Curmudgeon's Cave

Until I have time to answer...

2012-01-21T15:43:00.004-06:00

Travelled this week, so I'm catching up with the family, catching up with the office, and cleaning up the Curmudgeon estate for a get-together we're hosting tonight tonight. So no time yet to boil down a concise answer to the comments from Simpleton and Kookybura. Until there is, I'll leave you with a little snippet from Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons which will serve as the epigraph of the response when it finally comes....

Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

Santorum or Paul ?

2012-01-16T22:15:00.004-06:00

I (and dozens of other folks) received a political endorsement from a very nice, well-meaning woman from my traditional Mass group this week. She was excited that Rick Santorum was talking publicly about the problem of birth control, and she asked us all to support someone who “shared our values.” Her Santorum plea intrigued me—I haven’t seen a faithful Catholic run for highest office, except for Buchannan, who was in a way “before my time”—but I’m still not in Santorum’s camp, to say the least. The Ron Paul sticker is still on my car.

Anyways, I spent a couple of hours crafting a response to her endorsement. I haven’t “stretched my polemical legs” in quite a while, so I’m grateful she gave me the opportunity and the inspiration. Since I was moderately satisfied with how my response turned out, I’m converting it to a blog post. Here goes:

Santorum's personal rejection of contraception is admirable, of course, and it's somewhat in contradiction to...say...Ron Paul, who--as an obstetrician in the 70s and 80s--presumably prescribed contraceptives and performed sterilizations. I'm making that assumption because he's a Protestant, and if he hadn't wrote scrips for the pill, NARAL and Planned Parenthood would surely have found out and painted him as an extremist by now.

But I don't think Santorum's personal position on contraception...even in contrast to someone like Paul who must have personally promoted it (whether he knew better or not)...is enough to compel my vote. Why not? Obviously, someone like Ron Paul isn’t consistently pro-life. But at the most basic level, Santorum isn't consistently "pro-life" either. Santorum’s "pro-life" personal views didn't get in the way of his politics when it would have mattered most: his support of Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania Senate primary a few years ago. When Santorum could have backed another pro-lifer, Pat Toomey, and tipped the scales, he didn't. Instead, he supported Specter, who was NOT ONLY a pro-abort who controlled the Senate Judiciary Committee (where the best pro-life judicial nominees need not apply, even in the GOP's best days), but was also a turncoat who switched to the Democratic party a couple years later. Every observer I've read agrees that if Santorum had stuck to principle and stumped for Toomey, Toomey would have won (instead of lost by 1.7%), we'd have had a better Judiciary Committee, hence better federal judges, and the Dems wouldn't have had a filibuster-proof majority in the next go-round. (BTW, Toomey did beat Specter the next time and go to the senate after Santorum lost his own seat to a Democrat!)

And really, the issue of outlawing contraception in national politics...it doesn't simply matter, and Santorum won’t pursue it. I'm not saying that it shouldn't matter. It should, but it doesn't. Maybe some day it will at least matter at the state level. It's like nationally outlawing all pornography or buggery or usury or no-fault divorce. They are all admirable goals but candidly, they are not achievable on a national level at our present time and place. Although the link between abortion and all that bad stuff I mentioned above is obvious to us traditional Catholics, most non-Catholics (and heck, perhaps most novus ordo Catholics) aren't intellectually or spiritually equipped to deal with the link right now. We laymen should work one-on-one to convert people away from contraception, and our Bishops and priests should preach against it. However, too much public talk of outlawing contraception by a national political candidate at the present moment will be counterproductive. It will be exploited by his pro-abort enemies and slow down all our efforts to stop the greatest and "most fixable" of these evils...abortion. On this issue, we will only succeed if we tackle only one thing at a time.

The lady said Santorum “shares our values.” Well, leaving the pro-life issue and moving on to look at Santorum's other values? I honestly can't say they're the same as mine:

FIRST Santorum's an interventionist, looking to keep a huge United States military presence throughout the world--running up more debt, getting more American boys killed, and making more foreign enemies. For Santorum, patriotism is about geopolitical power. For me? Nope, patriotism is about loving ones’ land for what it is, not loving one’s government for the power it can project over other governments. Patriotism for me doesn't include going from one undeclared war to another….especially when the next one will be against a huge, prosperous country with a large, well-organized and educated populace that can really fight back—i.e., Iran. Nor does it involve the same bankrupting globalist busybody strategy as that other recently-collapsed empire: Great Britain.

SECOND, Santorum loves Israel--a state and a society which is absolutely hostile to the Church, and which is the very cause of that the "Islamo-Fascism" that Sean Hannity and Billy O’Reilly and the other neoconservative blowhards denounce. I, on the other hand, recognize that Israel is not a reliable ally, and that Moslems don't hate us for our freedom--they hate us because guys like Santorum vote to send Israel the guns and tanks and planes (and bombs marked "Made in the USA") that are used to kill their co-religionists, or if they’re lucky, merely expel them from their ancestral homes and leave them fenced in and starving.

THIRD, Santorum also believes in centralization of government, for example, federalizing education and doubling the number of education bureaucrats (99% of whom probably hate homeschooling). I adhere to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity--that is, the exercise of power by the lowest level capable of doing so (the family, the local church, the community, the state, and only where absolutely necessary, by the feds).

FOURTH, Santorum loves the police state, having voted for all sorts of restrictions on our ability to travel and communicate, and all sorts of new mechanisms for monitoring the daily activities of people in the United States. I value freedom of movement and (in my 30 or 40 flights a year) recognize that the TSA goons, the humiliating porn scanners, and the other monitoring of our activities don't keep us "secure"--they are simply part of a subtle retraining US residents to be sheepish and compliant subjects of the totalitarian state.

Neoconservatives like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich love the general growth in government as much as "moderates" like Mitt Romney and liberals like Hillary Clinton and Barry Obama. While their rhetoric is couched slightly differently, all of them want more government, more federal intrusion on our daily life, more perks for their friends (be they Obama's Chicago Daly Machine wonks or Mitt's Goldman Sachs pals or Santorum's military contractor donors or Newt's insurance company lobbying clients). Santorum won't make it easier for the Church to pursue its mission. He won't make it easier for faithful Catholics to raise holy families. He won't make it easier for our boys to find good jobs. He won't create the conditions necessary to rebuild Christian culture in the United States. And of course, he won't outlaw contraception. He has so many "backs to scratch" that he probably won't even get around to nominating judges that will unwind the nonsensical web of Constitutional "privacy" jurisprudence that prevents states from regulating contraception, prohibiting abortion, and discouraging buggery.

A friend of mine who’s since moved out of state—a very well-formed guy--once recommended Frank Sheed's book, Society and Sanity. Sheed is on solid Catholic ground, and he's an eloquent apologist. One of the central points of the book is a consideration of Christ's answer to the Pharisees, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's...." He approaches modern politics (circa 1960, I think) in the form of two questions about government which should be distinct in everyone's mind, but which are often muddled...they are paraphrased by me as "Who gets to be Caesar?" and "What things are Caesar's?" which I'll further rephrase as "How far does Caesar's authority extend?" My friend also pointed me to where St. Thomas Aquinas addresses the same issues, but I found Sheed to be much more accessible.

So here we are in 2012: this is an election which should be more about the second question than it is the first. All but one of the candidates is focused entirely on the first question. They all want me to believe that if they're Caesar, I can trust them because they share my values, and they can do more for me, and they can do it better. The organs of the federal government will be more efficient and stronger, but they’ll serve my interests. Only one of the candidates has anything substantive to say about that second question, and only one wants you to think about the limits of Caesar's reach. And unfortunately, it ain't Catholic Rick Santorum. It's Protestant Ron Paul.

In a field of imperfect candidates (all either statists or liberals), Ron Paul not only opposes abortion, but he is the one who is the most likely to REALLY give new momentum to the life movement (perhaps more momentum than he himself intends). He'll install judges who read the Constitution as it is (imperfect though it may be) and throw out the reasoning in cases like Roe and Doe and even Carpenter (the case that invented the "right to privacy" that prevented states from regulating contraceptives) and Lawrence (the case that prevents states from outlawing buggery). He’s not touting a huge program of federal prohibitions in their place like some pro-life lobbyists want, but really, such a prohibition is a pipe dream. Returning the life issues to the states (where the battle can be fought and won at least in most places over time) is really the best we can hope for—and the best we should hope for. The several states, after all, are where the plenary power to punish offenses against life and property properly rest.

Also, even though Paul's economic positions aren't perfect, there isn't a Rerum Novarum candidate to compare him to. His Austrian economic theory (BTW, at least he can speak intelligently about economics--the other candidates can't) is a much more sound basis for economic policy than Obama's soft socialism or Romney's Goldman Sachs TARP capitalism or Santorum's military industrial cronyism. In the absence of a candidate with a workable Distributivist program (if there is such a thing), quoting or at least plagiarizing Hillaire Belloc, Pope Leo XIII, and GK Chesterton, Paul's the one candidate who will at least redirect the country in a general direction that could ultimately be refined to a Catholic economic order.

As for militarism and interventionism—Paul’s obviously not a jingo. And as for subsidiarity--that big question about the scope of Caesar's authority--it's clear that a Ron Paul administration will have a smaller federal government--leaving more room in our society for families, the Church, communities, and states to operate and seek the Good on their own. I don't think anyone would argue that point.

The restoration (or rather reformation) of American culture on sound Catholic principles won't be easy. Barring a huge cataclysm, it won't happen in my lifetime. But whenever and however it happens (if it happens at all), it can only come back if we clear away the choking roots of our out-of-control, anti-Catholic, antagonistic federal government, and leave some open ground for the shoots of a civil society where Catholic principles to grow and flourish. A Catholic Humanae Vitae candidate (or…for the pre-Vatican II crowd…a Casti Conubii candidate) who otherwise promises more central government control of society, more war, and more spending, isn't going to do that. But a Protestant obstetrician will do it, even if he may not really appreciated what he was doing with his prescription pad a few decades ago. Ultimately Ron Paul is not the best possible candidate, but this is a multiple-choice test, not fill-in-the-blank.

As I said before, the question is "Who understands what things are really Caesar's?" In each case, Ron Paul is the answer that comes closest to the correct one.

George Eliot?

2012-01-08T20:33:00.005-06:00

My daughter, at 9 years old, asked me about TS Eliot: "Was he the man who betrayed St. Edmund Campion?

"Why no," I said, "TS Eliot was an Oklahoma-born poet and literary critic who moved to England and became one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. Why do you ask?"

"Because the man who betrayed Edmund Campion was named Eliot. He was George Eliot."

"Interesting....how do you know that?"

"Because, Daddy, I read it in a book from the lending libarary." It so happens that our chaplaincy's lending library is being stored in our basement.

"Hmm. Did you know there was important 19th century novelist...a woman who used the pen name George Eliot?"

Of course she didn't. She's only nine years old, for goodness' sake!

But it makes me wonder. We know why Mary Ann Evans took a pen name. I remember discussing it in my 19th century literature class in college, lo these two decades ago. (Answer: partly for marketing because books by women had a limited market back then; partly for anonymity because she was apparently living a scandalous life).

Why did she choose George Eliot as her pen name? That answer was not readily available via Google, so I must rely on my more literary readers to help out.

Why did she choose "George Eliot" as her pseudonym?

Curmudgeon’s ten minute fix to all the fiscal problems of the national government, the unjust tax system, and the economy, too….

2011-11-08T09:48:00.004-06:00

OK, before I begin, suspend disbelief.

Let’s make some assumptions…assumptions that you and certainly I don’t take for granted.

First, let’s assume that this is an active blog that some people still have on their readers. Let’s then assume for a minute that this is an appropriate place to rant about straight-up Washington politics.

Let’s assume that the national government is at least legitimate in principle, or could be legitimate if it stuck to the powers and limitations in the written Constitution.

To get even more theoretical, let’s assume that there was a group of individuals who had the intelligence, moral integrity and will to truly reform things for the common good.

Let’s assume those people got past the gatekeepers and rose to power.

Finally (since we’re already in the province of the absurd) let’s assume that I, the Kansas City Curmudgeon, was the leader of this little cabal of right thinking men.

The Curmudgeon Cabal doesn’t have silver bullet to immediately kill the serious moral and cultural monsters that haunt our society. Admittedly, those moral and cultural problems are far more important than taxes, spending and the economy. There just isn’t a quick fix--except perhaps outlawing television, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. What’s been destroyed since the 1920s (or since the French Revolution, or the days of William of Occam) will need to be rebuilt over generations, not months or years.

But there IS a quick fix to the temporal, material problem, and the fix might actually be a first step (or a second step, after fervent prayer and mortification) in addressing the moral/cultural problems. The quick fix is what I’ll call the Curmudgeon Reform Act of 2011. There are 5 elements—so far:

Replace the Social Security scheme with a real savings and disability plan.

Institute a low, simplified tax on ordinary income and long-term capital gains.

Retain or increase taxes on short term speculation.

Restore revenue generating tariffs on imports and adjust excise taxes to cover certain public goods

Institute a new Culture, Welfare and Education tax (“CWE”) that will never be collected.

Here are the details:

1. Replace the Social Security scheme with a real savings and disability plan. Eliminate payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare). Instead, require, for the first ___ years after the elimination, that every wage earner put 10% of his income in a privately managed, competitive but somewhat regulated welfare plan that provides disability and retirement income. Create a self-funded pension insurance program among the welfare plan providers to ensure at least a subsistence pension. Allow voluntary participation in Social Security and Medicare for people over 45 or so. Continue the employer-side taxes for a short while to help fund the folks currently on, or about to go on, the old system. Eventually, as the people’s savings ethic is restored and our charitable infrastructure is rebuilt, we can eliminate the mandatory savings plan. Or maybe we can’t.

2. Institute a low, simplified tax on ordinary income and long-term capital gains. Reduce taxes on ordinary income and long-term capital gains to a flat 5% or so on all income above the poverty level for each family. No deductions. Simplify the business tax rules so it’s easy to get to a net taxable income, and eliminate things like tax credits, accelerated depreciation, and the like. Tax every individual person and every limited liability entity (corporations, LLCs, LPs and LLPs) that function as a separate legal person. (Yes, this is double taxation, but at 5% / 10%, it’s a reasonable price to pay for the privilege of doing business in a non-recourse entity).

3. Retain or increase high taxes on short term speculation. Keep taxes on short term capital gains at a high level. Let's say 25%. Disallow the write-offs of short term capital losses. Yes, this would be said to “punish” short term investors. Why? Because they’re not really investors; they’re traders. We’ve gone from a society of investors to a society of speculators. Some speculation is necessary to ensure liquidity in our markets and to reward, in some degree, risk taking (that is, taking risks with ones’ own resources). However, high taxes on speculators will hopefully realign our capital markets.

4. Restore revenue generating tariffs on imports and adjust excise taxes to cover certain public goods. Institute modest tariffs on all imported goods. Not 40% or 50%. More like 5% or 10%. The tarriff should be a revenue mechanism, not a protectionist one. We won’t need protectionism if the Curmudgeon reforms are in place. Once again, it will pay to actually make things in the USA. Also, adjust excise taxes on things like motor fuel, as well as fees, to fully recover the cost of providing public goods like highways, so the taxes and the cost of those public goods are balanced and self-supporting.

5. Institute a new Culture, Welfare and Education tax (“CWE”) that will never be collected. Here’s the capstone of the plan: In lieu of all federal welfare, cultural and education programs, the Curmudgeon Cabal will institute a 10% tax on all income above the poverty level for the support of culture, welfare and education (sounds suspiciously like a tithe, doesn’t it?). The beauty of the CWE tax is that if it works, it will never be collected. We will allow a 100% tax credit (not a deduction…a dollar-for-dollar credit) for donations made to qualified charitable organizations. You know….organizations which are now referred to as 501(c)(3)’s. Although we hate bureaucracy and regulation, we acknowledge that we’ll need a few rules about this. Organizations will be subject to some minor regulation, somewhat as they are now, in order to assure legitimacy. They’ll also be classified: the big categories will be (a) physical welfare/poverty, (b) religion, (c) the arts, (d) the environment, and (e) education. Moneys flowing to these organizations will rebuild the societal infrastructure that was in place before the New Deal and the Great Society. The beauty is that the taxpayer--not the government--will decide how to allocate those donations between categories and which organizations within the categories to support. The only substantial restriction on the taxpayer is that no more than half of that 10% tax can go to any one category. Overtime, churches can restore hospitals, private education, and the like. Communities can support the arts (hopefully a restoration of true art, and nothing involving the use of feces). The cost of higher education can come down for those who should pursue it. Private conservation groups can buy and preserve habitats. Yada Yada.

In Conclusion

Now, I didn’t say The Curmudgeon Reform Plan wasn’t crazy. It is.

I didn’t say it would cure instantly the cultural malaise. It won’t.

I didn’t say it would bring about the Catholic confessional state. It can’t.

The plan (and the radical cuts in the federal and state government that go along with it) it be vigorously opposed by the greater DC real estate industry--not just the machine of government itself. The housing and office markets in DC, Montgomery County, Maryland and Fairfax County, Virginia will be devastated as out-of-work bureaucrats leave to find private sector jobs in the Heartland. But heck, maybe it will help the real estate market in Detroit?

All and all, the Curmudgeon Reform Plan can’t be worse that what we’re doing now. And, since this is a sorta, kinda Catholic blog (or at least a blog by a Catholic), I point out that it will be good for Holy Mother Church. I eagerly await the USCCB endorsement.

OK, I’ve already thought of one necessary change. Five percent on ordinary income may be a pretty high rate, considering that President Curmudgeon will be eliminating the federal welfare system, reducing the military to its proper role national defense (instead of imperial domination), ending foreign aid, reinstituting modest revenue-producing tarriffs, and otherwise moving to a consumption-based tax system for roads, etc. Let’s make it 3%.

Cheers!

Another subtler sign ....

2011-05-20T09:25:00.003-05:00

That, however S L O W L Y it is happening, the human element in the Church is regaining its sense of taste and proportion, and with that, perhaps its focus on "the True, the Good, and the Beautiful." You know, it's focus on God.

Vatican Slams New Pope Sculpture

Compare that to what's going on in the elsewhere....I saw something where they redid the head on a classic statue of Pope St. Pius X so that it had Bl. JPII's head. Can't find it to link right now, but you can search if you haven't seen it already.

C'mon Everybody

2011-05-19T00:21:00.001-05:00

Gimme a little kumbaya?

Hey Stan Hazlett!

2011-05-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

It's been a couple of months since you put a break in your show-trial disciplinary hearing for Phill Kline, but I'm still wondering....

Are you actually on Planned Parenthood's payroll, or are you just a volunteer?

See the complete list of LSN stories by Peter Smith on the Kline trial:

* 107-count criminal case begins against Planned Parenthood in Kansas* Phill Kline ethics trial: Day 1 – Live update* Kansas abortionists failed to report 166 potential cases of child rape: Phill Kline trial day 2* Phill Kline attorney makes witness sweat in Planned Parenthood ethics complaint case* DA’s diary snatching brings new twist to Phill Kline ethics trial, potential crime* Kansas Travesty: 249 child-age abortions over 3 years, just four sex abuse reports: Kline Hearings* Kansas judge testifies ‘probable cause’ existed to investigate criminal PP activity: Kline Hearings* Kline did not violate judge’s order in secret Planned Parenthood case: judge’s legal counsel* Planned Parenthood gambit: beat Phill Kline charges, defeat Live Action?* Former Tiller attorney combed CD of sensitive records from Kline investigation * The Phill Kline saga: Planned Parenthood protected, children forgotten, the prosecutor prosecuted* Day 6 trial: Kline protected sexual assault victim privacy, Tiller compromised patient privacy* Video: Kline says ‘those in power’ blocked Planned Parenthood, Tiller investigation* Witness: Phill Kline didn’t need/want adult patient names* Prosecutor tells investigator: we don’t have to accept report clearing Phill Kline* UPDATE: Kline tells ethics panel, ‘You are violating my due process rights!’ * ‘It is wrong!’: Phill Kline blocked from presenting full defense, calling all witnesses * Phill Kline: Kansas Supreme Court ‘obstructed’ child rape investigation to save Planned Parenthood* Phill Kline ethics trial adjourns for now: battle has cost him $200,000 says Kline

Obama bin Laden's "death"

2011-05-03T23:24:00.005-05:00

Ok, the real important question here is, now that we've invaded yet ANOTHER country and headshot an unarmed bin Laden, and he's supposedly dead (again), and yee-haw, we won the war on "terrorism" (whatever the hell that is), CAN WE SEND THOSE MOUTHBREATHING, KNUCKLEDRAGGING TSA PERVERT STOOGES BACK TO THEIR OLD JOBS AT BURGER KING?
Gosh, what a wonderful country this would be if you could walk onto a plane again in the "land of the free" (insert guffaw here) without being accosted, stripped, sexually assaulted, and irradiated by those bastards.

Man, Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao or Pol Pot would have wet their pants with glee if they'd have been able to be as intrusive into the lives of their ordinary subjects as our government has managed to be.

Do me a favor, and when you fly next time, and some TSA goon expects you to answer politely when he demands you speak to him, ask him point blank when he's going back into the fast food industry.

Yeah, unchanging Truth .... except ....

2011-02-01T16:50:00.003-06:00

.... for this German guy named Martin (maybe you've heard of him?) a few hundred years ago who decided to drop a few books from the scriptural canon, to finesse a few minor passages here and there, and ... oh yeah ... decided that only two of the seven Sacraments are really of divine origin!

OK. folks at Risen Savior Lutheran Church, Basehor, Kansas, I know you're Missouri Synod (which means that you're likely actual Christians, like some of your friends in the ELCA who've entered the New Age). Quit kidding yourselves. There's one true Church, and it didn't start in Wittenburg.

Oops, look what slipped through the pro-abort filters at the Associated Press AND Microsoft

2011-01-19T11:04:00.003-06:00

Here's an interesting article (at least it was interesting as originally published at 10:02 am Central time today). It was actually written in a truthful, matter of fact style. To think that it got through the mainstream media filter at Associated Press, and that it was posted on the Yahoo! news site!

