Uncle!

I can't figure out what's gone awry with my comments. It's all jacked up.

Does anyone here speak MovableType? I'm in beyond my expertise level.

I've got a couple of posts in my head, but I'm saving them because I don't feel like we can really discuss them if the combox doesn't work.

I've been working on the website for the Society of St. Gregory the Great, a group interesting in bringing and supporting the Traditional Latin Mass to Johnson County, Kansas.

As part of this project, I wanted to introduce the namesake to people who might be interested. Pope St. Gregory the Great is one of the most notable figures in Catholic history and worth getting to know.

Here is the story of Pope. St. Gregory the Great, reprinted from the Society's website.

Pope St. Gregory the Great was the 64th Pope of the Catholic Church. He was a monk, deacon, priest, pastor, papal nuncio, abbot and later pope, saint and Doctor of the Church.

Gregory was born in 540 as a citizen of Rome. By the time he was 30 years old, he had a successful political job as the Prefect of Rome, but decided to leave it for the monastic life. By all accounts, he loved living as a monk, dedicating his life to quiet contemplation of God and trying to make himself fit for Heaven by self-imposed discipline and long periods of fasting. He was called out of his cloistered monastic life by Pope Pelagius II when the Holy Father appointed Gregory as a Deacon of Rome in 579.

As Deacon (a job that is defined very differently than today), he served as an ambassador to the Court of Byzantium in Constantinople. It was a very tumultuous time for Rome, the Church and Gregory. The Lombards, enemies of Rome, were making military advances toward the city. The Church was encouraging political alliances with Tiberius in the Byzantine Court. And Gregory was trying to live a monastic life in a political job to the best of his ability, keeping time for prayers and scriptural study in additon to his duties to the Court. About 6 years later, when his appointment was over, he returned to his monastic life in Rome and soon became abbot of his community.

In this time, he learned of a youth slave trade in what is now England. The practice upset him so much that he set out to convert the Anglo world, getting permission from Pope Pelagius II, he took a handful of fellow monks and set out to convert Britain. It was here that he coined the clever phrase, "They are not Angles, but Angels"; Gregory is one of the patron saints of England.

By the time Gregory was 50 years old, Pelagius died and Gregory was elected as the Pope-- a job he reluctantly accepted. Pope Gregory would reign as pontiff for the next 14 years.

There were a number of different liturgies of the Church at this time with widely variant practices. Gregory is most notably known for sorting through these different liturgies and assembling a standard Mass for Christianity-- Scholars agree that this is the first thing that is fully recognizable as the Holy Mass, incorporating standard rubrics and fixed prayers that are still in use today. Even the style of Chant still used in Catholic liturgies today had its origin with this pope, the style is even still called "Gregorian Chant"!

Pope Gregory also taught and developed the doctrine of Purgatory, helped mould the papacy into a more authoritative office and is known as a great reformer of the Church. He presided over Christianity as it faced threats from the Huns, Goths and Lombards, he drained the papal treasury to ransom prisoners from the Lombards and Franks and gave abundant charity to the sick and poor.

In summing up his legacy, the Catholic Encyclopedia states it nicely:

It is beyond the scope of this notice to attempt any elaborate estimate of the work, influence, and character of Pope Gregory the Great, but some short focusing of the features given above is only just.

First of all, perhaps, it will be best to clear the ground by admitting frankly what Gregory was not. He was not a man of profound learning, not a philosopher, not a conversationalist, hardly even a theologian in the constructive sense of the term. He was a trained Roman lawyer and administrator, a monk, a missionary, a preacher, above all a physician of souls and a leader of men. His great claim to remembrance lies in the fact that he is the real father of the medieval papacy.

When he died on March 12, 604, St. Gregory was immediately canonized by public acclaim.

Pope St. Gregory the Great was the first person to be named "Doctor of the Church", the first monk to be elected to the papacy and the first pope to carry the title of "The Great". He personally founded seven monasteries, was one of the first popes to send missionaries out to foreign lands and gathered unity over lands in Europe to form what would later be called the "Papal States".

He is the patron saint of the papacy, the patron of school children, choirs and educators. He is the patron of a number of countries, of stone masons, of musicians. He is considered the founder of the ancient Mass and is the namesake of the Society of St. Gregory the Great.

St. Gregory the Great, ora pro nobis!

If you live in Johnson County and are interested in supporting the Traditional Latin Mass, please visit the website to find out what is going on with our group. We're making a lot of progress, but really need to show good broad-based support from people in our part of the Archdiocese. Please look into the Society and help by praying for us. We'll pray for you too!

The good news is that things are about 80% up and running.

The bad news is that the comments are going to be disabled for a while. I've got some setting locked and I don't know how to unlock it yet. Besides, I'm going to install a captcha system to make sure that y'all aren't spamming robots (not that I think any particular one of you are, of course).

But the lack of comments has been sad for me. Any blogger will sheepishly admit that comments are just about the best reason to write a blog. It's killing me that they're down right now.

We got hit by the big bad spam monster today. In my efforts to head off the monster, something has gone amiss with the site.

Stay tuned.

Luckily, it's still August and no one is reading anyway.

St. Isadore of Seville, patron of the internet, ora pro nobis!

It's been a strange August so far. This week has been remarkably cool; we've even turned off the A/C at our house. Of course, that's not strange for us--my lovely wife and I are pretty conservative on our energy bills when we can squeak by on a couple windows and a little breeze. It's also been a decently rainy summer. I've been able to skip out on the sprinkler hose in the garden fairly often too--which is good because I'm not a reliable garden-waterer to begin with.

So since it's a strange August, I'll do something strange too: finish what I started and follow up on Monday's post regarding the coming changes to the Catholic Mass. Let it never be said that I don't finish what I started!

So, um where were we?

Oh yes, in the New Order of the Mass (Novus Ordo).

Most Catholics today take part in the Novus Ordo. It's the Mass that most churches offer 364 days of the year (every day except Good Friday-- which is not technically a Mass). People who have some awareness of the old Tridentine Mass differentiate the two noting that in the old Mass, the priest "turns his back on the people" and the whole thing's said in Latin. Conversely, in the Novus Ordo, the priest "faces the people" and speaks in English (or whatever vernacular language is applicable). Good Father Zuhlsdorf, in his blog What Does The Prayer Really Say? often notes that these two distinctions aren't theoretically correct--rather, they're irregular changes from the actual Mass.

In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they're not.

But it's an important set-up to this point: the Mass was conceived and written in Latin. The prayers, the directions to the priest, the "liner notes"--all of the rubrics were written in Latin, the language of the Church. Then different conferences of bishops were to make the Latin rubrics compatible for their dioceses. In fact, the Novus Ordo is supposed to be offered in Latin--though provisions are allowed to adapt some of the prayers into the vernacular language for pastoral reasons. I don't know what those pastoral reasons might be, as far as I know, the term was never fully defined. But when the United States bishops returned to the States with their new copies of the Missal, the first thing they did was translate the whole thing into English and tell their priests to face the wrong direction.

Is that an uncharitable over-simplification? Perhaps. Whoops. Hold on tightly, it may get worse.

It appears that in the zeal to translate the Novus Ordo into English that our dear bishops have made some oversimplifications of their own.

You see, imagine two world, Heaven and Earth. Down here on Earth are us lowly humans. We're not perfect. We have our limitations. Sometimes that's a real bummer, you know? Up Heaven is the Almighty Lord. He is perfect. He is limitless. As man, we struggle to come in contact with God--He's beyond our capacity. So when we try, there are two paths: raise man up to God or bring God down to man.

I'm willing to assert that the Novus Ordo Mass in every Catholic church in America is an attempt to lower God to our level; the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops decided to make the Mass "accessible" to dumb dummies like me (and you?). Let me illustrate. Does everyone have their 45-page "White Book" that I linked yesterday? Good. Please turn to page 1.

