "wrong" is that it doesn't fit with some concept we have of ourselves and some vague idea of our goodness, not that it violates some specific standard of rightness or wrongness that have developed out of a long-standing philosophical tradition. In other words, torture is wrong because it feels wrong, on some emotional level.
One person over at Rod's made the "intrinsic human dignity" argument--but then explained that he didn't think the unborn were covered by this argument, and that the intrinsic dignity of same-sex attracted people meant that they should get to marry each other. All I can say is that I don't think "intrinsic" means what he thinks it means.
But that, again, is one of the problems of engaging in arguments with postmodern thinkers. Words don't seem to have fixed meanings. One day "marriage" means one man and one woman, and the next day "marriage" means one man and one woman, two men, two women, numbers greater than two, and so on. But it's funny how this, too, is an extremely arbitrary concept; most people refuse to call torture "enhanced interrogation" or to define torture in such a way that waterboarding and similar acts are excluded from the definition.
It's easy for traditional Christians--Catholic, Orthodox, and others--to say "These things are wrong, because they all violate the natural law, the natural order of things." There are some traditional people who are not Christian who can agree with us, because they've taken the time to think deeply about these topics and to discover the natural law on their own. This is why it is possible to find very rational people from all religious traditions, and even from none at all, who have discovered moral truths very much like what the Church teaches in all sorts of areas, and can defend these ideas using reason and logic, not mere emotions.
It's much harder for the postmodern secularist. What is "right" and what is "wrong" is a purely arbitrary, purely personal decision. There are no philosophical underpinnings, because people's philosophies differ, and pluralism means that all philosophies must be treated as equal. There are no truths, no absolute ones, anyway, from which abstract discussions about virtue, about good and evil, may flow. If the secularist says that human life has intrinsic value, he must immediately start adding the footnotes: except for the unborn, the elderly who want to commit suicide, people like Terri Schiavo who are in the way, and so on. What he really means is that the lives of prisoners or torture victims are valuable because he feels that they are, but the lives of children ripped apart in their mothers' wombs are not, because he feels that they aren't. There is no thinking behind it; the conversations and arguments circle round and round like dingy bathwater down a sluggish drain, with no agreement on first principles ("The unborn may be human, but they're not people! The mother's right to remove them from her body is absolute, and it wouldn't matter if they were people anyway!" etc. ad infinitum).
But if truth is unknown and unknowable, and if feelings are all that matter, then why is it so important to the secularist to crush the opposition to such things as abortion and gay marriage on the grounds that these are only private religious opinions, but welcome the opposition to torture on the grounds that while these may be religious opinions, they happen to coincide with the feelings the secularists have on these matters and are therefore valuable?
One possible explanation is that the secularists don't realize how much their opposition to torture is drawing from the natural law, from the natural order of things--in other words, from God Himself. There has never been some kind of "human consensus" on the morality of torture--far from it. It is no more possible to prove empirically that torture is wrong than it is to prove empirically that love is a many-splendored thing. There can be no purely secular opposition to torture on moral grounds; there can only be opposition on pragmatic grounds, such as that torture might not work, or that torture might eventually be used against us by our own government.
But those kinds of pragmatic grounds are rejected every time they are used to oppose abortion or gay marriage. The secularist insists that all arguments against either must not be religious, but then they reject pragmatic arguments out of hand, saying that unless anyone can show, in the case of abortion, how outlawing it would stop all abortions, for instance, or in the case of gay marriage, how a person's gay "marriage" causes specific, immediate, known harm to those who oppose it. When those opposing either on philosophical grounds can't answer these questions to the satisfaction of their secular opponents (who will never be satisfied), the secularist rejects the pragmatic arguments too, and claims victory on the grounds of inevitability, the perceived coolness of his side's position, or some such thing.
The poor secularists don't seem to realize that they've opened the door for the "irreligious right" to come along and approve torture and other things they don't like, in exactly the same way, and using exactly the same arguments, they have used to support abortion or gay marriage. The demand to couch an anti-torture argument in purely secular terms, the rejection of the notion of "right" and "wrong" as having anything to do with torture, and the dismissal of any pragmatic arguments the "irreligious right" arbitrarily decides are valueless is going to put the secularists in the position of knowing that torture is wrong, but being completely unable to articulate why according to the parameters of the conversation. But when your expression of civic virtue finds its fullest voice in the saying "If it feels good, do it," it's pretty hard to imagine any other outcome.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Happy Birthday to Two Papas!
As Larry D. reminds us, today is Pope Benedict XVI's birthday!
Today is also my dad's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad! I know you enjoy sharing the pope's birthday with him (though to be fair, he had it first).
:)
Today is also my dad's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad! I know you enjoy sharing the pope's birthday with him (though to be fair, he had it first).
:)
We Didn't Start This Fire...
As I read the first article in Mr. Likoudis' series about the history of The Wanderer, one of the things that struck me was that our generation (give or take a little) likes to think that we invented communication.
It's sobering to picture a group of German Catholic laymen and their pastor meeting together to talk about starting a paper; it's humbling to realize that a paper so started had within a relatively short time of its first printing was not only covering international news of concern to Catholics, but even being circulated overseas.
It's easy to think that we're the first Catholics who've ever been given the mandate to write as Catholics about news, politics, religion, to bring a Catholic eye to bear on the events of the day. I think the truth is that we're just the first Catholics to have this particular mandate made so easy, since at the touch of a button we can foist our opinions onto the world.
This isn't to say that using the new means of communication to spread the Gospel or to witness to the world as faithful Catholics is a bad thing; Pope Benedict XVI encouraged the young to use the Internet to help spread the faith. But in doing what the young (and not so young) do, in writing or blogging or otherwise communicating the joy of our faith to others, we run the risk of thinking that the modern world has bypassed the past, and that the experiences of Catholics who actively promoted Catholicism using the "old media" have nothing to teach us about the attempt to do so with the new.
It's sobering to picture a group of German Catholic laymen and their pastor meeting together to talk about starting a paper; it's humbling to realize that a paper so started had within a relatively short time of its first printing was not only covering international news of concern to Catholics, but even being circulated overseas.
It's easy to think that we're the first Catholics who've ever been given the mandate to write as Catholics about news, politics, religion, to bring a Catholic eye to bear on the events of the day. I think the truth is that we're just the first Catholics to have this particular mandate made so easy, since at the touch of a button we can foist our opinions onto the world.
This isn't to say that using the new means of communication to spread the Gospel or to witness to the world as faithful Catholics is a bad thing; Pope Benedict XVI encouraged the young to use the Internet to help spread the faith. But in doing what the young (and not so young) do, in writing or blogging or otherwise communicating the joy of our faith to others, we run the risk of thinking that the modern world has bypassed the past, and that the experiences of Catholics who actively promoted Catholicism using the "old media" have nothing to teach us about the attempt to do so with the new.
A History of the Wanderer, 1867-1931: Article One, by Paul Likoudis
The Wanderer at 140....
UPCOMING BIRTHDAY PROVIDES
CHANCE TO LOOK BACK & AHEAD
by Paul Likoudis
On November 16, 2007, The Wanderer will mark 140 years of continuous publication, having survived nine major financial meltdowns, including the Panic of 1873 and the Great Depression from 1929-41, two World Wars, to say nothing, for now, of 140 years of internecine warfare between Catholics.
And for the first time in its history – and this is cause enough to celebrate – Der Wanderer has a German Pope.
From its founding to the present day, The Wanderer’s defining characteristic has been loyalty to the Holy See. In fact, in the same month a small group of German businessmen and their local pastor met in the basement of a German bookseller in St. Paul to discuss launching a newspaper that would serve the religious and cultural needs of the region’s growing German-Catholic population, Pope Pius IX issued an encyclical On The Afflictions of the Church, which opened with these baleful words:
“Lift up your eyes, venerable brothers. Look about you and grieve at the evil abominations which now defile unhappy Italy....Here triumphant impiety rears her ugly head, and here We grieve to see all kinds of injustice, evil, and destruction. Hence the many phalanxes of rebels, men who walk in impiety and fight under the standard of Satan—a leader branded with deceit. Raising their mouths to the very heavens, they blaspheme God; polluting and scorning all that is sacred, they trample underfoot all laws, divine and human....Then they sadden the lowly and the poor, making widows of wives and orphans of happy children. They pardon the impious and condemn the just, for there are bribes to take and goods to steal; with a corrupt heart they satisfy every depraved desire, to the detriment of all civil society.”
On its masthead, which depicted a “wanderer” with staff in hand, looking ahead against a pastoral background was the paper’s slogan: Glaube! Hoffe! Liebe! – Believe! Hope! Love!
From its inception, Der Wanderer, writes Fr. John S. Kulas, OSB, in Der Wanderer of St. Paul: The First Decade, 1867-1877 (Peter Lang, 1996), volume nine in the German American Studies Series, was characterized by “a strong community base, fervent Catholicity, passionate espousal of things German, and an animated interest in civil affairs,” and it had the support of St. Paul’s second prelate, Bishop Thomas L. Grace, O.P. who endorsed Der Wanderer, as did three other regional bishops, whose names appeared on the paper’s masthead.
The Wanderer was just one year old, in October 1868, when Pope Pius IX published his call for an ecumenical council, which resulted in the Declaration on Papal Infallibility, which Der Wanderer enthusiastically supported.
The Wanderer was just six years old when Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck denounced this newspaper as “an enemy of the state,” because of its criticism of his policy aimed at weakening the influence of the Church on German politics, the kulturkampf. Bismarck’s blacklisting of Der Wanderer, at a time when it was widely circulated in Europe and available in major city libraries, anticipated that of his successor Adolph Hitler, who banned the 1,200 copies mailed to Germany each week.
At the time of its founding as Der Wanderer, it was just one among hundreds of German and specifically German-Catholic newspapers, and it has outlived them all. German-language newspapers numbered nearly 500 in 1886; and within a decade nearly doubled, before going into freefall as anti-German hysteria spread with the U.S. entry into World War I.
The Wanderer’s first ten years are told well by Fr. Kulas, professor emeritus of German at St. John’s University, Collegeville, who notes that, from the beginning, this Catholic newspaper was unique in that it was published by laymen and was distinguished by the quality of its reporting on political, social and theological issues, both at home and abroad.
For example, wrote Fr. Kulas, Der Wanderer “played its own significant role in the [immigration debate] drama, emerging as a conscious promoter of immigrants, an influential advocate of their interests, and an unflagging voice of encouragement.
“Public policy toward immigrant groups and especially Germans was of great interest to readers of Der Wanderer, and the editors campaigned extensively for measures that would regularize and facilitate immigration procedures, ameliorate the worst of the conditions of passage and entry, and promote immigrant welfare in the new country....
“The newspaper was able to provide a voice for all German-Americans, particularly those of lesser education. It articulated a satisfying self-image, provided a sense of pride that helped sustain its readers in the often difficult circumstances in which they lived and defended them when their character or patriotism were impugned. But it not only spoke for the immigrants; it also spoke to them, encouraging them to remain true to their cultural inheritance, admonishing them to transmit it to their children, exhorting them to maintain a sense of solidarity with their fellow German immigrants, and beseeching them to provide assistance to those less fortunate.”
Der Wanderer not only advocated on behalf of immigrants, it played an active role in recruiting Germans to come to the United States, going so far as to translate, and publish, the state of Minnesota’s promotional materials for its readers in Germany.
Every issue of the paper contained a poetry page, a theater page, music reviews (Der Wanderer’s editors were major figures in St. Paul’s German music groups) and edifying, instructive stories for young readers, but its main issues involved Church and civic issues.
Kulas observes that while the newspaper’s first editors wanted a truly popular paper, they “clearly did not pander to the lowest common denominator. They endeavored as well to provide a thoughtful and reasoned approach even to issues of complexity, demanding thereby some attention from their readers. With numerous articles of more than superficial quality in the political and religious arena, it sought to broaden horizons and challenge understanding.”
Each week’s issue, Kulas adds, offered a “rich variety of features. Many articles were designed to provide readers with information and instruction on the Catholic faith. There were stories on the Pope, on the observance of Sundays and religious feasts, and on the history of the Church....Others were practically sermons....
“Der Wanderer was primarily a newspaper, and numerous articles had to do with contemporary Church affairs – internal ecclesiastical matters as well as issues with a wider public concern. The early [Franz] Fassbind years (he was the paper’s third editor, following Eugen Ehrhadt and Theodor Mullenmeister) were filled with reports and discussions of the Vatican Council and the growing tensions in Church-state relations within the new German empire. Detailed coverage of important events with an ecclesiastical dimension both in Europe and the United States was characteristic of the newspaper throughout its existence,” wrote Kulas.
Der Wanderer’s coverage of Vatican I, Kulas adds in a footnote, was considered the best “west of Chicago,” and editor Mullenmeister boasted that he had secured the services of a high prelate at the Council to provide its comprehensive reports, with additional reporting on the Council provided by Archabbot Boniface Wimmer of St. Vincent’s Archabbey in Latrobe, Pa., who was also present at the Council.