Obviously, it states the case against the butcher too plainly to last before it's totally rewritten or removed altogether from the wires, so I've printed it off and linking it. I may post it later if it changes or disappears:

Pennsylvania Abortion Doc Charged with 10 Counts of Murder.

In praise of illiteracy....

2011-01-02T21:50:00.003-06:00

As I was desperately looking for comfort, rationalizaton and self-justification for myself and Mrs. Curmudgeon, what with the fact that more than half of the little Curmudgeons are illiterate, I stumbled upon a passage from an "old friend" from graduate school, Richard M Weaver:

What the defenders of present civilization usually mean when they say that modern man is better educated than his forebears is that he is literate in larger numbers. The literacy can be demonstrated; yet one may question whether there has ever been a more deceptive panacea, and we are compelled, after a hundred years of experience, to echo Nietzsche’s bitter observation: “Everyone being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.” It is not what people can read; it is what they do read, and what they can be made, by any imaginable means, to learn from what they read, that determines the issue of this noble experiment. We have given them a technique of acquisition; how much comfort can we take in the way they employ it? In a society where expression is free and popularity is rewarded they read mostly that which debauches them and they are continuously exposed to manipulation by controllers of the printing machine…. It may be doubted whether one person in three draws what may be correctly termed knowledge from his freely chosen reading matter. The staggering number of facts to which he today has access serves only to draw him away from consideration of first principles, so that his orientation becomes peripheral. And looming above all as a reminder of this fatuity is the tragedy of modern Germany, the one totally literate nation.

--from Ideas Have Consequences (1948), pp. 13-14.

Take THAT, Barbara Bush!

Gaudete!

2010-12-12T22:50:00.002-06:00

If you're having trouble finding something to rejoice about on this third Sunday of Advent (and you're not a member of this parish), then rejoice about this:

You didn't have to assist at a traditional Latin Mass with the "Prom Queen of Guadalupe" shimmering next to the Perfect Sacrifice.

I'm guessing it's one of those "enlightened" nuns who've kicked the habit

2010-12-11T10:17:00.004-06:00

Nun Embezzles $850,000 from New York college.

Yep, it was a good guess! She's part of a "dynamic union" that is trying to "speak to our contemporary society and be a positive influence for change." In other words, the Obama campaign.

Compare the traditional habit to the getup of the current "Executive Director" of the federation.

George Tiller, abortion martyr?

2009-06-09T00:10:00.005-05:00

Let's stop the hand-wringing and be frank: Yes, he deserved to die, and no, the cause wasn't served by having him die THAT way. The last thing we needed was some sort of diabolical martyrdom. If the blood of the [true] martyrs was the seed of the Church, we can only expect the Evil One to try and turn that on its head and use Tiller's blood as seed for his garden of wickedness. Obviously the shooter didn't read observation #3 in my post below on Lincoln and the pro-life movement.

Now, I'm not saying that I doubt the sincerity and passion of the guy who did it, no more than I doubted the sincerity and passion of Timothy McVeigh, nor I doubt the sincerity and passion of Guy Fawkes. But (as the evidence shows in the Gunpowder Plot, which happened at a most convenient time to consolidate public feeling behind King James and permit him to expand an ungodly government's control over the populace ... and the evidence may someday show in the Oklahoma City bombing, which happened at a most convenient time to consolidate feeling behind the Clinton Administration and expand an ungodly government's control over the populace) the coincidence of this finally happening just a few months into the Obama regime is uncanny. What better way to create good cover for an assault on people like us?

Certain shadowy operatives for the protestant regime found in Guy Fawkes a man whose anger at injustice overwhelmed his reason, and pushed him under the parliament building with kegs of explosives. It has been posited that certain shadowy operatives found in Timothy McVeigh a man whose anger at injustice overwhelmed his reason, and drove him to the OK Federal building with a Ryder truck of explosives. Some future historian (certainly not our coopted contemporary press) may learn that certain shadowy operatives encouraged this Tiller killer guy in a very similar way. The Obama Justice Department goons will be swarming the state to find evidence of a conspiracy, and I wonder if they'll be really careful not to find evidence of that sort.

So I guess we brace ourselves to feel the boot from the Daley machine thugs in Washington and vermin in Kansas politics (the ones that didn't follow Kathleen Sebelius to DC). I'm sure that pro-death shill Dan Watkins in Lawrence (who abandoned the Catholic faith to ride Sebelius's coattails and Tiller's money to the US Attorney nomination) can't wait to get confirmed into his office at the Dole Courthouse so he can ramp up the persecution.

Decree from Pope Roger on the Williamson Affaire

2009-03-04T21:45:00.005-06:00

The Remnant linked today to an important announcement in the Observatore Silicano. From the Taj Mahoney in Los Angeles, Pope Roger (in a declaration signed by himself and two officials of the American Jewish Committee) decreed that Bp. Richard Williamson was banned from Catholic facilities in the Archdiocese. So what? I can't imagine any member of, or lay adherent to, the Society, much less Bishop Williamson, spending a whole lot of time on Pope Roger's property. The whole point and beauty of being SSPX in L.A. is that you can ignore Pope Roger!

But his Holiness further declared as follows:

"Holocaust deniers like Williamson will find no sympathetic ear or place of refuge in the Catholic Church, of which he is not—and may never become—a member," said a commentary signed jointly by Mahony, head of the nation's largest archdiocese, and two officials of the American Jewish Committee.

"The cardinal wishes to send a clear signal to the Jewish community that Williamson is not a member or even welcome in the Catholic Church until he renounces his views," said Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the archdiocese.

Hmm. So Bp. Williamson isn't a member of the Catholic Church and may never become one? It seems that crazy Kraut antipope Ratzinger has it all wrong, huh, your Holiness? We're so glad we have you could take time from your liturgical dancing at the annual Religious Education Conference (and your federal grand jury investigation) to declare what Bp. Williamson's status is and to do so jointly with two Jewish guys who themselves aren't members of the Catholic Church.

I guess this is just one of the next logical steps after setting up your own liturgical rules contrary to Roman authority...to declare for yourself who is and who isn't Catholic, even if you don't have territorial jurisdiction over such persons.

Then again, wouldn't it be cool if Bishops could do such things? I can't imagine it would be difficult to find some Bishop somewhere to declare Pope Roger to be forever and irreconcilably outside the Church.

Lincoln and the pro-life movement?

2009-02-17T01:12:00.007-06:00

On this President's Day, observing (among other silly things) Lincoln's 200th birthday, shall we consider what the pro-life movement can learn from Abraham Lincoln?

1. Never let your movement be coopted by someone with a different agenda. The abolitionist movement gave itself over as a vehicle for the agenda of an ambitious man who, when it played well, decried the injustice of Negro slavery, but really was out to centralize power in Washington and replace a federation of sovereign states with a single central ... even imperial ... government, and who made it clear that if he could "save the Union" without freeing a single slave, he would do so.

Everything worked out fine for his cabal of generals and railroad owners and other industrial interests, which within a few years were pushing the Indians out of (or underneath) the western territories. But for the southern Negros, slave and free, the result was resentment and racial tensions which are a political factor to this day, and which contrast to the relative racial harmony which one finds in the dozens of countries Western Hemisphere which simply ended slavery peacefully, without an internecine war.

And today, we have seen the Bushie neocons use pro-life voters and pro-life election manpower to launch their own agenda of building a new empire of coerced global democracy. The pro-lifers should wonder if they've been had like the abolitionists, in that the neocon politicians and their war profiteering backers paid their lip-service and got what they want, but abortion on demand is still the law of the land, and the pro-lifers must now operate in the Obama backlash.

2. Read the Fine Print. It's commonly believed that Lincoln freed the slaves. Nonsense. He simply pulled a propaganda stunt by purporting to free slaves in unconquered Confederate territory. If you'll read the Emancipation Proclamation, you'll see he didn't free a single slave in territory Northern invaders controlled.

Likewise, pro-lifers today should pay attention to what really was written, in Roe and Doe, and their precedents, as well as what has happened since (and didn't happen) in Casey and other cases. Pro-lifers should also be sensitive to the federal Constitution. Justice Scalia is constitutionally correct, even as he's pro-life: this is not a federal issue. The way these cases are most likely to get rolled back is to establish that the subject of abortion, like almost all other regulatory and criminal matters, is properly the business of the states, which have plenary power.

If some post-natal person is chopped to pieces, it's a state crime, not a federal offense. So it should be. And so it should be, if some pre-natal person gets chopped to pieces.

Some dream case which rules a fetus has "personhood" will be no more sound Constitutionally than Roe or Doe (however morally sound). It will be a house built on the sand of inconsistent and incomprehensible due process jurisprudence, certain to be washed away by the next leftist wave. Pro-lifers should understand the constitutional issues, and be prepared to take their battle out of Washington to their own statehouses and state courts, where it properly belongs.

3. Don't turn monsters into martyrs. Before John Wilkes Booth's appearance, the balcony at the Ford Theatre was occupied by a man whose refusal to abide by the 10th Amendment to the Constitution caused over 600,000 deaths, who burned and looted massive swaths of his supposedly-beloved nation, and who destroyed a humane and thoughtful form of government that was founded on the Catholic notion of subsidiary (albeit by Protestants and Deists). With the pull of a trigger, Booth had suddenly created the secular saint we see in that hideous William Chester French sculpture.

And a few years ago, some loner idiots--not the organized movement--were popping off abortionists. Even if there's no sin against justice in using all necessary means, including deadly force, to stop the murder of an innocent, more harm than good is done when one raises such a vile person to to the altars of the pro-death crowd. Even for the organized movement that abhors such tactics, though, there's still a lesson here: Should we gain victories here and there, we must treat the vanquished pro-aborts with care, lest we cause a backlash and undo what we've accomplished.

And now back to the outrage...

2009-02-14T17:56:00.004-06:00

Pennsylvania Judges lining their own pockets by sending teenagers to jail:

Using the government's monopoly on the use of force to intentionally and wrongfully imprisoning someone is something that deserves summary execution, in the Curmudgeon sentencing guidelines.

But of course, it's really not that big of a deal to the government---a few years at most:

Conahan, who along with Ciavarella faces up to seven years in prison, did not make any comment on te case.

The only hope is that they get sent to some prison where there's a once-innocent teenager, ruined by these bastards, with an axe to grind (yes, a literal axe).

But of course their buddies on the bench will look our for them. Maybe a few hours of picking up trash will be all they get.

But Curmudgeon how can you and a Christian say such things? How dare you suggest we (and the incarcerated kids) do anything but turn the other cheek! Christians are supposed to be merciful and forgiving!

I'm reminded of a scene from Henry V:

The mercy that was quick in us but late,
By your own counsel is suppress'd and kill'd:
You must not dare, for shame, to talk of mercy;
For your own reasons turn into your bosoms,
As dogs upon their masters, worrying you.

But of course, we aren't governed by a conscience any more...either a good one like Shakespeare's King Henry or a bad one. We're governed by the mob, and by the corrupt men who are its master. So we can expect these guys to get off with a weekend of picking up trash all the same. It will be curious to hear if this gets meaningful attention in this age where government is good.

On the other hand, it would be delightful if perhaps we could imprison 1,000 to 2,000 judges for parking tickets, minor offenses and arrogant behaviour. Turnabout's fair play!

A little break from the outrage....

2009-02-14T15:31:00.006-06:00

We're about to go on vacation next week. We've been having trouble with the cassette adapter that we use to get our iPod sound into the radio in our (pre-iPod ready) van. It's cirtical on trips, because otherwise we're stuck listening to Western Kansas radio twang or lugging our CD library with us (if we can find our CD's, of course) We thought it was a problem with the casette adapter, so Mrs. Curmudgeon bought a new one at Target.

$18. Ouch.

Mrs. Curmudgeon suggested that we test to be sure it's the adapter and not the cassette player itself. How? I asked. She suggested I put a tape in and see if the player worked normally.

"Do you have a cassette?" she asked

"Umm of course I do...somewhere."

So I went down to the basement and pulled open a box that has been sealed for years. You know...a box containing remnants of our former worldly life.

The first cassette I pulled out was Van Halen II. One I didn't particularly enjoy even when I bought it in high school, and one which Mrs. Curmudgeon had never even endured. We agreed that it would be no loss if the cassette deck ate it. It was serving no purpose other than waiting for a more dramatic end in an old fashioned book-burning or TV-smashing party.

Well sure enough, there was a problem with the deck. It's stuck.

It won't play...God is merciful. The Curmudgeons wont be listening to "Dance the Night Away" over and over on a 15 hour drive. But it just keeps clicking and clicking.

I could not get the tape out. So, I got on the internet, looking for ideas.

As I searched, I ran across this:

$10
Metro on Craigslist. Project car, anyone? - Fuel Economy ...
Radio has "William Shatner Christmas carols" cassette tape stuck in deck, enjoy. ... must tow (preferably on a trailer with a solid deck and sides to avoid ... MPG - 2006
Toyota Corolla automatic. Latest project: pedal power bike 12v ...ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/10-metro-craigslist-project-car-anyone-671.html - 58k - Cached - Similar pages

Up until that point, I couldn't imagine anything worse than a minivan with Van Halen II stuck in it. Now I can. An '06 Corolla with Captain Kirk singing "Silent Night."

Beam me up, Scotty!

USCCB Collections Plan - sample letters

2009-02-12T21:54:00.004-06:00

In yesterday’s post, I raised the issue of the many, many national special collections that the USCCB and our local Bishops subject us to, and I explained how and why we tradition-minded Catholics can be heard by our own Bishop and the USCCB about the importance of spreading access to the traditional Latin Mass. I hope you’ll spread the word (not for promoting my blog…I could care less…but for promoting our common cause).

In that post I went so far as to outline a strategy that readers can use part or all of, and I’ve already received a couple of comments, and a couple of email requests, for sample letters to use in the campaign. So see below, and remember that what matters here isn’t getting into an argument, but in helping the larger Church and getting your Bishop and the USCCB National Collections Office to start thinking about helping our fellow Catholics who are attached to tradition in less-fortunate parts of the world.

Sample Letters:
For the Parish Collection:
(remember to skip this one on subsequent collections if your parish returns it to you the first time. We don’t need to tick off our own pastors and collection counters)

This special collection contribution is to be used solely for the [support of traditional Latin Mass (Extraordinary Form) apostolates in Central and Eastern Europe]. Please forward it to the diocese and the USCCB subject to that restriction. If you are unable to do so, please return it to me.

For the Diocesan Letter
(send this one every time unless you are specifically told not to by the Bishop)

JMJ
Date/Traditional Feastday

Most Rev N. [Cardinal] N.
Bishop/ Archbishop of X
Chancery Address
Chancery City, State/Province

Your Excellency (Your Grace, Your Emminence):

Enclosed please find a check in the amount of $____ which I am sending for the diocesan special collection for [the Church in Central and Eastern Europe], which I was unable to contribute in our parish collection last Sunday. I am mindful of our duty to support the wider Church beyond our own parishes and communities, and I want to do so in a way that directs my contribution to an important apostolate that is often neglected by the larger Church.

Therefore I am directing that my contribution be used solely for the support of an a traditional Latin Mass (Extraordinary Form) apostolate in Central and Eastern Europe, and for no other purpose.

Please note this purpose as you forward my contribution to the appropriate recipient, in accordance with Canon 1267. If you cannot comply with my these directions, please return the check to me.

You are in my prayers, and in those of my family.

Sincerely Yours,

K.C. Curmudgeon

For the USCCB special collections office
(each special collection has its own director...imagine that bureaucracy. These directors are priests...some even Jesuits. If you want to send one directly to that collection's director, locate the name at this web page. Otherwise, send it to the head honcho below, Mr. Markey)

JMJ
Date/Traditional Feastday

Mr. Patrick Markey
Executive Director, Office of National Collections
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
3211 4th Street NE
Washington, D.C. 20017

Dear Mr. Markey:

Enclosed please find a check in the amount of $____ which I am sending for the national special collection for [the Church in Central and Eastern Europe], which I neither my parish nor my diocesan collections office was able to accept. I am mindful of our duty to support the wider Church beyond our own parishes and communities, and I want to do so in a way that directs my contribution to an important apostolate that is often neglected by the larger Church.

Therefore I am directing that my contribution be used solely for the support of an a traditional Latin Mass (Extraordinary Form) apostolate in Central and Eastern Europe, and for no other purpose.

Please be sure that my contribution reaches an appropriate recipient, in accordance with Canon 1267. If you cannot comply with these directions, please return the check to me as soon as possible.

Sincerely Yours,

K.C. Curmudgeon

Finally, if the USCCB bureaucracy has fails you, go direct:

(Find an organization with offices here in the US and apostolates in the appropriate place if you can, especially if you want the tax deduction. I’ll make some suggestions in another post.)

JMJ
Date/Traditional Feastday

Contact Name
Organization Name
Address
City State ZIP

Dear X:

Enclosed please find a check in the amount of $____ which I am sending for the support of one of your organization’s apostolates in Central or Eastern Europe. [Here mention the specific apostolate if you know of it]

During the national special collection for Central and Eastern Europe in February, I attempted to make a contribution targeted to traditional Latin Mass (Extraordinary Form) apostolates there, but neither my diocesan Bishop nor the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ National Collections Office was willing to accept my contribution.

Therefore, I am sending it to you, knowing that you have apostolates in [______ ]. Please contact me if you have any difficulty in honoring my directives.

We are grateful for the work your institute does here in the US and in Central and Eastern Europe, and you and your priests are in our prayers.

Sincerely Yours,

K.C. Curmudgeon

cc: Your local bishop & the USCCB Collections Person you contacted above.

USCCB Collections -- A plan of action!

2009-02-11T06:13:00.000-06:00

Many of us who are in canonically-regular traddie communities are burdened with almost two dozen extra envelopes in our collection packets over the course of the year. These are "national" collections that are mandated by the Bishops who tow the USCCB boat, and in a couple of cases, they may just be extra diocesan slush fund collections. A PDF file listing the national collections can be found HERE.

They are:
For the Church in Latin America (January)
For the Church in Eastern and Central Europe (Early February/ around Ash Wednesday)
Rice Bowl (mid-February)
For Black and Indian Missions (late February)
Bishops' Overseas Appeal (mid March)
For the Holy Land (Good Friday)
Priesthood - Present and Future (mid-April)
Home Missions Appeal (late April)
Catholic Communications Campaign (mid May)
Peter's Pence (early July)
Mission Coop (mid July)
Catholic University of America (September)
World Mission Sunday (October)
The [notorious] Campaign for Human Development (mid-November)
Retirement Fund for Religious (mid-December)

Most of us ignore these envelopes, because we know we'd be contributing to just another high-overhead USCCB operation and semi-pagan, commie Maryknollers at best, or at worst (in the case of the Campaign for Human Development) directly supporting political organizations which undermine the Church. We think the Bishops and their diocesan and national bureaucacies are just after our checkbooks, as it seems they are. We know that if we give to these collections, even the evil Campaign for Human Development, our pastors and chaplains are bound to transmit the offerings to the diocese (Canon 1266).

But here's a quandry. We really can't just not give anything outside our parish...ever. We do have an obligation to support the wider Church...not just our own community. Many of us do just that...by supporting faithful religious orders, for instance. But is that enough? Canon 1262 provides that "The faithful are to give support to the Church by responding to appeals and according to the norms issues by the conference of bishops."

Now let's acknowledge that checkbooks can be wielded as effective weapons. Wealthy leftist individuals and wealthy leftist foundations often use the checkbook as their weapon of choice. While we can't perhaps write such big checks and wield such big weapons as these guys (they've got .45s; we've got .22s), we can make ourselves heard using our checkbooks.

Think about it. If an average Bishop gets an angry letter from a traddy about waste and corruption and modernism and special collections, what will he do? He'll probably never see it, because his secretary will screen it. If he does see it, he'll probably ignore it. If you're lucky, he might dictate a curt reply to you ... but that's only if you're lucky. I tried that once myself, complaining to Bishop Finn's predecessor about the irresponsible and downright heretical activities that were being funded by the Diocesan appeal. Instead of assuring me he'd clean things up (which I expected him to do...heh...heh), Bishop Boland practically told me to go find a parish in Kansas and hassle Abp. Kelleher instead.

But what if you send the Bishop a check? Even a small check? What will he do then?

If you send a Bishop a check, he'll probably cash it,and he'll probably read the letter it came in...even if it's for $25 or so. In fact, he has an obligation to cash it. Canon 1267, sec. 2, provides that offerings "cannot be refused except for a just cause..."

And what if you send the Bishop a check with specific conditions as to how it's to be used? What will he do them?

If you send a Bishop a check with conditions, he'll have to use it for the purpose stated in giving the gift, or if he can't, he'll return it. Canon 1267, sec. 3, provides that "Offerings given by the faithful for a certain purpose can by applied only for that same purpose."

So what's your point?

If we want to be heard in the matter of all these special collections (or if you want to make a point about anything else), you can use your checkbook and canon law to be heard...even by the Bishop.

Nobody notices an envelope that's dropped into a trash can at home. Nobody even notices an envelope that's put into the basket empty (except perhaps the poor old guys that are counting the collection while you're enjoying coffee and doughnuts after Mass). But if there's a check in the Chancery or the USCCB office...eventually someone at the Chancery or the USCCB office has to deal with it.

How would you do it?

The method I'll propose will involve some stamps. You'll have to be willing to spend a couple bucks per collection on stamps, as well as be willing to put out $20 or $50 or more in a special collection.