This is how the Mass begins. You get to church, dip your fingers in the holy water and bless yourself with the sign of the cross when you enter. Find a pew, genuflect towards the altar, file in and kneel down for a prayer before Mass (feel free to use your own). If the choir is trying to get everyone singing On Eagles Wings while you're trying to pray, I suggest shouting a Divine Mercy Chaplet toward the guitarist--but that's just me. Anyway, everyone stands up to begin Mass, the choir switches to singing Gather Us In. Father may stall getting Mass going by welcoming everyone, maybe telling a little joke, encouraging us to greet the people around us in the pews--and you may notice that none of that is in the 45-page "White Book" that you're holding next to this monitor. But gentle reader, you gotta play the cards you're dealt.

When he's good and ready to begin Mass, he'll start out with the sign of the cross and give a simple blessing: "The Lord be with you." This is right out of the Gregorian Mass- where the priest would begin the mass by turning to the people as blessing them "Dominus vobiscum." And for the last 40 years or so, Americans have been answering this blessing by saying "And also with you." But for about 1700 years before that (dating to around 200 A.D., it's older than even Pope St. Gregory the Great), the congregation answered back "et cum spiritu tuo", or and with your spirit.

But when the International Commission on English in the Liturgy originally translated the Novus Ordo into English, they decided to substitute some words.

Aside: of the 5 most common vernacular languages in the Catholic world, English is the only one translated this way. Compare:
French: Et avec votre esprit
German: Und mit deinem Geiste
Italian: E con il tuo spirito
Spanish: Y con tu espiritu
It is a common translation in other languages like Swahili, Lingala, Shona, Acholi, Lango, Alur, Jonam and Chewa (source)--but I am uncertain if the English translation affected these other translations or if they arrived at that conclusion on their own.

So what's the difference?

I may get in over my head here, but here goes: the liturgy is not the work of any individual priest. Rather, it is the work of the Holy Spirit working through the priest. And as such, we bless the Holy Spirit in our response--not Father Timbob directly. Priests are consecrated men, dedicated to the Holy Spirit--the work they do in the church is their opus Dei. So skirting around the Holy Spirit in the Mass is really acknowledging the wrong guy. I mean, I'm sure Father Timbob is a good person and I hope he feels the Lord is with him all the time; but we're talking about the Holy Mass here, so let's focus on our Triune God rather that Father Timbob for a while.

If you're not sold, that's fine. I'm not here to sell you. But the phrase The Lord be with your spirit is also scriptural in origin. It appears notably two places: in the closing lines of Saint Paul's Letter to the Galatians, and his Second Letter to Timothy.

But even more compellingly to me is what bad translations (or deliberately bad translations?) imply about the very nature of the Holy Mass. In a manner of speaking: the words mean something. They are the directions of the Roman Catholic Church to follow for offering the sacrifice of the Mass. And playing fast-and-loose with the translations , while probably not affecting the validity of the Mass, suggests that some renegade bishops in the USCCB or some stiff-necked liturgists in the ICEL or even well-meaning Father Timbob plays a greater role in liturgical history than does the entire Second Vatican Council or the entire Council of Trent or the entire 2000-year history of the Roman Catholic Church or even the Word of God in Holy Scripture itself--and that's just a little farther than the 6:00 PM Sunday Teen Mass should go, dontcha think? It's certainly territory I'm not comfortable walking.

Am I overstating things here? Maybe. But I'm also pretty confident in saying that if the Church comes up with an Order of the Mass, it's every Catholic's duty and right to a good liturgy and a good Mass. That's what I'm getting at here.

There are other changes. Some are going to trip you up for a while.

Take the Creed, for instance (please turn to page 9 in your "White Book"): we're pretty used to Father Timbob wrapping up his sermon with the "Profession of Faith", beginning "We believe in God, the Father, Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth..." This Creed goes back to the first Council of the Catholic Church--way before Vatican 2, before Martin Luther, before the Crusades, before the dark ages--back to 325 A.D.! This Council of Nicaea was in response (OVERSIMPLIFICATION ALERT!) to Christianity being made the official religion of the Roman Empire--it codified and defined what it mean to be a Christian, the things that Christians believe and set out the basic form that every Christian on God's green Earth can still ascribe to today. It has developed over time as our theology has deepened, but it is still often the only thing that all Christians (regardless of denomination) have in common.

At least we theoretically have it in common. Why do I say theoretically? Because American Catholics might be surprised to find out that the Faith they've been Professing for the last 40 years is not what the rest of the church has been saying for the last 1683 years since that Council of Nicaea. And it certainly isn't the same creed that even the rest of the Catholic world has been saying since the Second Vatican Council.

Let's set them up side-by-side:

LATIN: Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipoténtem, factórem cæli et terræ, visibílium ómnium et invisibílium. Et in unum Dóminum Jesum Christum, Fílium Dei unigénitum. Et ex Patre natum ante ómnia sæcula. Deum de Deo, lumen de lúmine, Deum verum de Deo vero. Génitum, non factum, consubstantiálem Patri: per quem ómnia facta sunt. Qui propter nos hómines et propter nostram salútem descéndit de cælis. Et incarnátus est de Spíritu Sancto ex María Vírgine: Et homo factus est. Crucifíxus étiam pro nobis: sub Póntio Piláto passus, et sepúltus est. Et resurréxit tértia die, secúndum Scriptúras. Et ascéndit in cælum: sedet ad déxteram Patris. Et íterum ventúrus est cum glória judicáre vivos et mórtuos: cujus regni non erit finis. Et in Spíritum Sanctum, Dóminum et vivificántem: qui ex Patre, Filióque procédit. Qui cum Patre, et Fílio simul adorátur, et conglorifícatur: qui locútus est per Prophétas. Et unam, sanctam, cathólicam et apostólicam Ecclésiam. Confíteor unum baptísma in remissiónem peccatorum. Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum. Et vitam + ventúri sæculi. Amen.

LITERAL ENGLISH: I believe in one God, the Father Almighty Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God. Born of the Father before all ages. God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God. Begotten, not made: consubstantial with the Father; by Whom all things were made. Who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven. And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary: and was made man. He was crucified also for us, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was buried. And on the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures. And He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father. And He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead: of Whose kingdom there shall be no end. And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life: Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son. Who together with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified: Who spoke through the Prophets. And in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. I confess one Baptism for the remission of sins. And I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life + of the world to come. Amen.

WHAT WE'RE USED TO SAYING: We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in being with the Father. Through Him all things were made. For us men and our salvation He came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Virgin Mary , and became man. For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; He suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day He rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures: He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son, He is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

WHAT IS COMING: I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. And one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

In my view, there are two notable changes in this new creed; I/We and consubstantial/one-in-being. There are others differences between the "new" creed and the one we're used to saying, but these are the two that really jump out.

The part that I'm going to stumble on the most is saying "I believe in God" rather than "We believe in God". I'm going to stumble because I'm just really really really used to saying it that way. But it's an important change, because professing this creed is an individualized statement. We profess our beliefs in God and the Church and declare our dedication to Jesus in the Trinity. They're among the last words we say before we enter into the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the part of Mass were the priest formally offers the sacrifice of Jesus in persona Christi. And that profession is not some group-think activity, it's an individual confession of our Christian identity. The Mass is personal to Catholics, it's not some huggy warm-up to the doughnut hour in the basement afterwards.

The other part is the change from "one in being with the Father" to "consubstantial with the Father". Consubstantial is a Latinized version of the Greek word homoousios. Homoousios is made up of όμοιο and ουσία, or same essence. In short, it says that Jesus is "made from" the same God-ness that the Father is "made from"--that they have the same substance and are con-substantial. To a Christian who accepts the Trinity (which is to say, all Christians), this is not a hard statement to make. Of course Jesus was God. That's the whole point! But like the ancient Church defining the Faith for all the world, we similarly define our Faith at Mass. Is Jesus one in being with the Father? Yes! But I've got to admit here, I consider myself a fairly smart guy, and I never really knew what one in being really meant. I'd say it at Mass with all the rest of the folks around me, but it's one of those things I could gloss over and not really think about.