Bismarck’s kulturkampf against the Church, his accruing of power and his waging of war, Kulas adds in several footnotes, drew strong denunciations from Der Wanderer, and punitive action from Bismarck, who branded Der Wanderer as a staatsfeindliche (enemy of the state) and blacklisted the newspaper. Such was the influence of Der Wanderer at the time that it was able to foment mass anti-Prussia rallies in Cincinnati, San Antonio, New Orleans, as well as across Minnesota and Wisconsin, because as one Wanderer reader wrote to a German editor, Der Wanderer’s coverage of the Franco-Prussian war was superior to any reporting by German newspapers.
“Like any Catholic newspaper on the frontier, Der Wanderer had a strong apologetical bent,” Kulas continues. “It determined to be not only an instrument of instruction in the faith but also an aggressive means of shielding the Church and its teaching from attacks from any quarter. Anti-Catholic bias was still rampant in American society and evidence for it was not difficult to find within other church bodies, some political groups, various intellectual circles, and the population in general. In Der Wanderer this bias was widely reported and bitterly attacked....
“Examples locally and from abroad abounded in issue after issue. It was deemed necessary to defend Catholics’ right to engage in politics; other reports sought to counter the outcry in the Austrian press advocating the dissolution of monasteries; a satirical piece was aimed at demolishing the canard that Catholics were forbidden to read the Bible...”
140 YEARS LATER
As The Wanderer approaches its 140th birthday, its editors intend to take a look back over those 14 decades, insofar as it is possible, since the newspaper was written exclusively in German until the debut of the English edition in 1931, and highlighting the major issues affecting both Church and State over that nearly century-and-a-half. [...]
(Original appeal to readers to share their stories about The Wanderer removed from this posting, April 16, 2009.)
# # # #
Note: this is the first in a series of eleven articles written by Paul Likoudis to celebrate the 140th anniversary of The Wanderer. It is posted here by permission of Mr. Likoudis.
UPCOMING BIRTHDAY PROVIDES
CHANCE TO LOOK BACK & AHEAD
by Paul Likoudis
On November 16, 2007, The Wanderer will mark 140 years of continuous publication, having survived nine major financial meltdowns, including the Panic of 1873 and the Great Depression from 1929-41, two World Wars, to say nothing, for now, of 140 years of internecine warfare between Catholics.
And for the first time in its history – and this is cause enough to celebrate – Der Wanderer has a German Pope.
From its founding to the present day, The Wanderer’s defining characteristic has been loyalty to the Holy See. In fact, in the same month a small group of German businessmen and their local pastor met in the basement of a German bookseller in St. Paul to discuss launching a newspaper that would serve the religious and cultural needs of the region’s growing German-Catholic population, Pope Pius IX issued an encyclical On The Afflictions of the Church, which opened with these baleful words:
“Lift up your eyes, venerable brothers. Look about you and grieve at the evil abominations which now defile unhappy Italy....Here triumphant impiety rears her ugly head, and here We grieve to see all kinds of injustice, evil, and destruction. Hence the many phalanxes of rebels, men who walk in impiety and fight under the standard of Satan—a leader branded with deceit. Raising their mouths to the very heavens, they blaspheme God; polluting and scorning all that is sacred, they trample underfoot all laws, divine and human....Then they sadden the lowly and the poor, making widows of wives and orphans of happy children. They pardon the impious and condemn the just, for there are bribes to take and goods to steal; with a corrupt heart they satisfy every depraved desire, to the detriment of all civil society.”
On its masthead, which depicted a “wanderer” with staff in hand, looking ahead against a pastoral background was the paper’s slogan: Glaube! Hoffe! Liebe! – Believe! Hope! Love!
From its inception, Der Wanderer, writes Fr. John S. Kulas, OSB, in Der Wanderer of St. Paul: The First Decade, 1867-1877 (Peter Lang, 1996), volume nine in the German American Studies Series, was characterized by “a strong community base, fervent Catholicity, passionate espousal of things German, and an animated interest in civil affairs,” and it had the support of St. Paul’s second prelate, Bishop Thomas L. Grace, O.P. who endorsed Der Wanderer, as did three other regional bishops, whose names appeared on the paper’s masthead.
The Wanderer was just one year old, in October 1868, when Pope Pius IX published his call for an ecumenical council, which resulted in the Declaration on Papal Infallibility, which Der Wanderer enthusiastically supported.
The Wanderer was just six years old when Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck denounced this newspaper as “an enemy of the state,” because of its criticism of his policy aimed at weakening the influence of the Church on German politics, the kulturkampf. Bismarck’s blacklisting of Der Wanderer, at a time when it was widely circulated in Europe and available in major city libraries, anticipated that of his successor Adolph Hitler, who banned the 1,200 copies mailed to Germany each week.
At the time of its founding as Der Wanderer, it was just one among hundreds of German and specifically German-Catholic newspapers, and it has outlived them all. German-language newspapers numbered nearly 500 in 1886; and within a decade nearly doubled, before going into freefall as anti-German hysteria spread with the U.S. entry into World War I.
The Wanderer’s first ten years are told well by Fr. Kulas, professor emeritus of German at St. John’s University, Collegeville, who notes that, from the beginning, this Catholic newspaper was unique in that it was published by laymen and was distinguished by the quality of its reporting on political, social and theological issues, both at home and abroad.
For example, wrote Fr. Kulas, Der Wanderer “played its own significant role in the [immigration debate] drama, emerging as a conscious promoter of immigrants, an influential advocate of their interests, and an unflagging voice of encouragement.
“Public policy toward immigrant groups and especially Germans was of great interest to readers of Der Wanderer, and the editors campaigned extensively for measures that would regularize and facilitate immigration procedures, ameliorate the worst of the conditions of passage and entry, and promote immigrant welfare in the new country....
“The newspaper was able to provide a voice for all German-Americans, particularly those of lesser education. It articulated a satisfying self-image, provided a sense of pride that helped sustain its readers in the often difficult circumstances in which they lived and defended them when their character or patriotism were impugned. But it not only spoke for the immigrants; it also spoke to them, encouraging them to remain true to their cultural inheritance, admonishing them to transmit it to their children, exhorting them to maintain a sense of solidarity with their fellow German immigrants, and beseeching them to provide assistance to those less fortunate.”
Der Wanderer not only advocated on behalf of immigrants, it played an active role in recruiting Germans to come to the United States, going so far as to translate, and publish, the state of Minnesota’s promotional materials for its readers in Germany.
Every issue of the paper contained a poetry page, a theater page, music reviews (Der Wanderer’s editors were major figures in St. Paul’s German music groups) and edifying, instructive stories for young readers, but its main issues involved Church and civic issues.
Kulas observes that while the newspaper’s first editors wanted a truly popular paper, they “clearly did not pander to the lowest common denominator. They endeavored as well to provide a thoughtful and reasoned approach even to issues of complexity, demanding thereby some attention from their readers. With numerous articles of more than superficial quality in the political and religious arena, it sought to broaden horizons and challenge understanding.”
Each week’s issue, Kulas adds, offered a “rich variety of features. Many articles were designed to provide readers with information and instruction on the Catholic faith. There were stories on the Pope, on the observance of Sundays and religious feasts, and on the history of the Church....Others were practically sermons....
“Der Wanderer was primarily a newspaper, and numerous articles had to do with contemporary Church affairs – internal ecclesiastical matters as well as issues with a wider public concern. The early [Franz] Fassbind years (he was the paper’s third editor, following Eugen Ehrhadt and Theodor Mullenmeister) were filled with reports and discussions of the Vatican Council and the growing tensions in Church-state relations within the new German empire. Detailed coverage of important events with an ecclesiastical dimension both in Europe and the United States was characteristic of the newspaper throughout its existence,” wrote Kulas.
Der Wanderer’s coverage of Vatican I, Kulas adds in a footnote, was considered the best “west of Chicago,” and editor Mullenmeister boasted that he had secured the services of a high prelate at the Council to provide its comprehensive reports, with additional reporting on the Council provided by Archabbot Boniface Wimmer of St. Vincent’s Archabbey in Latrobe, Pa., who was also present at the Council.
Bismarck’s kulturkampf against the Church, his accruing of power and his waging of war, Kulas adds in several footnotes, drew strong denunciations from Der Wanderer, and punitive action from Bismarck, who branded Der Wanderer as a staatsfeindliche (enemy of the state) and blacklisted the newspaper. Such was the influence of Der Wanderer at the time that it was able to foment mass anti-Prussia rallies in Cincinnati, San Antonio, New Orleans, as well as across Minnesota and Wisconsin, because as one Wanderer reader wrote to a German editor, Der Wanderer’s coverage of the Franco-Prussian war was superior to any reporting by German newspapers.
“Like any Catholic newspaper on the frontier, Der Wanderer had a strong apologetical bent,” Kulas continues. “It determined to be not only an instrument of instruction in the faith but also an aggressive means of shielding the Church and its teaching from attacks from any quarter. Anti-Catholic bias was still rampant in American society and evidence for it was not difficult to find within other church bodies, some political groups, various intellectual circles, and the population in general. In Der Wanderer this bias was widely reported and bitterly attacked....
“Examples locally and from abroad abounded in issue after issue. It was deemed necessary to defend Catholics’ right to engage in politics; other reports sought to counter the outcry in the Austrian press advocating the dissolution of monasteries; a satirical piece was aimed at demolishing the canard that Catholics were forbidden to read the Bible...”
140 YEARS LATER
As The Wanderer approaches its 140th birthday, its editors intend to take a look back over those 14 decades, insofar as it is possible, since the newspaper was written exclusively in German until the debut of the English edition in 1931, and highlighting the major issues affecting both Church and State over that nearly century-and-a-half. [...]
(Original appeal to readers to share their stories about The Wanderer removed from this posting, April 16, 2009.)
# # # #
Note: this is the first in a series of eleven articles written by Paul Likoudis to celebrate the 140th anniversary of The Wanderer. It is posted here by permission of Mr. Likoudis.
Announcing a Weekly Series
I've mentioned the venerable Catholic newspaper, The Wanderer, a few times in the recent past. After the first mention, I had an interesting e-mail exchange with The Wanderer's news editor, Paul Likoudis.
Two years ago Mr. Likoudis wrote an eleven-article series detailing the history of The Wanderer and giving an account of the paper's one hundred forty years of publication. It's a fascinating look back not only at lay Catholic journalism but at the problems and concerns of our Catholic ancestors; I've often thought that only someone not really acquainted with history can see our present troubles as the worst the Church has ever had to endure, and this account in many places highlights that reality.
Amazingly, Mr. Likoudis has given me permission to re-publish this series in its entirety on this blog! It is not currently available online elsewhere, and plans to print it as a small book have so far not been feasible, from what Mr. Likoudis writes. So for the next eleven weeks, each Thursday (all else permitting) I will publish one of the articles; in a separate post I will add any thoughts or commentary on the subject of Catholic journalism and the like.
While I may have to break some of the articles into two posts, and will remove from the first article the appeal from two years ago for readers to write in and share their stories, it is otherwise my intention to publish the articles without alteration. In this way, when the series is finished, I can create a link list to the articles so that anyone doing research on Catholic journalism will be able to find and read them easily.
I hope my readers will enjoy this fascinating look at the past!
Two years ago Mr. Likoudis wrote an eleven-article series detailing the history of The Wanderer and giving an account of the paper's one hundred forty years of publication. It's a fascinating look back not only at lay Catholic journalism but at the problems and concerns of our Catholic ancestors; I've often thought that only someone not really acquainted with history can see our present troubles as the worst the Church has ever had to endure, and this account in many places highlights that reality.
Amazingly, Mr. Likoudis has given me permission to re-publish this series in its entirety on this blog! It is not currently available online elsewhere, and plans to print it as a small book have so far not been feasible, from what Mr. Likoudis writes. So for the next eleven weeks, each Thursday (all else permitting) I will publish one of the articles; in a separate post I will add any thoughts or commentary on the subject of Catholic journalism and the like.
While I may have to break some of the articles into two posts, and will remove from the first article the appeal from two years ago for readers to write in and share their stories, it is otherwise my intention to publish the articles without alteration. In this way, when the series is finished, I can create a link list to the articles so that anyone doing research on Catholic journalism will be able to find and read them easily.
I hope my readers will enjoy this fascinating look at the past!
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Please Pray
From Nutmeg's blog comes the sad news of the death of Thomas Aquinas College president, Dr. Tom Dillon, who was killed in a car accident in Ireland; his wife is in the hospital.
Eternal rest grant unto Him, O Lord. Many prayers for his wife's recovery, and for his family in these upcoming days.
UPDATE: A news article about the tragedy.
Eternal rest grant unto Him, O Lord. Many prayers for his wife's recovery, and for his family in these upcoming days.
UPDATE: A news article about the tragedy.