Step 1: Write a check and a very short note (not a long missive...less than 50 words) stating that you want your contribution to this collection to be used solely for X, and if it cannot be, it should be returned to the donor. In the case of the Latin America collection, "X" should be "solely for the support of traditional Latin Mass (Extraordinary Form) apostolates in Latin America." For the "mission" collections, "X" would be "solely for the support of the missionary activities of institutes regularly providing the traditional Latin Mass (Extraordinary Form) to to those they serve." For the Catholic Communications Campaign, it should be "solely for the communication of information and resources on the traditional Latin Mass (Extraordinary Form)." You get the idea. The only problem is the Campaign for Human Development...I'll cover that later.
Step 2: Put that check and note in your special collection envelope and drop it, like an obedient Catholic, into the basket at the Offertory on the appointed Sunday.
Step 3: Wait for your chaplain, pastor or parish office manager and call to complain that you're making their job harder, and then have them either forward the check and the note to the Chancery or return it to you so you can direct it to the Chancery yourself. If you get the check back from the parish, skip Step 3 on future collections and go directly to Step 4.
Step 4: If your chaplain, pastor or parish office manager returns it to you, then mail a check for the same amount, payable to the Archdiocese, directly to your local Bishop with a polite short letter stating that you want to contribute to the collection, but you also want to make sure your gift is targeted to what you see as a critical need in the Church. Don't go beyond that (except perhaps in the case of the Campaign for Human Development, which I'll address below). Don't mention your own community or your own priest. Don't criticize the new Mass or the Vicar General's toupe. Don't even say you're a traddie (trust me...they'll know). Just keep the message focused on how they're to use your check. If you want, you might ask them to confirm with you that the check will be properly directed.
Step 5: If the Bishop's office calls you (which is unlikely), then be prepared to state your reasons why you did what you did (here, use less candor and more prudence than you would with your own priest, except in the case of the Campaign for Human Development, where you can be candid). Just state that there's lots of money flowing to people who have the New Mass (Ordinary Form), and you want to make sure that those attached to the Extraordinary Form get something, too, because you worry that they might otherwise be neglected by the USCCB. Remind them that it's your right and their obligation under Canon 1267. But I would recommend that you not use the opportunity to bash the new Mass or comment on the Vicar General's toupe. Save that for another letter on another day.
Step 6: if the Chancery returns the check to you, then send a check directly to the USCCB. I think you can probably get the address from one of the collection links above. The same principles apply to the accompanying letter.
Step 7: if the USCCB returns the check to you, then send a new check in the same amount directly to an appropriate group (in the case of the Latin American collection, the Campos prelature would be a good one). In the letter, let the recipient know that this is a check you tried to give through a national collection, but that your local Bishop and the USCCB refursed to accept it for the purpose you intended. Copy your local Bishop and the USCCB collections office on the letter.
Step 8: be happy that you helped the traditional Catholic cause by (a) getting money to a traddie group who can do some good with it and (b) letting the Bishop and the USCCB collections office that you're out there, and you're not stingy...just focused.

What about the Campaign for Human Development?

As for the Campaign for Human Development, I wouldn't use the above strategy at all. In this one case, I would suggest simply returning your empty CHD envelope to the Bishop about a month before the collection, with a polite letter stating that you cannot in conscience provide support to organizations which are enemies of the faith (perhaps enclosing a short, sober article you find online which details CHD wickedness). State that you're giving $x to a specific worthy organization that actually relieves poverty (outside your own parish or community) in lieu of giving anything to the CHD. Also ask him to stop permitting the CHD collection to be made in his diocese.

How's that for a curmudgeonly strategy for dealing with special collections? I'm open to refinements; please comment below, and forward this idea to all your friends (I don't have many readers now that I've quit blogging, so I could use some help disseminating the idea).

If this idea catches on, I'll try to rough up some sample letters for the steps above.

What's important at the USCCB?

2009-02-10T21:42:00.000-06:00

When visiting the USCCB website for information on another post, I couldn't help but notice the LEAD article on the website. Now at a time when lots of important things are going on that will strengthen Holy Mother Church (the potential regularlization of the SSPX and the potential reunion of a large group of Anglicans), the USCCB won't have any of it. Instead, it features this:

Ch’an/Zen Catholic Dialogue Spreads ‘Welcome Table’ at Retreat

(I linked the permanent article, not the front page, above because I assume that it will all change in a day or two when they come up with some other goofy thing to put up.

"Rev Victoria" and "Rev Heng" must be loving all the attention they're getting, as must Sister Mary Ann (Sisters of Charity---surprised she's not an IHM or and RSM). I see we had a Bishop there, too. Bishop Wester of Salt Lake City. Well, I supppose Bp. Wester is used to hanging around people with some really strange religious beliefs, given where he's from.

Aren't you glad our Bishops are paying for this stupid stuff....excuse me...this EVIL stuff....while we're closing parishes and schools and convents around the country?

Sign me up!

2009-02-10T18:12:00.000-06:00

The Regensburger Catholic theology professor Wolfgang Beinert classifies the SSPX as "reactionary and anti-democratic".

Dow Jones with 15 minutes 'til the bell.

2009-02-10T14:45:00.000-06:00

We're gonna spread happineeeeeeeeessssss! We're gonna spread free-ee-dom!
Obama's gonna fix it...Obama's gonna change the world!

^DJI 3:43pm ET 7,872.71 DOWN 398.16 DOWN 4.81%

Seems the stimulous package he rammed through the Senate today is having an effect.

Eurotrash? Euroclerics?

2009-02-10T04:47:00.000-06:00

Continually amazed at the nonsense coming from European Bishops these days. Gillibrand at CathCon is doing yeoman service translating it on the fly.

Now we see the fruits of Vatican II, eh? These guys make even Cardinal Roger Mahoney sound Catholic!

Doing the right thing

2009-02-09T17:42:00.000-06:00

Imagine a Bishop or a seminary rector who said something scandalous to the faithful and harmful to the faith.

Now imagine his superior taking decisive action within a matter of days to distance himself and those under his authority from the source of scandal.

Now imagine the source of scandal promptly and publicly apologizing for all the trouble within a week.

Now imagine the source of scandal dropping into the background, and consistently with his promised apology, letting himself be cast into the sea and surrendering his post.

Also imagine a superior throwing a different, unrepentant source of scandal out of his order entirely....again within a few days of the violation.

Hmmmm. Maybe the "regular Catholics," Jesuits and several U.S. Bishops included (not to mention the entire German episcopate), could take a lesson from all this.

I could be proven wrong over the next few weeks, but at present, it seems that the "disobedient" and arrogant" Society of St. Pius X, from its actions so far, does have something to teach us "regular Catholics" about obedience and humility after all.

Of course the people that would benefit can't hear all this over their own shrill PC screams. But wouldn't it be something if scandal within the institutional Church handled is such a decisive way?

Pray for the Holy Father, that he might overcome his enemies inside and outside the Church, for Bps. Fellay and Williamson, and for everyone in or attached to the SSPX!

Quiz on remission of SSPX excommunications

2009-02-06T04:03:00.000-06:00

So much stupidity in the Catholic news these days! Here's a one-question quiz to see if you're keeping up:

Identify the person who published the following statement:

A few years after the Second Vatican Council, a French [A]rchbishop, Marcel Lefebvre ... judged that the Council had taken the Roman Catholic Church too far in a progressive direction, so far that no [P]ope since Pius XII has been validly elected and served as [P]ope.

Was it
(a) the Editor in Chief of the National Catholic Reporter?
(b) an anonymous commenter on the "Lost Lambs" blog?
(c) the Roman Catholic Bishop of Buffalo?
(d) internet canonist and anti-SSPX crusader Ed Peters?
(e) Bill Tammeus of the Kansas City Star?

If you picked (c), you win.

Was it because he is ignorant, or because he's devious? Honestly, I cannot bring myself to believe that a sitting Bishop would be so poorly informed about an ecclesiastical matter. Which means I'm assuming the latter.

Shame on me for having so little respect for the man. But if you respect the office, it's that much harder to respect the man.

The Kansas City Star falls another notch?

2009-02-05T16:06:00.000-06:00

From the Kansas City Business Journal (and not the Kansas City Star)

(intro music by Roger Miller:)

Kansas City Star....that's what I are!
Yodileedila-ye ya' oughta see m'car
Drive a big ole' Cadillac with wire wheels
Got rhinestones on the spokes
Got credit down at the grocery store and my barber tells me jokes
I'm the number one attraction in every supermarket parking lot
I'm the King of Kansas City...no thanks Omaha...thanks alot.

(fade)

Ahem, from the Kansas City Business Journal:

Kansas City Star will cut more jobs

The Kansas City Star will cut more jobs as part of a restructuring plan its parent company announced Thursday. The McClatchy Co. (NYSE: MNI) plans to cut an additional $100 million to $110 million in costs in the next year, starting later in the first quarter.
* * *
Also on Thursday, McClatchy reported that it lost $21.7 million, or 26 cents a share, in the fourth quarter, which ended Dec. 28. This compares with a loss of $1.4 billion, or $17.46 a share, a year earlier. Revenue for the quarter was $470.9 million, down 18 percent from $573.4 million the prior year.
* * *

No one could miss (at least no one who doesn't work for McClathy could miss) seeing the causes of this: content that is insufficient, poorly selected, poorly written, in a poorly designed paper.

For instance, Inane columns like this one on the Bishop Williamson matter, involving no research and no original thought...and preceded or accompanied by no actual reporting of the underlying news, even on the once-a-week Faith page. In a vaccuum, I might have wondered why there was no report of the lifting of excommunications here in the very newspaper market where the SSPX is headquartered.

But heck, no one even reports for the Falling Star any more. They've laid off all their reporters. If an event isn't reported over the AP wire, or it isn't visible from an editor's window, or it doesn't involve Mark Funkhouser, it doesn't get reported. They just fill the space where the news used to be with graphics and with guest articles that read like the copy came into the place written in crayon.

The only reason to ever buy a Falling Star would have been for packing dishes or lining pet cages or lighting a woodstove. But now that they've skinnied the paper down to pay for their gazillion-dollar presses, and their glass palace, it's not even useful for that.

The days of the Star are numbered. A few weeks ago, I proposed to a journalist/investigative reporter I know that if a guy had a million dollars or so, he could launch a new general circulation paper in town...a tabloid size paper that came out in print once or twice a week with daily email updates to fill in the gaps (like the KC Business Journal), and actually made some effort to provide real news and informed commentary. Something that was fair and balanced, but was edited for consumption by a reasonably informed and educated, commonsense reader with a Western and Christian worldview. I'm not talking about a highbrow publication, or a special-interest religious publication. And no, I'm not talking about a print version of FoxNews (blech~!) I'm just talking about a decent paper with a staff that sifts and reports general news for intelligent people of good will, rather than a mediocre and incomplete leftist rag like we have now.

Scranton Bishop Wipes Out FSSP parish?

2009-02-03T09:17:00.000-06:00

It appears that the Bishop of Scranton is consolidating the FSSP parish in Scranton out of existence. This is, of course, in the diocese where the FSSP is headquartered. The traditionalist world has been very quiet about this. WHY?

Is there any news to post or print on this development?

http://thetimes-tribune.com/articles/2009/02/01/news/doc4985bcaf3b2a2950235456.txt

http://www.saintmichaelsrcc.org/

Pope rehabilitates Holocaust denier, angering Jews

2009-01-24T10:58:00.000-06:00

Deo gratias!

Our enemies are the principalities and powers, among them the Associated Press and whatever demon got into that devious Swede's and that idiot Brit's heads to try and torpedo a rapprochement.

As for this little complication...the holocaust questioning thing. I'll not comment and reserve judgement on the substance of it, as I really don't have any knowledge of the event beyond the conventional textbook history (which I distrust) and it would seem hard for anybody who did claim some expertise to question it on the larger points, for it's beyond credulity to hold that anybody could pull off a hoax of such magnitude. The substance of Williamson's stupid comments are not germane to the issue.

Let's consider, though, the shrill argument that we're already hearing in online newspaper comment boxes, and by tomorrow, we'll hear from "more respectable" quarters, who will live only in the present, and cannot consider the past.

1. The question of whether or not this bishop is in communion with the Holy Father is based on his current opinions on an secular subject rather than his part in the unfortunate sequence of events in 1988.

2. Williamson holds a crackpot idea about a secular subject.

3. No one who has crackpot views on secular subjects should be in communion with the Holy Father.

Now, I don't mean to keep Williamson out of the Church, but I'm not so sure I don't find that reasoning compelling or useful if it were applied to the Universal Church, and not just to traddies.

I think the Holy Father should reinstate the excommunication declared in 1988 with respect to Richard Williamson, and in the same decree, he should apply this principle to all Bishops.

Anyone with me?

Browsing at a hospital chapel

2008-09-01T23:06:00.000-05:00

I was wandering around Providence Medical Center today (because...I mean....where else would I want to be on a beautiful sunny Labor Day afternoon?), and I started thinking of the devil's latest conquest in Mexico, and I wanted to reread chapter 12 from the Book of Wisdom. Alas, the drawers in the patient rooms all had protty-bibles, placed by the Gideons. No Wisdom to be found in the prots' bible, as you know. They think Wisdom is apochyphal. I didn't hope for a Douay, but there was not even an emasculated RNAB to be found laying about in a Catholic hospital. Where would I look?

Eventually, I found myself in the chapel, where it appeared (from the white electric sanctuary lamp) that the Blessed Sacrament was reserved. Being easily distracted, my reflections passed from Canaanite and modern infanticide to the hospital itself and the religious order that founded it (what each once was, and what each has degenerated to today). It occurred to me then that our Lord, presumptively in the tabernacle, might appreciate a little old-fashioned worship of Himself and honor to His Blessed Mother, so I knelt down and said the five joyful mysteries of the Rosary, in Latin. It seemed unlikely that such a thing was common in that chapel. I cannot know, but I hope He enjoyed the change from his routine of lay-led communion services in English and Spanish.

Afterwards, as I was leaving the chapel, I noticed a pamphlet rack in the back. Even though it was bad form to do so with my back to our Lord in the tabernacle, for some reason I picked up a couple of them, just curious to know what the laymen who ran the chaplain's office were peddling. Expecting to see just the usual kumbaya-Catholicism one finds in such places, I was really surprised to find that about half the space in the rack was literature from the Unity people (you know, those folks who've gotten beyond the idea of a hierarchical church, and gotten beyond the God of Abraham, and who've built the ooh-so-cool temple on the Plaza).

The tracts were full of reflections on sickness, suffering and hope; a few from a version of the Bible I've never heard of, others from random folks I'd never heard of (presumably, they're folks who hang out with Unity types). Some reflections benign or trite. Some reflections assuring me that god (if not God) is within me in a way that...well...seemed to go beyond anything that Pius XI might have said. And at the end of each, there was a phone number you could call to pray with somebody at Unity, 24/7.

And so I thought, "Surely, even for this place, tracts from such a source were not intentionally placed there? I mean, surely, these were put here by someone passing through without asking for permission?"

That must have been it. The Unity tracts HAD to have been left without permission. After all, a Catholic hospital (even one affiliated with enlightened nuns who've kicked the habit) wouldn't promote whatever sort of religion "Unity" is. But I must say that the guy who left those tracts was enterprising. Before he smuggled the tracts into the chapel, he went to the trouble of stamping them all "Providence Medical Center Spiritual Care Office."

At least I could be assured that as soon as the priests or orthodox laymen who staff the Spiritual Care Office noticed, they'd be off the shelf. Right? Right!

Comforted by that thought, I can worry more about the Unity guys than the Providence staff. Perhaps I'll call the Unity prayer line and invite the guy who answers to pray the full version of Leo XIII's prayer to St. Michael with me.

USCCB Summer Games

2008-08-17T22:18:00.000-05:00

One of my friends, for whom I've invented the moniker "Kumbaya," has a guest post which I'm happy to put up:

WASHINGTON D.C. (Associate Spoof) -- Nevermind the "real" summer games going on in Beijing; there's a far more interesting set of games going on here in the states: The USCCB Summer Games. Just in case you've never heard of these games, here's a rundown of the most popular events.

Starting with a test of speed, stamina, and strength, the games open with the ICEL Translations Criticism Contest. In short, the contestants vie to see who can complain the loudest, the fastest, and the longest about the translations of the newly proposed liturgical texts. This year's competition looks to be especially interesting as the perennial favorites have been stewing over Cardinal Arinze and Archbishop Ranjith's recent exhortation to toe the line and follow the translations as rendered by ICEL. Cardinal Mahoney is favored to win as long as he's not disqualified for false starts.

Verbal dexterity, creative obfuscation, and use of the diocese legal team will be pushed to the limit in the Abuse Lawsuit Obstacle Course. With the retirement of defending gold medalist Cardinal Law, the field is wide open this year. Speculation among some insiders is that Bishop Brom of San Diego might have an edge but the field is packed with many highly qualified contestants. A record number of requests for press passes have been received for this event.
In the non-clerical events, competition for the gold will be the tight in the Liturgical Dance Competition and the Greet Your Neighbor and Exchange the Sign of Peace individual medlies. Assuming enough traditionalists can be duped into being "catchers," the Javelin Throw should be a real crowd-pleaser at the Olympic Coliseum, as well as the Pick Your Dogmas Archery Contest (which, as in previous years, is only open to "dissenting Catholics").

Two new events have been added to the field thanks to last summer's publication of Summorum Pontificum. The first is Team Weight Lifting, a timed event in which contestants reconfigure a sanctuary from Novus Ordo mode to Tridentine mode and then back again. Also new to this year's games is the Red Tape Relay in which Catholics file requests for a traditional Latin Mass with their local bishop while raising a non-refundable 25% down payment to finance the operations of a part-time community which will be serviced by a bi-ritual priest -- all while preparing an appeal to the Ecclesia Dei Commission in case the request is denied.
Sadly, not all of the planned events will be taking place in this summer's contest. One of casualties was The 100-Annulment Sprint which was nixed when all but two of the contestants were dismissed for "rubber stamping" during the qualification round. Also canceled was the Spirit of Vatican II Road Race because nobody could agree where the race started, where it finished, what path the course was supposed to follow, or who was allowed to take part in the event.

Expect security to be tight at this year's games, as well as possible gender-checks for female contestants attempting to infiltrate the all-male events. Check your local diocesan newspaper for complete coverage.

Boston Post

2008-08-04T22:27:00.000-05:00

Updated the Boston Church Closing post below with pictures. Finally got them uploaded.

Diabolical self-storage?

2008-08-03T18:33:00.000-05:00

Happy to be back in Kansas, and out of new Sodom, I pulled in to the parking lot at Blessed Sacrament in Kansas City for 11am High Mass, thinking it was great to be back in God's country.

Or was I ?

There it was.

.....The deacon who taught my confirmation class in Texas warned me about it.....

.....I heard a sermon preached on it a few years ago.....

......here it was, the most satanic song ever written, morphed into the most satanic self-storage container ever made, right there in the parking lot of a Catholic parish:

I often wonder about what goes on at Blessed Sacrament when we're not there.

Sometimes I wonder more. And sometimes I wonder less.

The comment box is open.

For Alison

2008-08-03T08:03:00.000-05:00

First of all, madam, I think you should start your own blog, if you haven't already. You're much more amusing than I am. Mrs. Curmudgeon thought "Pandas Revealed" far superior to any of my witticisms.

Secondly, a "personal parish" is as follows:

Can 518 (1983 Code of Canon Law): As a general rule a prish is to be territorial, that is, one which includes all the Christian faithful of a certian territory. When it is expedient, however, personal parishes are to be established determined by reason of the rite, language, or nationality of the Christian failthful of some territory, or evn for some other reason.

A parish is a juridic person with some rights (however precarious under the new regime). Many places (e.g., Denver, Rockford, Sacramento, Kansas City Missouri) have traditional communities which are established as personal parishes or their equivalents. Others (e.g., our little group) are mere "chaplaincies," with no rights, but which exist only at the sufferance of the ordinary. That's not to say there aren't risks to personal parishes (see Scranton PA), but they're not entirely a plaything of the chancery as St. Rose Philippine is.

Springtime of Vatican II in Boston

2008-08-01T18:13:00.001-05:00

I'm on a business trip, and I had a few hours free last night and found myself in Boston's Chinatown, so I went by and took a few pictures of recently-closed Holy Trinity, a symbol of the wise episcopal governance and collegial papal deference that Boston has enjoyed over the last forty years.

How wonderful the aggiornamento has been! This is the traditional Latin Mass community met for a number of years, and it's my understanding that they were quite prepared to take over responsibility for the historic church(which, judging from the exterior, could stand a little work).

Of course, to allow those traditional folks to have their own place would have been unthinkable; they're not really a part of the larger Church, you know. And besides, Cardinal Sean might be able to make a few thousand dollars to throw at the buggery bill by selling it to some goofy New Agers who would....ironically....have a beautiful place to celebrate gay weddin's.

It was the announcement from the Diocese of Scranton, home of the North American FSSP headquarters, that the FSSP-served traditional personal parish be supressed or merged with a happy-clappy parish "to cope with the priest shortage" when the FSSP is probably the only institute in that diocese that actually produces plenty of religious vocations? I figured, having read that, that I'd venture a little bit and see the wreckage in Boston.

Isn't it something, how incredibly stupid we all are, in the eyes of the evil or incompetent men who've politicked their way into being our shepherds, and in the eyes of their crooked chancery rat handlers? And isn't it something, the money that can be made out of church closings when you team the chancery rats up with guys like Alan Meitler? Church closin' is good business, and business has been good in Boston, and Scranton, as it has been in the Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kansas.

New profile photo

2008-08-01T18:04:00.000-05:00

It is only out of the profound love I have of Mrs. Curmudgeon that I've donned socks.

What about the one-child policy?

2008-07-28T00:10:00.001-05:00

Not surprisingly, some animals are more equal than others in China. Forced contraception and forced abortion doesn't apply to them uniformly:

4 panda cubs born at Chinese breeding center
Sun Jul 27, 9:48 AM ET

BEIJING - Four giant panda cubs were born within 14 hours at a breeding center in southwest China, a mini baby boom for the rare animals, a state news agency reported Sunday.

The births began Saturday at the Chengdu Panda Breeding Research Center when 9-year-old Qiyuan, or Magic Luck, gave birth to female twins at 5:24 p.m. and 6:16 p.m., Xinhua News Agency reported, citing center expert Yang Feifei.

More HERE

Yawn....y'all still here?

2008-07-24T22:35:00.000-05:00

I happened to remember my password ... finally. Gosh it's been a long time since I posted. When I look at the site meter I'm absolutely shocked it's not at zero.