In a strange way, the translators tried to make the term "consubstantial" more accessible to your everyday Catholic. But I'd assert that the opposite happened: they created a term that allowed people to say the words without thinking about them... and I stopped thinking about those words. We stopped accessing them at all.

And that's the essence of the whole problem, isn't it?

In a way, we've stopped lifting ourselves up for God. We've decided that we can try and bring Him down to our level. We take the liturgy of His Church and have taken all the work right out of it--and what's the result? I'll only speak for myself here, but for a long time, I just quit. Church wasn't lifting me up, it wasn't edifying, it wasn't even fun (have you heard Catholics sing?!). But I think I had the wrong idea about Mass, like I was going for a stage show--that sitting in the pews meant I was going to get zapped by some bolt of Grace. And though I won't blame the translators for my malaise, I think it's indicative of my situation. The whole thing is on liturgical salvation autopilot! The congregation is all agreeing that we believe the same things, we're all lining up for Communion hosts and sharing each other's slobber on the wine goblets, even the Priest himself holds up the chalice and says that it's "for you and for all" (that changes too--turn to page 18). Doesn't it sound like the whole happy round spaceship church goes to Heaven together?

Well, let's hope so.

But the point is that this Mass isn't what the Church imagined when Archbishop Bugnini (the man generally credited for writing the Novus Ordo) submitted his New Order of the Mass to Pope Paul VI. Somewhere along the way, we've lost our grip on the real Catholic liturgy. These changes have been submitted from the ICEL to the Vatican--the Vatican has enthusiastically approved them and copies have been/are being sent to every diocese in the English-speaking Catholic world. As of yet, there's no timetable for putting the new translations into effect, but hopefully by this time next year, we can wish that the Lord will be with Father's spirit (I whisper it at Mass already!).

I'm sure that some Catholics might put up resistance to the new translation. Some people are really afraid that the Pope is going to demand that churches switch back to the Tridentine Mass and totally kick the Novus Ordo out the window (some people might think that's a great idea. I know one such person very very well). But that's not what we're dealing with here. Other well-meaning Catholics might say that the words are obscure, the language is clumsy and that people just won't "get it". Those are fair and legitimate concerns! So it's up to us and it up to Father Timbob to catechize Catholics about what their Mass is really saying.

The translation that you'll probably hear in Church on Sunday is a bad one. We all know that now. In fairness, most of the trouble came with good intentions! But let's pray that we get off that road paved with good intentions... I'm afraid of where that road goes.

The Ordinary Catholic Mass that most Catholics attend every Sunday is going to slightly change. And in my opinion, they are changes for the better. I'm going to get into that more in a later post, but first we need to review how we got where we are today.

Here's the deal (it's kind of complicated):
When the Roman emporer Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313, Christians began to begin to formalize their worship. Prior to this, Christian worship was an event in secret, held in houses and basements under fear of being discovered by the Romans (who would torture them, feed them to lions and sell tickets to the spectacle in the Collesium). American Catholic writes:

Stately ceremonies suitable in a huge church emerged. Processions, courtly movement in the sanctuary, metered chant (composed by St. Ambrose) and sung litanies that galvanized the voices of thousands, incense and bells, kissing sacred objects and the use of genuflections became a pattern to accompany the ancient structure of the Eucharist.

The celebrants wore clothes worthy of a Roman senator. Their robes eventually came to be called vestments, since they were retained long after fashions changed. The simple plates and cups of house worship became elaborate chalices and patens. This was an inevitable evolution due to social acceptance, organizing an empire-size Church and, indeed, ecclesial prosperity.

This era witnessed the rise of extraordinary bishops, known now as Church Fathers, such as Augustine and Chrysostom, whose homilies were rich in theology and pastoral in application.

In the year 590, Pope Gregory I ascended to the papacy. In these days, the Church was going through some growing pains and different forms of the Catholic Mass were circulating around the known world. Pope Gregory codified the liturgies, rearranged them and set the basic format into what scholars basically agree is the real beginning of what you'd recognize as a Roman Catholic Mass. Gregory's work was so important and so influential that was declared a saint by popular acclaim and is one of only three popes of the 266 popes to carry the honorific title "the great". (Pope St. Gregory the Great, Pope St. Leo the Great, Pope St. Nicholas the Great are the three. What about Pope John Paul II? Some people call him "John Paul the Great", it's true. There's really no formal procedure for such a title, they have to arise from general use. At this point, there's not enough evidence that the title will catch on. I'd dispute that he earned such a title, but that's more than I really want to get into).

The "Gregorian Mass" still lives today, albeit further developed in history. St. Gregory is the patron of a group that a friend of mine is starting to bring and support the Traditional Latin Mass to Johnson County, Kansas. The group is called The Society of Pope St. Gregory the Great in his honor.

Through the long history of Catholicism, the Mass has endured some ups and downs. By the middle ages (what used to be called the "dark ages"), some problems began to pop up. Basically, people weren't catechized (taught about the Church) very well and started getting confused on what was really going on at Mass. Priests often had crummy country-seminary training and often weren't much better educated than the serfs to whom they were preaching.

These midieval laymen often witnessed the priest raise up the unleavened bread and saying "Hoc est enim corpus meum" ("This is my body") and confused it for the words "Hocus Pocus"-- thus coining the term. It also goes to say that many didn't understand the Mass as much more than a magic trick. Complicated subjects such as Transubstantiation were basically WAY over the head of the regular peasant. These were distant days for Catholics, much of whom who were very removed from their religion. Various Church Councils were called in this time to declare and affirm a number of things, there were five Lateran councils, some in France, some in Constantinople, around Italy-- there were a lot of councils held in a lot of places. These councils had a number of functions like addressing different heresies that people were making up at the time, dealing with the newly re-infamous Knights Templar, making sure that Catholic laity were actually receiving Holy Communion at least once a year, defining the functions (and later, split) of the Eastern and Western Churches, governing politics and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (seriously). Councils decided all kinds of stuff.

About the time of the Renaissance, the papacy was a moral mess. The eight renaissance popes were big benefactors of the newly-rediscovered fine arts, but were really shady characters. You can do your own research on the renaissance popes, but suffice it to say that they carried a reputation for serving themselves before serving God or man.

Then stuff began to change for the better. The biggest council (in terms of impact on the Mass) was the Nineteenth Council one, beginning in 1545. This Council of Trent took place over 18 years, lasted through 5 popes and became bascially the benchmark of Catholic thought for the next 500 years. It was called to address the heresy of Protestantism, to reaffirm the Catholic Mass and to reform the Church.

Trent was a huge deal and can't be overestimated. It was basically a house-cleaning council and truly formalized the Catholic Mass-- which would go substantially unchanged right up until Pope Paul VI would authorize a New Order of the Mass in 1970.

This New Order of the Mass (in Latin, Novus Ordo Missae) is also a big deal.

We all know about the 1960's. We know that was the decade that changed EVERYTHING. Music. Fashion. Technology. Architecture. Science. Drugs. Politics. Culture. Art. Education. The list goes on and on-- and includes Religion (not just Catholicism, mind you)

In the 1950's and building up to 1962, there was a lot of turmoil in the Chuch. The First Vatican Council in the 1868 began to define how a Catholic should address or embrace biblical literalism and how to combat the heresy of Modernism (a problem the Church has to deal with from time to time). But that council was drawn to a quick close when Italy fell into civil war (a problem Italy has to deal with from time to time) and the business of the Council was never finished. By the 1950's, some people would say that a lot of the bishops of the Church had succombed to the temptations of Modernism and were wandering from the lessons of the great Council of Trent.