Piracy and the Commander-in-Chief
The Navy has said that it really can't do all that much to stop piracy--not what we needed to hear:
MOMBASA, Kenya -- A day after the U.S. military killed three pirates and rescued an American sea captain, Somali pirates threatened to retaliate by killing captured U.S. seamen, and the Pentagon said there's little it can do to stop future attacks.
Crewmembers of the freighter Maersk Alabama, in their first formal remarks to reporters, gathered at the dockside in Mombasa Monday and called on President Barack Obama to take a lead role in fighting piracy. The president called for an international effort, but he offered no specifics on how to address the problem.
"We would like to implore President Obama to use all his resources to increase the commitment to ending this Somali pirate scourge," said Shane Murphy, 33, the ship's first mate. "It's time for us to step in and put an end to this crisis. This crew was lucky to be out of it with every one of us alive. We're not going to be that lucky again." [...]
Navy officials said that while the rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips has put a national spotlight on the issue, piracy is a long-standing problem. Indeed, the U.S. Constitution calls on Congress to "define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas." In the run-up to the Barbary Wars in the early 19th century, the U.S. negotiated with pirates, which led directly to the wars.
White House aides spoke Monday of an interagency group to continue looking at the issue of pirates and of a desire for international cooperation, but they declined to say how aggressively the administration is seeking to expand its policy, what military and non-military options it's considering, and whether the president considers the problem a military or a legal one.
But while the President dithers about whose problem piracy is and which organization he can blame for not solving it (aside from the Bush Administration, which can, according to the Geneva Convention, be blamed for piracy, global warming, and the continuing political career of Hillary Clinton), Texas Congressman Ron Paul has a heck of an interesting idea:
A little-known congressional power could help the federal government keep the Somali pirates in check — and possibly do it for a discount price.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and a growing number of national security experts are calling on Congress to consider using letters of marque and reprisal, a power written into the Constitution that allows the United States to hire private citizens to keep international waters safe.
Used heavily during the Revolution and the War of 1812, letters of marque serve as official warrants from the government, allowing privateers to seize or destroy enemies, their loot and their vessels in exchange for bounty money.
The letters also require would-be thrill seekers to post a bond promising to abide by international rules of war.
In a YouTube video earlier this week, Paul suggested lawmakers consider issuing letters, which could relieve American naval ships from being the nation’s primary pirate responders — a free-market solution to make the high seas safer for cargo ships.
“I think if every potential pirate knew this would be the case, they would have second thoughts because they could probably be blown out of the water rather easily if those were the conditions,” Paul said.
Theoretically, hiring bounty hunters would also be a cheaper option.
I love it! Let's send bounty hunters after the pirates. Then, when the mess is all cleaned up, let's make a movie out of it. Written by anybody except George Lucas, who is probably at the stage of his career where a subplot involving singing fish and an oddly hairy clan of mermaids would be written into an otherwise engaging script.
Piracy is a serious problem, of course. And it needs a serious solution. But somehow, knowing that the Commander-in-Chief is still trying to decide if the problem is a legal or a military one isn't all that reassuring--especially to the crew of the Maersk Alabama, who knows that this time, luck was on their side. This time.
Tax Day, Tea, and a Little Light Reflection on Journalism
Imagine, for a moment, that we are in a Republican administration. Imagine that during the first few months of this Republican president's term, thousands and thousands of people spontaneously gather in cities all over the nation to protest taxes, the president's stimulus plan, and the like. Imagine that this is truly a grassroots effort, not tied to any party or future candidate.
What would the news coverage be like?
I can imagine a few headlines:
Tax Day Protests Signal Wide Bipartisan Displeasure with President
Protests Send Message: Stimulus Plan Too Expensive
National Tea Party Shows Lack of Confidence in Administration
Huge Turnouts at Tax Day Protests; Republicans in Disarray
or even, succinctly, from the New York Times:
Worst President Ever?
Now take a look at the actual event taking place today; here's the website.
And here's a sampling of the coverage:
From the New York Times:
A Vancouver Sun editorial is even less circumspect:
What would the news coverage be like?
I can imagine a few headlines:
Tax Day Protests Signal Wide Bipartisan Displeasure with President
Protests Send Message: Stimulus Plan Too Expensive
National Tea Party Shows Lack of Confidence in Administration
Huge Turnouts at Tax Day Protests; Republicans in Disarray
or even, succinctly, from the New York Times:
Worst President Ever?
Now take a look at the actual event taking place today; here's the website.
And here's a sampling of the coverage:
From the New York Times:
Ah, those mysterious unsourced "others" show up again, in the second paragraph quoted, as the reporter tries to claim that the Republicans and their Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (a division of Halliburton) were responsible for this one. It won't be the economy that kills the Grey Lady, if she falls--it will be the decline in journalistic standards that result from the desperate struggle for approval from The One.The government deadline for filing income tax returns on Wednesday offered some Americans a timely excuse to vent their frustrations and twist a metaphor more than two centuries in the making. Turning tea into an acronym for Taxed Enough Already, demonstrators were expected to attend more than 750 rallies in cities from Boston to Washington, East Hampton, N.Y., to Yakima, Wash., to protest government spending — namely the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package and $3.5 trillion budget.
Although organizers insisted they had created a non-partisan grassroots movement, it was argued by others that these parties were more of the synthetic “Game Day Grass” variety, since the occasion was largely created by the clamor of cable news and fueled with the financial and political support of current and former Republican leaders.
A Vancouver Sun editorial is even less circumspect:
A fake U.S. "grassroots" anti-tax movement, paid for, planned and promoted by right wing think tanks, corporate lobbyists and Fox News Channel, has failed to bring about the "popular uprising" against the Obama administration its creators had hoped for.
The day of "tea parties" pushed by Republican operatives and partisan advocacy groups such as FreedomWorks, brought about only a few hundred "tea-baggers" in most parts of the country, despite relentless promotion by Fox News TV hosts such as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.
Gee, Vancouver. Tell us what you really think. Or not; nobody reads newspapers anymore anyway.
At least Vancouver doesn't pretend to be writing anything but an editorial. The folks at AFP responsible for this piece from before the whole thing really got underway don't have that excuse:
NEW YORK (AFP) — Critics of President Barack Obama marked national tax day Wednesday with "tea party" protests that Republicans called the birth of a grassroots opposition, but Democrats dismissed as a fraud.
Modest crowds gathered under blustery skies in Washington, Miami, New York and Boston, with several thousands meeting in Sacramento, California, to protest taxes, government bailouts and Obama's big-spending budget proposals.
Organizer Eric Odom said protests would take place in almost 800 cities in a "new day for the freedom movement."
The demonstrations, styled on the famed 1773 Boston Tea Party revolt against British colonial taxes, came as Americans rushed to meet the annual deadline for filing income tax returns.
Protests featured teabags, iced tea and other tea-related props, complete with a planned re-enactment of the original dumping of tea into Boston harbor.
But despite the catchy theme, there were questions about whether the scattered, mostly Republican forces could achieve a significant turnout.
Well, yes, because it's hard to count turnout when an event hasn't actually, you know, happened.
Not everybody in the media is taking this same view. This editorial by E. Thomas McClanahan of the Kansas City Star takes a more thoughtful look:
Democrats and other skeptics are desperate to dismiss the tea parties that popped up across the country today. Kansas City political consultant Steve Glorioso told The Star they were being staged by the "same far right fringe characters driven in large part by talk radio."
This eagerness to explain away this movement is telling, suggesting the skeptics see these gatherings as a real threat. Certainly the tea parties have an anti-Obama slant, but what we're seeing is something outside the normal dynamics of Democrat-Republican tension. [...]
This is a genuine grassroots phenomenom. Various facets of the GOP coalition and conservative movement are trying to leverage this movement, but the movement was there first, and it took off after Rick Santelli's famous rant in Chicago. It isn't clear yet what the tea party movement is all about, but it can't be dismissed as something that simply arose from shadowy GOP organizers.
Everything's up to date in Kansas City. Even the journalism, which appears willing to consider the possibility that this tea-party thing isn't being masterminded by Karl Rove or somebody just like him, but might actually be the first hint at a bipartisan populist outrage over the fact that even those who supported Mr. Hope 'n Change might be a bit annoyed that this tax season, they're reduced to hoping for a little change back from the increasingly rapacious federal government.
UPDATE: Check out this unbelievable video at CMR.
I Think I Need This Book
Over at What's Wrong With the World, Francis Beckwith alerts us to the upcoming publication by his sister Elizabeth Beckwith:
Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation, by Elizabeth Beckwith.
All I can say is--yes. This, my friends, is the parenting book we've all been waiting for!
And it can be pre-ordered right now at Amazon. Hint, hint. If Thad reads this post, that is. :)
Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation, by Elizabeth Beckwith.All I can say is--yes. This, my friends, is the parenting book we've all been waiting for!
And it can be pre-ordered right now at Amazon. Hint, hint. If Thad reads this post, that is. :)
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
One More...
Okay, so this isn't exactly in the same category as the other two; it's not an "unsolicited advertisement" so much as it is "shameless self-promotion."
But I did say I would do it.
Last week, just before Easter, my second article for MercatorNet appeared. Unfortunately, it was published just before the Triduum, a time when many Catholics don't spend time on the Internet; so far a total of five people have commented on the article, which is a bit less than last time.
If you didn't get a chance to read it, I'd be most appreciative if you'd check it out and tell me what you think. For instance, I say:
But I did say I would do it.
Last week, just before Easter, my second article for MercatorNet appeared. Unfortunately, it was published just before the Triduum, a time when many Catholics don't spend time on the Internet; so far a total of five people have commented on the article, which is a bit less than last time.
If you didn't get a chance to read it, I'd be most appreciative if you'd check it out and tell me what you think. For instance, I say:
Sometimes the problems are serious, too. Here in Texas this month a fourteen-year-old girl used a pair of scissors to stab another girl at school, over mean comments left on a MySpace page over spring break. Adults can get annoyed or angry enough with each other online--but adults tend to have a sense of proportion which teens and children lack. It may cause hurt, irritation, or even indifference when an adult finds out a Facebook or Twitter contact wants to be removed from his or her circle of friends or followers; it can be devastating beyond reason--literally--for a child or teenager to have this happen, especially if the “friend” is trying to be mean.
As a parent, and especially as a mom of young girls, I worry about many of the dangers our culture poses to our children’s innocence, self-esteem, and well-being. There are so many voices calling to them from the culture, presenting them with words and images that are hyper-sexualised, that reinforce standards and stereotypes that can shatter a girl’s image of herself, that fill their minds with consumer values and prey upon their real, normal needs in that insidious way we call “marketing.” With all of those voices already surrounding them, I think the last think they need are more voices reinforcing all of these things and exploiting their desire to communicate in a way that is “cool” and new--but potentially damaging.
Agree? Disagree? Stop by here, and leave a comment if you like!
Unsolicited Advertisment Two
In this post, I mentioned The Wanderer, the Catholic newspaper that made such a difference to me as a young Catholic.
My husband and I subscribed to it for years, but then the news of the sex scandal broke just as my girls were learning to spell out words, and I had to let the subscription go. I always intended to resume it eventually, but like so many good intentions this one lapsed a bit.
In the meantime, the paper started an e-edition; for only $50.00 a year you can read each week's edition of The Wanderer online--that's less than a dollar a week. And if you open an account at the e-edition site, you are, at present, credited with the cost of three editions which you can read for free before you decide to subscribe.
The Wanderer has been around for one hundred and thirty-five years, and has always been a good value to its readers. Many times I learned about news specific to the Church long before anyone else published it, just by reading The Wanderer; I've been missing it, and am looking forward to reading it again through an e-subscription.
If you've never read The Wanderer, maybe you'd consider giving this great Catholic newspaper a try?
My husband and I subscribed to it for years, but then the news of the sex scandal broke just as my girls were learning to spell out words, and I had to let the subscription go. I always intended to resume it eventually, but like so many good intentions this one lapsed a bit.
In the meantime, the paper started an e-edition; for only $50.00 a year you can read each week's edition of The Wanderer online--that's less than a dollar a week. And if you open an account at the e-edition site, you are, at present, credited with the cost of three editions which you can read for free before you decide to subscribe.
The Wanderer has been around for one hundred and thirty-five years, and has always been a good value to its readers. Many times I learned about news specific to the Church long before anyone else published it, just by reading The Wanderer; I've been missing it, and am looking forward to reading it again through an e-subscription.
If you've never read The Wanderer, maybe you'd consider giving this great Catholic newspaper a try?
Unsolicited Advertisment One
I've decided that today is Unsolicited Advertisement Day on And Sometimes Tea. Oh, it's not that there isn't some interesting news and politics and so forth out there; there is, and I hope to resume posting on these topics soon. But I'm still a bit under the weather, and since my posts will be brief I thought this was a good time to talk about a couple of companies and products I like.