Hmm. So much going on in my life. Still not quite settled into the new cave and the environs still need attention. So I guess I'm not ready to resume the blog. Maybe this fall?

In the meantime, if you're still out there, what would you think of a "Kansas Secede!" bumpersticker? I was thinking of printing some up and starting a movement, but I often overestimate the inertia out there.

So what does the average St. Louis Catholic think about his Ordinary?

2008-01-28T00:23:00.000-06:00

Well, just so we don't all lose our focus and see a near term success in the culture war, we might spend a few minutes reading the comments to this story about Abp. Burke's rather....episcopal...reaction to SLU coach Rick Majerus's antics (there are almost 500 of them).

The article is stupid and misleading of course...who would expect otherwise from an outlet run by Ted Turner? But the comments are useful, because they give insight into what the "Joe Six-Packs" in St. Louis and elsewhere think about a bishop who dares to do his job. And they help us come to grips with just how far gone the culture is, and just how effective the Vatican II "pastoral" approach has been in forming Catholics and influencing non-Catholics.

"It seems to me that faith education works all right as long as people are not that serious about their faith."

2008-01-01T02:01:00.000-06:00

So says, British MP Barry Sheerman, presumably with a straight face. State subsidies for Catholic schools are under fire in Britain because certain (but not all) Catholic Bishops in Britain are acting in ways which vaguely resemble...Catholic Bishops.

Much can be said about the danger state subsidies would pose to Catholic schools here in the US, when we think about vouchers and the strings that would be attached to them.

But I think much more could be said about the fact that so many prelates and educators in Catholic schools....and for that matter, so many parents of Catholic school children, especially ones I know here in Kansas City...would say the same thing.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis

2007-12-26T20:31:00.000-06:00

Word comes to us that Msgr. Heliodore Mejak, for over 63 years the pastor at Holy Family Parish in KCK, passed away on Christmas Day.

Msgr. Mejak was reported to be the longest-serving pastor in the world, and only the SECOND pastor to serve in the parish since its formation in the 1920s.

Deus, qui inter apostolicos Sacerdotes, famulum tuum Heliodore, sacerdotali fecisti dignitate vigere: praesta quaesumus; ut eorum quote perpetuo aggregetur consortio.

O God, Who wast pleased to raise Heliodore, Thy servant, to the dignity of the priesthood: vouchsafe to number him with They bishops and priests for evermore.

Msgr. Mejak was always friendly to traddies, and was a calm port in the ecclesiastical storm of the 1970s for many in Kansas City.

No details on funeral arrangements.

Oh yeah, and "Happy Holidays"

2007-12-25T01:59:00.000-06:00

Well, I'll wish you the same devious, intolerant, insensitive greetings I've been wishing everyone, including my Jewish friends, all week:

Merry Christmas, and a Blessed New Year!

Two currents of work in women's religious communities...

2007-12-23T15:16:00.001-06:00

Well, while we're gratified to see some young women's communities organizing and growing and bringing new Graces into Holy Mother Church, we're not surprised how little some of the older communities, flush with the spirit of Vatican II, have left to contribute:

Nuns leave their brains to science

Seriously, perhaps the neurologists studying those brains can find the "spirit of Vatican II" switch and come up with a way to turn it off before their whole orders disappear.

Malessere?

2007-12-14T22:49:00.000-06:00

The answer to the problem, of course is to unwind the masonic revolution that has brough Italy great miseries and small ones over the last 130 years, and to restore the Papal States.

A nugget from Frank Sheed.

2007-12-02T17:41:00.000-06:00

Nope, I' m still not really blogging again; too much real life, and too much reading to do.

But the reading is much more rewarding. Finally getting through Frank J. Sheed's Society and Sanity (1953), which I've had for over a year and just hadn't gotten through.

Here's a nuggest from pp. 181-82, which my prottie and flag-wavin' Neo-Catholic friends need to digest:

At the moment the sky is filled with the clang of battle between Totalitarianism and Democracy. In fact, there is no opposition between them. They are answers to two different questions.

Totalitarianism is an answer to the question, "What things are Ceasar's?"--the answer it gives being that all things whatsoever are Caesar's, that the State's right of control is unlimited, that the citizen has no rights against the State, no part of life that is simply his own.

Democracy is an answer to the question "Who is Caesar?"--the answer it gives being that Caesar is whomever the People elects.

Obviously there is no necessary opposition between them. One State might easily give both answers. It might decide that authority resides in the People, and that the People elects its government and can change its goverment. And it might also decide that there is no limit to the People's control, throught that elected and dismissible goverment, over the life of the individual, that, for what is conceived to be the good of the totality, the individualmay be totally regimented. There is no paradox here, no improbability even. A government which can claim to be doing what the majority of the people think best can interfere in the life of citizens as the most absolute tyrant could not: it was not an autocrat who in this century imposed Prohibition upon a great people: no autocrat would have dared. In fact control by government is spreading so fast in the democracies that the distinction already noted between the two main times of social authority has less meaning that of old, and Caesar is as good a symbol for one as the other.

Yes, one very clear explication that supports my view that I'd rather live under an autocrat like Franco that the current Spanish democracy, of for that matter, the current U.S. democracy. God bless Franco.

A friend from Montana has repeatedly recommended this book, and it's wonderful. A shame it's not in print, and you can count on Sheed & Ward, Frank's own publishing house, now run by leftists, be be sure it stays out of print.

Remember the Generalissimo!

2007-11-04T21:14:00.000-06:00

The bastard socialists who've taken over Spain are still busy at work, rewriting history and stirring up hatred against the man that saved Catholic Spain (or at least prolonged its life 70 years) and probably saved all of Western Europe from revolutionary barbarians (or at least prolonged its life 80 years).

The ruling party, which is well into its campaign of subtle persecution of faithful Spaniards and Holy Mother Church, has passed a law condemning Francisco Franco.

Ah, it's hard to remember that God knows why he put me here, now, instead of among the Carlists of Spain in 1936. Oh, to have such a noble cause, and to have contributed to its success! Well, I guess if He'd have also had to have given me a better facility in Spanish (worst grades in elementary school) and make me a better shot, too. But to think I might have been there and gotten a shot off at commie Ernest Hemmingway!!!

Hey Lady, that ain't a breadbox you just walked by!

2007-10-31T23:32:00.000-05:00

So I'm in St. Louis earlier this week and I find myself across the street from the Old Cathedral with a half-hour to myself. A nice opportunity to go spend some time in front of the Blessed Sacrament in the same church from which Fr. DeSmet and countless other Catholic missionaries departed to bring the Faith to the American West.

So I slip over there.

I tug on the door, and it's open. And I'm pleased to see that there's some semblance of order and tradition in the arrangement of the place. Some goofy stuff here and there (the ambo, for instance), but still an altar rail, and a central tabernacle, and a raised altar on which a traditional Mass could be celebrated...still obviously Catholic.

And so I'm rather settled in before the Real Presence there, and I'm midway through the mystery of the Presentation when this older, heavy-set woman in a sleeveless shirt comes wandering out of the sacristy, across the sanctuary, and kicks herself over the velvet rope spanning the central gap in the altar rail. She comes down to me and tells me (with maybe slightly more regard as she just showed our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament) that I'll have to go; she's locking up. I watched her waddle back to the Church and hold the door open waiting on me to leave (again with nary a glance at the tabernacle).

Somehow I bit my tongue, but now I wished I wouldn't have. HEY LADY, THAT AIN'T A BREADBOX YOU JUST WALKED BY, that's the Creator and the Saviour of the World, Who humbled Himself to become a creature. And you can't even humble yourself acknowledge His presence with even so much as a novus-ordo nod to the tabernacle?

Or perhaps, despite the burning sanctuary lamp, He wasn't there at all? Maybe she knows something I don't about the way the sacraments are "celebrated" there? If so, at least she didn't give Him any offense, and it really was just a fancy breadbox.

Argh. Once again I'm reminded of the state of the rest of the Church. God bless Archbishop Burke for trying to restore the Faith in St. Louis, but what regard can people have for the Church when they have no regard for her Founder? Especially people who apparently have some role to play in the upkeep of a holy place that's been designated Bascilica?

I'm not sure I could ever go back in the Old Cathedral now. Next time I'll find a full hour and drive down to St. Francis de Sales.

Carnahan's Still on the Devil's Payroll

2007-10-18T20:56:00.000-05:00

Ah, yes...we remember way back to the year 2006, when Robin Carnahan, Satan's apprentice in the Missouri Secretary of State's office, did her part to further the culture of death by assuring that the people of Missouri got a misleading ballot summary of Amendment 2, the Clone-n-Kill initiative. She managed to fool enough people so that (although the initiative's support declined week after week as people learned the truth in the runup to the election) just enough people pulled the lever in Missouri to make sure our own little Island of Dr. Moreau could stay in business. Of course, she did have a little help, to the tune of $30 million from baby-killin' billionaire Jim Stowers. But she did her part by making sure that Missouri voters couldn't tell that the state was redefining "cloning" to mean something that it did not.

And now we fast-forward to the fall of 2007, to learn that Robin's being even more bold. She's taken THIS and written ballot language describing it as a proposal "to repeal the current ban on human cloning or attempted cloning."

OFFICIAL BALLOT TITLE AS CERTIFIED BY SECRETARY OF STATE

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to repeal the current ban on human cloning or attempted cloning and to limit Missouri patients’ access to stem cell research, therapies and cures approved by voters in November 2006 by:

redefining the ban on human cloning or attempted cloning to criminalize and impose civil penalties for some currently allowed research, therapies and cures; and
prohibiting hospitals or other institutions from using public funds to conduct such research?

This proposal could have a significant negative fiscal impact on state and local governmental entities due to its prohibition of certain research activities. However, the total costs to state and local governmental entities are unknown.

Of course she'll get away with it. The Missouri courts earned their thirty pieces of silver last time and made sure the challenge to present the proposal fairly and honestly was quashed. And there's no reason to think they won't oblige again.

At this point the Enemy and his instruments are so drunk with his own success, and has gained so much confidence, that they're not even trying to cover their movements anymore.

Middle Schoolers Need Protection

2007-10-18T18:00:00.000-05:00

Let's see:

McCarthy, the principal, said he sympathizes with those who have reservations about the program. "I think it makes people nervous to think middle school students are having sex. Frankly, it makes me nervous. But there's a small population out there that needs protection," he said.

Damned straight, they need protection. That protection could involve vigilant teacher during the day, a responsible older sibling after school, and a father at home in the evening (you know, the kind father who keeps a 12-gauge in the closet and a castrating clamp in the workshed*).

But of course, that's not the sort of protection they propose.

--Curmudgeon

*actually, I guess I'm not that kind of father. The shotgun currently in my closet is only a 20 gauge, and we band our cattle. We don't have a clamp. I don't think that banding will work on male creatures who have opposable thumbs. I'll have to get the right equipment if Eldest ends up in public school.

How to be wrong when you're right...

2007-10-14T20:49:00.000-05:00

Apparently there's a guy named Bill O'Reilly who's a big deal on some TV news channel I don't watch and on some syndicated radio show that I don't listen to. I've seen him or heard him a couple of times in passing. He's apparently a self-identified Catholic, too, who's quite eager to peddle the distortions of his own ill-formed conscience as superior to Catholic teaching. And beyond that, he's an incomparable blowhard bore.

From what I've seen, he makes Rush Limbaugh seem like Russell Kirk.*

Well, anyways, he's apparently weighed in on the homosexual infiltration of Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco, where last week Archbishop Neiderauer committed sacrilege by giving the Blessed Sacrament to a couple of flamboyant sodomites who are apparently part of the "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence." Bill is apparently outraged that these guys invaded and desecrated a Church.

What an idiot! They didn't invade! They were invited and welcomed there. As all of us who ever pay any attention to the news of the Church know, heck, they used to have functions at Most Holy Redeemer! And the Archbishop who committed the sacrilege is complicit in the promotion of their sodomite agenda.

And apparently some of the folks who got that Archbishop appointed are more than complicit in the promotion of the sodomite agenda, but that's another story.

Anyways, back at this Bill O'Reilly character. Sheesh. A big fancy network and a staff of several (if not dozens of) people, and they can't check facts? Is that all it takes to be on the TV and make a bunch of money? Heck, I can do that, and I can direct the outrage where it truly belongs.

In the meantime, I'll just go back to my book about Fr. DeSmet.

--Curmudgeon

*For those of you who don't know, Russell Kirk was the thoughtful, exceptionally well-read man who deserves the most credit for starting the modern conservative movement....back when there was still something worth conserving.

Mrs. Curmudgeon's gone noodlin'

2007-10-13T21:49:00.000-05:00

Mrs. Curmudgeon does keep up with going's on in the devil's playground of Lawrence and regularly looks at the Lawrence Urinal World.

And yesterday, she read a story about something she'd like to try, noodlin'.

Frankly, if my family were starving, I'd give it a try, as part of my paternal duty.

But otherwise, forget it.

I'll just get my Lawrence repast as Joes Bakery. Mmm. Hot Glazed NOW. Or then again, maybe I won't.

Seriously, though, for the cracks one makes about the Lawrence paper, I guess you've got to compare it to the Kansas City Star. Sure, Dolph's little paper is wrong more than it's right, but it's at least more readable than the Star. The well-written noodlin' article is a case in point. Just try to find tight, clever writing like that in the Star. And the news is actually meaningful. Knowing that Joe's Bakery is closed down is far more useful than any of the crap they put in the Star FYI section. Now I know to head straight for Munchers (which, frankly, I was inclined to do anyways. The cream cheese doughnut at Munchers beats even the hottest, fresh-from-the-oil glazed at Joes).

The most evident mark of God's anger

2007-10-12T22:43:00.000-05:00

Three little excerpts:

First, :

Archbishop George Niederauer gave Holy Communion to two men dressed in drag as nuns during an Oct. 7 visit to Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco, witnesses who attended the Mass told California Catholic Daily.

Second:

The most evident mark of God's anger and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world are manifested when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clergy who are priests more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds. Instead of nourishing those committed to their care, they rend and devour them brutally. Instead of leading their people to God, they drag Christian souls into hell in their train. Instead of being the salt of the earth and the light of the world, they are its innocuous poison and its murky darkness....

Third:

WASHINGTON (October 11, 2007)—Pope Benedict XVI named Bishop Jaime Soto, Auxiliary Bishop of Orange, California, to be Coadjutor Bishop of Sacramento, California. Bishop Soto is 51. The appointment as coadjutor bishop confers on Bishop Soto the right to succession to Bishop William K. Weigand of Sacramento. Bishop Weigand is 70.

There's little more to say.

Oh, little more except this, from Diogenes at the CWNews blog, quoting Bp. Soto:

Fourth:

Chris Andersen's present difficulties pain me very much not only because he is a friend but also because he is an associate in the ministry. Our works brings us into intimate contact with people's lives. In a time when the exchange of simple affections within the most intimate of circles has become a rare commodity, our associations with others run the grave risk of being misunderstood by all parties including perhaps the priest himself [OTR's emphasis]. There is cause therefore to exercise prudence and right judgment while at the same time pursuing the mission of Church to bring healing and comfort. If Chris has failed in exercising such prudence or has in fact abused the privilege provided him by the people of God I would the hope the court would seek some remedial means of dealing with the case at hand as opposed to extensive incarceration.

Fifth, from St. John Eudes:

The most evident mark of God's anger and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world are manifested when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clergy who are priests more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds. Instead of nourishing those committed to their care, they rend and devour them brutally. Instead of leading their people to God, they drag Christian souls into hell in their train. Instead of being the salt of the earth and the light of the world, they are its innocuous poison and its murky darkness....
How on earth can a Catholic remain in God-forsaken California? Jeff, seriously. How?

No friend of the OKC Traddies

2007-09-25T09:17:00.000-05:00

Fr. Jack Feehily, in the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, apparently can't wait to add his screed to the dunghill of motu proprio criticism. You might have missed it, but an OKC local pointed it out to me. On page 13 of the current issue of the diocesan newspaper, the Sooner Catholic, he complains to the editor about the paper's announcement of a Solemn High Mass in Kingfisher. Apparently, Fr. Feehily thinks publicity for the traditional Mass is verboten. And he repeats the usual, insulting crap about how there's no active participation in our little nostalgic exercise.

Not remarkable: I'm just posting a link to it because it might otherwise be missed.

Yet further proof that Holy Orders is no cure for idiocy or deviousness, whichever may be the motivating force in this case. Naturally he omitted fact that the Mass that "came about as the result of a great church council" was concocted by a freemason and protestants, and was (to quote somebody with a little more clout than Fr. Feehily) "a banal, on-the-spot product," and he of course omitted the fact that the codification of the Mass that saved Holy Mother Church from the heresies of the Protestant Revolt came out of a far more august and important council, Trent.

And hey, when he says "there can be no going back," I'm sure his congregation of one- and two-child families, who catch Mass whenever it doesn't interfere with soccer tournaments, would agree. But it won't be long until the large families of backwards, nostalgia-addled traddies outnumber the likes of his. Of course, he ends with a statement that the newfangled Mass is a call "to transform the world." Nevermind how the world has transformed the new Mass or the bulk of the Church, eh?

Well, were I in OKC, I'd issue a challenge: pick three kids and three grownups at random out of Father Feehily's congregation. Pick three kids and three grownups out of the traddie community, again at random. Then quiz each on what's happening at Mass. Keep going and quiz them on their catechism. I think we'll know then who's getting more out of Mass.

But of course, then, I'm sure Fr. Feehily would much rather take refuge in his glittering generalities and his certitude that somehow modern man has figured out (in between soccer games and Star Trek reruns) something new about his faith--something that was completely missed by the thousands of martyrs and saints that preceded us.

Traditional . . . er . . . "extraordinary" Mass in Oklahoma City

2007-09-24T22:27:00.001-05:00

Mrs. Curmudgeon and I had reason to be in Oklahoma City this Sunday morning (the reason being our desire to avoid the handholding and kumbaya crowd at an "ordinary" Mass in the city we'd been visiting over the weekend). So, we got up early, drove to OKC, and assisted at the 11am low Mass at St. Michael the Archangel Chapel, the FSSP apostolate in the Bethany, Oklahoma. Now we can add Oklahoma City to our list of traditional communities we've visited (joining it with the communities in DC, Rockford, Sacramento, Phoenix, San Diego and Denver).

We just barely made it to Mass on time: our Mapquest directions led us to a dead end in a trailer park. But with a little luck and a little help from some guy resting under a tree at a protestant university's athletic complex, we made it in time.

What a neat place, and what a neat story! Apparently (said one of the locals), the grounds of the Church were once the clubhouse and entrance area to a golf course, but the course had been flooded decades ago by the Corps of Engineers on a reservoir project. A parishioner had purchased the grounds, including the clubhouse, many years ago, and he's given a substantial portion of it over to the use of the traditional community there, which has constructed a small chapel and, I understand, have rehabilitated the clubhouse for use as classrooms and social space. The grounds are beautiful, with a little pond and lots of flowering trees and shrubs. And the chapel is attractive as well. The chapel is small, seating maybe 100 in the nave and another 20 or 30 in the vestibule/cryroom and choir loft. It's small enough that a PA system at the ambo is entirely unnecessary. They've integrated and old altar and side niches into the new building, and they've got some attractive new stained glass.

I'm sorry that I wasn't able to get interior pictures; by the time I retreived my camera phone, baptismal rites had started in the vestibule. And I'm sorry I didn't have a decent camera with me; we left it at home, but I figured that a couple of phone pics were better than none.

All told, the community's facilities are to be envied. The setting is beautiful, and safe, and controlled (very much unlike our own setting at Blessed Sacrament). The church is very attractive, too, but also (even moreso than with Denver or Sacramento) too small and destined to be quickly outgrown: no more than four or six altar boys could be in the sanctuary at any one time, and we'd need five or six Masses on Sunday to get everyone into the small nave. However, it's a great start, and most importantly, it's theirs to use, without working around extra unnecessary furniture, or scheduling conflicts, or special permissions before such uncontroversial tasks as weeding the flowerbeds, or any of the other stuff that goes along with being tenants in someone else's church.

And of course, people naturally ask what the Mass was like. It was, happily, just a nice low Mass, celebrated reverently by the new assistant chaplain there (with a charming British accent that I didn't pick up until the Leonine prayers). No surprises at all (nor should there be). A solid sermon on love and lust was preached by the chaplain (who, it's obvious, learned to preach from the same folks my own chaplain did). Granted, the chaplain (who couldn't be older than me) lost some credibility by claim to be "an old priest" with "years of marriage preparation counselling." But they were otherwise great. Perhaps I liked the sermon so much because it vindicated by own intention to arrange a marriage for the Eldest Curmudgeon (who, at age 5, still accepts that fact that I get to pick her husband if she has a married vocation).

All and all, a great place to visit. I wish that Mrs. Curmudgeon and I had been able to get to OKC to attend the earlier Missa Cantata, socialize a bit with the OKC Traddies and catch up with some old friends who moved there from the Kansas City SRPD community.

Three Years Later

2007-09-15T22:00:00.000-05:00

Three Years Later, Ultra-Conservative Lottery Winner Continues to Raise Concerns
(a/k/a Chapter 2 of “Not Me”)

Ditch Weekly, Kansas City, April 20, 2009.

On April 12, 2006, Kansas Citian Krusty Curmudgeon won the entire $224.2 million PowerBall jackpot from the Missouri Lottery. His comments after winning raised worries among lottery officials and others, and his actions since that time have kept those concerns alive.
The area just north of the city of Stanley, North Dakota, has changed a great deal in the last two years. Just off State Route 8, within view of White Lake, a new 15,000 foot grocery store, a 15,000 foot general merchandise discount store, and a string of shops have recently opened, and behind it, a new residential development, Douay Estates, may someday double the population of a county that had about 6500 residents in 2000.