At this time, Pope Pius XII died and (Oversimplificaton Alert!) the cardinals didn't know who should replace him. It was a heady time in the Church and there was a feeling that Catholicism would be tied irrevocably to the past or wander dangerously to the modern world. Some people saw John XXIII as a "compromise candidate", he was a nice and jovial old man, trusted and old. May I underscore that he was 77 years old-- and that everyone knew that? It is my belief that he was elected to simply "buy time" for the church to figure out what direction to go. He was to be a "placeholder pope".

Well, in 1962, Blessed Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council (commonly called "Vatican 2") as a "Pastoral Council" that was designed to make sure that the nearly-2000-year-old Church was still addressing the needs of a 1960's Catholic. All the bishops of the world were summoned to Rome and there was a nervous energy in the air. They sought out to "open the windows of the Church" and let some fresh air blow in.

I think that Blessed Pope John XXIII's council caught some people by surprise. A lot of people probably wondered if the Good Pope knew what he was getting into.

Then predicably, John XXIII's age caught him and he died before the his great Council could be completed.

I wonder what Vatican 2 would have looked like if he'd been able to see it to the end. But such thoughts are just predicting history, and predicting history is just making up the story the way you wished it happened.

By the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, it was clear that the bishops were going to go beyond the essential pastoral concerns of those latter-day Catholics. And by 1970, we'd have a whole new Mass. This New Order, the Mass of Pope Paul VI would be loosely based on that old Tridentine Mass (Mass of the Council of Trent) that had been the gold-standard for 500 years, based in the Gregorian Mass of the Sixth Century.

I'm not here to pass judgement on the Catholic Mass. I can appreciate both forms of the Roman Liturgy, the Ancient Mass and the Novus Ordo. But the differences are so striking and the change was so swift that Catholics of the 1960s describe it as if they just walked into the wrong church.

It was a time of HUGE upheaval for the Faith. Splinter groups would dig in their heels to resist change, others felt that the change wasn't finished went way farther than the Council and the Church ever intended to change the sacred liturgy of the Roman Catholic church. We saw (and see) people who refuse to acknowledge the authority of popes, who assert that every pope since then is an imposter pope, who say that Pope Paul VI was a grand switcheroo with a kidnapped and secretly imprisoned pontiff... Those were heady days to be a Roman Catholic.

In many ways, these are heady times to be a Roman Catholic, but that's a whole different post altogether.

Before I wrap up this post, I want to make a couple things clear: the Pauline Mass is a legitimate form of the Mass. Some people might tell you otherwise; those people are wrong. The Second Vatican Council was a pretty important event. It produced a number of documents that are to serve the Church in its care to the world. Some assert that the documents are poorly written and leave more questions than answers-- I can't speak authoritatively on that subject and will decline to do so. But the documents are real and you can buy them in bookstores and read them for yourself. Enjoy.

Some councils are more important than others. The First Council of Nicaea (325) was tremendously important, it defined what it meant to be a Christian. The Second Council of Lyons (1274) was a pretty big deal, bridging the Roman and Greek Churches and establishing the format for electing popes.

But pop quiz: what happened at the Council of Chalcedon (451)? How about the Council of Vienne (1311)? Yeah, I thought so.

You know what I feel about the Council of Trent (1545). And presumably, the Second Vatican Council will turn out as one of those councils that left an indeliable mark on Catholicism. But I fear that a little more than the bathwater went out through the Church's newly open windows.

Well anyway, there's some changes going on in the United States in the way that priests offer the Novus Ordo Missae. And in my opinion, they're changes for the better.

So here's your homework: read the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops new translation of the Mass at http://www.usccb.org/liturgy/missalformation/OrdoMissaeWhiteBook.pdf See if you can spot the changes.

We'll get to a little more specific review sometime. Hopefully sooner than later, but it's August and you'll get what you get.

Today is the the feast day of St. Lawrence of Rome. You can read more about St. Larry in this post where I named him patron.

St. Lawrence is the patron of brewers, comedians, barbeque and WhollyRoaminCatholic.com.

Today I'm going to smoke some pork ribs and drink a little beer in his honor. (That's my kind of saint!)

St. Lawrence, pray for us!

Well, maybe not rigged exactly. But predictable anyway.

From the WSJ's China Journal:

June 23, 2008, 6:26 am
The Science of the Medal Count

Economists got their turn in the Olympic spotlight on Monday, with the release of a report that suggests China could topple the U.S. on the medals table during this summer's Beijing Games.

PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that Beijing will win 88 medals, followed by the U.S. with 87 and Russia with 79. However, the report's author, PWC's London-based Head of Macroeconomics John Hawksworth, is quick to point out that Beijing and U.S. are "basically neck and neck."

PWC has conducted the study since the 2000 Games in Sydney, and ITS China operation was not involved in coming up with the estimate. "It's just a break from our normal serious economic analysis," says Mr. Hawksworth.

Performing well is serious business for Chinese authorities, who have made topping the medals tally a tacit goal despite publicly downplaying exepectations. China came in third, with 63 medals, during the Athens Games.

The study isn't exactly a prediction of Games performance, says Mr. Hawksworth -- it's more of a benchmark to judge a country's performance. The economists didn't try to predict the performance of any individual athletes. Rather, they made a statistical model that took into account historical performance, political and economic factors, as well as a boost that athletes from the home team always seem to get.

Population and size of an economy are big factors in his model, but culture also plays a factor says Mr. Hawksworth. He points out, for example, that tiny Australia (41 medals in Athens) always performs far better in the Olympics than huge India (just 1 in Athens). "Everyone in India is mad about cricket, but not the Olympics," he says.

By his calcuations, some 90% of a country's performance in the Games medal tally is determined by these political and economic factors. "And 10% is down to individual genius, or those other factors that can't be explained through science," says Mr. Hawksworth.

"It would be a rather boring Olympics if it was totally predictable," he adds.

For example, benchmarks for the 2004 Olympics ran afoul of both individual feats and doping scandals. PWC benchmarked an Athens tally of 70 for the U.S., Russia 64, China 50, Germany 45, Australia 41 and Greece 29. The actual outcome was U.S. 103, Russia 92, China 63, Australia 49, Germany 48 and Greece 16 including six golds.

And before you ask, no. It has nothing to do with being Catholic.

It's August. Deal with it.

It's August. You get what you get from the newspaper, television and blogosphere. I'm sorry if the posting has been a little weak, but not REALLY sorry.

This post doesn't have anything to do with Catholicism. But it's of interest to me because it's about the feminization of men. I think this is a bit on the decline of late-- men have been trying to reclaim macho (If you don't believe me guys, look at this picture and think about how you totally wished you looked like that), but the damage has been done.

From The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/03/gender.healthandwellbeing

Depressed, repressed, objectified: are men the new women They're less fertile, more weight-obsessed and 'non-essential to parenting'. No wonder men are confused about modern masculinity. Elizabeth Day The Observer, Sunday August 3 2008

If recent research is anything to go by, 21st century man is in a desperate muddle.

In June, men discovered that their libidos are in freefall, prompting a 40 per cent increase in males seeking counselling for impotence problems. Their existential angst worsened in July, when British men discovered that they have the most unequal paternity rights in Europe. According to Nicola Brewer, chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, fathers in the UK are seen as 'not essential for parenting'. The same month saw the publication of a medical study that proved the quality of men's sperm declines to such an extent after they hit 45 that the chances of a partner's miscarriage are doubled.

It's not only their internal biology; men are also succumbing to the traditionally female preoccupation of looking good on the outside, too. Sales of male beauty products have leapt 30 per cent over the past decade. Almost 20 per cent more men are having plastic surgery than ever before while, last year, researchers from Harvard discovered that a quarter of anorexia and bulimia sufferers is male. During the fashion shows, male models had their own equivalent of the size-zero debate. 'Male models look chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished' noted the New York Times.