The first one made our Easter day so special, despite my illness. I had ordered three wooden saint dolls from Catholic Folk Toys for my girls; each girl was given a doll of her confirmation patron saint. Kitten's was St. Francis, who can be seen here; Bookgirl's was St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, and Hatchick's was St. Joan of Arc, both of which were custom doll orders. At $15.00 apiece the dolls were an excellent value, and I couldn't have been more delighted with how adorable they all were! They arrived in good time before Easter and came in little fabric bags, perfect to be tucked in among the candy.
Tammy, the wonderful lady who makes the toys, kept me informed via email and was easy to contact when I couldn't quite figure out the custom order process; the whole experience of ordering from Catholic Folk Toys was an excellent one, and I hope to order from them again in the future.
If you are looking for a gift for a special occasion such as a First Communion or Confirmation, please consider ordering from Catholic Folk Toys!
The first one made our Easter day so special, despite my illness. I had ordered three wooden saint dolls from Catholic Folk Toys for my girls; each girl was given a doll of her confirmation patron saint. Kitten's was St. Francis, who can be seen here; Bookgirl's was St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, and Hatchick's was St. Joan of Arc, both of which were custom doll orders. At $15.00 apiece the dolls were an excellent value, and I couldn't have been more delighted with how adorable they all were! They arrived in good time before Easter and came in little fabric bags, perfect to be tucked in among the candy.
Tammy, the wonderful lady who makes the toys, kept me informed via email and was easy to contact when I couldn't quite figure out the custom order process; the whole experience of ordering from Catholic Folk Toys was an excellent one, and I hope to order from them again in the future.
If you are looking for a gift for a special occasion such as a First Communion or Confirmation, please consider ordering from Catholic Folk Toys!
Monday, April 13, 2009
And It Was Easter
I really was looking forward to Easter.
Sure, it was going to be a bit hectic. Mass at 8:30 a.m. is always a challenge for me, anyway, but we manage it every week, thanks to good guardian angels and three--yes, three--alarm clocks in the master bedroom.
And the forecast was for torrential rain, which might mean a stop at home for everyone to at least pretend to consider changing out of Easter finery before heading to my sister's house for a family get-together, featuring this woman's amazing potato salad, which is truly worth its weight in gold, along with other good food and plenty of playtime for the kids and conversation for the adults.
Still, it would be Easter.
And then I contracted the very worst bout of food poisoning I ever had in my life, on Holy Saturday evening. I'll spare you the details--not everything is bloggable--but suffice it to say that my Easter Sunday was very different from what I'd expected.
I saw my family head out to Mass, and I was proud that Kitten and Hatchick were ready to be the entire soprano section in our little choir (the other sopranos had gone to the Vigil). Bookgirl is one of the altos, but she told me after Mass that she and another alto had occasionally joined with the sopranos to help out.
I waited in bed while they were gone, getting up to answer the phone when my wonderful doctor called back--on Easter Sunday--to reassure me about my symptoms and to tell me to stay put and drink lots of fluids.
I spoke on the phone to my sister to tell her we wouldn't be able to come, and to my sister-in-law, who stopped on her way to the family get-together to drop off some of that amazing potato salad for my family to enjoy.
I greeted Thad and the girls when they came back from Mass, and heard from them all about how Mass had gone, and how beautifully the church was decorated, and how joyful everything was.
I spent most of the rest of day hovering between bedroom and bathroom and trying to drink at least some juice here and there, while wondering why food had become my mortal enemy and secretly hoping that food and I would manage to bury the hatchet and become friends again before the really good potato salad was all gone.
My girls had fun opening soft stuffed animals from their grandma and grandpa (two bunnies and a sweet mommy and baby sheep) and a lovely Last Supper plaque from their other grandma and grandpa; they got to play video games with their Dad, and helped him fix a last-minute supper. They popped in and out of the bedroom to share these things with me and to offer more juice at regular intervals; and before they went to bed, Bookgirl gave me a cross she'd made for me out of wooden craft sticks, painted a lovely yellow with glitter.
And it was Easter.
Despite everything, it was Easter. It was still a day for rejoicing, for love and family, for prayers--the Glorious Mysteries on a Sunday again!--and for reflection. Maybe I didn't get to have the day that I thought I'd have, or celebrate in the way I hoped to celebrate. Maybe I ended up "fasting" even more strictly than I did on Good Friday, instead of feasting with my extended family members. Maybe I had to miss Mass, instead of getting to sing the lovely Easter songs I'd been so looking forward to singing.
But it is Easter. Christ is Risen; we are saved from eternal darkness. And what's a little inconvenient illness compared to that?
Sure, it was going to be a bit hectic. Mass at 8:30 a.m. is always a challenge for me, anyway, but we manage it every week, thanks to good guardian angels and three--yes, three--alarm clocks in the master bedroom.
And the forecast was for torrential rain, which might mean a stop at home for everyone to at least pretend to consider changing out of Easter finery before heading to my sister's house for a family get-together, featuring this woman's amazing potato salad, which is truly worth its weight in gold, along with other good food and plenty of playtime for the kids and conversation for the adults.
Still, it would be Easter.
And then I contracted the very worst bout of food poisoning I ever had in my life, on Holy Saturday evening. I'll spare you the details--not everything is bloggable--but suffice it to say that my Easter Sunday was very different from what I'd expected.
I saw my family head out to Mass, and I was proud that Kitten and Hatchick were ready to be the entire soprano section in our little choir (the other sopranos had gone to the Vigil). Bookgirl is one of the altos, but she told me after Mass that she and another alto had occasionally joined with the sopranos to help out.
I waited in bed while they were gone, getting up to answer the phone when my wonderful doctor called back--on Easter Sunday--to reassure me about my symptoms and to tell me to stay put and drink lots of fluids.
I spoke on the phone to my sister to tell her we wouldn't be able to come, and to my sister-in-law, who stopped on her way to the family get-together to drop off some of that amazing potato salad for my family to enjoy.
I greeted Thad and the girls when they came back from Mass, and heard from them all about how Mass had gone, and how beautifully the church was decorated, and how joyful everything was.
I spent most of the rest of day hovering between bedroom and bathroom and trying to drink at least some juice here and there, while wondering why food had become my mortal enemy and secretly hoping that food and I would manage to bury the hatchet and become friends again before the really good potato salad was all gone.
My girls had fun opening soft stuffed animals from their grandma and grandpa (two bunnies and a sweet mommy and baby sheep) and a lovely Last Supper plaque from their other grandma and grandpa; they got to play video games with their Dad, and helped him fix a last-minute supper. They popped in and out of the bedroom to share these things with me and to offer more juice at regular intervals; and before they went to bed, Bookgirl gave me a cross she'd made for me out of wooden craft sticks, painted a lovely yellow with glitter.
And it was Easter.
Despite everything, it was Easter. It was still a day for rejoicing, for love and family, for prayers--the Glorious Mysteries on a Sunday again!--and for reflection. Maybe I didn't get to have the day that I thought I'd have, or celebrate in the way I hoped to celebrate. Maybe I ended up "fasting" even more strictly than I did on Good Friday, instead of feasting with my extended family members. Maybe I had to miss Mass, instead of getting to sing the lovely Easter songs I'd been so looking forward to singing.
But it is Easter. Christ is Risen; we are saved from eternal darkness. And what's a little inconvenient illness compared to that?
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Happy Easter!
This is our passover feast,
when Christ, the true Lamb, is slain,
whose blood consecrates the homes of all believers.
This is the night
when first you saved our fathers:
you freed the people of Israel from their slavery
and led them dry-shod through the sea.
This is the night
when the pillar of fire destroyed the darkness of sin!
This is the night
when Christians everywhere,
washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.
This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.
What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.
O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!
Most blessed of all nights,
chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead! (From the Exultet)
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
Good Friday
O Sacred Head, surrounded by crown of piercing thorn! O bleeding Head, so wounded,
reviled and put to scorn! Death’s pallid hue comes o’er Thee, the glow of life decays,
Yet angel hosts adore Thee, and tremble as they gaze.
I see Thy strength and vigor all fading in the strife, and death with cruel rigor,
bereaving Thee of life; O agony and dying! O love to sinners free! Jesus, all grace
supplying, O turn Thy face on me.
In this, your bitter passion, Good Shepherd, think of me. With Thy most sweet
compassion, Unworthy though I be: Beneath Thy cross abiding for ever would I rest,
In Thy dear love confiding, and with your presence blest. (attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux)
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Holy Thursday
A song we will be singing tonight: Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
that we to judge thee have in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by thine own rejected,
O most afflicted!
Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee!
'Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;
I crucified thee.
Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
the slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered.
For our atonement, while we nothing heeded,
God interceded.
For me, kind Jesus, was thy incarnation,
thy mortal sorrow, and thy life's oblation;
thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion,
for my salvation.
Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,
I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee,
think on thy pity and thy love unswerving,
not my deserving.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
More on Social Networking
I'm about to begin a three-day blog break; while I will post a picture or a prayer or something of that sort each day after this one, I won't be writing posts here.
But before I go, I wanted to thank the good people at MercatorNet for letting me write for them again; this time the topic is social networking and children. I love the headline they chose for the piece; here's a bit from the essay itself:
But before I go, I wanted to thank the good people at MercatorNet for letting me write for them again; this time the topic is social networking and children. I love the headline they chose for the piece; here's a bit from the essay itself:
If there’s one thing that’s true about most girls--and most women--it’s that we like to talk. My oldest was expressing herself in short sentences of two or three words by the time her baby sister was born, even though my oldest was only thirteen months old herself at the time; there was just so much to say, and so many new and interesting ways to say it. By the time their youngest sister had joined us and had become verbal herself, my husband would marvel at our daughters’ capacity to maintain “chatter mode” for all of their waking hours, and sometimes, for the two who shared a room, well into the night.
It’s not surprising that many trend forecasters see women easily outpacing men in their use of social networking sites. On some sites, women already outnumber men; and while men tend to be the early adopters of all new technology, it’s the women who seem drawn in overwhelming numbers to those sites that promise new and better ways to chat, converse, interact, gab and gossip.
As more and more moms embrace the promise of easy conversation these sites offer, though, there’s a chance that we’ll forget who’s watching over our shoulder, and what our adoption of these technologies might mean for our kids.
I hope you'll take a second to glance over the piece and, if so inclined, let me know what you think in the comments over there. I realize that a lot of you, like me, will be trying to curtail your internet use over the next few days, so I may re-post the link next week as well.
A blessed Triduum to all!
Last Chance to Fight for Conscience Rights for Healthcare Workers
If you haven't already done so, please go to this USCCB web page and follow the instructions to email HHS in regard to conscience protections for pro-life doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers. President Obama plans to overturn the conscience protections put in by the Bush administration, which will have the effect of forcing all healthcare workers to participate in or refer for abortions if asked to do so.
The comment period ends tomorrow, April 9. If you're like me and it takes you a few reminders before you remember to go out and click links and compose an email, this reminder is for you!
Please join us in helping Catholic and other pro-life healthcare workers retain the right to refuse to participate in the terrible moral evil of the murder of the unborn.
Anyone who wishes to copy this post in its entirety (so long as you include the above link) in order to post it yourself, email it, or otherwise distribute it before the end of the day tomorrow should feel free to do so.
God bless!
The comment period ends tomorrow, April 9. If you're like me and it takes you a few reminders before you remember to go out and click links and compose an email, this reminder is for you!
Please join us in helping Catholic and other pro-life healthcare workers retain the right to refuse to participate in the terrible moral evil of the murder of the unborn.
Anyone who wishes to copy this post in its entirety (so long as you include the above link) in order to post it yourself, email it, or otherwise distribute it before the end of the day tomorrow should feel free to do so.
God bless!
Why Catholic?
A reader of this blog who has a fine blog of his own sent me the following question, which was sent to him by a friend:
For me, the question is: Why are you Catholic and not Protestant or Orthodox?
The simplest way for me to begin is t0 say that I am Catholic because I believe that Christ intended to found a specific Church, that the Church He founded still exists, and that His Church is the Catholic Church. But I know that's not the whole story.
I began my life as a Catholic quite early. I was born into and baptized into a Catholic family, was raised Catholic, and have strong cultural roots to the Catholic faith. I can't deny that those roots have been somewhat weakened by modernity and especially by the rapid-fire changes of Vatican II; I was born in 1968, three years after the Council closed, but the post-Conciliar changes were just beginning to make their way into parish life during my childhood, and the period of loosey-goosey, anything goes Catholicism was at its heyday in my youth.
My parents, though, were traditional even before there were "traditionalists." They would clarify and explain things that our teachers in the Catholic schools were leaving out, and would challenge some of the things going on at the parish. Eventually they realized they were not alone, and the heady period of weekly Wanderer readership (don't laugh--when I was eighteen my life's ambition was to write for The Wanderer) and the wild adventure into that thing called homeschooling came to pass in our family.