The grocery, Raphael’s, opened six months ago, and the discount general merchandise store, Nicholas’ Mercantile, opened last week. Also open are some smaller shops, including Anthony’s Meats, a butcher shop immediately adjacent to the grocery which has its own storefront as well as a counter opening into Raphael’s to serve grocery patrons. Flanking the grocery on the other side is Elizabeth’s bakery, which, in addition to its own storefront and lobby with tables and chairs for coffee-and-pastry patrons, also has a service counter that sells into Raphael’s. Also open are Amand’s Cellar, a liquor store, and The St. Lawrence Grill.

Soon to open in the remaining shop spaces are Clitherow’s Books and Gifts, C&D Pharmacy, and a medical office. The developer has land to develop several more small retail shops as well.
Across the newly-paved Campion Drive, also facing Route 8, a building is under construction to house the Douay Credit Union and to provide a few office suites for rent. Behind the Douay building is Isidore’s Service, which sells fuel, performs auto repairs and sells tires.

Further down Campion Drive there are two new three-story apartment buildings and two others under construction, all similar in appearance to those built commonly built in cities in the 1920s and 1930s. There is a row of newly constructed small houses, and another row under construction. Nearby, several intermediate single family homes on typical city-sized lots are under construction, and larger homes on half-acre to two-acre lots are either recently completed or are being built a few hundred yards away. In total, 40 houses have been completed and another 25 are under construction. A carpenter who is working in the project told Ditch there were at least a fifty more houses that would come up in the next year. In the center of all this residential development is a large brick residence, a community meeting hall named after missionary and explorer Jean-Pierre DeSmet, a playground, a chapel building, and a private school building.

The first indication that this development is somehow different from the typical subdivision in more urban areas is probably lost on most of those who see it. But someone familiar with Catholic saints might notice that each shop is named after the patron saint for its particular trade, and the new street signs bear the names of Catholics who died in the religious violence that followed the Protestant Reformation in England. The main entrance road, a boulevard lined with young trees, is named after Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest who was executed by the English in 1581. If the observer pulls in and drives through the streets that have been built to date, he or she may notice subtle religious symbols at the intersections and in the roundabouts, as well as in front of most of the newly built homes: statutes of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, or Francis of Assisi, and a mosaic of St. Michael, a sword-wielding angel.

Another unusual feature of this development is the lack of advertising for the project. The unfinished homes and lots do not have for-sale signs, and the houses and none of the property in the development is listed with real estate agents. There are reports that the developer, who declined to be interviewed for this feature, is actually giving many of the lots away, and only asking the new owners to agree to the covenants for the subdivision and to pay their share of the cost of building streets and running utilities to the lot before they connect their houses. And ironically, Curmudgeon himself has not yet built a house here.

The developer is Douay Services, LLC, a company, like the project, named for the town in France where many English Catholics settled after King Henry VIII broke the English church away from Rome in the sixteenth century. Douay is owned by a series of other companies and trusts that are traceable to Krusty Curmudgeon, the Kansas City man who, on April 12, 2006, won the largest jackpot ever awarded by the Missouri Lottery, $224.2 million. Curmudgeon is a member of an ultra-conservative branch of the Catholic Church that continues to hold its services in Latin and preaches a strict morality where television, many modern fashions, sex outside of marriage, religious freedom and the equality of women are scorned. When interviewed shortly after he won the lottery, Curmudgeon told a reporter from the Kansas City Star: “I'm going to sell my house and build a compound of sorts somewhere out of the way--maybe start semi-rural a Catholic ghetto of sorts. . . . Once I get my family situated and my affairs properly organized to protect them, I intend to go from being a bystander to combatant in the culture wars."

And Curmudgeon has followed through on many of his other plans, including becoming a “combatant in the culture wars.” Curmudgeon now has a Kansas City-based staff of three (two full-time and one part-time) employees who, with the help of freelance writers and unpaid volunteers, publish a daily online news service and a 16-page weeklyt general circulation newspaper. He plans to move the newspaper to his new development in the next year. Curmudgeon has made donations to conservative extremist politicians and to right-wing social causes, including the backers of Missouri Amendment 1, the 2007 referendum which almost succeeded in reversing the Missouri stem cell research initiative passed in 2006. Curmudgeon regularly provides bail money and legal support for protesters who are arrested at Kansas City’s Stowers Institute, abortion clinics, and political and civic events. And when denounced by former Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes, who called him a “radical” at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon last year, Curmudgeon, who happened to be present covering the event for his website and newspaper, stood on his chair and shouted back “No, madam, I am a counter-revolutionary!”

His other stated plan, the establishment of what he called a “semi-rural Catholic ghetto,” is well underway. At an event a few weeks after his lottery win, Curmudgeon revealed his plans for Douay, a 300 acre tract of rolling farmland near Stanley, North Dakota. That event was closed to the press, but individuals in attendance said Curmudgeon announced he was buying land near Stanley, and was in negotiations with the Mountrail County officials to arrange for a mixed use development that would include small, locally owned retail shops and housing for a wide range of income levels, all built around a community center, a private school, and a church. He stated he was going to lease shop space to fellow ultra-conservative Catholics who would operate local businesses—no chain stores allowed—and help organize a credit union to be a source of working capital. He also promised to give away small lots of land—land that would be subject to strict covenants and restrictions—to fellow ultra-conservatives, and that if someone wanted a larger lot, those might be available, too. While Curmudgeon himself did not disclose why he chose a site in North Dakota for his projects, individuals close to him wrote in an email that was eventually forwarded to Ditch that “Mountrail County a place where a cohesive group of faithful Catholics stand a better-than-average chance of resisting the heathen mob.”

The Douay project moved along rather quickly. A local engineer planned the necessary utilities—sewer, water, natural gas, electricity, and data cable (no cable television or traditional telephone lines were needed, Curmudgeon insisted). The project passed through the minimal county approval process rather quickly. The only problem came when the local school district asked for land within the development for an elementary school. The Douay representative initially refused, saying that there would be little need for it because it was likely all the families would either homeschool or sent their children to private schools, but a week later, Douay announced that it would leave 10 acres in parkland available for potential delivery to the school district, in the event that there was a need. Some Mountrail County residents also initially opposed the plan, stating that they didn’t want such a large development in their area creating additional traffic and changing the character of the White Lake area, but Douay representatives met with them, one by one, bought out some neighboring landowners, and somehow placated others. None of the landowners will discuss any payments they received with the Ditch, stating that they had signed confidentiality agreements.

Confidentiality seems to be the watchword in the Douay project, and all persons involved keep a suspiciously low profile. The developer is secretive about his plans, declining interviews from the press and inquiries from local real estate brokers. Samuel Smith, a Mountrail County real estate agent who spoke to the Ditch, approached Douay on behalf of a buyer he represented, but was told that this was not a project that they could deal with a broker on. It seems that Curmudgeon is trying to avoid the application of federal Fair Housing law, which prohibits religious discrimination and preferences in the sale or lease of residential property, while at the same time trying to establish a neighborhood that is made up almost exclusively of ultra-conservative Catholics. That goal is evident in the covenants and restrictions recorded against all the property in Douay, which don’t mention religion at all, but (in addition to imposing typical subdivision rules) do attempt to restrict the types of books and magazines that can be sold in the shopping center or distributed within the residential area, the availability of contraceptives, and the clothing that can be worn in the common areas.

Two priests from the Confraternity of St. Paul, a religious order established to serve Catholics who rejected the English-language service and other reforms introduced by Vatican II, have been given a large house near the center of the project. They do not hold any public religious services yet, but the priests have private services during the week in the chapel that was recently built for the school, and many of the new residents of Douay regularly attend. The school chapel seats fewer than 100 worshipers, but it was built so that it could be expanded to a larger church that seats 700 or more. The Catholic Diocese of Bismarck has not yet authorized a parish church to be built in the project, and the priests don’t claim to be parish priests subject to the Diocese. Ditch was unable to reach them by telephone, but an email inquiry was returned in which their one priest, Fr. Donald Davidson, stated that he “had informed the Bishop of Bismarck of his residence in the diocese, and was not holding himself out as being in public ministry or being a pastor, but was merely saying Mass and hearing confessions on private property as an informal chaplain to some friends who have recently moved up here.
The school is not yet named or organized; however, eight classrooms have been built, and they are regularly used by homeschooling families who share resources, and priests of the Confraternity of St. Paul teach high school math, Latin and French classes to students of homeschooling families who desire it. There are regular activities in the Community Center, including a regular Sunday afternoon social gathering of many Douay residents and others who attend the Confraternity’s services.

While Mountrail County locals have accepted the new development with only minor complaints, and others in North Dakota have declined to comment, people in the Kansas City area have repeatedly expressed concern about Douay and other Curmudgeon projects. Bernie Varnette, head of the Kansas City Alliance of All Faiths, has written against Curmudgeon several times since his lottery win was announced and routinely writes against “extremism and separatism” of the Douay approach, particularly in focusing on the symbols of only one religion, and in honoring only the Catholic victims of religious violence. Some Kansas City Jewish leaders have called for an investigation into the inherent anti-semitism and intolerance in Curmudgeon’s Kansas City-based projects. The representatives for the Kansas City Gay Lesbian Causus said Curmudgeon’s projects smacked of sexual bigotry and hate, was relieved that he appeared to be leaving town, but would monitor the Douay project even after he left.

In Topeka, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, herself a Catholic and a regular target of protests by Curmudgeon and his supporters, had previously suggested that Kansas now has its own Catholic Taliban. Even some Kansas City Catholic leaders have been critical. Rev. Tim Tinker, pastor of Our Lady of Leawood Catholic Church, says that Vatican II changed church doctrine in many ways, and now it’s important for Catholics to embrace and be part of the larger world, rather than to regard it as something to be despised. “The people who are moving to Douay are either full of pride in their own righteousness or have been filled with fear by people like Curmudgeon,” Tinker said.

Nor have federal authorities been at ease with the backer of the Douay project. When asked about Curmudgeon and Douay, the public affairs officer for the Kansas City, Missouri office of the United States Attorney had no immediate comment. But other anonymous sources within the office say that Curmudgeon’s financial arrangements have been under scrutiny.

Curmudgeon has claimed that he has given away all but $2 million of his winnings, and while there was no evidence of wrongdoing in the initial IRS investigation, the US Attorney’s office is opening other investigations. Also, although no clear violations of the Fair Housing Law have been reported, they would like to find a violation. “In this country, you can’t simply go live with your own kind. It’s un-American,” the anonymous source said. “We’ll continue the investigations in coordination with our colleagues in North Dakota, and then investigate the investigations, and eventually we’ll create something to hang on him. The obstruction of justice statute is a beautiful thing. We sent Martha Stewart to prison on nothing; we’ll get Mr. Curmudgeon, too.”

Questions and concerns about the Douay are certain to continue in the months ahead, and the Ditch will continue to cover any developments.

Scholarship for Local Priest to Attend FSSP Traditional Mass Training

2007-09-12T08:39:00.000-05:00

The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter offered training this summer to interested priests who wanted to learn how to celebrate the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. Given that so many priests responded, the FSSP is offering two separate weeks of additional training, as described below.

Kansas City Catholic and Curmudgeon's Cave want to help send a local priest to this workshop. So here's the deal: the priest from either the Archdiocese of Kansas City (KS) or the Diocese of Kansas City--Saint Joseph (MO) who first emails kansascitycatholic[at]hotmail.com and says that he wishes to receive the training offered by the FSSP will have his $300.00 tuition paid by wolftracker and Curmudgeon.

First email in the inbox [that is, in Orville's inbox, not mine] wins.

Here's more information about the training from a Una Voce America press release:

'Bellevue, WA, Sept. 11, 2007 - The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, in collaboration with Una Voce America, in response to overwhelming popular demand is happy the announce two additional workshops for training priests in the "Extraordinary Form" of the Roman Rite, to be conducted at Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary during the Fall Semester of 2007. The first workshop will take place from Friday, October 5th through Tuesday, October 9th. The second will take place from Friday, November 2nd through Tuesday, November 6th. Available placements are limited so priests are urged to contact the seminary at their earliest convenience. The cost for each of these five day workshops is $300.00. All the fundamentals involved in learning the Traditional Latin Mass will be covered.
Priests will receive a complete explanation with hands-on practice of the rubrics of the 1962 Missale Romanum as well as an introduction to Latin, traditional liturgical principles, and Sung Mass. A comprehensive materials packet will be provided including translations of the rubrics, audio CD's with the recited texts of Low Mass and Celebrant's chant for Sung Mass, and a demonstration DVD with examples of both Low and Solemn Mass.

A starting point for Catholic Separatist discussions

2007-09-08T18:52:00.000-05:00

For discussion, the current official catechism provides in paragraph 2243 as follows:

Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well-founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.

First, what is the source of the teaching in this paragraph? There is no footnote in the text. Aquinas? A papal encycical (hopefully pre-Vatican II)? An ecumenical council?

Second, do any conditions (other than #4) remain unsatisfied?

Third, does anyone seriously believe that even #4 is satisfied?

PS, I know I could find the answer to my first question if I weren't too cheap to buy a Denzinger or too lazy to go to the evil local Jesuit college's library.

Catholic Separatists

2007-09-08T18:26:00.000-05:00

If only there were time, I'd form a Catholic Separatist internet group (which would, I daydream, coalesce into a real--not just virtual--Catholic Separatist movement).

In recent travels through various parts of the country, I've been thinking a good deal about what it would be like if ten or fifteen or fifty thousand (if there are fifty thousand) of us all moved to one place, admitting the truth that the lodges and the socialists have won and that our government and social structures are degenerate beyond saving. We'd go somewhere out of the way--an arid plateau somewhere, or perhaps the state of North Dakota--and refuse to submit to the the corruption of our children and interference with our families and crippling, confiscatory taxation, and we'd go it on our own...until, of course, the government burned us out, threw the survivors in prison, and put our children on an intensive MTV regimen in homosexual foster homes to get them "caught up" with their peers.

But there isn't time. I'm too busy with family projects and breadwinning and long-neglected reading, so I won't start the group. But I invite anyone of like mind (although very few people read the blog anymore, now that I've quit posting regularly), with more leisure time, to have a crack at it. If you do, I'll stop by from time to time, pound out something inflammatory, and disappear for weeks.

I've put some of my daydreams to pen (actually, to keyboard), and maybe I'll post them to get the idea down the road.

In the meantime, please, somebody get us started.

Angry cholerics only need apply. The world needs contemplatives, but not in this sort of venue.

The Best Mother in the World

2007-08-31T10:49:00.000-05:00

LONDON - Princess Diana's family solemnly marked the 10th anniversary of her death Friday, with her younger son eulogizing her as "the best mother in the world."

Hmm, you’d think that a royal (or, for us Jacobites, a royal pretender) would have higher standards than that.

The whole story is here, if you're in a voyeuristic, tabloid mode.

Pagan Labyrinths and Traditional Sanctuaries

2007-08-26T23:45:00.000-05:00

How long has it been? Eight months now? What's happened in that time? The freeing of the traditional rite? What hasn't happened? There hasn't been any sign that the Archbishop has given the St. Rose Philippine Duchesne Community permission to find a real home. We still don't have a traditional sanctuary where we need not stumble around Novus Ordo furniture (excuse me, "ordinary form" furniture). We still don't have a regular place for our classes and social functions, either.

But those of us who see the Leaven from time to time can take comfort that progress is being made elsewhere in the diocese. Sacred Heart Parish in Shawnee may not have a traditional sanctuary either, but they can now proudly say they have a LABYRINTH.

“The labyrinth is very representative of who we are as a parish,” explained
Ann Daugherty, parishioner and music director at Sacred Heart. “We have young
and old parishioners, some whom have been here for years and some who are
new.”

Yeah, not exactly a grotto for the Blessed Mother, eh? Nevermind all those rosaries, let's engage in a little New Age spirituality and see if we can't find the Minotaur, while we're at it, eh? The article lamely claims that labyrinths are some sorth of primitive, or at least medieval, spiritual exercise.

Yeah, right.

Medieval? So there are labyrinth design in gothic cathedrals, sure. But the new labyrinth movement was "rediscovered" a heretical Episcopalian priestess from California as a means of shaking off the angry white male God and replacing Him with....a deified and feminized vision of onesself. Hardly medieval, unless of course you believe Dan Brown or the freemasons.

A great article exposing the labyrinth sham (written by a heretical Methodist who nonetheless recognizes paganism when he sees it) is available here.

Hey, this free access to National Catholic Distorter is interesting!

2007-08-10T22:14:00.001-05:00

Here's the summation of their editorial on the motu proprio:

We fear that re-embracing the Latin Mass could undermine the liturgical reforms that undergird the spiritual and theological developments of the Second Vatican Council. Changes that will set off our alarms include:
Reconfiguring seminary curricula to focus time, resources and talent on training priests to offer Mass and other sacraments in Latin and away from training that would support celebrating the sacraments in the vernacular.
Cutting back on seminary training on pastoral duties, such as counseling and chaplaincies.
Restricting church design and architecture in favor of old forms not conducive to the guidelines in liturgical documents written in the last 20 years.
Discouraging efforts to use contemporary music and other artistic expressions in liturgy.
Increasing restrictions on liturgical ministries open to all laypeople, men and women.

Some of us fear; some of us pray.

And in this article, we have some woman in Colorado Springs complaining that the traddies there preferred the company of other traddies, and preferred the old organic calendar to the "on the spot product" manufactured a few years ago, and preferred that church architecture.be....well....traditional. And she goes on to use a "we all celebrate Dad's birthday a different day" analogy. Well, of course, that's quite compelling, until you realize that Dad birthday is when it is, and SOMEBODY changed it.

Sister Joan's take?

2007-08-10T21:14:00.000-05:00

I'd sure like to read this article, but not so badly that I'd give the National Catholic Distorter my credit card number:

Column

Joan
Chittister
The Latin Mass:
The laity will decide

OK, I guess I don't have to give them that, or anything else about me, so long as I click through a link to find .... yes.... a picture of an oppressed woman in a mantilla, following the Mass in her "Tridentian" hand missal.

This is beautiful. Yes, it's shootin' fish in a barrel, but hey: It does not make reconciliation easier with women, who are now pointedly left out of the Eucharistic celebration entirely, or with Jews, who find themselves in the Tridentine Good Friday rite again described as “blind” and as objects of conversion. One wonders if reconciliation is really what it’s all about.

Poor Mrs. Curmudgeon, struggling to reconcile herself. I would say she reconciled with Rome much easier singing the choral part of the Aspereges Me that she did when I first took her, still a heretic, to Mass in college so she could sing kumbayas

It all depends, of course, on what you want to teach about our faith in the Eucharist. . . The Latin Mass, in which the priest celebrates the Eucharist with his back to the people, in a foreign language -- much of it said silently or at best whispered -- makes the congregation, the laity, observers of the rite rather than participants in it.

There goes the materialist, eh? If you can't measure it, it isn't happening, right? I'll tell you (as someone who has assisted from the pew in both N.O. and Tridentine Masses, and as someone who has served at the altar in both N.O. and Tridentine Masses, that I participate most fully in Tridentine Masses where I'm in the pew, alone at a low Mass, focused on the prayer, instead staring at the ceiling at an N.O. Mass while the ICEL drone goes on, or instead of (long ago) serving the N.O. in my rope belt and alb-thingy and watching the people in the Nave, and even (more recently) serving in cassock and surplice in the Tridentine Rite and focusing primarily on the my duties and trying to get the Latin pronounciation of the response to Orate Fratres right.

The symbology of a lone celebrant, removed from and independent of the congregation, is clear: Ordinary people have no access to God. They are entirely dependent on a special caste of males to contact God for them. They are “not worthy,” the liturgy says, even “to receive” the host.

This is even funnier than the caption of the oppressed woman reading her "Tridentian" Missal. Of course, Sis, the it's that goofy ICEL gloss on the Novus Ordo liturgy that says we are "not worthy...to receive." Obviously, you haven't actually been to or looked at a Roman Missal in a good long while. The Domine Non Sum Dignus is that we are "not worthy...that You should enter under my roof."

The Eucharist in such a setting is certainly not a celebration of the entire community.

Indeed it is not. What a relief, to spend 45 minutes at a low Mass, or 90 minutes at a high Mass, and escape from the our worldly society wherein everything is a celebration of yourself!

At the same time, the sense of mystique, the incantation of “heavenly” rather than "vulgar” language in both prayer and music, underscores a theology of transcendence. It lifts a person out of the humdrum, the dusty, the noisy, crowded chaos of normal life to some other world. It reminds us of the world to come -- beautiful, mystifying, ordered, perfumed. It takes us beyond the present, enables us, if only for a while, to “slip the surly bonds of earth” for a world less mundane. It privatizes the spiritual life. This is a God-and-I liturgy.

Careful, there, Sis. An objection to transcendence, beauty, and order? You're running the risk of making your agenda a little more clear than your spiritual handlers might want you to!

"The Vatican II liturgy, on the other hand, steeps a person in community, in social concern, in the hard, cold, clear reality of the present. The people and priest pray the Mass together in a common language, with a common theme. They interact with one another. They sing “a new church into being,” non-sexist, inclusive, entered together in the Jesus who walked the dusty roads of Galilee -- curing the sick, raising the dead, talking to women and inviting his community to do the same.
The Vatican II liturgy grapples with life from the point of view of the distance between life as we know it and life as the Gospel defines it for us. It plunges itself into the sanctifying challenges of daily life.
It carries within it a theology of transformation. It does not seek to create on earth a bit of heaven; it does set out to remind us all of the heaven we seek. It does not attempt to transcend the present. It does seek to transform it. It creates community in an isolating society. "

Aw, now you've gone and showed just a few more cards than you should have. Nevermind that the Latin is less "sexist" than the N.O. thanks to the useful noun homine. Oh well, and I'm quite sure your typical reader doesn't know who Robert Hugh Benson is, much less recall the humanist liturgy he imagined in his 1907 apocalyptic novel Lord of the World. And your typical reader has to be delighted that what passes for Catholic Mass is, ideally, more like the neo-pagan opening ceremonies of the modern Olympic Games than like the Mass of the saints.