Every week, it seems as if there are new surveys and studies tripping over themselves to paint the grimmest possible picture of modern masculinity. They tell us that men are more neurotic and less fulfilled than ever before; that they are objectified rather than revered; that they are expected to be more in touch with their emotions and yet are criticised for it. Men appear to be confused about what they are and unsure about who they are meant to be. So with more of them feeling disenfranchised, disillusioned and disempowered, is it feasible to think of men as the new oppressed minority? Might men, in fact, be the new women? And, if so, who is to blame for making them feel marginalised?

In the UK, men account for 75 per cent of all suicides. They are twice as likely to die from the 10 most common cancers that affect both sexes and, typically, develop heart disease 10 years earlier than women. Although there is a national screening programme in place for cervical and breast cancer, there is no equivalent for men, in spite of prostate cancer claiming 6.7 per cent more deaths for men than cervical cancer in women.

While women still earn on average 12 per cent less than men and are severely under-represented in top-level corporate roles, men in full-time employment work an average of 41.9 hours a week, compared to women's 37.6 hours. According to the American men's-rights author Warren Farrell, there might be a glass ceiling for women, but there is also what he calls 'a glass cellar' for men. 'What I mean by that is men are both at the top of the economy scale and at the bottom. Of the 25 professions ranked the lowest [in the US], 24 of them are 85-100 per cent male. That's things like roofer, welder, garbage collector, sewer maintenance - jobs with very little security, little pay and few people want them.'

Farrell says that women generally prefer a more flexible work-life balance and that implies 40-hour weeks 'at most'. Often, mothers are able to work fewer hours only because they are financially supported by their male partners. This, he claims, is the real definition of power. 'I define power as "control over one's life". A balanced life is far superior to the male definition of power: earning money someone else spends while he dies sooner.'

It would be easy to dismiss these arguments as anti-feminist but there are some commentators who think this could be a fundamental misreading of the movement's original goal: equality for both sexes, rather than the dominance of one at the cost of the other. Rosie Boycott, who co-founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1971, points out that their first editorial insisted liberation should be for men as well as women. 'It is as much of a trap for a man aged 18-65 to feel solely financially responsible for 2.2 children and his wife, to be entitled to two weeks' holiday a year and to work nine to five, as it is for a woman to be responsible for all the childcare and housework,' she says. 'Men don't feel comfortable admitting that they're taking time off work to take their daughter to the dentist. We need a bigger critical mass of people to make that happen.'

But much of this remains a resolutely middle-class problem. At the lowest end of the economic scale, women are still attempting to shrug off the yoke of oppression and inequality.

Meanwhile for many men, their loss of status in the home and the workplace is twinned with a loss of confidence in themselves. Neil Oliver, the television historian who has just published Amazing Tales for Making Men out of Boys, says that there is a conspicuous dearth of positive male role models. 'I grew up hearing tales of Ernest Shackleton and watching films like Zulu,' he says. 'The world in which I was a little boy was one of clearly defined roles for men and women and we don't have that any more, so men are struggling to readjust. Manly men have been hunted to near extinction in Britain and the concept of manliness has been outmoded. Yet the urge to be a man is a primal thing and still exists in boys today.'

In the classroom, too, boys are at risk of losing out on male role models. According to government figures for 2006, the ratio of newly qualified female to male teachers under the age of 25 was approaching seven to one. The introduction of coursework and modular exams is believed to play to traditionally female strengths - girls tend to be more methodical while boys tend to follow high-risk strategies such as cramming the night before an exam.

Some critics argue that this creeping 'feminisation' has led to girls outperforming boys on almost every level: they use more words, speak more fluently in longer sentences and with fewer mistakes. By the age of 11, some 76 per cent of boys have attained government-set literacy standards, compared to 85 per cent of girls. At GCSE level, 66.8 per cent of girls achieved A-C grades in 2007, compared to 59.7 per cent of boys (in real terms, this means they trail behind their female counterparts by nine years).

Do these statistics have any bearing on the everyday experiences of ordinary men? 'I don't know if I feel oppressed, but there's a sense in which women can talk about us with impunity,' says a 32-year-old male lawyer from London, who does not wish to give his name in case his female colleagues start pelting him with rotten tomatoes. 'I've been in the office on several occasions where sweeping generalisations have been made about the general crapness of men: "Oh, all men are useless, no wonder he couldn't get the job done in time" - that sort of thing. I don't take it all that seriously - at least, not yet - but I know that I wouldn't get away with saying the same things about women.'

For a long time, it wasn't particularly fashionable to stand up for men. Warren Farrell, the daddy of the so-called 'masculinist' movement, has been making his arguments since the late 1970s and frequently attracts outrage. His books -Why Men Earn More and his latest, Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? - seek to redress what he sees as an endemic sociocultural bias against his gender.

In almost all respects, he believes that men are now the weaker sex: 'The problem with feminism is that it saw man as the enemy. When only one sex wins, both sexes lose.'

On a superficial level, Farrell's insistence that men are scrabbling around in the dark searching for their lost masculinity like a mislaid dumbbell seems ill-conceived and borderline offensive. However, over the last few months, several books have been written reiterating Farrell's belief that men are disgruntled with their lot and must fight back against a Western culture that worships womanhood while demeaning masculinity. Apparently, men are stymied by biology as well - human genetics experts estimate that man will be extinct within 125,000 years owing to their declining sperm count and the mutation of the Y chromosome.

So - although women hold only 17 per cent of parliamentary positions across the globe, despite there being only 10 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and ignoring the fact that it is still illegal for a woman to drive a car in Saudi Arabia - it seems that, sometimes, it is harder to be a man.

Just ask Guy Garcia, author of the forthcoming The Decline of Men, an upbeat look at how the American male is 'tuning out, giving up and flipping off his future'. There is, says Garcia, 'a social predisposition to treat men as unworthy parents, betrayers and incorrigible philanderers'. Or there's Michael Gilbert, whose 2007 study, The Disposable Male, does pretty much what it says on the tin. 'Motherhood is immutable,' Gilbert writes. 'Paternity is the social construct. Amazingly, we have been doing everything we can to deconstruct it.'

Nor is it just men who have taken up the cudgel. This year saw the publication of Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care by Kathleen Parker, a pithy stateside newspaper columnist who prides herself on her Coulter-esque capacity to say the unsayable. 'I think men are confused because they are receiving conflicting and often confusing messages from women and culture,' she explains. 'We want them to be providers and protectors - except when we don't. We want them to count our contractions and share baby's midnight feedings, but then we want them out of the picture when we tire of them.'

Parker reserves much of her ire for 'the highly lucrative boy-bashing industry' that views sexual discrimination against men as a form of shared hilarity. So while you can buy T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan 'Boys Are Stupid - Throw Rocks At Them', to claim the same about women would be viewed as an incitement to violence. Discrimination against men increasingly seems socially acceptable. 'When Susan Pinker, the highly regarded psychologist and journalist published her recent book, The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls and the Real Difference Between the Sexes, she received an email from a colleague asking her to give a comment 'on the difference between men and women's brains - or rather, men's lack of brains!'

'It was a joke no one would make about women,' Pinker tells me. 'When you said you were writing a piece on men, I was just floored because my experience has been that no one cares a whit about men. I think there is a double standard. Because women have been discriminated against for so long there is a hyper-sensitivity about making jokes about them that doesn't exist for men. They are assumed to be fair game because they're on top. There's a notion that it's acceptable for women to treat men as dolts. It's a form of female bonding, as if it's known that men are a bit useless.'

Of course, lots of men are relatively happy with the status quo, but does this make it desirable or just?

There is still a novelty factor attached to the notion of a full-time father and a mother who goes out to work: in many ways, the man who wishes to be a stay-at-home dad can be likened to the woman who wanted to be a surgeon in the 1950s. They both face a similar barrage of sexist assumptions.

