In Veritate Ambulare

An Admission

2007-09-23T10:20:00.000-06:00

It has come to my attention that law school tends to consume one's time to prodigious degrees. This little corner of the blogosphere was already rather anemic, and I simply don't have anything like the time to do anything with it anymore. For the sake of not pretending, it's best to go ahead and admit that. I'll be leaving the archives online, but I do not expect to be posting in the foreseeable future. Thanks to all our readers. I'll leave everyone with just one little request -- say a little prayer for Charlie Weiss and the football team, they need it.

K of C Convention

2007-08-09T21:46:00.001-06:00

I am just returned from volunteering at the 125th Knights of Columbus Supreme Convention. I'll try and get some details up here over the next several days -- St. Blog's seems to be awefully quiet on the largest gathering of hierarchy in the Western hemisphere. I said "Your Excellency" more times Monday and Tuesday than in the rest of my life put together (and even got in one "Your Eminence"). While I'm at it I'll see if I can't finish cleaning up our color scheme changes and post the rest of my contraception talk.

Update: Rocco seems to have some coverage, focusing primarily on Cdl. Bertone's comings and goings. At least he speaks kindly of the Order. I'll have some tidbits that he doesn't bother to mention, along with some first-hand bits that he just doesn't know.

Whoops!

2007-07-25T20:52:00.000-06:00

It seems that I have neglected to change the tags for our images -- they were hosted on my old school server, which seems to have just recently been flushed. We'll get things back up and running here shortly.

Calendrical Thoughts

2007-07-10T22:17:00.000-06:00

I will refrain, at least at the moment, from babbling about the Motu Proprio. Those who know better and speak better than I on such things are relatively easy to find. Huzzah, three cheers, Deo gratias, indeed. To break my long hiatus, I have, as Monty Python would say, something completely different.

Recently, my parents were in Nashville and had the singular misfortune of attending Mass at Holy Family in Brentwood. (I'm afraid the the tie-dye quilt over the sanctuary, twig crucifix, stadium seating, and do-it-yourself-share-your-faith-journey rite of acceptance combined to force this parish onto my black list after the last visit.) In the homily, Father apparently opined that the liturgical calendar does not make any sense to people in the southern hemisphere, since its cycle of death and rebirth does not coincide with the seasonal cycle of death and rebirth. i.e., Easter isn't in the Spring, thus, Christianity must somehow make much less sense. The inevitable result, then, as the number and percentage of Catholics living in the Southern hemisphere grows, is that the liturgical calendar will have to be revised so that feasts match up with seasons there.

This would make perfect sense -- if Catholicism -- or even mere Christianity for that matter -- were an animistic faith in which observances derived nature and meaning from the weather or the the seasons. Christmas may have been established on a day that facilitated its replacement of the winter solstice as a high holy day among the Germanic tribes. But this does not mean that Christmas derives any of its integral meaning from that association. The same is even more true of Easter, which, unlike some other feasts, is actually a calendrical anniversary, albeit on a different calendar. The meaningful calendrical relationship for Easter is that with Passover -- not (primarily) that with spring. The Church has been successfully spreading the Gospel in the Southern hemisphere for two millennia. The absence of a fully inculturated liturgical calendar hasn't seemed to stop her yet. Sure, the Petrine authority could erect an Australian Rite and publish a Missale Austrinus so that the poor people below the equator could have Easter during their spring. But this seems to cut against catholicity. Was there really nothing to say about the ninth chapter of Luke's gospel?

Into Great Silence review

2007-05-21T10:25:00.000-06:00

Like Mr. Fitzpatrick, I saw Into Great Silence this weekend. It wasn't exactly what I expected, though I would recommend it to anyone interested in a visually beautiful glimpse of the monastic life.

A detailed review can be found here. I'd agree with most of what Mr. Fitzpatrick says, adding that the film can get a little tedious at points. I can only take so many minutes of pondering the same scenic view of the snow-covered monastery. The good bits more than make up for any shortcomings, however. Favorite scenes included an afternoon of some of the younger brothers frolicking in the snow and a very sweet interview with an elderly brother about being joyful in the face of death because it means going home.