"In their fundamental message, they present us with more than two different styles of music or two different languages or two different sets of liturgical norms. They present us with two different churches.
The choice between these two different liturgies brings the church to a new crossroads, one more open, more ecumenical, more communal, more earthbound than the other. The question is which one of them is more likely to create the world of which we dream. "

Yes, one more earthbound. Yes, one "to create the world of which we dream." No disagreement there, Sis. Here's the first time (and perhaps the only recent time) you've expressed a Catholic truth more clearly than the Holy Father.

Now it’s up to the laity to decide which church they really want and why. Which we choose may well determine the very nature of the church in years to come.

Yes, and once again, I still can't seem to find any New Coke at Hy-Vee?

Yes, we shall see soon....

2007-07-13T00:37:00.001-05:00

I guess I haven't taken Father Zuhlsdorf's advice. I stated earlier that we wouldn't know the value we can assign to this motu proprio until we see what the Ecclesia Dei Commission really does for the faithful, particularly with the most recalcitrant ordinaries.

And well, I guess we shall see soon. Father Z has got his hands on a statement from Tod Brown, Bishop of Orange. In it, we see the bishop (1) dividing and conquering, isolating the "stable groups of the faithful" by requiring them to go to their geographic pastors, and (2) mildly threatening any decent clerics that might be left in the diocese to wait for him to take the lead, (3) contain the Mass at the tiny chapel in San Juan Capistrano and (4) wreck any new attempt at restoring the Mass by calling on the use of the modern lectionary (with, we can only assume, the crappy ICEL translations we've all fled.)

Anyways, if you want to read it with Fr. Z's commentary, CLICK HERE. Or see below for snippets with no commentary (my own, perhaps less charitable, commentary has been attempted, but deleted). We'll see what happens in the Diocese of Orange, and we'll know where the Church is headed.

OFFICE OF THE BISHOP
Marywood Center
P.O Box 1419
2811 E. Villa Real Drive
Orange, California 92863-1595
PHONE (714) 282-3105
FAX (714) 282-3029

MEMORANDUM

To: The Presbyterate of Orange
From: Most Reverend Tod D. Brown
Re: The Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum
Date: 10 July 2007...

I urge all pastors to join me in a common pastoral approach to the implementation of the Moto Proprio. It is the prerogative of pastors when requested by “a group of faithful (coetus fidelium) attached to the previous liturgical tradition exists stably (or continuously) (continenter exsistit),” i.e., parishioners in the full canonical sense of that term, and who request the celebration of the Holy Mass according to the rite of the Roman Missal published in 1962, together with the other liturgical celebrations as specified in the Apostolic Letter, it is their prerogative to “willingly accede (libenter suscipiat) to their requests, if the following conditions can be pastorally met:

• The availability of a priest, in good standing, who can demonstrate a minimum rubrical and linguistic ability to celebrate the extraordinary form.

• The ‘group’ of the faithful (that) exists ‘stably’ needs to be of sufficient number to warrant the public use of the forma extraordinaria. Individuals who are not geographically or intentionally part of a particular parish community should have recourse to their proper parish with their request or to the existing public celebrations that presently are offered in the Diocese of Orange at Mission San Juan Capistrano and Pope John Paul II Center.
• If the public celebration of the Eucharist in forma extraordinaria is conceded in accord with the norms as articulated in the Apostolic Letter (Art. #6), serious consideration should be given in using the Readings in the vernacular using the reformed Lectionary for Mass and its expanded cursus of Scripture texts. In this way, the entire parish community, whether utilizing the forma ordinaria or the public forma extraordinaria may be united in heart and mind around a single proclamation of God’s word.

While great responsibility is placed upon the pastor of the local parish in making these pastoral determinations, it remains for the Bishop of the Local Church in his role as moderator of the liturgy in his own diocese, to insure peace and serenity in the implementation of the universal norms of the Church regarding the worthy celebration of the liturgy as well as to intervene to prevent abuses from arising with regard to liturgical celebrations in his diocese. As pastors charged with the care of souls it is incumbent upon us to do whatever we can to help build a greater sense of communion in our local Church where divisions may exist particularly in areas of liturgical praxis. May this Apostolic Letter be an opportunity for us all to renew our commitment to being worthy stewards of the Holy Mysteries faithfully celebrated in accord with the rich Tradition of the Church.

Hey, dude, where in this store do you keep the New Coke?

2007-07-08T23:17:00.000-05:00

The Coca Cola Company allows production of "Coca Cola Classic"
By John Thavis Coca Cola News Service

ATLANTA (CNS) -- In a long-awaited overture to disaffected soda traditionalists, the president of the Coca Cola Company allowed limited production of "Coca Cola Classic," the original formula soft drink which was recently replaced by New Coke.

The president said the Classic formula should be made available in to consumers who desire it. He said that while New Coke, introduced a few months ago, will remain the flagship product of the brand, Classic Coke should be considered "the extraordinary form of the Coca Cola product."

This reintroduction implies no failure of the New Coke production and marketing plan, but simply "two variations on the one flagship Coca Cola product." The president's directive came July 7 in a four-page letter to bottlers titled "Introducing Coca Cola Classic." The old formula will begin appearing in bottles and cans--not in fountains--Sept. 14. An accompanying personal letter from the president dismissed fears that the decisions would foment divisions among Coke drinkers or be seen as a retreat from the New Coke campaign.

The president said New Coke would certainly remain the company's predominant product. Drinking Coca Cola Classic presupposes a certain degree of sophistication and traditional preferences and "neither of these is found very often," he said. But the president expressed sympathy with consumers who are attached to the old Coke formula and uncomfortable with New Coke.

In the period since the introduction of New Coke, he said, excessive, Pepsi-like sweetness often led to "unfinished bottles and unsatisfactory mixes with rum and bourbon which were hard to bear.""I am speaking from experience, since I, too, lived through that period with all its hopes and confusion. And I have seen how arbitrary changes in the formula caused deep pain to individuals totally rooted in the old formula," he said.

The president noted that many older consumers have a long connection with the Classic formula. But in recent years, he said, it has been clearly demonstrated that young people are also attracted by the old formula.

By widening its availability, the president said, he hoped to make the new and old Coca Cola formulas "mutually enriching."

The old formula has been hoarded and bottled by small, out-of-the-way bottlers since shortly after the introduction of the new formula, but customers had to make special trips--often hundreds of miles and beg bottlers for it, who did not always consent.

...[T]he new policy did not explicitly state that those buying Coca Cola Classic were also expected to buy New Coke. The company said that crossover purchasers would be presumed, however.

He emphasized that although the new formula was designed to replace the old formula, the old formula was "never formally abandoned." Its restoration as an extraordinary product thus does not undermine the company's decisions with respect to New Coke, he said.

"There is no contradiction between the two formulas. In the history of our company there is growth and progress, but no rupture," he said."What earlier generations held as a good product remains such, and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful," he said.

Hmm. Anytime Skylstad is involved....

2007-07-08T22:51:00.000-05:00

OK, while it's great to see pious women abandoning the dispair of the sedevacantist position, I have to wonder:

(a) Why would the choose to make their obedience under the care of such a lousy steward as is Bp. Skylstaad? Maybe they could have jumped over to Bishop Vasa's diocese and had a much more sane reintroduction into full communion.

(b) How much have these nuns agreed to pay on the Spokane bankruptcy settlement?

(c) How do they like the new Mass? Skylstad isn't known as one particularly solicitous of traddies. How many kumbayas will it take before they start wondering if the seat of Spokane is really empty?

(d) If they reach the conclusion I fear they might in question (c) above, would they then be"Sedespokantists?"

I remain the skeptic

2007-07-08T18:09:00.000-05:00

Yes, despite what everyone says, I still remain skeptical. Maybe, just maybe, if the people in Springfield, and in Orange, and in Houston, and elsewhere, are accommodated in short order (especially if that accomodation comes quickly from the Ecclesia Dei commission over the local ordinary's stalling tactics, and we see Rome taking care of traddies), that skepticism will fade. But for now, I remain skeptical.

For instance, a statement that priests of the old-rite orders (sorry, I'm not good enough at Romanitas to go along and say "two forms of the same rite")....ahem, a statement that priests of the old-rite orders can't in principle refuse to say the newfangled Mass....such a statement seems like a little time bomb.

I'm sorry, Fr. X, but your objections to the N.O. as a baser form of liturgy are unacceptable. You're assigned to say the N.O. every Sunday at 9am--maybe it would ok if you said a public Tridentine Mass Sunday at 3:30 pm.

On the other hand, if Fr. Y can't say the N.O. because he has a tee time....well....that's a practical reason, not a principled one. Perhaps Fr. X oughta take up golf.

How many does St. Vincent's seat?

2007-07-07T12:58:00.000-05:00

It may be crowded at St. Vincents during the Triduum next year:

Art. 2. In Masses celebrated without the people, each Catholic priest of the Latin rite, whether secular or regular, may use the Roman Missal published by Bl. Pope John XXIII in 1962, or the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970, and may do so on any day with the exception of the Easter Triduum. For such celebrations, with either one Missal or the other, the priest has no need for permission from the Apostolic See or from his Ordinary. [emphasis added].

As I feared, this motu proprio restores nothing to us, the laity, nothing, either in principle or in practice. And in practice, it actually takes away from the clerics: they can no longer celebrate the holiest liturgies of the year in the old rite, and those haggard diocesan clerics, ordinarily limited to one Mass on a feria, in practice won't have the ability to say the old Mass as they want to. The reprehensible modernist bishops have one another battle. You can just hear Cardinal Murphy Cormac O'Connor gloating about it, happy to avoid any prayers that would lead infidels, heretics and schismatics to the one true faith.

So all of you in Springfield, Missouri, and other places subject to oppressive modernist regimes, you won't be assisting at an authorized traditional Mass anytime soon.

I guess it really isn't just a rumor....

2007-06-28T08:52:00.000-05:00

Vatican Press Release:

28.06.2007

COMUNICATO DELLA SALA STAMPA DELLA SANTA SEDE
Si è svolta ieri pomeriggio in Vaticano una riunione, presieduta dal Cardinale Segretario di Stato, in cui è stato illustrato ai rappresentanti di diverse conferenze episcopali il contenuto e lo spirito dell’annunciato "Motu proprio" del Santo Padre sull’uso del Messale promulgato da Giovanni XXIII nel 1962. Il Santo Padre si è recato a salutare i presenti e si è intrattenuto con loro in un’approfondita conversazione per circa un’ora. La pubblicazione del documento – che sarà accompagnato da un’ampia lettera personale del Santo Padre ai singoli Vescovi - è prevista entro alcuni giorni, quando il documento stesso sarà stato inviato a tutti i Vescovi con la indicazione della sua successiva entrata in vigore.
[00979-01.01]
[B0356-XX.01]

Let's pray that my fears from last night are unfounded!

Worse off than before...?

2007-06-27T21:49:00.000-05:00

Having been on the farthest fringes of the Catholic news loop for some time, Mrs. Curmudgeon was the one who pointed me to the news that the Vatican had released the motu proprio to representatives of the various episcopal conferences. Rorate Caeli has the details; no point in pretending that I'm telling anyone any thing they don't already know.

But of course, there are two points which weren't, perhaps, emphasized enough on that site and in the comments that followed. They bear out a concern I've had for the last couple of years that under the guise of preserving Tradition, the Vatican apparatchiks will destroy it.

The froggie liberal Catholic paper La Croix reports, among other things, that (per Rorate Caeli's translation):

"The motu proprio should predict safeguards to guarantee the last word to the bishop, in case of a disagreement between faithful and priests on this matter."

...and....

"... the motu proprio could establish that the lectionary be, in both rites, the one established by Paul VI in 1967. [sic]"

Well, if the La Croix report is true, in a few weeks, the Vatican will find itself farther than it has been in years from any sort of reconciliation with the SSPX or other "irregulars." And the SSPX and other irregulars with find themselves with an influx of now-indulterous priests and laity who recognize this "liberalization" for what it really is...a wolf in sheep's clothing (in fact, not very convincing sheep's clothing). Nothing has been liberalized; the Ecclesia Dei regime will continue, but with the new burden of substituting the ridiculous, pointless calendar novation imposed by Pope Paul for no other purpose than to break with tradition, and with the awful Pauline lectionary that destroys the wonderful annual cycle that (even after just a few years) I so look forward to.

And I'm sure that the distance will be just fine for many of the wicked men in Rome and various chanceries about the world who are eager to drive the last vestiges of the Church out of their little modernist organization. Anyone who's not asleep can recognize that any changes to the preconciliar Missal right now will be identified by traditionalists as an attempt to co-opt and divert. If there's to be any hope of healing any wounds in the church, that healing certainly won't come if there's tinkering with the Tridentine rite. The Tridentine rite must remain static in order to survive within the formal boundaries of the Church. The Wuerls and Ricards and (closer to home) Liebrechts of the world will certainly cheer this motu proprio, if La Croix is right, because it very well could cause the movement to regularlize the old rite to splinter, and it will leave them free of the last remnant of tradition so they can continue their Barney Masses and their Clown Masses and their Young-Halfdressed-Hottie-Liturgical-Dancer Masses without that embarrassing reminder of how it used to be, when we worshipped the Almighty instead of ourselves.

The only hope we have is that, in fact, La Croix is simply assisting the froggie bishops in a last ditch effort to sabotage this project. Will the Vatican screw this up? Hmm. I'm hoping they don't, of course, but there's a good four or five decade-long history of the Vatican screwing things like this up, isn't there?

But if it's not sabotage, and the Vatican is determined to screw this up, then the Curmudgeons (and others) will have a decision to make. Are we willing to participate in the final destruction of the old rite? Are we willing to go along the latest fabricated, on-the-spot, half-assed nonsense? And are we willing to listen to the see-Spot-run banal translations that the wretched ICEL and USCCB have imposed on everyone else every Sunday?

Hmm. My preliminary answer to that question will certainly disturb some of my indulterous clergy and lay friends. Let's just hope the question isn't asked.

I'm still here.

2007-06-10T22:22:00.001-05:00

As for the last couple of months, I've got all kinds of excuses:

Been busy. Lost my password for the new blogger for a while, and had trouble logging on to the old computer. We finally sold the old Cave, and moved to temporary lodgings while we search for a new one, so I've been carting boxes. Didn't have a place to set up the old desktop (which was really cranky anyways) so it wasn't convenient to blog until recently, when we got the laptop. Employment circumstances have changed (for the better), and commute has extended, so haven't had so much lazy time at home to blog, or to surf the internet and find things to get mad and blog about. I've also been traveling some. I've been waiting for the motu proprio and our liberation. I've been reading real, printed books.

I could go on--I've got plenty more excuses where that one came from.

But I won't.

I just want folks to know that I'm still out there, and I still have the best of intentions about returning to the blog.

In the meantime, enjoy a lousy camera phone picture of a beautiful sanctuary.

I was in the Denver area on business a while back and had an opportunity to stop by the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Community, the FSSP apostolate in Littleton, Colorado. Another great story, alongside that of St. Stephen Protomartyr in Sacramento: the indulters in Denver, unobstructed by (although still hassled by) modernist chancery rats or an indecisive archbishop, located a suitable facility built by a Protestant sect that had contracepted itself out of existence, and turned it into something beautiful (too small, of course, but beautiful). I knocked on the door and met a few really nice folks who showed me the church, and we had a nice visit. I learned that OLMC is, only a few years after starting their project, debt free with quality facilities (too small, of course, and not as beautiful as something built by our great granparents before the modernists destroyed ecclesiastical architecture in the 1940s, but quality).

And it's all theirs! No working around the novus ordo table in the middle of the sanctuary for them. No clearing out early so the rappers can come in and profane the sanctuary with their "music" for them. No scrambling to figure out what to do with the liturgical gear between Masses for them. What a joy it must be to be able to live a normal Catholic parish life, instead of being a tenants at a dying novus ordo parish, and getting short shrift from the chancery rats who are only interested in our money!

Just another Thursday after Easter....

2007-05-17T06:46:00.000-05:00

This, from the short-lived Slackjawed Trad, is rather fitting on this random Thursday after Easter:

Sunday, February 4, 2007

Ascension on Sunday?

Sure, it's nowhere near the feast of the Ascension. But we can anticipate it, can't we? Every year I get bugged about it, and this year I'm getting bugged about 100 days early. Seriously, if we start talking about it, and whining to our bishops about it NOW, maybe they'll have had enough by the time they and their other provincial bishops get together and he'll fix the latest mistake in the novus ordo calendar.

Anyways, what's this about? Well, I know it's 100 days ahead of the liturgical schedule, but I just got the bishops' new translation of the novus ordo readings for this year's feast of the Ascension (Luke 24:46-53), which are based on Latin texts which were not available to St. Jerome, or even the more recent translators of the Neo-Vulgate:

[Jesus] said to them: "Thus it is written that the Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead on the third day. In His name, penance of the remission of sins is to be preached to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses to this. See, I send down upon you the promise of my Father. Remain herein the City until you are closed with power from on high."

Then He led them out near Bethany, and with hands upraised, blessed them. And as He blessed, He began to leave, but James, the brother of Jesus, spoke: "O Lord, it is but the the fortieth day since your Resurrection from the dead, and but the fifth day of the week. It would not be fitting to mark such a common day such as this for Your Ascension; rather, you should wait to ascend on the first day of the week, verily, a much holier day than the fifth day.

And Andrew grasped the garment of Jesus as He began to rise to heaven and said "Teacher, please don't leave us until the forty-third day, as truly the Father's chosen People wandered the desert for forty-three years, and the the rain fell upon Noah for forty-three days, and you yourself fasted in the desert for forty-three days before you commenced your ministry."And Jude said, "O Lord, if you were to leave today my family might not be able supp together. And some disciples might neglect the commemoration of your glorious ascension and instead remain home to watch television. Should you leave on this day many disciples would neglect to commemorate it. If you wait until the first day of next week, the day of your glorious resurrection, it shall be Mother's Day and the disciples might attend Holy Mass to please their mothers. Please remain with us."

And Simon-Peter said, "Teacher, I beseech you to wait until the forty-third day, for John, the apostle whom you love, has scheduled a haircut and has not come with us to witness this."And the other apostles grasped His robes and pulled Him to the ground and bid Him "Yea, Lord, do not leave us on such an inconvenient day. Truly if thou art the Christ, the Son of God, Thou canst delay Thy departure to a day more suitable for us."

And thus, my friends, we have Ascension Sunday. What a shame Holy Mother Church was so wrong for so many centuries! To celebrate it on a Thursday? Bah!If you offended by this....well, if you're offended by it....well, write your bishop about it; don't write me.

Posted by Slackjawed Trad at 9:58 PM 1 comments Links to this post

What happened to me?

2007-04-12T08:28:00.000-05:00

I was blogging.

Then I quit in October.

Then I was blogging again about the November cloning election.

Then I quit again.

Then I started blogging again in January.

And now I've disappeared.

Pretty much everyone's given up on me, I know (and there weren't that many to start with).

But here's the deal: In late March, I received an email from the Netherlands Lottery Board announcing that I'd won a million Euros.

Since then, I've been furiously working to get my financial and legal affairs in order, doing tax planning, setting up trusts, etc., etc.

In the next couple of days, I'm going to fly to Amsterdam and claim my prize. (Don't worry, I'll be wearing a bracelet that says "DO NOT EUTHANIZE ME!" in English and Dutch.)

And once I do that, I'll have plenty of time to devote to the blog. I'll make it what it once was....and more.

Report on the "Loyal Dissent" lecture.

2007-03-25T16:19:00.000-05:00

A report from our mole on the Topics-to-Go lecture by "'loyal' dissident theologian" Fr. Charles Curran yesterday, March 24. He promises more later.

Curmudgeon, Wolftracker,

Once again, I ventured into the deep and attended the Kansas City Catholic dissenters’ Topics-to-Go lecture series at the All’s Souls Unitarian Universalist "Church." And once again, I sacrificed a morning of my life (a beautiful spring morning, by-the-way) to hang out with a bunch of liberal gray-hairs.

You guys really need to start paying me for this. Really! At least cover the cost of the almond croissant and coffee I got at Napoleon’s Bakery to carry me through the ordeal. And give me five bucks to put into the "freewill offering" basket so they can pay airfare for the next dissident to Kansas City (don’t worry…I wouldn’t really do the latter).

So now I’m flipping through 15 smallish pages of notes looking for something interesting to say about Fr. Charles Curran’s talk. This time a professor was talking, so there were some outrageous things said, but not in a particularly outrageous way, unlike the antics of Bishop "Just Tom" Gumbleton (or Sister Joan Chittister and Kathleen Sebelius) last year. I’ll get to the summary in a moment, but as with the other talks, the most interesting things were the setting, the crowd and the Q&A session.

The setting was more subdued than last time. The only literature available as you walked in was a Voice of the Faithful brochure and a free copy the current issue of National Catholic Reporter (more on that later). I didn’t see literature or hear any new announcements about the KCSJ People of God organization that they were trying to start last year. The auditorium was as it was last time, except that additional chairs were set up in the foyer so that the huge crowd could be comfortable as it spilled out of the auditorium (it never did, BTW. There were a good number of empty seats. Attendance has fallen off since "Just Tom’s" talk in the heady early days of their project).

The front wall of the "sanctuary," the UU’s auditorium, still had that 25-foot tall nonrepresentational fabric-and-rope thingamabob that reminded me of a woman’s reproductive system. I used to think that there’s no place in this world for nonrepresentational art of that sort. I was wrong. The UU "sanctuary" is the perfect place for such a thing. This time I also noticed that beside the podium was a hoop-and-lamp doo-dad which is the UU logo. However, the lamp wasn’t lit. Rather fitting for it to be there in front of a dissident priest. And rather fitting that the lamp’s fire was out.

Anyways, the crowd was—as noted above—gray. Very gray. Lots of old women, fewer old men. A dozen or so younger folk (out of a total of around 200 people). And lots of women (old and young) dressed like men, with their hair cut like men. I didn’t sit next to anyone this time—there were plenty of seats available, but the woman down the row (30 to 40-ish, with the regulation manly haircut, manly khaki pants, and manly white button-down blouse) was apparently a true believer. She chortled at the typical applause lines (e.g., from Fr. Curran, "We tend to idolatry, making God in our own image, but we really don’t know what She looks like!") and guffawed and sighed at all the right places.