'There is a culture of motherhood, a sanctity about it, that is quite strong in the UK,' argues Duncan Fisher, chief executive of the Fatherhood Institute. 'There's a gratuitous exclusion of men and the impression is given that you're left looking over the mother's shoulder. Midwifery services are described as "one-to-one care". After the birth, each mother is given a free magazine called "Mum Plus One". If a woman goes to a job office, she is asked "Are you a mother? Let's see what kind of job you want to do," whereas no one would ask a man if he was a father.

'The guy is just not factored in. That's OK if you're a well-resourced middle-class man who can assert himself. But that's why so many teenage fathers drift away: there's no expectation that they should be included.'

Yet research shows that children with supportive fathers have lower instances of substance abuse, higher self-esteem and higher educational achievement.

Nor is this cheerful presumption of man's uselessness limited to fatherhood. The Advertising Standards Bureau reports a steady increase each year in the number of complaints about the way men are portrayed on television as 'buffoons' or 'idiots'. A 2007 advertisement for MFI kitchens depicted a woman slapping her husband in a dispute about leaving the toilet seat up. 'If a man belittles a woman, it could become a lawsuit,' says Farrell. 'If women belittle men, it's a Hallmark card.'

Tad Safran, a Los Angeles-based scriptwriter and journalist, discovered this to his cost last year when he wrote a scathing piece in a national newspaper about British women's 'unkempt' appearance. 'The hate mail I got was insane,' he says now. 'I was called "Sexist of the Year". Maybe I deserved it, but certainly that wouldn't have happened to the same extent if it had been written about men.' As if to prove his point, a few months later, another British broadsheet published a feature entitled 'Are Men Boring?' Both articles were based on ludicrous generalisations but no one labelled the female journalist sexist.

Does any of this really matter when men occupy an almost unquestioned position of primacy in nearly all walks of life? Are they getting their boxer shorts in a twist about trivialities? And is it patronising to assume that the nagging disaffection felt by primarily middle-class men in the Western hemisphere is shared by men the world over?

Maybe. But, according to experts like Susan Pinker, there is a necessary truth here too: that perhaps our harmless chatter among female friends occasionally carries a deeper significance than we might like to think; that for all the sperm banks and Rampant Rabbit vibrators on offer, men still have a role to play that can complement women rather than limiting them. We might, she argues, end up demeaning our own gender: 'It does us a disservice to gloss over the fact that our husbands, sons, brothers or fathers are all unique individuals. I've never believed in this Mars/Venus division: we're all just people.'

This is interesting to me. In the 60's, women learned to roar. Since then, men have learned to wimper.

Continue reading "Wherein men should be men" »

American Papist linked to a great game last week that is totally awesome.

Life Game: Atheist

The controls to me a second to figure out, but y'all are probably smarter than me.

Today is the Primary Election Day in Kansas. The building where I work is a polling location so it was hard to find a place to park this morning.

The price we pay for democracy!

Kindly, take a moment to pray for voters and candidates; for wisdom and courage.

AN ELECTION PRAYER TO MARY

O Most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Mercy, at this most critical time, we entrust the United States of America to your loving care.

Most Holy Mother, we beg you to reclaim this land for the glory of your Son. Overwhelmed with the burden of the sins of our nation, we cry to you from the depths of our hearts and seek refuge in your motherly protection.

Look down with mercy upon us and touch the hearts of our people. Open our minds to the great worth of human life and to the responsibilities that accompany human freedom.

Free us from the falsehoods that lead to the evil of abortion and threaten the sanctity of family life. Grant our country the wisdom to proclaim that God's law is the foundation on which this nation was founded, and that He alone is the True Source of our cherished rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

O Merciful Mother, give us the courage to reject the culture of death and the strength to build a new Culture of Life.

From EWTN. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners.

August is when readers and bloggers slow down, this site will be no exception. I'll still post intermittently, but it'll be hit-and-miss for a while.

In the meantime, I'd like to share a little gem Slate.com, originally written in 2001.

http://www.slate.com/id/112553/

August
Let's get rid of it.
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, July 27, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET

August is the Mississippi of the calendar. It's beastly hot and muggy. It has a dismal history. Nothing good ever happens in it. And the United States would be better off without it.

August is when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Anne Frank was arrested, when the first income tax was collected, when Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe died. Wings and Jefferson Airplane were formed in August. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour debuted in August. (No August, no Sonny and Cher!)

August is the time when thugs and dictators think they can get away with it. World War I started in August 1914. The Nazis and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact in August 1939. Iraq invaded Kuwait Aug. 2, 1990. August is a popular month for coups and violent crime. Why August? Perhaps the villains assume we'll be too distracted by vacations or humidity to notice.

August is the vast sandy wasteland of American culture. Publishers stop releasing books. Movie theaters are clogged with the egregious action movies that studios wouldn't dare release in June. Television is all reruns (or worse--new episodes of Sex and the City). The sports pages wither into nothingness. Pre-pennant-race baseball--if that can even be called a sport--is all that remains. We have to feign interest in NFL training camps. Newspapers are thin in August, but not thin enough. They still print ghastly vacation columns: David Broder musing on world peace from his summer home on Lake Michigan? Even Martha Stewart (born Aug. 3) can't think of anything to do in August. Her Martha Stewart Living calendar, usually so sprightly, overflows with ennui. Aug. 14: "If it rains, organize basement." Aug. 16: "Reseed bare patches in lawn." Aug. 27: "Change batteries in smoke and heat detectors."

You can't get a day off from August, because it is the only month without a real holiday. Instead, the other months have shunted onto this weak sister all the lame celebrations they didn't want. Air Conditioning Appreciation Week, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist Week, National Religious Software Week, Carpenter Ant Awareness Week: All these grand American celebrations belong to August. Is it any accident that National Lazy Day, Relaxation Day, Deadwood Day, and Failures Day are commemorated in August?

August is the month of vagueness. October is the 10th month, March is the third month. What's August--bet you can't remember. Does it have 30 days or 31? You have to recite the rhyme to figure that one out. The great writers of history forget August: It rates three mentions in Bartlett's Quotations, compared with a dozen for December and two dozen for March.

The people with August birthdays are a sorry bunch. Sure, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton* were born in August, but the other presidential Augustans are Herbert Hoover and Benjamin Harrison. Film is represented by Robert Redford and Robert De Niro--but also by John Holmes and Harry Reems. Third-raters populate August: George Hamilton, Danny Bonaduce, Rick Springfield, and Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford were born then. August gave us Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. In art, August offers Leni Riefenstahl, Michael Jackson, and Danielle Steele. (To be sure, not everything that happens in August is so terrible. Raoul Wallenberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Herman Melville, and Mae West were born in August. Richard Nixon resigned in August. MTV launched in August. And Jerry Garcia died in August.)
August can't even master the things it is supposed to do well. Despite its slothful reputation, it is not the top vacation month, July is. Nor is August the hottest month (on the East Coast, at least). That crown, too, is July's. August is when the garden starts to wither, and when the long summer days cruelly vanish.

We should rage, rage against the dying of the light. The United States desperately needs August Reform. Purists will insist that we shouldn't tinker with the months, that August should be left alone because it has done workmanlike service for 2,000 years. That's nonsense. Calendars are always fluxing. August itself was a whimsical invention. In 46 B.C., as part of a broad calendar change, Julius Caesar added two days to Sextilis, an old 29-day month. In the reign of his successor, Augustus Caesar, the Senate voted to change Sextilis' name to "Augustus" (as the Senate under Julius Caesar had renamed the month before, "Quintilis," "Julius").

August was created by politics, and it can be undone by politics. For too long, bureaucrats in Washington have been telling you how you must divide up your calendar. But these are your months, and you should be able to do with them what you like. Genuine August Reform will be hard. It will require tough compromises to protect the special interests of September and July. (And who better to sponsor this revolution, incidentally, than Sen. John McCain--birthday Aug. 29?)