Both the presence of orthodox Catholic media in our home and the pre-Vatican II religion texts that came with our homeschooling curricula had a huge impact on me. I was in high school, rebelling without realizing it against the liberal feminist pacifist pro-Democrat hegemony of my Catholic school teachers at the all-girls' Catholic high school I'd been attending; the (to me at the time) meaty, substantive articles in this exciting Catholic newspaper and the detailed and breathtakingly rational descriptions of what Catholics believed and why we believed it in my textbooks was a positive relief compared to the squishy feel-goodism masquerading as Catholicism I'd been exposed to in the schools most of my life.
The more I learned about who and what the Church claimed to be, and Who She saw as Her founder, the more certain incidents in my past made sense to me. As a young child, I'd asked my mother if Protestants all each believed that their church was the "true" one; repeating this question a few years later to a Protestant friend I'd been shocked to hear her say that her church taught that it didn't matter. All Christian churches (well, possibly except Catholics; this was the South, after all) were "true" churches, because all sought to follow the spirit of Christ. True, they had different founders, but...The idea of different founders didn't make sense to me, but the Protestant notion of the Eucharist made less sense. If Christ had really meant His Body and Blood to be merely symbolic, as she claimed, what about that Gospel reading where many of His followers left in disgust when He said they would have to eat His flesh and drink His blood? Couldn't He simply have explained the symbolism instead of letting them leave over a misunderstanding? I wouldn't have appreciated, then, the full richness of that section of the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel, but it, and dozens of other Eucharistic passages in the Scriptures, remain even today one of my reasons for being a Catholic instead of a Protestant; I think the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist is the truly Scriptural one, and the Eucharist is, moreover, so central to my life as a follower of Christ that I couldn't imagine life apart from His Presence in this mystery.
Getting back to that notion of "founders--" years later when my sister and I were working after college, she came to me asking to borrow my copy of the World Almanac. I wondered why, and she said a Protestant co-worker had asked her who founded her Church. "Jesus," my sister had said.
"Oh, sure, spiritually, but who was the real founder?" a woman persisted.
My sister went a few rounds explaining that unless you wanted to say, "St. Peter," (which was somewhat inaccurate) you could only say, "Jesus." There was no particular merely human founder of the Catholic Church.
Her co-worker was still puzzled, which was why my sister wanted to borrow the almanac. Today, of course, such sources go out of their way to say, "Jesus, but really Peter, but really some other bishops in the 300s, but really..." as they go out of their way to try to twist the simple truth into something unrecognizable. But my 1980s-era secular World Almanac and Book of Facts engaged in no such sophistry; beside "founder" next to "Catholic Church" the chart simply read, "Jesus Christ." In the almanac, remember--not in a religious source book. My sister's co-worker was, if I recall, impressed--and intrigued.
To me, though, then and now, the idea is a simple one. Christ clearly meant to start a Church. He clearly meant to leave somebody in charge of it, and He clearly meant something very particular with all that "Do this in remembrance of Me," bit emphasized in the Gospels. From the very beginning of the Church, though, some people thought they ought to re-do His teachings a bit. In the earliest years these groups existed in open heresy; later, they broke away convinced that some new understanding compelled them to "go back" to a purer, simpler time, without all that authority and ritual and so forth. But in my admittedly simplistic view of things, these new churches were started because they had one or more of these three ideas:
Now, all of this answers the why Catholic; why Catholic and not Protestant parts of the question. The "why not Orthodox" question is rather complex, because I do believe as the Church does that the Orthodox are also a real Church. They have apostolic succession and valid sacraments. But what they don't have is the Pope, and again, I find the arguments against papal authority unconvincing.
It's probably far beyond the scope of this post to say fully why that is, except for me to say that I do think Christ intended for Peter to have a special role, above and beyond his companions. Granted, James and John were also often singled out in the Gospels, or rather, not "singled" but along with Peter called to witness some of Our Lord's earthly life that no one else saw firsthand. But it is only Peter who receives the keys; it is only Peter who first denies Christ, and then is forgiven, told "Feed my lambs" and "feed my sheep." Surely it would have made more sense for Our Lord to have said something like this to St. John, who alone of the apostles did not abandon Him at the foot of the Cross, right? But it is Peter who is told these things, and it is Peter who goes from hiding in the upper room, to fearlessly leading the other apostles in Acts, after the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon them all.
I do hope for Catholic and Orthodox reunification, and I also hope it won't be long in coming. But of the two Churches, I believe I'm in the one that most fully reflects the scriptural image of the Church Christ intended to found, and did found; and being a member of that Church is a blessing beyond anything I deserve.
Lengthy as this is, it is bound to be incomplete; a question like this one could be answered well in a book, not in a blog post. But I'll stop here, to give others the chance to weigh in--I do hope that you will!
I have been a Protestant my entire life, yet I acknowledge what R.R. Reno described as "the insanity of [the] slide into self-guidance." (Catholic Matters, Richard John Neuhaus, p. 65). I also whole-heartedly agree with Neuhaus himself when he says, "The allegedly autonomous self who acknowledges no authority but himself is abjectly captive to the authority of the Enlightenment rationality that finally collapses into incoherence." He adds, "Confronted by such truth claims, we necessarily ask, 'Sez who?' By what authority, by whose authority, should I credit such claims to be true?" (ibid., p. 70)First, I'd like to emphasize that the reason this question is being shared around is not just to ask a couple of people; anyone who would like to answer these questions is strongly encouraged to do so in the comment boxes (or on your own blog, if you have one).
And so I ask: If you are Protestant, why are you Protestant and why are you not Catholic or Orthodox? If you are Catholic, why are you Catholic and not Protestant or Orthodox? If you are Orthodox, why are you Orthodox and not Protestant or Catholic?
Note that whatever question applies to you is actually in two parts, asking a positive affirmation of why you are what you are and an answer of why you are not what you are not.
Thanks in advance to all who search deeply and share good, honest thoughts.
For me, the question is: Why are you Catholic and not Protestant or Orthodox?
The simplest way for me to begin is t0 say that I am Catholic because I believe that Christ intended to found a specific Church, that the Church He founded still exists, and that His Church is the Catholic Church. But I know that's not the whole story.
I began my life as a Catholic quite early. I was born into and baptized into a Catholic family, was raised Catholic, and have strong cultural roots to the Catholic faith. I can't deny that those roots have been somewhat weakened by modernity and especially by the rapid-fire changes of Vatican II; I was born in 1968, three years after the Council closed, but the post-Conciliar changes were just beginning to make their way into parish life during my childhood, and the period of loosey-goosey, anything goes Catholicism was at its heyday in my youth.
My parents, though, were traditional even before there were "traditionalists." They would clarify and explain things that our teachers in the Catholic schools were leaving out, and would challenge some of the things going on at the parish. Eventually they realized they were not alone, and the heady period of weekly Wanderer readership (don't laugh--when I was eighteen my life's ambition was to write for The Wanderer) and the wild adventure into that thing called homeschooling came to pass in our family.
Both the presence of orthodox Catholic media in our home and the pre-Vatican II religion texts that came with our homeschooling curricula had a huge impact on me. I was in high school, rebelling without realizing it against the liberal feminist pacifist pro-Democrat hegemony of my Catholic school teachers at the all-girls' Catholic high school I'd been attending; the (to me at the time) meaty, substantive articles in this exciting Catholic newspaper and the detailed and breathtakingly rational descriptions of what Catholics believed and why we believed it in my textbooks was a positive relief compared to the squishy feel-goodism masquerading as Catholicism I'd been exposed to in the schools most of my life.
The more I learned about who and what the Church claimed to be, and Who She saw as Her founder, the more certain incidents in my past made sense to me. As a young child, I'd asked my mother if Protestants all each believed that their church was the "true" one; repeating this question a few years later to a Protestant friend I'd been shocked to hear her say that her church taught that it didn't matter. All Christian churches (well, possibly except Catholics; this was the South, after all) were "true" churches, because all sought to follow the spirit of Christ. True, they had different founders, but...The idea of different founders didn't make sense to me, but the Protestant notion of the Eucharist made less sense. If Christ had really meant His Body and Blood to be merely symbolic, as she claimed, what about that Gospel reading where many of His followers left in disgust when He said they would have to eat His flesh and drink His blood? Couldn't He simply have explained the symbolism instead of letting them leave over a misunderstanding? I wouldn't have appreciated, then, the full richness of that section of the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel, but it, and dozens of other Eucharistic passages in the Scriptures, remain even today one of my reasons for being a Catholic instead of a Protestant; I think the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist is the truly Scriptural one, and the Eucharist is, moreover, so central to my life as a follower of Christ that I couldn't imagine life apart from His Presence in this mystery.
Getting back to that notion of "founders--" years later when my sister and I were working after college, she came to me asking to borrow my copy of the World Almanac. I wondered why, and she said a Protestant co-worker had asked her who founded her Church. "Jesus," my sister had said.
"Oh, sure, spiritually, but who was the real founder?" a woman persisted.
My sister went a few rounds explaining that unless you wanted to say, "St. Peter," (which was somewhat inaccurate) you could only say, "Jesus." There was no particular merely human founder of the Catholic Church.
Her co-worker was still puzzled, which was why my sister wanted to borrow the almanac. Today, of course, such sources go out of their way to say, "Jesus, but really Peter, but really some other bishops in the 300s, but really..." as they go out of their way to try to twist the simple truth into something unrecognizable. But my 1980s-era secular World Almanac and Book of Facts engaged in no such sophistry; beside "founder" next to "Catholic Church" the chart simply read, "Jesus Christ." In the almanac, remember--not in a religious source book. My sister's co-worker was, if I recall, impressed--and intrigued.
To me, though, then and now, the idea is a simple one. Christ clearly meant to start a Church. He clearly meant to leave somebody in charge of it, and He clearly meant something very particular with all that "Do this in remembrance of Me," bit emphasized in the Gospels. From the very beginning of the Church, though, some people thought they ought to re-do His teachings a bit. In the earliest years these groups existed in open heresy; later, they broke away convinced that some new understanding compelled them to "go back" to a purer, simpler time, without all that authority and ritual and so forth. But in my admittedly simplistic view of things, these new churches were started because they had one or more of these three ideas:
- Christ didn't actually mean to start a physical Church, but only a spiritual one;
- Christ meant to start a physical Church, but He didn't mean to create a hierarchy who would be "in charge" and teach with authority; or
- Christ did mean to start a Church, but He didn't mean anything about that Eucharist idea except that it would be a nice symbol, and thus there was no need for an ordained priesthood or the inherently sacrificial character of the Catholic Mass.
Now, all of this answers the why Catholic; why Catholic and not Protestant parts of the question. The "why not Orthodox" question is rather complex, because I do believe as the Church does that the Orthodox are also a real Church. They have apostolic succession and valid sacraments. But what they don't have is the Pope, and again, I find the arguments against papal authority unconvincing.
It's probably far beyond the scope of this post to say fully why that is, except for me to say that I do think Christ intended for Peter to have a special role, above and beyond his companions. Granted, James and John were also often singled out in the Gospels, or rather, not "singled" but along with Peter called to witness some of Our Lord's earthly life that no one else saw firsthand. But it is only Peter who receives the keys; it is only Peter who first denies Christ, and then is forgiven, told "Feed my lambs" and "feed my sheep." Surely it would have made more sense for Our Lord to have said something like this to St. John, who alone of the apostles did not abandon Him at the foot of the Cross, right? But it is Peter who is told these things, and it is Peter who goes from hiding in the upper room, to fearlessly leading the other apostles in Acts, after the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon them all.
I do hope for Catholic and Orthodox reunification, and I also hope it won't be long in coming. But of the two Churches, I believe I'm in the one that most fully reflects the scriptural image of the Church Christ intended to found, and did found; and being a member of that Church is a blessing beyond anything I deserve.
Lengthy as this is, it is bound to be incomplete; a question like this one could be answered well in a book, not in a blog post. But I'll stop here, to give others the chance to weigh in--I do hope that you will!
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Maple Syrup and Moral Nightmares
Vermont, a state noted for maple syrup, extremely cold weather, and extreme stupidity when it comes to any understanding of gender, has become the first state to use a quasi-legislative process to override a veto and approve gay marriage:
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — Vermont has become the fourth state to legalize gay marriage — and the first to do so with a legislature's vote.
The Legislature voted Tuesday to override Gov. Jim Douglas' veto of a bill allowing gays and lesbians to marry. The vote was 23-5 to override in the state Senate and 100-49 to override in the House. Under Vermont law, two-thirds of each chamber had to vote for override.
The vote came nine years after Vermont adopted its first-in-the-nation civil unions law.
It's now the fourth state to permit same-sex marriage. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa are the others. Their approval of gay marriage came from the courts.
I'm allergic to maple trees, and from now on I'm allergic to syrup that comes from Vermont, too. Vermont may be the biggest producer of maple syrup in our nation, but doing a little research I found that some other states aren't too shabby in their production, either. Sadly, they're all "blue states" which went for Obama in the last election. Still, I'd rather buy organic maple syrup from an Ohio sugar farm than support Vermont in their insanity.