There was another amusing incident (amusing…like all of this…in a dark sort of way). Before the lecture started, the leader of the pack stood up and announced that there were copies of Curran’s book, Loyal Dissent, available in the back. Then she announced that someone had accidentally been given an autographed copy of the book, and she asked everyone who bought a book to examine theirs to see if there was a greeting scribbled to Sister Farrah Far-Out. Some guy raised his hand, and Sister Far-Out herself marched up to make the exchange. Her habit was indistinguishable from that of most of the other women in attendance: Regulation haircut, khaki pants, and a white button-down shirt. Perhaps they’re all sisters of the same order?

Anyways, there were no Roman collars in sight (certainly not from Fr. Curran, a suit-and-tie priest all around), but I recognized the former pastor of a midtown KCMO church behind me, and I also recognized my parents’ former rural pastor (now, I think, at some JoCo assignment…one of the "Holy Something-or-Other" parishes that seem to run together in my mind). I tried to get a couple of solid orthodox priests I knew to attend with me, and ask a few difficult questions, but I suppose Saturday morning confessions and other duties—or perhaps good sense—kept them away.

Now, I should discuss my talk, but I’ve just got to jump ahead. I’ll get to the bulk of Curran’s talk later in this email…or perhaps in the next. The Q&A session featured two or three queries and comments from the audience (two from some of the few members of the audience under 60), expressing fear for their progressive movement in the face of …. people like us: young conservative Catholics. One young woman (conspicuous due to her rather feminine haircut) asked "I look around, and I see a striking age difference here. We all see it. Most people who are young see things in black and white and are more conservative and legalistic. What are we to do?" A second woman, whose appearance I didn’t note and don’t recall, said she was concerned about the lack of youth in the room and asked "What do you think about the future of loyal dissent?" A third guy…thirtyish…stood up and announced that he was not so conservative as he used to be, and asked Curran to comment on "conservative dissent" on issues like bringing back--gasp--the Latin Mass.

In response to the first question, Curran took a mild track. He acknowledged that there was danger in certitude, and also that it was important that "groups like this" got together and dissenters drew support from one another. However, said Curran, it’s important that we all get along: it’s a big Church, and there is a need for Diversity as well as Unity. Curran then moved a little farther down the trail and cautioned the first questioner and the audience about the dangers of young Catholics looking for certainty, and he likened the conservative revival to the upsurge of evangelicalism that has eclipsed moderate protestantism in the last 40 years.

(Here, I noted that it was highly unusual…if not unheard of…for the dissenters to describe reactionary Catholic nuts like me as a source of "Diversity." Usually the Topics-to-Go crowd seems themselves as the sole source and arbiter of Diversity. We’re not ordinarily scored as "Diverse" notwithstanding that we’re often a minority of one in a room such as this).

To the second and third questioners, Curran opened up a little more, noting that keeping the interest of youth is a problem for every Church of every demonination. He noted that the average age of the subscribers to National Catholic Distorter was 67. That’s right….67 (!)...and they’re struggling to get younger readers. He sees real problems in the future. Curran’s suggestion was that younger people are too busy playing soccer-mom to get involved like the gray-heads in the room.

(Here I repressed an urge to jump up and answer the obvious question. So dissenters aren’t reproducing? Imagine that! I wonder if it has anything to do with disregard of the "non-core" teachings about artificial contraception? Or with the attitude of religious indifferentism? Too busy enjoying themselves to trouble with more than one designer child and too busy celebrating themselves to give that one designer child a solid leftist formation. Fr. Charlie oughta come to Blessed Sacrament. It’ll scare the hell out of him.)

Anyways, I have a few chores to do, so I’m going to postpone the writeup of the whole talk until latter on. I will say, though, that at the end of the talk, I lingered a little bit in the corner, pondering mischief. Do I kneel down and ask my parent’s old pastor for a blessing? Or perhaps as Fr. Curran? After all….St. Francis said that his first act on meeting a particular wicked priest would be to kiss his hands, because of their indellible sacerdotal character. Naw, I decided…my chaplain describes sacramentals as "spiritual bullets," but there seemed to be something wrong with firing such a bullet off in that setting.

More later.

Your unjustly-paid correspondent.

No problem at all

2007-03-24T21:29:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I took down a comment that directed readers to audio files of the St. Rose Philippine Duchesne Lenten mission, out of a concern (thoughtfully raised by Indulter X) that providing the recordings for free would interfere with the preacher's CD sales and make it harder for him to continue his ministry. Last week I was assured...indirectly...that the concern was unfounded, and that the preacher, Fr. Isaac Mary Relyea, is happy to have the conferences available.

They're available by CLICKING HERE.

Who needs the CD's when you've got the guy himself?

2007-03-12T22:51:00.000-05:00

Tonight was the first of four nights of our parish mission. We're quite fortunate to have Fr. Isaac Mary Relyea with us. Tonight he preached on death. Tomorrow night is judgment, then heaven and hell on Wednesday and Thursday (actually, I think Wednesday will be hell. I'd never heard of the guy before yesterday, but he's pretty darned good (and he's got a high standard to compare to with our FSSP priests).

If you're interested, a few pews remain: Mass is at 6:30pm , and Rosary and Fr. Isaac Mary's talk follow. Blessed Sacrament, 20th and Parallel Parkway (or thereabouts...just look for the steeple). There's also Mass and a talk at noon.

Come, but just don't take my seat.

I'm glad this thing doesn't conflict with Fr. Charles Curran's upcoming talk. I'm sure they'll be in the same league, eh?

UPDATE MARCH 13: Mea culpa. Apologies to Fr. Isaac Mary, and to the Fathers of Mercy. I had found a CPM designation for him on the Google search I did yesterday. Turns out that it's just plain wrong. He's not a member of that institute (which, judging from the one Father of Mercy I know, is nonetheless to be highly regarded). Guess that goes to show you can't always trust the internet. Except for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is never wrong, of course. Oh, and this website...another one that is totally free from error or deception.

Remember . . . they said it wouldn't cost Missourians a dime?

2007-03-10T23:55:00.000-06:00

I'm sure it's been prudently taken down from the Clone & Kill website now that they've won, but you'll recall that one of the grand lies that Jim Stowers' mouthpieces repeated ad naseum during the Amendment 2 campaign was that Amendment 2 wouldn't cost Missourians any money--there would be no public funding for scientists who created and then ground up babies for medical experiments.

Of course, that's 180 degrees from what Amendment 2 actually said (see Sec. 38(d)5) but of course, one isn't expected to be truthful in political campaigns, and if you have the right judge, and you've promised big bucks to the Secretary of State's future gubenatorial campaign, one isn't even obliged to be truthful on ballot language.

Now, of course they're all up in arms over there in the Missouri legislature, because some members really had the audacity to hold the cloners to their word. Blunt's plan to sell off state university assets to build cloning labs has been stymied.

And our own State Senator, Jolie Justus, towing the line of the party of death, is of course posturing her outrage.

Because you see, if it isn't about cloning, it also isn't about funding.

Of course not.

Let's not forget Satan's little helpers at the plaintiff's bar

2007-03-10T22:37:00.000-06:00

Of course, remember, it's about healing, not about money. It's also about justice (but please don't ask us to explain to you how getting 40% contingent fees on a judgment paid by expropriating the patrimony accumulated by generations of sacrificial giving from innocent fellow Catholics, instead of the perverts and their enablers themselves, is just).

Now, one of my big blogging regrets is that early on, I intended to focus on the modern theives and scoundrels at bench and bar who are exploiting the misdeeds and misgovernance of the clergy and hierarchy in order to destroy the Church and enrich themselves in the process. I got a few posts off on the subject, here, here and here, for instance, but I wandered off into other rants. The bad guys are still at it, of course, and Satan's own Marci Hamilton is still scribbling away in her comfy-chair at Cardozo, putting out unsupportable nonsense that a law professor--even one all- consumed with the project of ridding the world of religion--should not be allowed to print under her credentials. If I start posting regularly, I need to get back to this topic. Really, because it's one that nearly everyone else ignores.

But, Oh, Mr. Curmudgeon, though, where did you get this ad?

Well, I got it from Orville, with many thanks. Orville cut it out of a newspaper.

But from which newspaper, you ask?

The Davenport Leader
The Quad City Times
The Kansas City Star
Pitch Weekly
The Quad City GLBT News
The Catholic Key

Yes, of course, he cut it out of the Catholic Key (page 10 of the March 9, 2007 issue, vol. 39, no. 10).

Obviously, things are still rudderless at the Key (which is, of course, better than having a firm hand at the tiller steering the paper purposefully in the wrong direction). But we see our own diocesan newspaper being used as a tool of the enemies of the Church (which isn't new, of course, but this is noteworthy for its brazenness). Something must be done.

Hilary, we need you down here!

Regnans in Excelsis

2007-03-09T22:10:00.000-06:00

Pius Bishop, servant of the servants of God, in lasting memory of the matter.

He that reigneth on high, to whom is given all power in heaven and earth, has committed one holy Catholic and apostolic Church, outside of which there is no salvation, to one alone upon earth, namely to Peter, the first of the apostles, and to Peter's successor, the pope of Rome, to be by him governed in fullness of power. Him alone He has made ruler over all peoples and kingdoms, to pull up, destroy, scatter, disperse, plant and build, so that he may preserve His faithful people (knit together with the girdle of charity) in the unity of the Spirit and present them safe and spotless to their Saviour.

1. In obedience to which duty, we (who by God's goodness are called to the aforesaid government of the Church) spare no pains and labour with all our might that unity and the Catholic religion (which their Author, for the trial of His children's faith and our correction, has suffered to be afflicted with such great troubles) may be preserved entire. But the number of the ungodly has so much grown in power that there is no place left in the world which they have not tried to corrupt with their most wicked doctrines; and among others, Elizabeth, the pretended queen of England and the servant of crime, has assisted in this, with whom as in a sanctuary the most pernicious of all have found refuge. This very woman, having seized the crown and monstrously usurped the place of supreme head of the Church in all England to gether with the chief authority and jurisdiction belonging to it, has once again reduced this same kingdom- which had already been restored to the Catholic faith and to good fruits- to a miserable ruin.

2. Prohibiting with a strong hand the use of the true religion, which after its earlier overthrow by Henry VIII (a deserter therefrom) Mary, the lawful queen of famous memory, had with the help of this See restored, she has followed and embraced the errors of the heretics. She has removed the royal Council, composed of the nobility of England, and has filled it with obscure men, being heretics; oppressed the followers of the Catholic faith; instituted false preachers and ministers of impiety; abolished the sacrifice of the mass, prayers, fasts, choice of meats, celibacy, and Catholic ceremonies; and has ordered that books of manifestly heretical content be propounded to the whole realm and that impious rites and institutions after the rule of Calvin, entertained and observed by herself, be also observed by her subjects. She has dared to eject bishops, rectors of churches and other Catholic priests from their churches and benefices, to bestow these and other things ecclesiastical upon heretics, and to determine spiritual causes; has forbidden the prelates, clergy and people to acknowledge the Church of Rome or obey its precepts and canonical sanctions; has forced most of them to come to terms with her wicked laws, to abjure the authority and obedience of the pope of Rome, and to accept her, on oath, as their only lady in matters temporal and spiritual; has imposed penalties and punishments on those who would not agree to this and has exacted then of those who perserved in the unity of the faith and the aforesaid obedience; has thrown the Catholic prelates and parsons into prison where many, worn out by long languishing and sorrow, have miserably ended their lives. All these matter and manifest and notorius among all the nations; they are so well proven by the weighty witness of many men that there remains no place for excuse, defence or evasion.

3. We, seeing impieties and crimes multiplied one upon another the persecution of the faithful and afflictions of religion daily growing more severe under the guidance and by the activity of the said Elizabeth -and recognising that her mind is so fixed and set that she has not only despised the pious prayers and admonitions with which Catholic princes have tried to cure and convert her but has not even permitted the nuncios sent to her in this matter by this See to cross into England, are compelled by necessity to take up against her the weapons of juctice, though we cannot forbear to regret that we should be forced to turn, upon one whose ancestors have so well deserved of the Christian community. Therefore, resting upon the authority of Him whose pleasure it was to place us (though unequal to such a burden) upon this supreme justice-seat, we do out of the fullness of our apostolic power declare the foresaid Elizabeth to be a heretic and favourer of heretics, and her adherents in the matters aforesaid to have incurred the sentence of excommunication and to be cut off from the unity of the body of Christ.

4. And moreover (we declare) her to be deprived of her pretended title to the aforesaid crown and of all lordship, dignity and privilege whatsoever.
5. And also (declare) the nobles, subjects and people of the said realm and all others who have in any way sworn oaths to her, to be forever absolved from such an oath and from any duty arising from lordshop. fealty and obedience; and we do, by authority of these presents , so absolve them and so deprive the same Elizabeth of her pretended title to the crown and all other the abovesaid matters. We charge and command all and singular the nobles, subjects, peoples and others afore said that they do not dare obey her orders, mandates and laws. Those who shall act to the contrary we include in the like sentence of excommunication.

6. Because in truth it may prove too difficult to take these presents wheresoever
it shall be necessary, we will that copies made under the hand of a notary public and sealed with the seal of a prelate of the Church or of his court shall have such force and trust in and out of judicial proceedings, in all places among the nations, as these presents would themselves have if they were exhibted or shown.

Given at St. Peter's at Rome, on 27 April 1570 of the Incarnation; in the fifth year of our pontificate.

Pius PP.

The fashionable historians denounce it as the rash act of a holy, clear-thinking, but politically naive man. It wasn't fashionable, but it was right. Indeed, perhaps we need a little more holiness and clear thinking from Roman quarters (and from other points in the hierarchy), and a little more political naivete. A click of the news....from the UK, from the Czech Republic, from Red China, from the United States confirms it. I hinted at such myself last year. Perhaps Cardinal Biffi will give us a taste of that very sort of thing...the thing we had a taste of back in the days of Cardinal Ratzinger.

I really need to carry a few extra St. Benedict medals in my Car

2007-03-04T16:22:00.000-06:00

Bumper sticker alert:

The Divinity in me

blesses the Divinity in You.

Aikes!

This sort of thing helps me focus my thoughts about New Agers. Honestly, I don't usually give them much thought, notwithstanding the proximity of their "spiritual center" to the Curmudgeon's Cave. But for some time, I've been thinking that their worship of self, of their own wills, of their own urges, can be summed up as follows:

Spiritual maxxxxxxxxxx.

Ahem. I don't want to get picked up in the wrong kind of Google searches. Let's try it again:

Spiritual self-abuse.

Who's laughing? At what?

2007-03-02T21:12:00.000-06:00

Fr. Andrew M. Greeley, who is probably still rather perturbed by the cancellation of the local speaking engagement by his buddy, Bishop "Just Tom" Gumbleton (and the loss of a weekend of chumming about at the expense of whomever is funding the dissident activity in the Diocese of Tuscon), lets us know what he thinks about the state of Catholic education.

You see, in his column in the local shopper section of the newspaper in Tuscon (where he apparently now resides), he says there's a division between the hierarchy and the laity, and that the hierarchy is destroying Catholic education.

And how, Andy! (I mean . . . Fr. Andy)!

Oops, you mean the hierarchy's concern for "secularization and relativism" is what's killed it? Surely that's an editorial mistake...you meant the hierarchy's disregard of it. Right, Andy? (I mean . . . Fr. Andy)?

At least Fr. Andy's right on one point, as Orville noted in our brief exchange about this article this morning:

All of this pessimism troubles me because I've spent much of my life doing research on Catholic schools. I have concluded that Catholic schools are among the best things that the church in this country has done, that they are resources in social capital that the church should treasure and that they are more important in a time of change in the church than in a time of stability. Most people laugh at my research, which is the fate of a sociologist whose findings conflict with conventional wisdom.

Yes, the underlining is mine. At least he knows most of us laugh at his research. ...those of us who've gotten over the scandal of it....

One thing I'd also like to note: Fr. Andy he still can't come to grips with the fact that he, and those like him, are winning the battle. He dare not declare victory, or his troops might lose interest in his cause. But of course, the people in his camp these days can lay claim to "conventional" wisdom; concerns about relativism and secularism aren't conventional at all.

A week since the motu proprio

2007-03-01T21:07:00.000-06:00

Well, it's the first of March. It's been a week since the motu proprio was released and the ancient rite was released from bondage...

...or so some thought.

Actually, I have it on good authority, from the a volunteer at a parish in Overland Park, who overheard the parish secretary telling the sacristan that he heard the associate pastor talking to the pastor of a church in Kansas City, who knew a seminarian at Mundelein, whose friend from pretheologiate at Conception was a seminarian at the North American College in Rome, and the friend in Rome had dinner with a seminary professor whose housekeeper has a second cousin, and that second cousin is a headwaiter at a ristorante near Ottaviano station which is frequented by some Monsignori in the Pontifical Council for the Family, who were talking about a conversation one of them had had with the janitor who was responsible for cleaning Cardinal Arinze's office, and the headwaiter overheard from the Monsignori that the motu proprio would most certainly be released March 12, the Feast of St. Gregory the Great.

March 12.

It must be true. It must be.

So, call Vegas. Check the line on it, and put your money down.

March 12.

SOLD OUT!

2007-02-27T22:32:00.000-06:00

Less than a week after a friend of mine forwarded me the announcement of Fr. Charles Curran's forthcoming appearance in Kansas City, I hear again from him and learn that the venue is full, and they're taking no more reservations for the speech by the dissident priest and discredited theologian on March 24. Too bad, so sad. I'm just glad my correspondent got a seat reserved before registrations closed. We'll wait to hear his report in a few weeks.

In the meantime, wouldn't it be cool to have a lecture by a real Catholic theologian at the same time, and very near the same place? Anyone want to set that up? Anyone?

Kansas City's Ecclesiastical Ruins.

2007-02-27T09:18:00.000-06:00

The air cleared this afternoon a little bit, and the leaves aren't on the trees yet. So one can see a fair bit out my office window. I pulled my binoculars out of my drawer today, and looked out. And I counted. St. Vincent's. Blessed Sacrament. Holy Name. Annunciation. St. Michael. Holy Trinity. St. John the Baptist. St. Stanislas. Those are just the seven parish churches I can see that have been shuttered by the Diocese in the last few years. But for topography, and for demolition by-the-bye, I'd be able to see at least seven more.

No doubt, there are people working in Boston and New York and St. Louis office buildings who can see more recent ruins outside their windows.

But their more recent experience doesn't do much to lessen the shame of ours.

My last trip to that barbershop.

2007-02-26T22:39:00.000-06:00

I asked Mrs. Curmudgeon what she thought, and she thought I was way past due. She reminded me that she had told me I was way past due last Saturday, too.

So I got in the car and drove over the river to get my hair cut in a quaint little working class barbershop. No real man really wants to go to some chain for a haircut...you know where the guy cutting your hair is a little too...stylish...and a little too friendly. No man wants to schedule weeks ahead of time and pay $40 for a foo-foo haircut where the whole place is a little too...stylish...either.

So I went to an old fashioned barbershop. I'd been there a couple of years before, and I figured it would be easier to get in and out of there than it would be to drive over to Kansas, and I had another stop north of the river anyways.

But apparently, the old guy in the white smock from the Norman Rockwell painting had since sold out to a couple of women at that barber shop I chose.

Well...ok. The line didn't look too long. And at least the TV wasn't blaring, and there wasn't an issue of Penthouse under the TV (like I noticed on my last trip to the quaint downtown barbershop I frequented a few times, years ago). It's not quite the same, having one's hair cut by a woman who wasn't wearing a white smock and didn't step out of a Norman Rockwell painting, but we must have some commerce in the world as it is...maybe.

Unfortunately, though, I wished the TV had been blaring. The two barber women were talking about their planned Mediterranian cruise, which was a week away. I wondered how they afforded such a vacation, at 12 bucks a head, because I certainly couldn't afford it. But that was none of my business.

And then the topic turned to a particular nude beach on the French Riviera. Apparently, in a whole shop of working-class folks, everyone had heard of this beach but me, and the conversation got lively--not disgustingly prurient, but lively. I wondered if I should walk out, but it was my turn in the chair, and so I hopped up, thinking surely they'd stop.

But they didn't. And I heard the woman cutting my hair tell the other woman that she had told her 16 year old daughter to "get over it and quit being so modest."

Wow.

Maybe a few years ago when I watched more television I wouldn't have been so surprised to hear such a thing come out of a mother's mouth. But believe me, I was surprised.

I did let her finish my head (where else on earth could I have gone to have it finished?) paid with a small, undeserved tip, and got the heck out of there without words, only a slight nod and an insincere smile. I probably should have said something, but I was at a loss. What does one say to such a mother?

I suppose an experience like this is good once in a while, particularly for the head of a family, so long as youngsters aren't in tow. Being in a group of people totally unlike you, socially and religiously, without the boundaries one has in a workplace (at least in my workplace) that keeps things from getting outright raunchy....being in a place like that serves as a bit of a reality check from time to time.

We forget, when we spend our social time with like-minded folks, and when our co-workers tend to practice at least a modicum of discretion, what inroads the Enemy has made, and why it's so important to protect our families from the world out there.

In the meantime, does anybody know of a Catholic barbershop around town?

Thanks.

2007-02-25T19:03:00.000-06:00

Thank you, whoever you are. You know why. I'm grateful and I look forward to the read.

--Curmudgeon.

Reminiscences

2007-02-23T00:25:00.000-06:00

Permit be to revisit a couple of daydreams.

This was a fun post. Someday maybe I'll follow up with a chapter 2:

http://curmudgeonkc.blogspot.com/2006/07/massachusetts-interdict.html

I rather enjoyed this one, too:

http://curmudgeonkc.blogspot.com/2006/04/not-me.html

Thursday Musings

2007-02-22T22:46:00.000-06:00

1. What on earth happened to my Blogroll? It was out of date before. Now it's just flat gone. Must have happened when I converted my template to the newfangled Google one. Hmm. Didn't notice until I went to clean out my Evil Trad reference. Maybe I'll just steal Wolfie's blogroll.