Here is a framework for compromise. Cede the first 10 days of August back to July, thus extending holiday revelry for more than a week. September would claim the last 10 days of August, mollifying the folks who can't wait to get back to serious work. Labor Day would come 10 days earlier, the school year would run longer, and the rush of fall activity could get jump-started. August itself will keep 10 days. That is just enough: Every summer we'll be able to toot happily, "Gosh, August went by so quickly this year!"

And as for the 31st day, it will be designated a holiday independent from any month. It will fall after the 10th and last day of August, and it will celebrate the end of that most useless month.

I like summer and all, but August is ridiculous.

I'm going to be pretty busy for the next week or two, so I might not get a lot of good entries up for a while. The way that I like to write is pretty time-consuming. Fellow bloggers know how much time it takes to crank out a good post.

So in the meantime, let me recommend some good sites to you:

If you read WRC because you like personal writing from a Catholic perspective, then check out "Et Tu?" - The diary of a former atheist.
If you read WRC because you like commentary on the Catholic Mass, then I cannot speak highly enough about Good Father Zuhlsdorf's What Does The Prayer Really Say?
If you read WRC because you like Catholic news and comment, then spend some time with American Papist.

There are so many other good sites (I'm running out of time before I have to get to a meeting) and I love all the ones in the "regular reads" links to the right. Also check out the "Tagbacks" links below, which are sites I like but that get chewed up by my webserver and I'm not as familiar with them.

See you soon!

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that when I was away from the Church, I always figured that I'd start going again some time.

It brought me back to a conversation that I had with a roommate back in college. He was saying that he wanted to quit smoking one day, but didn't know which day it'd be. He said that he didn't figure he'd smoke when he had a family, that it wasn't a good thing for a father to do around his children. He said that he didn't want to be one of those old guys who have to pull their Oxygen tanks wherever they go, that he didn't want to have a wheezy laugh that ends in a sloppy wet cough. He said that he always knew that one day he'd be a former smoker, but he also knew that that was for some day in the future, not for that day back in 2002.

That same conversation was the first time that I admitted out loud that I figured I'd be a churchgoer again someday, but didn't know when. He looked away into some near distance and said that he didn't think he'd ever be a regular in a church again; that he didn't think he'd ever really be accepted at a church after the stuff that he'd done.

I didn't know exactly what he meant and didn't ask. I couldn't figure out if he wanted me to ask or not. It doesn't matter.

My roommate said that he grew up "Evangelical Methodist" (I didn't know that such a thing existed), but that it was his parents church back home. When he first got to college, he was big into the Christian scene, but then he found out about bourbon and it pretty much ended his time with his plastic-fish-on-the-trunk-of-the-car crowd.

This story also pops into my mind for a different reason.

I was reading Good Father Zuhlsdorf's blog, What Does The Prayer Really Say?, and saw at the end that his blog, he notes that it is:

Powered by: Luke 5:1-11 and WordPress

I have changed his Luke 5:1-11 link to the New American Bible translation. It's not the best translation available, but it's quite readable and does not detract from the point of this section of the bible. Go read it. It's short, I'll wait. Luke Chapter 5, Versus 1 through 11.






Have you read it? Seriously now, go back, click the link and read the first 11 verses.






Good job. Thank you.

Here we've got Jesus starting to assemble his apostles--essentially recruiting men to begin His Church. It's a crucial scene to the history of human history, one that would ultimately be part of THE STORY of Western Civilization for the next 2000 years (and counting). Jesus sees these three fishermen who were starting to clean up from a long day's work. Simon and his partners James and John have been at work all night. These were men who made their lives' income by doing work the hard way. Dragging huge fishnets out at sea, in the dark of night and the heat of the open sun; a Midwestern guy like myself might compare it to a construction worker today. You've got to be big and strong and work when you're hurt and tired. Simon was gruff and impetuous, headstrong and stubborn. He was basically illiterate and would be the kind of guy today to have a "School of Hard Knocks" bumper sticker on his pickup.

So when this Jesus guy--a person they hadn't met--shouts out to their boat to go back out and cast their nets on the other side of their boat, they had every reason to ignore Jesus. Jesus was not a fisherman, he was a carpenter--a lowly job for a poor and lowly man. What did he know about commercial fishing? Objectively, probably little. Simon barked back to Jesus that they're tired, they've caught nothing all night. They were professionals, they knew their trade.

But they did it anyway. Strange, isn't it? We don't know why Simon and his fishing partners did what Jesus said, but they did anyway. And of course, they caught so much fish that their nets were strained to the breaking point, their boats were so full that they barely stayed afloat under the weight of their catch.

That's an amazing story, and if it ended there, we've seen enough to understand that Jesus' first apostles where hand picked, that they followed His directions from the very start and that we've beheld the simple power of Jesus. Good tale.

But to me the most interesting point is what happened next, in verse 8. Simon got back to shore, fell in front of Jesus and said "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man." Those are awesome words. We know that Simon instantly knew he was in the presence of an incredible man. Lord might not just mean "God". It might have also meant "Sir" or "Boss". Except that Simon notes he is not worthy of even hanging around Jesus--that his sins make him unfit to be with Him. That's not the kind of reaction you have to your boss. It's the kind of reaction you have to your God.

Jesus told him to get up, he looked at these three fishermen and told them to come with Him--that from thenceforth, they'd be fishers of men. They brought their boats to shore, left everything and followed Him.

I doubt these guys knew that they were rewriting their life's stories in that moment. That John would spend most of his later life imprisoned and alone, that he'd die in Ephesus after a life of torture and rebuke. That James would see Jesus tortured and crucified, that he himself would be have his head sliced off at the order of the king. That Simon would later be picked by Jesus to be "the rock", the petros, that his name would be changed to Peter and that he'd be the first bishop of Rome, the first pope, and that a life dedicated to Jesus would ultimately end up resulting in his own crucifixion, hung upside down on a cross, a painful and humiliating death.

They couldn't have known it at the time. They also couldn't have known that by walking away from those fishing boats, they'd carry the good news of Christ to all the land, that they'd feed his lambs and tend his sheep, that they'd offer peace and salvation to billions and billions of people in the still-continuing course of history. That thousands of years later, people would still name their children after these simple fishermen, that the gospel they preached to the Jews and Gentiles would be a part of the gospel in every continent on Earth and to every nation under the sun.

They couldn't have known. Indeed, Simon Peter denies himself to Jesus, saying that he wasn't fit to be in his company. He was a sinful man and it was better for all if Jesus just left Simon alone.

And I think about my roommate. Saying that he wasn't fit for church anymore. That people would know him and reject him. That it was just better for everyone if he just left church alone.

I'm not saying that this guy was going to re-write the next two thousand years of history or that he'd eventually be executed by crucifixion. I kind of doubt that, actually.

But I read those words again: "Do not be afraid".

Wise words.

When I walked back into church, I was very afraid. Afraid of getting funny looks from the "regulars" who'd wonder what I was doing in their pew, afraid of altering my Sunday mornings irrevocably--that I'd have to get up early every week without any exceptions. I was afraid that someone would talk to me, afraid that no one would talk to me, afraid of doing the wrong thing, afraid to not do anything. I was afraid of things I couldn't identify and fully conscience that none of my fears were justified at all. That part doesn't matter.

"Do not be afraid".

And when they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.

A friend of mine's wife (who is also a friend of mine) is currently in labor. It's their first child and taking a while. Keep them in your prayers, please.

Prayer For One In Childbirth Hail, O Queen of Heaven, Mother of Mercy, Consolation of life, and Joy of them that love you! To you do we cry for this poor sufferer. In your maternal goodness, take pity on her. Abandon her not in her pains, since she places a childlike confidence in you. Through your own blessed delivery and your Divine Son, stand by her and gladden her with a happy delivery, that she may gratefully praise your kindness! In all our troubles and necessities, we fly to you for help, O Blessed Virgin Mary. Amen.