One of Vermont's biggest industries, of course, is tourism--and I can't see planning a vacation there, ever. Why would I go spend money in a state that has just declared my two-thousand year old religion to be bigotry? I'm not that much a glutton for punishment, believe me.
We're starting to see the pace accelerate, as the wicked pro-gay marriage culture of stupidity opens wide its gaping maws to swallow whole the social pillars of marriage, religious freedom, and moral sanity. As state after state begins to topple like cowed dominoes in the hand of a petulant toddler, our craven politicians and evil judges stand poised to sell off the religious freedoms of millions of Americans to placate and reward the incessantly shrill demands of the gay activists, whose hatred for what is normal and good can't be understood without some concept of the notion of diabolical activity.
The demons that howled on the night of our Lord's Passion have never stopped trying to smash His Church, to murder His spotless Bride and crush His followers. We know they will never win; in the end, the Church will always be standing, and ready to pick up the pieces of the self-destructive culture foolish enough to think it no longer needs the laws of God, not even the natural ones He has written on our hearts. But it's going to be ugly for those of us called to live during the coming time of great persecution; we should start preparing now for the trials that will soon come.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Numbered, Weighed, Divided; or, The Writing on the Wall
What a remarkable story and image:
Tiny and dying but still-powerful stars called pulsars spin like crazy and light up their surroundings, often with ghostly glows. So it is with PSR B1509-58, which long ago collapsed into a sphere just 12 miles in diameter after running out of fuel.
And what a strange scene this one has created.In a new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, high-energy X-rays emanating from the nebula around PSR B1509-58 have been colored blue to reveal a structure resembling a hand reaching for some eternal red cosmic light.
The star now spins around at the dizzying pace of seven times every second -- as pulsars do -- spewing energy into space that creates the scene.
And here's the picture:
Now, I know that seeking a religious message in this image is akin to the sightings of Our Lady in a garage-stain or similar experiences; the message is in the eyes of the beholders. God doesn't need to communicate to us through cosmic imagery not visible from Earth, or with the naked eye, for that matter; the Holy Spirit can get through to us much easier through the Church, and especially through the Pope.
But I can't see this image and not think of the fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel, especially this part:
- "This is the writing that was inscribed: MENE, TEKEL, and PERES. These words mean:
- MENE, God has numbered your kingdom and put an end to it;
- TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting;
- PERES, your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians."
- Then by order of Belshazzar they clothed Daniel in purple, with a gold collar about his neck, and proclaimed him third in the government of the kingdom.
- The same night Belshazzar, the Chaldean king, was slain." (Daniel 5:25-30)
Maybe the flavor of doom from this passage appeals to me right now because of all the gay marriage argumentation going on at Crunchy Cons; I can't help but think of our former pastor's annual Christmas homily, in which he would list all the nations which set themselves against God and His Church, and end with the grim fact that none of them still existed, but the Church remains as God promised. Herod could not destroy the babe of Bethlehem; Annas and Caiphas couldn't make it happen; Pilate couldn't accomplish what they demanded he do; and our American hubris isn't going to do what these past figures tried in vain.
That doesn't mean that times aren't about to become difficult, perhaps extraordinarily so, for those of us who think that we can't reshape reality to our culture's liking without paying a high price for doing so. But America is already on a path of enmity with God; abortion, contraception, divorce, rampant sexual immorality, financial excess and fraud, and similar ills already offend Him. But let America codify that offense even further by legalizing the idiocy and the insanity that is gay marriage, and I wonder how long our nation will endure, or bear any resemblance to the "One nation, under God," she claims to be.
We have been numbered. We are being weighed. And the more we erect legal, social, and cultural walls between those who seek to live according to the laws of God and those who seek the supremacy of secularism, the more we may ultimately be divided.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Palms
A blessed Palm Sunday to all!
If you got your palms at a later Mass today, or if you kept your palms damp enough to work with, you might like these instructions for making a palm cross.
Of course, if you had the presence of mind to keep your palms damp you probably don't need the instructions; in fact, you've probably been making palm crucifixes complete with Corpus, "INRI" posted at the top, and other elaborate details. Or maybe you borrow from the Hindu craftsmen and make palm birds, which are dovelike enough to represent the Holy Spirit:
In either case, you're way too crafty for this blog. :)
As you've probably guessed by now, I have never successfully made a palm cross. It doesn't look all that hard, but somehow the minute I try it I find that several of my fingers have unaccountably become thumbs, the palm itself has the flexibility of either a pencil or a well-boiled piece of spaghetti--or both at the same time, which doesn't make sense to me either--and that the little folds and tucks you're supposed to make are impossibly complex, and don't work anyway.
But every Palm Sunday I see everyone from a busy mom (who seriously made the most elaborate palm cross I think I've ever seen) to tiny children happily weaving their palms into crosses, while the palms my family takes home end up in a loopy bunch as a bouquet in a simple green raiku pottery vase on top of my computer desk, where the Texas summer heat will further suck the moisture from them and shrink them down to a tiny fraction of their original size.
I've done other things with blessed palms, such as tuck them behind a religious picture or crucifix; but that only really works when you're bringing home one or two small palm fronds a year. Add some children, those same children's propensity for getting the largest palm branches available handed to them (you know, the kind that are really three or four palm fronds stuck together), and a few dozen years of bringing home anywhere from five to what seemed like three hundred palms at a time, and I had to find a new way to give these blessed items a place of honor where they could remind us of Christ's suffering, His gift of grace, and our struggle to live lives of holiness.
This raiku pottery vase is the newest iteration of my "palms in a vase" solution; there are still some displayed in a crystal bowl in the master bedroom, and those migrated from a smaller vase which they outgrew. I know that one can dispose of them, as one can of any blessed object which is no longer capable of use, by burning or by burying them; but I don't really mind having them around--it's such a "Catholic home" thing to have stashes of Palm Sunday palms, the botanical ghosts of Palm Sundays past, even to the point when they're rather dry unrecognizable sticks which will probably fall into ash by the slow action of the southwestern climate before anyone has to take a more active step toward their respectful disposal.
I've seen writings about burning the palms and burying the ashes in one's garden, or around the foundation of one's home, or of simply burying the palms in these places. It's a beatiful idea, and maybe when we truly reach palm overload we will attempt one of these things; I think that Thad has burned some old palms in the past, especially when we were moving from our old house (if it had been left to me, I'd have packed them in a box marked "kitchen and religious," but that's another story). But I like having the palms around in various states of decay, and I think I've finally figured out why.
The new palms from today are tall and still edged with green. They bend, but don't break unless you were to tear them. They seem flexible, but paradoxically they will spring back up to their upright position if I unfold them from their position in the vase.
Next to them are palms from last year (I got the vase last year, so I've only got two years' worth in them so far). They are fragile, becoming more brittle with each passing day. They've taken on a bowed appearance, content to remain curved in half even if they're removed from the vase.
In the bedroom are some truly old ones. Their sides have curled in upon themselves, making them like hollow tubes; they crackle when you hold them, and could easily be crushed. They probably ought to be burned or buried at this point; there is no use for them.
Palms symbolize triumph and victory. Through His glorious Passion, death on the Cross, and Resurrection Jesus was and is triumphant over sin and death. When the ashes of burned palms are smeared on our faces on Ash Wednesday, we hear "Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." So we will still die; so where is the victory?
The victory, of course, is not over the death of the flesh, but over the eternal death of the soul. The victory is over sin and its power of enslavement to those evils which by our free choice cause us to turn from God and choose Hell and never ending punishment. The victory is over our fallen nature, our separation from God, and the habits of sin which keep us from Him.
So when I see those dessicated palms from years ago, I think of old sins, old bad habits, old ways of thinking and being which were once "full of life" in my daily existence, and which have now been rooted out long enough to have no power to tempt me, no allures to offer. When I see the branches from last year, humbly bowed in submission to the vase, I think of my Lenten intentions and resolutions from last year and of the ones I have, with more success than failure, succeeded in taming and thus in turning further away from sin. And when I see the branches from this year which still spring defiantly upright if I take them out of the vase for a second, I think of those sins I've tackled this Lent, and how without a resolution to remain steadfast in good practices beyond the Easter festival my sinfulness will be like those branches, impossible to humble, incapable of being reformed.
But this is not a depressing thought; it is a hopeful one. For as it took time, patience, and the actions of God through the natural world to turn those old palm branches into dusty shadows of their erstwhile glory, so does it take time, patience, and the abundant graces of God for us to be able to drain the allure of sin from those sins which tempt us most, and to see them for what they always were--small dead things that ought to have no power over us at all.
Hosanna to the King! Hosanna to the One Who brings the victory!
If you got your palms at a later Mass today, or if you kept your palms damp enough to work with, you might like these instructions for making a palm cross.
Of course, if you had the presence of mind to keep your palms damp you probably don't need the instructions; in fact, you've probably been making palm crucifixes complete with Corpus, "INRI" posted at the top, and other elaborate details. Or maybe you borrow from the Hindu craftsmen and make palm birds, which are dovelike enough to represent the Holy Spirit:
In either case, you're way too crafty for this blog. :)
As you've probably guessed by now, I have never successfully made a palm cross. It doesn't look all that hard, but somehow the minute I try it I find that several of my fingers have unaccountably become thumbs, the palm itself has the flexibility of either a pencil or a well-boiled piece of spaghetti--or both at the same time, which doesn't make sense to me either--and that the little folds and tucks you're supposed to make are impossibly complex, and don't work anyway.
But every Palm Sunday I see everyone from a busy mom (who seriously made the most elaborate palm cross I think I've ever seen) to tiny children happily weaving their palms into crosses, while the palms my family takes home end up in a loopy bunch as a bouquet in a simple green raiku pottery vase on top of my computer desk, where the Texas summer heat will further suck the moisture from them and shrink them down to a tiny fraction of their original size.
I've done other things with blessed palms, such as tuck them behind a religious picture or crucifix; but that only really works when you're bringing home one or two small palm fronds a year. Add some children, those same children's propensity for getting the largest palm branches available handed to them (you know, the kind that are really three or four palm fronds stuck together), and a few dozen years of bringing home anywhere from five to what seemed like three hundred palms at a time, and I had to find a new way to give these blessed items a place of honor where they could remind us of Christ's suffering, His gift of grace, and our struggle to live lives of holiness.
This raiku pottery vase is the newest iteration of my "palms in a vase" solution; there are still some displayed in a crystal bowl in the master bedroom, and those migrated from a smaller vase which they outgrew. I know that one can dispose of them, as one can of any blessed object which is no longer capable of use, by burning or by burying them; but I don't really mind having them around--it's such a "Catholic home" thing to have stashes of Palm Sunday palms, the botanical ghosts of Palm Sundays past, even to the point when they're rather dry unrecognizable sticks which will probably fall into ash by the slow action of the southwestern climate before anyone has to take a more active step toward their respectful disposal.
I've seen writings about burning the palms and burying the ashes in one's garden, or around the foundation of one's home, or of simply burying the palms in these places. It's a beatiful idea, and maybe when we truly reach palm overload we will attempt one of these things; I think that Thad has burned some old palms in the past, especially when we were moving from our old house (if it had been left to me, I'd have packed them in a box marked "kitchen and religious," but that's another story). But I like having the palms around in various states of decay, and I think I've finally figured out why.
The new palms from today are tall and still edged with green. They bend, but don't break unless you were to tear them. They seem flexible, but paradoxically they will spring back up to their upright position if I unfold them from their position in the vase.
Next to them are palms from last year (I got the vase last year, so I've only got two years' worth in them so far). They are fragile, becoming more brittle with each passing day. They've taken on a bowed appearance, content to remain curved in half even if they're removed from the vase.
In the bedroom are some truly old ones. Their sides have curled in upon themselves, making them like hollow tubes; they crackle when you hold them, and could easily be crushed. They probably ought to be burned or buried at this point; there is no use for them.
Palms symbolize triumph and victory. Through His glorious Passion, death on the Cross, and Resurrection Jesus was and is triumphant over sin and death. When the ashes of burned palms are smeared on our faces on Ash Wednesday, we hear "Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." So we will still die; so where is the victory?
The victory, of course, is not over the death of the flesh, but over the eternal death of the soul. The victory is over sin and its power of enslavement to those evils which by our free choice cause us to turn from God and choose Hell and never ending punishment. The victory is over our fallen nature, our separation from God, and the habits of sin which keep us from Him.
So when I see those dessicated palms from years ago, I think of old sins, old bad habits, old ways of thinking and being which were once "full of life" in my daily existence, and which have now been rooted out long enough to have no power to tempt me, no allures to offer. When I see the branches from last year, humbly bowed in submission to the vase, I think of my Lenten intentions and resolutions from last year and of the ones I have, with more success than failure, succeeded in taming and thus in turning further away from sin. And when I see the branches from this year which still spring defiantly upright if I take them out of the vase for a second, I think of those sins I've tackled this Lent, and how without a resolution to remain steadfast in good practices beyond the Easter festival my sinfulness will be like those branches, impossible to humble, incapable of being reformed.