2. Standing in line this morning, to get some protein in my after yesterday's fast and abstinence, I had a good look at Ronald McDonald (yes, I know, but it was the most acceptable option where I was. The mom-n-pop place nearby has closed, and the other quick place has too much foo). Anyways, back to Ronald...has he always been so effeminate? I never noticed when I was a kid.

3. Mark your calendars! That paragon of Catholic theology, Fr. Charles Curran, will be speaking for the "Topics to Go" leftish crowd on "Loyal Dissent" at 9:30am on Saturday, March 24, at All Souls Unitarian Universalist "Church," in the shadow of Jim Stowers' American Century towers. Anyways, will Charlie wear his clerics? Well, probably. Media might be there, ya know. I'm sure he still has a suit in his closet, and by now he's taken a lesson from Richard McBrien and Andy Greeley to always have a picture of you in your clerics above some heretical caption. Better to undermine the church with, my dear.

4. Was Ronald McDonald always so effeminate? I never noticed when I was a kid.

5. Finally, I'm Evil no more. Yesterday, I quit. After some time of chafing under certain directives imposed by the Evil Overlord, who has transformed the League of Evil Traditionalists from a fun ring of good natured (mostly) traddies, both indulters and "irregulars," into a boring ring where "docility" is de jure, I'd had enough. The League of Docile Traditionalists? Naw, I'll pass. You'll notice I'm no longer sporting the "Evil Trad" button. I still greatly admire Hilary and certain others in the Ring, (including, but not limited to, Mary and the newest member, Gillibrand) though.

Forget about the SSPX

2007-02-20T21:56:00.000-06:00

Okay, over at Kansas City Catholic, he had over 50 posts on the SSPX situation (one of which was mine). I'll spare you my usual rant about the arrogance and uncharitableness of the typical SSPX critic, and the harm that such a person does...for now. Like it or not, whether you view them as damned schismatics or noble warriors for the faith, they're not coming into a regular situation until they see evidence that there's a new wind blowing in Rome. Some folks don't think they'll ever come back.

So, let's just all forget about them for a couple of years. After all, they've been around for over 30 years, and during most of that time, they've been largely ignored. Let's all go back to ignoring them, and in the meantime....

In two days, I'm told by the latest internet buzz, the Holy Father will be finally acknowledging the right of every priest to say the old Rite (I'm sure it's true....this time). He ought to simply follow it up by freeing not just the Mass, but also the faithful who are attached to it.

Let's give the FSSP, and the other canonically regular traditionalists what the SSPX wants. Eh? Your Holiness? Nevermind Fellay and Williamson. Call Fr. Berg in. Consecrate him a Bishop...yourself...in the ancient rite...right there before the tomb of St. Peter. Dismiss the Ecclesia Dei Commission altogether and set up a new office to moderate traddie Catholic concerns. Send Msgr. Perl to work as a teller at the Vatican Bank, and bring in somebody from OUR side. Maybe Msgr. Schmitz? Send Cardinal Ricard back to drink his Bordeaux, and appoint in Bp. Bruskewitz and Abp. Burke (and their foreign equivalents, if any) to serve on the new commission alongside Bp. Berg. Give the FSSP the authority to operate worldwide in their own chapels, and serve their own faithful, without the intermeddling, the taxing, and the politicking of the modernist chanceries. Make the ICRSS an institute of pontifical right and do the same thing for them. Consecrate Msgr. Wach, too.

And then just ignore the Society of St. Pius X for a couple of years.

And then, sometime in 2010 or 2011, when you can point to the FSSP, the ICRSS, and the many smaller institutes that have sprung up to operate under the pre-1965 regime, and you can demonstrate that Rome has lived up to its promises....the promises (by the way) your predecessor apparently made in 1988 to the founders of the FSSP (but didn't follow through on), and the promises you seemed to make to the Institute of the Good Shepherd just recently (but your own Ecclesia Dei Cardinal, Ricard, has already undercut ), maybe then you can call Fellay into your office, and say "Hey, look at this, Bernard. We're doing exactly as we promised. Look at Southern California. There are ten apostolates in Orange and LA, and I told Tod Brown and Roger Mahony to pound sand. Look at the Diocese of Linz. Traditionalists are the only ones left. Look at how Campos is spreading throughout Latin America. Look all over the place. It's what you've been asking for all these years. Now either be part of this or go into formal schism."

And then, having manifested your good faith, and having the traditionalist movement in full blossom....then the choice will be clear to them, and you'll be able to separate the faithful Catholics who (I believe) make up the bulk of the SSPX and their adherents from those who are truly outside the Church.

Or is such a suggestion somehow ridiculous?

British media faux pas; a bad report on the culture of death

2007-02-19T21:48:00.000-06:00

One of my physician friends sent this over....

MUM GIVES BIRTH ..AFTER ABORTION
By Martyn Halle
EXTRA checks have been introduced at a hospital after a woman gave birth to a healthy baby - even though she'd had an abortion. Managers at Derby City General Hospital said additional measures have been implemented to prevent a repeat incident.

It seems that the British press isn't quite so savvy as ours. You'd never have the Wichita Eagle Beacon reporting on something so hideous as the birth of a child happening at Tiller's chop-shop on Kellogg, although one surmises that such a thing happens on a regular basis there, but is quickly . . . . corrected. My physician friend notes the quote at the end:

The local NHS trust carried out 1,301 abortions last year. A hospital spokesman said: "Although this happens rarely, a continuing pregnancy is a risk of this procedure. We take great care to minimise this."

I'm sure they do.

I have a disgruntled fan!

2007-02-15T21:26:00.000-06:00

Well, most of my old fans (maybe four out of the five of them) were disgruntled about one thing or another. Why else would they have followed my 15-month, 500-page saga of hair-tearing, windmill-tilting, and foaming at the mouth?

But there's one who's disgruntled about me....the Slackjawed Trad.

I kinda like him, so far.

More on the Society of St. Pius X

2007-02-11T22:29:00.000-06:00

Interesting, intelligent discussion re obedience and the traditional orders--with local implications--over at Kansas City Catholic. (No, I wasn't just surfing the net; Wolftracker told me about it personally).

I got my twocents in...perhaps late...but I got 'em in.

Oh, how I miss blogging!

Laid to rest...

2007-01-27T22:38:00.000-06:00

Today the Curmudgeons attended the solemn Requiem and burial for a longtime acquaintance, and a decorated soldier in last fall's Missouri clone wars. Wolftracker marked his passing earlier this week.

While the "official" anti-cloning organizations sat back last fall, biting nails over whether or not the hypothetical semi-churched soccer mom in St. Charles or Lee's Summit would be turned off by the plain and simple truth, this guy--despite the hole in his head--actually went out and did something about it. And he used his edgy personality and marketing background to great effect. He did the hard part; we just passed the hat to get stuff printed and the folks at Missouri Right to Life found the money to run the billboards. Our friend was one important factor in closing the gap, so that Jim Stowers, who spent $30 million, almost lost his bid for the state of Missouri on November 7.

Looking through some of his non-cloning work today at the luncheon and visiting with his widow (may God bless her), I decided, with her consent, to rerun some of his work on that project: bumper stickers, billboard designs, and even his cloning party-crashing report. Enjoy, and take heart that, even though we won't have his talents in the next battle against the culture of death, we will, God willing, benefit from his intercession.

May almighty God have mercy on him, and may he rest in peace. Amen

Bumperstickers & Billboards:

And the cloning party crasher's report:

Curmudgeon,

Phew!

I just returned from Satan's workshop, where about 30 of the deceived, the ignorant, and the willfully malicious were hangin' with Stower's handsome, eloquent puppet. Sorry I didn't catch his name.

They marked me right at the door – guy wearing church clothing, carrying a sheaf of loose papers. NOBODY carries papers in deepest, darkest Cass Co. unless they're a lawyer (there are no attorneys in Cass Co, just lawyers) or a process server. Or otherwise out to make trouble, which I was. Once I got into the gym, where the presentation was already in progress, I was flanked by the three women who were working the front door. (I wasn't late.) I thought that was weird – why did all three of them search me out and surround me?

I let the Mouth of Stowers give his presentation, which was naught but slickly packaged lies, one tumbling out after the other. The presentation was extremely thin on scientific facts, extremely thick on emotional, huggy-bunny "how can we let those mean, mean lawmakers in Jeff City ruin our precious chances for a perfect life, free from all pain and suffering, followed by eternal torment in Hell?"

There was ONE slide on the science behind Clone-and-Kill, and a great, steaming pile of unscientific crap – but it was GOOD unscientific crap. Here are the main points:

It's NOT cloning. No, no, NO! Just what it is remains undefined, but it's definitely NOT cloning. Even though the Mouth of Stowers said that the process produced an exact genetic copy of the donor. Naw, THAT'S not cloning. It's......something else.
The eggs required will come from the patient's dear old Mom, and his sisters, and his aunts, and his daughters, and great-grand-daughters, and may Almighty God help those poor guys whose womenfolk aren't willing to have their ovum hormonically squeezed out of them. The Mouth of Stowers (MOS) made it seem that all it would take was ONE egg, and, Voila! there would be a cure, all shiny and new and just laying there on the table! Cool!
Amendment 2 is all but required for the continued economic growth of Missouri, kinda like the Royals. Or the downtown stadium. Without it, Stowers might just take his ball and go home! And we all know what that would do to the economy! I mean, before Stowers built Mordor on the Plaza, the economy of the State was just, I don't know, not good!
Just look at all these doctors, and patient advocacy groups, who are behind this wholesale slaughter of human life! There are LOTS of them. So Amendment 2 MUST be good, right?
It's not about human life, or abortion, or anything like that! (Chuckle, chuckle.) If anybody tries to tell you it is, just ignore them. They're just silly, silly. Neanderthals, really, or Ostrogoths, Pay no attention to them! (Chuckle, chuckle.) We are sophisticated, and scientific, and so modern!
Religious people are against us. But look! We have Jack Danforth! He's an Ordained Episcopal Minister, and if he thinks it's OK, it's OK!
Are there cures now? No. But look-we've only been killing human embryos since 1998 or so! We haven't had the time to really get funky. We need that TIME, which the evil Matt Bartle tried to take from us. Bad Bartle! But if you vote yea, everything will be fine. So trust us - there will be cures SOMEDAY, we promise. Really.
There are 400,000 frozen embryos out there (really, trust us, there are) that the evil George Bush won't let us have! If we could just have this frosty population of a medium-sized city, which we could then kill, my, wouldn't all our lives be rosy!

Then it was Q & A time, which I blew big time. MOS asked for questions, and I sat on my tongue, waiting to see if there were "friendlies" in the crowd. There weren't. It was devolving rapidly into a Stowers love fest, which I decided to break up the way I know best. Tactlessly.

I told the MOS that "you don't 'grow' stem cells, sir, as you have erroneously claimed over and over again in your presentation. You grow a human baby, which you then kill...."

The room erupted, predictably, in jeers and catcalls. "It's not a baby, it's a ball of cells!" And etcetera. The usual pro-abort "logic". The woman behind me began a hyperintellectual litany of "Do you eat eggs? Do you eat eggs? Is it a chicken, or an egg? It's an unfertilized ball of cells!" Over, and over, and over.

The guy next to her told me he had three genetic diseases, and he needed a new liver. "And I don't care how many stems cells die before I get it!" he said. Oh, you're gonna get it, alright, I thought to myself. A group of women behind those two ethicists asked me, "When this amendment passes, and your children get a disease, what are you gonna tell them?" I pointed to Mr Disease Trifecta sitting behind me, and I said, "I hope that, unlike this gentleman, that they will be unwilling to take human lives to heal themselves."

Then the room just exploded with inane pro-choice cliches. The three chicks who shadowed me got up, and one of them said, "If anyone would like a more productive line of questions, MOS is going to step over here." My cue to step over there, and out the door, being followed by one of my Democratic Escorts.

I bought a bottle of wine on the way home.

Until next time....

Since we received the story above back in October, Mrs. Curmudgeon hasn't been able to pass the Stowers Institute without chuckling....Mordor on the Plaza.

Our fallen comrade also did s few great handouts and ads for the Diocese of Kansas City St. Joseph, but I don't have these in a format I can post on blogger.

Eternal rest grant unto him O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Me and Guy Crouchback

2007-01-21T22:00:00.000-06:00

In my post-blogging life, I've been doing a lot of things. Lots of reading and writing. Most of the reading has been tedious, and most of the writing has been stuff that I pray will be put in a file drawer and never looked at again. I've had a fair bit of housework, too, which has kept me from doing too much reading for pleasure.

One thing I did pick up, though, was Evelyn Waugh's (perhaps most underrated) novels, Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle, known as the Sword of Honour trilogy. Great read, I tell you. Great read.

If you haven't read Waugh, don't start with Brideshead Revisited. Save that one for later; the more you know Waugh, the more you'll appreciate Brideshead. My suggestion is that you start where Waugh started, Decline and Fall. A hilarious book, wherein you see Waugh's wit and style first emerge. Once you've done Decline and Fall, then you can move into the headier books. I'd read a couple more, though, before I hit Sword of Honour or Brideshead. Save A Handful of Dust and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold until after Sword of Honour or Brideshead. They're downers. I would recommend that you also save Helena for later, because while it's certainly not a downer, I think you have to be familiar with Waugh to appreciate the way he applies the early stamp of 20th century British society to the late Roman Empire. Next comes Waugh's non-fiction. Perhaps because of my lack of enthusiasm for modern-day Jesuits, I haven't read Campion (no, I've got nothing against the old Jesuits). However, a friend just read it and it was highly recommended.

--Curmudgeon

PS, "But Curmudgeon, it's been two months! Why won't you complain for us?" Ok, in my stealing time here and there to read, I picked up a belated Christmas gift, Frank Sheed's Theology and Sanity. Although I'm just a little ways into it, I thought, "Hey,. I wonder what they're up to at Frank's publishing house, Sheed & Ward, these days?

So I looked 'em up. And after I read the "About Us" page, I didn't go any further:

A Brief History of Sheed & Ward Book Publishing
Founded in 1926 by Australian lawyer Francis Joseph Sheed and his British wife Maisie Ward, Sheed & Ward is one of the most eminent Catholic publishing houses in the world today. In its now 77-year old history, Sheed & Ward have published some of the most prominent names in Catholic thought, including Hans Kung, John Courtney Murray, Edward Schillebeeckx, Dororthy Day, Clare Boothe Luce, Jacques Maritain, Francois Mauriac, G.K. Chesterton, and Paul Claudel. In recent years, Sheed & Ward have published some of the most important contemporary Catholic and Christian writers from both North America and Europe, including Daniel Berrigan,
Andrew Greeley, Rowan Williams, Joan Chittister, Michael Walsh, and Daniel Harrington.

Currently under the ownership of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Sheed & Ward are continuing its founders' original vision
and expanding it to meet the challenges of the publishing world of the 21st century. Drawing both from the storied tradition begun by Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward in 1926 and innovative strategies to bring the company forward, the young, dynamic Sheed & Ward team are committed to being the preeminent publishers of Catholic writing in the English-speaking world.

If only they published Rembert Weakland and Richard O'Brien, they'd have it made, eh?

Approaching 60 days....

2007-01-18T23:32:00.000-06:00

...and I'm still not blogging. And Oh, but I want to!

What I really don't get though is that I still get 30-60 hits a day, down from 150 or so when I was really trying. So it goes.

OK, I'm going to try this "quitting blogging" thing again...

2006-11-27T23:14:00.000-06:00

At the chiding of a spouse and a clerical friend, I'm going to try, once again, to give up blogging. So much to say, but there will always be stuff to say.

Maybe I'll take up smoking instead.

Wish me luck.

Where's the pro-death interfaith service this year?

2006-11-26T22:19:00.000-06:00

You may recall that last time Kathleen Sebelius was inaugurated, she had her interfaith hootenany at Assumption church, across the street from the Statehouse. Sensible people and faithful Catholics went ballistic--the pastor at Assumption (the parish of my father's childhood, BTW) was letting a pro-death pol celebrate her Tiller-funded victory in a Catholic church.

So they went to the chancery with their concerns, and Archbishop Kelleher wrung his hands a little in the press, but he refused to use his authority (your staff has a hook on the end for a reason, your Grace), and he let the sacrilegious show go on.

Well, it's time once again for Sebelius to go through her celebration of herself, and I just got an email from a concerned Knights of Columbus member asking us to contact the chancery and ask Archbishop Naumann to make sure it doesn't happen again. Naumann seems to be of stronger mettle than Kelleher, based on his recent columns dealing with Sebelius and her worldview, so we hope this won't be an issue, and we hope that Sebelius's enablers will not even attempt to defile a Catholic church again, but it wouldn't hurt if you contacted the chancery and let him know you're concerned, now would it?

abnoffice@archkck.org
12615 Parallel Parkway
Kansas City, KS 66109
Phone: (913) 721-1570
FAX: (913) 721-1577

And if you decide to call, do be nice to Mrs. Klingele. She is NOT one of the rats of which I spoke earlier.

Another post from retirement...

2006-11-25T15:05:00.000-06:00

As I sit here in the virtual retirement community, my thoughts go back the heady days of blogging, and I hop online to page through the website of that repulsive little rag I love to hate, the Kansas City Star. Whenever I didn't have anything to say, I could go to www.kansascity.com and get fuel for an instant rant.

What's been in it lately?

On Thursday, a report on the chancery rats' plan* to put the church out of business in Wyandotte County: lull the parishioners to sleep with administrative consolidations, quietly transfer money from the solvent parishes to the ones that are broke, and keep the buildings open for a year or two, so that no one's looking when they start selling off property. Folks at Holy Family, and St. Cyril's, and Our Lady & St. Rose, don't think for a moment you've dodged the bullet! Look at what Meitler did in St. Louis. It's still coming....

And today, the Saturday Faith spread....always a good laugh (or it would be if you didn't cry out for the lost souls who put it together). Bill Tammeus thinks it would be a good idea if that evangelical preacher Ted Haggard would embrace his sin, rather than repent of it. Gotta love this line:

If people assume their sexual orientation is sinful, there’s no way they can love their truest selves. That means a balanced, loving, authentic, responsible life of service to others is impossible.

See it's sexual "orientation," what we used to quaintly call "temptation," that evil, orthodox Christians condemn, it's not the act of will--i.e., actually engaging in buggery. Because, of course, we don't have free will. We aren't creatures of reason (except for the folks running the Stowers Institute. They are.). We're all beasts, subject to our passions, etc, etc., etc.

Now I remember why the Curmudgeons don't take the Star.

--Mudgie

*I'm not including the Archbishop among the rats, but I do wonder why he won't get a cat, or at least set some traps. His brother priest from St. Louis, now his episcopal neighbor, has made good use of his, but could probably spare a few.

Bruskewitz at it again

2006-11-19T23:40:00.000-06:00

Haven't had much commentary on strictly Church stuff lately, what with having given up blogging and with my previous focus on the fight against the Missouri cloning amendment. But yesterday in the car, I heard an audio replay of EWTN's The World Over, in which Raymond Arroyo went to far less effort to conceal his disdain for most of what the USCCB is up to than he has in previous years.

And apparently, many of the Bishops put forth even less effort than Mr. Arroyo. Arroyo had a number of Bishops commenting on various things---the disconnect between "official priorities" and staffing; the line items in the USCCB budget; the method by which business is conducted).

Among the snips he played for us was one from Lincoln Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz. The impeturbable ordinary of the Cornhuskers rose during discussion of some-or-another document (I think it was The Spiritual Value of Fibre: a Pastoral Response to the USDA's Proposed Revisions to the Food Pyramid), and quoted Cardinal Ratzinger on the pointlessness of the national bishops' conferences. I checked yesterday and today to see if the audio of the program was available at EWTN.com, but it's not. When it is, if I'm around, I'll find it, link to it, and tell you at what point in the clip you'll hear it.

But it was pure Bruskewitz: he quoted Ratzinger (whatever happened to the Cardinal anyways?) stating that the national conferences had no teaching authority and no ecclesial role to play. Bruskewitz just wanted everyone in the room to keep that in mind, he said, as they considered the document. To that, Bill the Bankrupt Bishop Skylstad, at the podium, meekly asserted that the statemnts he quoted were 20 years old, and that of course Skylstad saw great value in the Bishops' conferences and they've done great things (like give him an excuse to leave his mess in Spokane behind?).

I think Dusty posted on this, too. One or the other of us will probably have a link up when the program is archived online.

Don't spoil this...

2006-11-15T06:25:00.000-06:00

Another thing I've had time to do since I gave up blogging is reading the opinion pages.

And here's one I read this morning. Whaever you do, DON'T spoil the column by scrolling to the bottom to see who the author is until you've finished reading (no, it's not "Just Tom" Gumbleton, but it could be).

USCCB Budget

2006-11-14T21:47:00.000-06:00

Yes, I'm no longer blogging, but...

For those of you keeping score, the budget for the Vatican is reported to be about $250 million. That's about what it costs, say scattered reports, to run an entire government, and conduct the business of the Church in Rome (including dry cleaning all those white cassocks and preserving all those artifacts and historic buildings).

By contrast, the USCCB has a budget of $139 million.

OK, so the USCCB has no diplomatic missions to fund. It has no army to support. No streets to sweep. No centuries-old buildings to maintain. No artwork. No tourists to its modern office building. No Piero Marini productions to stage. No need for somebody to vacuum up dustbunnies in the Paul VI audience hall. And most significantly, it has virtually no canonical authority. It does nothing but issue statements that make Teddy Kennedy proud. And somehow, the USCCB spends more than half of what the Vatican spends each year.

And somehow, none of us can be surprised.

If you live in a diocese where your Bishop isn't a loonie, are you asking your Bishop what's going on back there?

--Curmudgeon

Hat tip to somebody. I saw this a while back somewhere, and meant to post on it before I gave up blogging. As it was, I had to go rediscover the data, but you get the idea.