Thanks for your help. Blessed Virgin Mary, Lady of Good Help, ora pro nobis!

CatholicsComeHome.org is a nonprofit organization who noticed that a lot of Church outreach efforts... are not really good. So they decided to do better.

Take a second and watch this clip. It's super.

Hat tip: Get To Mass.

NOT.

(From the bulletin of St. Francis Xavier Church, the Jesuit parish that proudly advertised itself as the only parish in the US this year to march as a unit in the Gay Pride Day parade in New York.)

2008 Catechetical Convocation

ATTENTION DANCERS!
2008 Catechetical Convocation - Archdiocese of New York
"The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church"
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Westchester County Center, White Plains, New York
Modern dancers, liturgical dancers, and expert dancers
in Mexican, Philippine, German and African dance
are invited to volunteer
for the Opening and Closing Prayer experiences
of the 2008 Catechetical Convocation of the Archdiocese of New York
to be held on Saturday, September 27, 2008 in White Plains, NY.

Yikes. Saint Vitus, patron of dancers, ora pro nobis!

Please!

Hat tip: American Papist, via Diogenes of Catholic World News

Danielle Bean, writing in Faith and Family Magazine:

"You know the problem with being an author?" Ambrose mused from the backseat of the car yesterday afternoon.

I absolutely do, I wanted to tell him. I know many of the problems with being an author. The pay, the hours, the never having the right idea when you need it but then having exactly the right idea immediately after you hit "send" or in the middle of the night or while you are driving down the highway at 70 miles per hour with nary a pen in sight.

But I thought a 9 year old might have a different perspective, and so I answered only, "What?"

I'm not exactly an author, but I can appreciate the talk. Go read the whole thing.

The Windsor Hills Baptist Church is the kind of Church that makes Senator Barack Obama pretty nervous.

The Windsor Hills Baptist holds a youth conference every summer that tries to get young people interested in church. According to the website, the youth conference has all the predictable bible teen camp things like preaching, skits, a big country cookout, volleyball, basketball, choirs, and a preacher kids' conference. There's also a drawing for an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.

You know. All the typical stuff.

Unfortunately, the gun giveaway has been cancelled. It turns out the head pastor had an some kind of foot injury, so they're not giving away the gun this year. Luckily, someone's loaning the church a shotgun so they can still have the shooting competition.

The Windsor Hills Baptist Church Youth Conference website also contains the complete opinion document of the United States Supreme Court in the District of Columbia v. Heller decision about the right to bear arms. The site doesn't have any word on whether this will be specifically be discussed at the cookout or the preacher kids' conference, but I'd suggest that attendees should bring a highlighted and annotated copy of the Heller Opinion anyway. Organizers will then try to pry it from your hands.

All jokes aside, little events and stunts like this to get young people interested in church usually don't turn out well. For one, they're usually conceived by adults trying to be "hip" and attended by youth who either (a) see right through the adults' charade, or (b) are probably pretty uncool. I'm sorry if the second point above doesn't sound charitable. I don't mean it as an insult, just as informed reporting. I was in category (b) for a lot of my junior high and high school days, so I've been there.

What happened to me is why I'm disinclined to appreciate or encourage young people to get interested in the LifeTeen stuff that some Catholic churches offer. LifeTeen is a format of Mass and Youth Groups that try to incorporate bad Christian Rock and hip preaching to high schoolers who are supposed to be enjoying it. I'll get to that in a moment.

I went to one of these services a couple years ago by accident at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Lenexa, Kansas (yes, the same Holy Trinity that refused to let a Catholic organization use a side chapel for Mass). This is when I was trying to figure out how to be Catholic again and how to rejoin the Church after being away for years. Sunday morning had gotten away from me and I missed all the Masses being offered around town. I found that Holy Trinity had a 5:00 PM Mass on Sundays and set out for evening Mass.

Little did I know.

The lyrics to the Christian rock music were on the overhead projector being shown on the wall right night to our Lord crucified on the Cross. They had a band of about nine gentrifying gray haired old men playing acoustic guitars and swaying back and forth to their own rhythms. About 40% of the people there hadn't been "teens" for at least 40 years--in the spirit of charity, I'll presume they drove their kids to Mass. When Father Tom Dolezal delivered his sermon, he plopped down on the sanctuary steps and sprawled out on the floor and preached from this sprawl for the next 20 minutes or so. It's been a couple years ago, so I don't remember the homily or if it was good, but I do remembering that the whole Mass was a disjointed conglomeration of dippy music and hugging sessions that could best be described as pseudo-Catholic.

And if I were 13 years old and in junior high again, I bet I would have kind of liked it--or at least thought that I should like it. I had a pretty shallow understanding of my faith back then and was kind of scared to challenge myself. It's a long story that I haven't totally sorted out in my head, but I was developing a stunted personal theology that was about to get totally confused by my Catholic High School religion classes that mixed in strange admiration of Buddhism, Protestantism, Secular Humanism, Deism and "diet" Catholicism that didn't make any sense and wouldn't stand up to my own intellectual thinking. I'd eventually talk myself out of God altogether, but that'd be a few years after I was a smiling 13-year-old gluing felt banners for school Masses in the gymnasium.

You know how young children picture God as an old man with a white beard in a chair that sits on a floating cloud? Kids see this bearded God as some kind of genie who grants wishes, called "prayers", whenever they ask. When kids start to get older, they figure out that God is not some kind of magic-making wish-giver and struggle to replace that notion of God with something else. Enter: felt banners and Christian Rock. Some people never get out of this stage in life; I think some of them end up driving their children to LifeTeen Masses.

By the time I went to college, my Catholic thinking had ended up as Moral Relativism and then just outright quitting. I'd had enough. God seemed like a confusing delusion that was a trick for suckers and dupes, the only people that really figured God out were the atheists and the televangelists. Though I'd never say as much publicly, I didn't have much time for the Church as I knew her and wasn't interested in finding time.

In an unrelated path of my life, I'd eventually end up making a mess of myself and my life; it'd take that point for me to pick something else. You know the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? I decided to change what I was doing; the results I had been getting kind of sucked. I don't need to go over this story again, you can read about it in the introduction if you want.

So what does all of this have to do with Baptists and their assault rifles? Admittedly, not much. But seeing youth conferences and teen camps tend to remind me of this story. I wonder if our attempts to cultivate a crop is just casting seed on rocky ground, where the seed will sprout but doesn't develop roots. Of course the flip-side is true too! It'd be hard to tell an eight-year-old about about St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul, the sense of loneliness, desolation and abandonment by God that is often considered the hallmark of intensely deep Christian mysticism. Eight-year-olds are still in the felt-banner stage!

But when these Oklahoma City teenagers grow up to be adults, will they still consider the Almighty Lord to be something squeezed between basketball and trap shooting? I don't know. Maybe their conference does a nicer job of addressing these issues than I give them credit. Yet I reserve the right to remain a skeptic.

And not just because it's a Baptist camp and I'm a Catholic! Catholics are pretty good shots too.

I'd like to have a short discussion of vocabulary that people use when discussing religion and Godly issues.

Theism - A belief that God exists. From the Greek word Theos, meaning deity, god or gods. This is where I am. I put it on top because it's the right answer. Thanks for reading. :)
Atheism - A combination of Greek words a- (without) -theism (belief in God). People who fall in this camp are annoyed by religion, but it doesn't "offend" them; it just wastes their time. I understand atheists, I get their point of view; it's an intellectual position that is not challenging to reach.
Anti-theism - A combination of Greek words anti- (against) -theism (belief in God). In a way, this is in-your-face confrontational atheism, also called "new atheism" because it picks fights. These people have read their little Richard Dawkins books and are mad about it.
Deism - A belief that a deity (God) created the world, but doesn't get involved. No heaven, hell, praying, nothing. People who say that the United States was rooted in Christianity have a poor understanding of deism and famous deists. Count the famous American deis