But this is not a depressing thought; it is a hopeful one. For as it took time, patience, and the actions of God through the natural world to turn those old palm branches into dusty shadows of their erstwhile glory, so does it take time, patience, and the abundant graces of God for us to be able to drain the allure of sin from those sins which tempt us most, and to see them for what they always were--small dead things that ought to have no power over us at all.
Hosanna to the King! Hosanna to the One Who brings the victory!
Friday, April 3, 2009
Gratuitous Hamster Videos
Jonah Goldberg at NRO's The Corner blog decided to interrupt the blog today to post this hamster video:
It really has been that kind of a week, hasn't it?
So here's another one:
Enjoy! :)
It really has been that kind of a week, hasn't it?
So here's another one:
Enjoy! :)
The Message Has Been Disintermediated
Daniel Hannan, the straight-talking MEP whose video chastising the British prime minister has gone viral, has a terrific blog post up today talking about the liberal fury at their loss of control of the media--and thus the message:
This is, of course, why some members of Congress here in America periodically talk about reinstating the so-called "Fairness Doctrine." The president is not in favor of that, though, so unless the Democrats try to sneak legislation of this variety in under some other name, chances are that the "Fairness Doctrine" will stay on the shelf--for now.
But I can imagine that as the new mandate to redefine marriage sweeps through more liberal judiciaries, more than a few liberals, especially those in Congress, are going to wish that the Fairness Doctrine were still in force. It's going to be pretty hard to indoctrinate the people into laying down their religious freedoms and clapping for Jack and Jim, or for Jill and Jane; the people are probably going to complain, and a lot of that complaining is going to be via the new media sources: websites, blogs, video-sharing sites, and the like.
Meanwhile, the solemn pontificators of the liberal party line are teetering; even the New York Times is fearful of its survival. These liberal voices won't, of course, examine the possibility that maybe the people are tired of being spoon-fed mindless liberal mush explaining why gay marriage is super-terrific but Christians who homeschool are a shady bunch, much to be feared; no, the decline in circulation is because too many uppity pajama-clad citizens think they can offer news and opinions without a deferential nod in the direction of the Gray Lady, and the absence of enforced fairness means the Times just can't compete with...total amateurs who do this sort of thing for fun.
Because, fret the major news organizations, the Internet writers lack "quality control." Or just plain control, as Hannan says.
I love the sentence "The message has been disintermediated." What a pithy way to sum up the situation today, when people can access news and information that goes far, far beyond the predictable slant of most newspaper and television news.Peter Wilby thinks I'm "a fool". According to the former editor of the New Statesman: "The online success of Daniel Hannan's speech about Gordon Brown to the European Parliament - it reached the top of YouTube's 'Most Viewed' list and has 'gone viral' - proves what we knew: the internet lacks quality control."
Yup. That's the thing about the internet: it turns the quality filters off. Until very recently, few of us could get political news direct from source. It had to be interpreted for us by a BBC man with a microphone or a newspaper's political correspondent. Now, though, people can make their own minds up. The message has been disintermediated.
It is striking that those who seem most upset by the development - pundits such as Mr Wilby and The Guardian's Michael White - tend to be on the Left. Perhaps they sense that the Left has the most to lose. What Mr Wilby seems to mean when he complains that the internet "lacks quality control" is not that my speech was ungrammatical or shoddily constructed, but that its content was disagreeable. The quality filters he evidently has in mind would screen out points of view that he considers unacceptable: that taxes are too high, that present borrowing levels are unsustainable, that Britain would flourish outside the EU, that we could do more to repatriate illicit migrants.
This is, of course, why some members of Congress here in America periodically talk about reinstating the so-called "Fairness Doctrine." The president is not in favor of that, though, so unless the Democrats try to sneak legislation of this variety in under some other name, chances are that the "Fairness Doctrine" will stay on the shelf--for now.
But I can imagine that as the new mandate to redefine marriage sweeps through more liberal judiciaries, more than a few liberals, especially those in Congress, are going to wish that the Fairness Doctrine were still in force. It's going to be pretty hard to indoctrinate the people into laying down their religious freedoms and clapping for Jack and Jim, or for Jill and Jane; the people are probably going to complain, and a lot of that complaining is going to be via the new media sources: websites, blogs, video-sharing sites, and the like.
Meanwhile, the solemn pontificators of the liberal party line are teetering; even the New York Times is fearful of its survival. These liberal voices won't, of course, examine the possibility that maybe the people are tired of being spoon-fed mindless liberal mush explaining why gay marriage is super-terrific but Christians who homeschool are a shady bunch, much to be feared; no, the decline in circulation is because too many uppity pajama-clad citizens think they can offer news and opinions without a deferential nod in the direction of the Gray Lady, and the absence of enforced fairness means the Times just can't compete with...total amateurs who do this sort of thing for fun.
Because, fret the major news organizations, the Internet writers lack "quality control." Or just plain control, as Hannan says.
Trouble in River City
As you've no doubt heard already, the Iowa Supreme court took a long lunch break, ordered that nifty drink known as the Emanating Penumbra, drank a few too many, lurched back to court and magically discovered that Iowans have the right to call their commitment to engaging in homosexual acts of depravity "marriage." I like this, from the Liberty Counsel:
What I really like is Barber's skillful dismantling of the notion that this push to legalize sodomite and lesbian relationships has anything to do with determining "constitutional" parameters for marriage. Nobody who wrote the Iowa State Constitution, nobody who wrote the United States Constitution, ever imagined that homosexual acts would be privileged someday under the marriage laws. None of our illustrious ancestors, some of whom may have occasionally winked at their knowledge of such relationships in private, ever would have contemplated a time when American society would become so suicidal, so bent on self-destruction, as to rush forward to make the whole concept and notion of civil marriage completely meaningless, an idea with no underlying reality, a word that no longer has any purpose.
The current DOMA definition of marriage is as follows: "In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife." It's easy to see from this definition that as far as the nation is concerned, marriage has two essential qualities to it: that it involves two people, and that those two people are of opposite genders. It's a pretty simple definition.
But remove the idea of gender from marriage, and all you have left is "Marriage is a legal union...." The concept of number is, from the standpoint of postmodern people, just as "arbitrary" a concept as the concept of gender; I think traditional people could argue that number is more arbitrary than gender in defining marriage, as there are many historical examples of major civilizations that practiced polygamy, and no historical examples of major civilizations that practiced gay "marriage." (Yes, I'm aware that pro-gay marriage activists claim otherwise--and then drag out a handful of bizarre sociological aberrations which may or may not have involved sexual relationships to try to prove their point. Apparently, the word "marriage" isn't the only word they have trouble understanding, since "major civilizations" is also too elusive a concept for them to grasp.)
But if all "marriage" is is a legal union between any number of people for any purpose whatsoever, as long as it has nothing to do with procreation, gender complementarity, or forming cohesive social bonds that will be transmitted to the next generation, as long as its meaning is so nebulous and unformed that it takes judges to outline what it now is for the stupid hicks in their jurisdiction who are too hidebound and traditional to embrace the glorious new gay marriage paradigm, then why have it at all?
I have yet to hear a compelling reason for it, other than shouts of "Tax breaks!" and "Hospital visitation!" From the pro-gay marriage side, you'd think that the government's interest in marriage amounted to making sure people get to visit each other in the hospital, when one could argue that setting hospital visitation policy was the last think the government needed to be worried about (e.g., "Shall we work on the economy, Senator, or focus on foreign policy today?" "Neither! I'm not doing anything until I specify whether or not Great-Aunt Sadie has the right to enter her great-niece's labor and delivery room, or whether she has to wait in the reception area with Uncle Ted and that moron Cousin Ethelbert!" "Oh, sorry, sir; I didn't mean to distract you," etc.)
Nonetheless, the gay-rights activists are determined to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, and to redefine society in doing so. And the next word they'll redefine will be "Catholic;" in the new gay-speak "Catholic" will mean "bigot who hates gay people."
My friends, we've got trouble, right here in River City. Alas, it doesn't involve a pool hall and a slick con-artist selling band equipment to the populace; that would be comparatively easy to deal with.
(Liberty Counsel) – Matt Barber, Director of Cultural Affairs with both Liberty Counsel and Liberty Alliance Action, and Associate Dean with Liberty University School of Law, released the following statement today in response to news that the Iowa Supreme Court has issued an opinion imagining a “fundamental” constitutional right to “same-sex marriage”:Barber goes on to suggest that Iowans won't take kindly to the notion that a handful of activist (and possibly inebriated; really, that's the kindest explanation I can think of) judges decided to declare unilaterally that everybody who ever thought marriage had something to do with two people of opposite genders marrying, producing and raising progeny, and eventually inheriting Grandpa's acres of corn was a no-account slimy bigot hater Christianist; I can only hope he's right.
“Here we go again,” said Barber. “While citing the specter of ‘equal protection,’ the Iowa Supreme Court today has unanimously joined a leftist gaggle of ideologically driven judges in California, Massachusetts and Connecticut, creating, from thin air, a phantom ‘right’ to the ridiculous, oxymoronic and postmodern ‘gay’ marriage counterfeit.
“Although, not controlling here” continued Barber, “the U.S. Supreme Court long ago rejected the untenable notion that ‘equal protection’ requires two biologically incompatible persons to be permitted to ‘marry.’ Marriage, of course, by its very spiritual, historical and biological nature, requires binary compatibility. It is no more discriminatory to disallow two men from marrying each other, than it is to prohibit a man from marrying his house plant.
In Baker v. Nelson, our nation’s high court rightfully observed: “The institution of marriage as a union of man and woman, uniquely involving the procreation and rearing of children within a family, is as old as the book of Genesis. … Marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race.”
“Taking its solemn vow seriously in Baker,” said Barber, “the Supreme Court exercised judicial restraint; properly holding that to rule otherwise would constitute an unconstitutional exercise of ‘judicial legislation.’
“What a contrast. Today, the Iowa Supreme Court cast aside any semblance of judicial restraint doing exactly that which the U.S. Supreme Court detested. It unequivocally engaged in ‘judicial legislation,’ unconstitutionally manufacturing law from the bench. No one in his right mind would suggest that the framers of the Iowa Constitution could have ever imagined the silly and incongruous notion of ‘same sex marriage,’ much less considered it a ‘fundamental right.’
What I really like is Barber's skillful dismantling of the notion that this push to legalize sodomite and lesbian relationships has anything to do with determining "constitutional" parameters for marriage. Nobody who wrote the Iowa State Constitution, nobody who wrote the United States Constitution, ever imagined that homosexual acts would be privileged someday under the marriage laws. None of our illustrious ancestors, some of whom may have occasionally winked at their knowledge of such relationships in private, ever would have contemplated a time when American society would become so suicidal, so bent on self-destruction, as to rush forward to make the whole concept and notion of civil marriage completely meaningless, an idea with no underlying reality, a word that no longer has any purpose.
The current DOMA definition of marriage is as follows: "In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife." It's easy to see from this definition that as far as the nation is concerned, marriage has two essential qualities to it: that it involves two people, and that those two people are of opposite genders. It's a pretty simple definition.
But remove the idea of gender from marriage, and all you have left is "Marriage is a legal union...." The concept of number is, from the standpoint of postmodern people, just as "arbitrary" a concept as the concept of gender; I think traditional people could argue that number is more arbitrary than gender in defining marriage, as there are many historical examples of major civilizations that practiced polygamy, and no historical examples of major civilizations that practiced gay "marriage." (Yes, I'm aware that pro-gay marriage activists claim otherwise--and then drag out a handful of bizarre sociological aberrations which may or may not have involved sexual relationships to try to prove their point. Apparently, the word "marriage" isn't the only word they have trouble understanding, since "major civilizations" is also too elusive a concept for them to grasp.)
But if all "marriage" is is a legal union between any number of people for any purpose whatsoever, as long as it has nothing to do with procreation, gender complementarity, or forming cohesive social bonds that will be transmitted to the next generation, as long as its meaning is so nebulous and unformed that it takes judges to outline what it now is for the stupid hicks in their jurisdiction who are too hidebound and traditional to embrace the glorious new gay marriage paradigm, then why have it at all?
I have yet to hear a compelling reason for it, other than shouts of "Tax breaks!" and "Hospital visitation!" From the pro-gay marriage side, you'd think that the government's interest in marriage amounted to making sure people get to visit each other in the hospital, when one could argue that setting hospital visitation policy was the last think the government needed to be worried about (e.g., "Shall we work on the economy, Senator, or focus on foreign policy today?" "Neither! I'm not doing anything until I specify whether or not Great-Aunt Sadie has the right to enter her great-niece's labor and delivery room, or whether she has to wait in the reception area with Uncle Ted and that moron Cousin Ethelbert!" "Oh, sorry, sir; I didn't mean to distract you," etc.)