All in all, Into Great Silence is a stunningly beautiful film, and I would recommend seeing it if it is playing near you. I think it has the potential to do a lot of good for vocations. There was a group of very arty, film-student-types in front of me in the theatre, and afterwards, their general consensus was "well, that was interesting. Their life looks really cool." If it can get that sort of response from guys with spiky hair and eyebrow piercings, just imagine what it could do for someone on the verge of discerning a vocation.

Prayer Request

2007-05-13T16:25:00.000-06:00

Your prayers for Paul's mom would be much appreciated.

Contraception, Part II

2007-04-22T21:51:00.000-06:00

Part I
Our look at the moral theology of contraception continues.

Therefore, if we accept that sex is the necessary physical element of this divinely ordained self-giving reflection of God by man, we can begin to draw some concrete and logical conclusions about it.

I) Sex is not self-centered; it is not, and cannot ever be, about me. It has to be about my spouse, about my act of giving of myself.

II) Sex is not about pleasure. It is pleasurable, and it was created as such by God, but that is one of its qualities, not its purpose. Pleasure is inward-looking, self-centered – the same things we just established sex isn’t. God has attached pleasure to things that are good and necessary for us to do: eating, sleeping, having sex, etc. But God attached that pleasure to these things because He intended life to be joyful and to encourage us to do them because they were good; they aren’t good because they are pleasurable. We’re supposed to derive pleasure from sex, and that’s not precluded by this point or its giving nature. But we do need to remember that sex, like any other human action, has pleasure as a quality, not a purpose.

III) Sex is appropriate only in the context of a permanent relationship: marriage. Because it is a reflection of God’s eternal – and therefore very permanent – self-giving love, it would be entirely inappropriate, and entirely inaccurate, for us to attempt to reflect that love in any kind of transitory or impermanent fashion. As a temporal being, I can’t match God’s perpetual and eternal love: but I can bind myself to the utmost of my capacity, I can have permanence in my love, even if I can’t have perpetuity.

IV) Sex is appropriate only in instances in which its mutually self-giving quality is fully expressed – God’s love has no reservations, holds nothing back, and has no barriers. Therefore, our loving imitation of that love shouldn’t either.

So that’s brought us quite definitively to sex itself. So let’s start into this section by asking, “what, exactly, is sex?” We might think we know the answer, but it’s actually worth looking at. The soul’s side to sex has been outlined above – marriage has a sacramental, spiritual side, of course. The physical side, for our purposes, requires a very precise and slightly graphic definition: the deposition, through the conjugal act, of seminal fluid in the “appropriate receptacle” of a woman.

So right away we can eliminate things like in vitro as not actual sex: no conjugal act.

Also, we can exclude from being sex all non-coital acts: no deposition and no conjugal act, either. As a note, nobody’s outlawing foreplay, but these sorts of activities aren’t sex, and should not be used to take the place of the sexual act itself. There’s a reason it’s called “foreplay.”

Third, and this is the one that will surprise people, we have to exclude anything involving condoms: this can’t be real sex. It has a conjugal act, but there’s no deposition. It renders the sexual act impotent, thus frustrating its very purpose and nullifying it. Thus, we lump condomistic sex with non-coital sexual acts in the category that some have termed “psuedo-sex.”

So let’s backtrack for a second now: we know what sex is, but what is it for? We’ve discussed the theological importance of sex, and we’ll need to bear that in mind, but sex has practical purposes as well, which can be summarized as “babies and bonding” – sex is for reproduction, and sex is for married persons to share and express their bond of love. You need to have these two elements, the procreative and the unitive, to have rightly-ordered sex. You might technically have a full sexual act while frustrating one of these elements (rape and contraception are the two standard respective examples), but it won’t be good sex. What you have then is more akin to Bullemia, where someone forcibly extirpates the nourishing quality of eating while maintaining some of the other qualities in its nature.So we have a seamless garment, in which the these unitive and procreative natures are interwoven. And together, they form what is really just the opposite side of the self-giving-image-of-God nature of sex. These are just two ways of describing the same reality, and they both entail the same things and they have the same prerequisites.

Contraception, Part I

2007-04-21T15:35:00.000-06:00

Several weeks ago, I gave a presentation to our John Cardinal Newman Community on the Church's teachings on contraception. I'll present it here in a series of posts over the following days.

This talk is ostensibly about contraception, but there’s a good deal of ground we’ll have to cover before we get there – what I’m going to say about contraception is really a conclusion, which won’t make any sense unless we have first established the correct set of premises. To talk about contraception, you obviously have to talk first about sex. But to talk about sex, you first have to talk about man, and to talk intelligently about man, you have first to talk about God. So, let’s start with God.

What do we know about God? We know a variety of things about God, but I’d like to focus on one of His overarching and unifying qualities: God is love, Deus caritatis est. This well established principle was, of course, the topic of Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, which came out last year.

We can see how this works in practice by considering the Holy Trinity: The Father creates the universe and sustains it out of love, and His instrument in that loving act is His word, the Son, the consubstantial and eternal Logos. The Son, in turn, gives Himself entirely to the Father in love, dying on the cross as the perfect sacrifice of perfect love. The love between the Father and the Son is so great that it manifests itself as a third person, the Holy Spirit

God proceeds, as Genesis tells us, to make man in His own image – and not just in the image of the Father, but in the image of the entire Godhead: “let us make man in Our image.” And although it is primarily in our souls that we possess this image of God – which makes sense, since God is a spiritual, and not a corporeal being, the Incarnation withstanding – God creates us body AND soul.

Therefore, just as God exists fully in the self-giving act of love, so too is man made to give of himself in love, and in so doing he most fully realizes his status as being a reflection of God’s image.

Man has as his final cause God – union with God is our purpose, our end. We have been created to be united in love with something outside ourselves. We have, then, what John Paul II referred to as a “spousal nature,” by which we will most fully realize our purpose by being united with God following the resurrection.

But man can’t enjoy bodily or even spiritual union with God here on earth – this has been rendered impossible by the fall. We have a connection with God through the sacraments, but not this spousal union.

Therefore, God, in His love and wisdom, created man in such a way that he can partially fulfill his call to give of self, partially fulfill his spousal nature, within the confines of our earthly existence.

For this reason, God created man “male and female” and gave them marriage to unite them spousally, and sexuality, the bodily component of that union.

Thus, man most fully reflects God’s image when a man and a woman are united in the marital embrace – they share a union in both body and soul that mirrors the union among God’s persons: they share a spiritual bond by virtue of the sacrament of which they have partaken, and they share a physical bond by virtue of the realities of man’s physical nature. Because we are a union of body and soul – not merely a haphazard jumble of the two, and not merely animated bodies, but a real union – we could not in this life most completely reflect God’s image without the union and giving of one of these aspects. God the Father gives perfect love without corporeal existence, but this is because He transcends it while giving completely of Himself. We have bodies, and so if we attempted to give of ourselves entirely without doing so bodily, we could not – we would be withholding something that we have. Thus, both body and soul are required to be called upon in marriage, because we have both to give.

Furthermore, because people so united are giving entirely of self – as God gives entirely of Himself – in love, they are drawn close to God: by choosing and partaking in love, they grow in their imitation of the perfect love, God Himself. Thus, marriage has in reality a triangular quality: the two spouses united with each other, and each united with God. This is why Archbishop Fulton Sheen entitled his book on marriage Three to Get Married. The whole affair is about more than just husband and wife: it’s about God. It also reinforces the manner in which marriage is a reflection of the Trinity by making the relationship triune.

Answered Prayers

2007-04-20T11:41:00.000-06:00

The Bettanellis have received some wonderful news. Thanks be to God.

Let us remember, while thanking God for Melanie's health, to lift up in prayer all those without good diagnoses.

PBA Ban Upheld

2007-04-18T14:19:00.000-06:00

But I wish Anthony Kennedy's clerks would proofread better. Bad proofing produces ambiguity, and ambiguity leads to bad law. Take this sentence from the majority opinion:

"The Act excludes most D&Es in which the fetus is re-moved in pieces, not intact."