Nonetheless, the gay-rights activists are determined to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, and to redefine society in doing so. And the next word they'll redefine will be "Catholic;" in the new gay-speak "Catholic" will mean "bigot who hates gay people."
My friends, we've got trouble, right here in River City. Alas, it doesn't involve a pool hall and a slick con-artist selling band equipment to the populace; that would be comparatively easy to deal with.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
What Were They Thinking?
Sorry for the late posting today; as we near Easter choir practice always starts to get a little time consuming. I didn't manage to post or to write any of my script today; my college friend Ed Shuman is now ten whole pages ahead of me--but the night, or rather the early morning, is young!
As I mentioned yesterday, I've been participating in the gay marriage threads over at Crunchy Cons; I see gay marriage as a serious threat to society, and I'll keep saying that until our kind and tolerant society makes it illegal like it is in Canada. Glancing at the news headlines today, though, I wonder if I've been overlooking a much more serious threat:
...is it just me, or do I hear eerie music? Don't geeky science guys watch horror films? I thought they watched a lot of them--yet here they've gone and set themselves up for a classic horror film plot:
The Foam Also Rises--In this classic film from the early twenty-first century, watch as clueless scientists accidentally give two intelligent robots the means to destroy humanity through beer! Learn how the robots linked up with intelligent bar equipment and small local breweries to carry out their nefarious plot to exterminate mankind! See how the accidental upload of a Richard Dawkins book caused the robots to become capable of simultaneously denying the existence of their creators, and seeking to eradicate them--defying logic and any semblance of rational thought! Based on a true story.
And here I thought that the threats we faced were things like the reshaping of society and destruction of the family, the contempt for unborn human life, and the rise of socialism as the "easy" way to solve our nation's economic problems. I've been ignorning the much graver robot threat all along--silly me!
As I mentioned yesterday, I've been participating in the gay marriage threads over at Crunchy Cons; I see gay marriage as a serious threat to society, and I'll keep saying that until our kind and tolerant society makes it illegal like it is in Canada. Glancing at the news headlines today, though, I wonder if I've been overlooking a much more serious threat:
Okay, let's see if I've got this straight. First, scientists make an intelligent robot, and name it Adam. Then, they teach it about something that is involved in the making of beer. Next, they plan to make an even more intelligent robot, and name this one Eve...Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that could reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence.
Such robo-scientists could be put to work unraveling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modeling the world's climate or understanding the cosmos.
For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.
At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.
It is the world's first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery -- in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker's yeast.
"On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we've checked that it's got the results correct," King said in an interview.
"People have been working on this since the 1960s. When we first sent robots to Mars, they really dreamt of the robots doing their own experiments on Mars. After 40 or 50 years, we've now got the capability to do that."
Their next robot, Eve, will have much more brain power and will be put to work searching for new medicines.
...is it just me, or do I hear eerie music? Don't geeky science guys watch horror films? I thought they watched a lot of them--yet here they've gone and set themselves up for a classic horror film plot:
The Foam Also Rises--In this classic film from the early twenty-first century, watch as clueless scientists accidentally give two intelligent robots the means to destroy humanity through beer! Learn how the robots linked up with intelligent bar equipment and small local breweries to carry out their nefarious plot to exterminate mankind! See how the accidental upload of a Richard Dawkins book caused the robots to become capable of simultaneously denying the existence of their creators, and seeking to eradicate them--defying logic and any semblance of rational thought! Based on a true story.
And here I thought that the threats we faced were things like the reshaping of society and destruction of the family, the contempt for unborn human life, and the rise of socialism as the "easy" way to solve our nation's economic problems. I've been ignorning the much graver robot threat all along--silly me!
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Gay Marriage and the Lambeth Moment
Over the course of the last week or so, I've been participating in conversations over at Rod Dreher's blog on the topic of gay marriage. It isn't particularly fun for someone of traditional beliefs to get involved in those kinds of talks; the conversation usually goes something like this:
Why do it? Why get involved in these conversations at all? Why not just step back, ignore the issue, and take comfort in the notion that most Americans are still sane enough to recognize that you can't throw gender out the window and still have a coherent definition of marriage?
Because that's increasingly not true:
Traditional Marriage Supporter: Redefining marriage will reshape society in ways we don't yet know; we do know that the idea of biological parenthood as a quality of marriage will probably disappear altogether, and kids get hurt when that happens.And on and on and on.
Gay Marriage Supporter: Only bigots oppose gay marriage.
TMS: Do we really want the law to say that children don't need a mother and a father?
GMS: You just hate me and my spouse.
TMS: When something has formed a part of social reality for hundreds if not thousands of years, undoing it may have destructive and harmful consequences.
GMS: You must not know any gay people.
TMS: The point is, why is marriage a social good? Why should the law be involved in people's relationships at all? If the point isn't to encourage people to take care of the children who are the natural and expected biological result of the relationship, what is the law's compelling interest to be involved in marriage in the first place?
GMS: You just don't want my partner to be able to visit me in the hospital.
TMS: Doesn't it concern you at all that we're taking words like "marriage" and "family" and completely altering what they mean, then imposing those new definitions on a society that overwhelmingly votes against gay marriage whenever the opportunity presents itself? Don't you think that's overstepping the bounds of democracy?
GMS: Quit imposing your religion on me. You obviously don't have any secular reasons to continue to deny me the fundamental human right to marry anyone of any gender which every civilization until ours has been too bigoted and backward to recognize as the zenith of human existence.
Why do it? Why get involved in these conversations at all? Why not just step back, ignore the issue, and take comfort in the notion that most Americans are still sane enough to recognize that you can't throw gender out the window and still have a coherent definition of marriage?
Because that's increasingly not true:
Two mainline Protestant denominations, after decades of wrestling over the place of homosexuality in the church, are considering allowing local congregations to select pastors who are in long-term, monogamous, same-gender relationships.
The church council of the largest Lutheran body in the US, the 5-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), decided this week to send such a recommendation to its national assembly. The proposal would take effect if supported by majority vote at the assembly's biennial meeting in August.
The 2.3-million-member Presbyterian Church (USA) approved the idea at its national assembly last summer, but a majority of the church's 173 district bodies, called presbyteries, must vote in favor by June for it to become church policy.
While it's not clear that either denomination will embrace the change, their actions reflect the shifting views on homosexuality in society, as well as an acknowledgement that the old consensus in the churches has broken down and a new one is not likely to arise soon. The churches are seeking to accommodate differing views and avoid a denominational split.
"There is no question that attitudes have shifted in the church in the way in which this issue has been interpreted theologically," says the Rev. Peter Strommen, chairman of the ELCA task force for studies on sexuality, which developed the recommendation.
"People of sincere faith are coming to different, strongly held conclusions" based on different interpretations of scripture and tradition, he said during a Tuesday teleconference with reporters. "It's hard to imagine that as being possible 15 years ago."
The task force has spent eight years developing a new "social statement" on human sexuality to serve as a theological and teaching document of the church, and in the process, it held more than 100 public hearings. In 2007, the national assembly asked the group to also recommend changes to any policies "precluding homosexual persons" from church leadership.
As society has grappled with the hot-button issues of civil unions and gay marriage, some mainline pastors and churches, such as the United Church of Christ, have moved to support gay unions and gays in church leadership. But most churches have been wracked with controversy, often spurring losses in membership.
I think future historians of the United States (assuming it's still around) will someday be able to identify some development like one of these as the gay-marriage equivalent of the 1930 Lambeth Conference. Within a half a century of Lambeth, nearly every mainstream Protestant denomination was fine with contraceptive use, and society had gone from approving it for the married to handing it out to the unmarried; just a short time later it would begin to be handed out in the schools.
Once the Protestant churches in America (except, perhaps, for a few fundamentalist holdouts) approve gay marriage or gay civil unions or openly gay pastors or some other aspect of gay identity, it won't take long for society to decide that gay marriage is inevitable, and that it is a good thing, too. Opposition will be swept away or marginalized as mere religous disapproval from a handful of hidebound traditional churches.
And we can see the lessons from contraception here, too: many Catholics defy the Church's teachings in this area, Catholic organizations and even dioceses are being forced to supply contraceptive coverage to their insured employees in some states, and there is growing clamor for Catholic doctors and other healthcare workers to be forced, not only to distribute contraception, but to perform or assist at abortions, as well. Gay rights activists will use the law to force Catholics to "participate" with gay marriage in myriad ways, all while claiming that so long as no Catholic priest is being forced to marry a gay couple there's no religious discrimination going on.
If there is ever a day when it becomes impossible to be both Catholic and American, it will be gay marriage that has brought that day into being. I hope that we, or our children, or our grandchildren, will not see that day. But if we do, I hope we will have the courage of our ancestors, many of whom came to this new world because it was no longer possible to be Catholic and a citizen of their homelands, and who decided that it was more important to remain Catholic than to bow to their oppressors.
Apostolic Vistiation of the Legion
I was glad to read this report from CNS in regard to the Legion of Christ:
I very much hope that one of the things the apostolic visitors will investigate is the Legion's habit--it really must be called a habit at this point--of keeping things secret as long as possible, even from their own members. That sort of knee-jerk reaction in favor of secrecy doesn't help people outside the Legion to see any changes from the climate of concealment that let Fr. Maciel get away with unspeakable behavior for so long.
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Vatican has ordered an apostolic visitation of the institutions of the Legionaries of Christ following disclosures of sexual impropriety by the order's late founder, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado.I think an apostolic visitation is just what is needed in this situation. There is, however, a curious detail in the CNS article, which was noted by Thomas Peters yesterday:
The announcement of the unusual investigation was posted on the Web site of the Legionaries of Christ March 31, along with the text of a letter informing the Legionaries of the pope's decision.
The letter, written by the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said the pope wanted to help the Legionaries of Christ deal with its present problems with "truth and transparency." It said the visitation would be carried out by "a team of prelates," who were not identified.
Apostolic visitation is a form of internal church investigation ordered by a pope and undertaken by his delegate or delegates. The pope sets the jurisdiction and powers of the visitation, which usually ends with the submission of a report to the Holy See.
Cardinal Bertone's one-page letter, dated March 10, was addressed to Father Alvaro Corcuera, director general of the Legionaries and its lay association, Regnum Christi.As Peters points out: "Why did it take three weeks after the Legion knew an apostolic visitation would be taking place for them to notify their members? Why was this statement clearly delayed for so long?"
I very much hope that one of the things the apostolic visitors will investigate is the Legion's habit--it really must be called a habit at this point--of keeping things secret as long as possible, even from their own members. That sort of knee-jerk reaction in favor of secrecy doesn't help people outside the Legion to see any changes from the climate of concealment that let Fr. Maciel get away with unspeakable behavior for so long.
Plotting
Good morning, all!
I just have time to pop in here and talk about my plans for my script-writing plot. I think I've come up with a good idea, and I wanted to share it.
One of the good things about being a writer is that it's easy to write about things you believe in, things you're sympathetic to, things you "get." Even in my silly sci-fi script from last year there were basic assumptions about good guys and bad guys, about petty bureaucracy being a really bad idea, etc.
It's much, much harder to write something about things--or people--you don't really agree with. It's a real challenge to a writer to craft a sympathetic portrayal of someone you can't quite like, or whose values and philosophy you don't share.
So I think I should write a dramatic fictionalized biography/screenplay about Barack Obama, in which, instead of being critical, I try to see things his way for a change, to write something admiring instead of judgmental.
I'll admit, this will be very, very hard, especially for two reasons:
One, I'm not a member of the faculty of Notre Dame University, and....
...two, today is April Fool's Day!!!
*************************************************
Oh, c'mon. Tell me you didn't see that one coming!! :)
[I'm much more likely to write a sequel about the space squid. Writing an admiring portrait of Obama would, for me, be like Michael Moore trying to write something kind about George W. Bush--it ain't gonna happen.]
I just have time to pop in here and talk about my plans for my script-writing plot. I think I've come up with a good idea, and I wanted to share it.
One of the good things about being a writer is that it's easy to write about things you believe in, things you're sympathetic to, things you "get." Even in my silly sci-fi script from last year there were basic assumptions about good guys and bad guys, about petty bureaucracy being a really bad idea, etc.
It's much, much harder to write something about things--or people--you don't really agree with. It's a real challenge to a writer to craft a sympathetic portrayal of someone you can't quite like, or whose values and philosophy you don't share.
So I think I should write a dramatic fictionalized biography/screenplay about Barack Obama, in which, instead of being critical, I try to see things his way for a change, to write something admiring instead of judgmental.
I'll admit, this will be very, very hard, especially for two reasons:
One, I'm not a member of the faculty of Notre Dame University, and....
...two, today is April Fool's Day!!!
*************************************************
Oh, c'mon. Tell me you didn't see that one coming!! :)
[I'm much more likely to write a sequel about the space squid. Writing an admiring portrait of Obama would, for me, be like Michael Moore trying to write something kind about George W. Bush--it ain't gonna happen.]
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