Now, both Kennedy's opinion and the Syllabus devoted quite a bit of time prior to this discussing how the law in question does not prohibit dismemberment Dilation and Evacuation abortions. But here, he indicates that it prohibits some of them. Why does it say that, you ask? Because of the lack of a comma after "D&Es." If there were a comma there, it would be saying that the Act excludes most D&Es because most D&Es involve the removal of the fetus in pieces. As it reads now, it says that the Act prohibits most of those D&Es that involve removing the fetus in pieces. The presence or absence of the comma changes whether or not the prepositional phrase "in which . . ." is a restrictive (without the comma, written meaning) or descriptive (with the comma, likely the intended meaning) -- and as we can see, thus changes the meaning of the entire sentence. Being a sentence buried deep within an opinion and making a point well established elsewhere, this is pretty harmless. But if we're letting this sort of mistake slip here, how sloppy are we going to be in situations where it really matters?

All that aside, it's an enormously welcome opinion. Kudos to the Court.

Congrats, Alice!

2007-04-17T20:45:00.000-06:00

Congratulations to our dear blog-friend, Alice Gunther, who won three very well deserved titles in this year's Homeschool Blog Awards. Alice's Cottage Blessings was voted Best Crafts, Plans, & Projects Blog, Best Homeschool Encourager Blog, and Live-What-You-Believe Homeschool Blog.

Beyond being an encourager to homeschooling families, Alice encourages everyone with whom she comes into contact. She's been an incredible source of inspiration to me, both in my aspirations to raise a family and in my practice of our Faith. She is a shining example of Catholic womanhood, and the internet, and my life, is better for her presence. The voters in these Homeschool Blog Awards categories chose well.

Congratulations, Alice, and thanks for all you do.

Subways

2007-04-16T20:06:00.000-06:00

I spent several days at the end of last week traveling in the Chicago area -- from Columbus to Midway, then around town on the CTA, hence to South Bend, and then back again. Coming from a part of the country in which public transportation is, to the extent it exists at all, primarily a source for jokes about public services, such adventures are always, well, adventurous.

One of the most interesting things about them is that they provide opportunities to ride around very large cities. Large cities, and especially public transportation through large cities, are fascinating case studies in humanity. The array of building ranging from brand new to refurbished to falling down around one's ears, the shuffle of myriad people going this way and that, the various possessions that people find reason to prop up in apartment or office windows, almost everywhere you look you find something that contains a story about history or society. That's not to say that large cities are necessarily superior to their alternatives; indeed, I prefer open spaces and am firmly convinced that one can learn just as much, and live far more happily, in them than in a big city. But the metropolis has a story to tell. Much like a museum, it's full of information, but you wouldn't want to stay there once they turned out the lights.

You can tell the people who live in the city from the people who have come to visit. Those accustomed to the routine sit on the L and stare at the ground, or read, or fidget. They're tired, bored, and know how all of this works. They'll tell you where this train goes, but only if you ask. And they might not get it right. But the visitor peers out the window, hoping to learn what all the other passengers have already forgotten, as shop fronts and neighborhoods go clicking by. Who was Forrester? What did he do in that building with his name over the door? Do the architects who work in those drafting rooms now even know? If one had time and ability to get off the train and nose around, maybe one could find out. But I haven't time, and nobody else remembers even to care.

One of the particularly fascinating aspects of very large cities is the enormous number of churches. Even more excitingly, the traveler can infer that in a place like Chicago, a significant portion of them will be Catholic, and not merely the tv-dinner Protestant edifices that are stacked top to bottom in every Southern city and town. Of course, from the Metro you can only see the belfry, roof, or steeple of most of them -- sometimes one gets a glimpse of more, but not often. One inevitably finds oneself engrossed in an unwinnable game of guessing to whom each belongs. Baroque twin towers with bronze domes: surely Catholic; enormous pyramidal shingled steeple, vaguely German air: probably mainline Protestant, perhaps Prussian immigrant-built; chintzy imitation Baroque facade, no statues: American Protestant knock-off of real architecture; blocky cruciform structure with large dome over the central crossing: a long shot, but I called it for the Orthodox; Florentine-style belfry: again, surely Catholic; brown spires somewhat reminiscent of Sagrada Familia: Catholic.

Of course, without the accompanying foot tour, and never being close enough to read a sign, one is never able to verify one's score. The game ends, as does the little journey through the city, with a collection of new questions, but very few answers.

Fr. Hardon

2007-04-10T18:24:00.000-06:00

The Curt Jester passes along a report that the first steps have been taken in the cause of canonization of Fr. John Hardon, SJ. Observant readers will recognize the name from the article I linked in my last post.

The good father's With Us Today: on the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist is one of the most heartfelt books I've read on the subject (and this is no small number, given that reading books on the Eucharist has been my only academic work this semester). As I said in my notes on the work, Fr. Hardon's love for our Eucharistic Lord is obvious. He's quite inspiring.

More information on the cause can be found here.

A Recommendation and a Reflection

2007-04-07T11:11:00.000-06:00

My ongoing research project has me in "All Eucharist, all the time" mode (not a bad thing, by any stretch), so I give you this article by Fr. John Hardon, SJ for your Easter reading.

I've been trying to think up some profound post upon the first anniversary of my reception into the Church, but I really can't come up with anything. That's not to say that this hasn't been quite the profound year for me, spiritually speaking, but I just haven't any words to describe what's happened. It doesn't feel like it's been only a year, really. Being Catholic is as natural to me as breathing now. I haven't been "in" very long, certainly, but in a lot of ways I can hardly remember what life was like before. Particularly, I've no idea how I managed to live without the graces He grants through His Presence in the Blessed Sacrament. How does anyone?

Please join me in praying for Amy, a dear friend of ours here at IVA, for Jennifer F., and for all other candidates and catechumens coming into the fullness of the Truth tonight. May they feel as blessed by God and as welcomed by His family, the Church, as I do, and may their faith only grow in steadfastness and in fervor as they continue their journey heavenward.

Bleg

2007-04-01T13:06:00.000-06:00

If you know of a good translation of Christoper Rasperger's 200 interpretations of "This is My Body," I would be much obliged if you'd let me know where to find it. I've not been able to come up with one, and my Latin is far too rusty to create my own. The text can be found here.

Blessed Holy Week, everyone!

Fr. DeFedirico

2007-03-29T15:12:00.000-06:00

I received word today from the Memphis Knights of Columbus that one of our retired priests, Fr. Gabe DeFedirico, was taken to the ICU today and that there was difficulty reviving him. Fr. Gabe was a fiery little Italian-American man from Philadelphia, who always managed to combine great humor with astounding candor. He came across as gruff very often, yet also ran the diocese's pre-marital counseling. He had an amusing nickname for every conceivable wrong way of receiving Holy Communion (such as the "Trick-or-Treat," in which the communicant stuck out his hands and opened his mouth, leaving the minister guessing how he desired to receive), and a startling blunt manner of articulating the presence of evil in the world: he would list the litany of excuses for something or other, and then say, "No. Such and such is EVIL." At the same time, he displayed a disarmingly simple love of our Lord and the Blessed Sacrament, and could present homilies as memorable for their unadorned and straightforward caring as easily as he could present ones relying on humor or sheer bluntness. He never wanted for an anecdote, having accumulated a truly copious array in his interesting life, and he was quite adept at integrating these into the instructional facets of his ministry. He once observed that until he was an adult, he thought that his parents had never argued; only then did he realize that they did it all in Italian, so as to spare their American children.

In perhaps the most memorable of his homilies I ever heard, he told of his time as a prison chaplain. Every week, he would bring the Blessed Sacrament to a Catholic inmate. One week, the prisoner in the neighboring cell, an old man, leaned up against his bars and said, "Father, please give me what you bring to him." He replied, "I'm sorry, but I can only give it to someoen who believes that it's the Body of Christ." "I do believe!" responded the inmate. Fr. DeFedirico told that he gave Holy Communion to the man, and ended with this observation: "When I went back next week, the man was dead."

That's a simple tale, and one frought with potentially spurious relationships. But it's one that I've spent the last eight years thinking about.

Just in: Parents raise children; hot water needed to make coffee

2007-03-19T18:02:00.000-06:00

I can count on one hand the number of times I have read something intelligent in the pages of the Memphis Commercial Appeal (syndicated columns, comics, and the sports page excluded). But apparently they've published this surprisingly intelligent article on pre-K programs.

Now, pre-K and Headstart programs sound really great at first -- everyone supports kids learning, and everybody can support giving disadvantaged children some sort of assistance. And then you think about it a little harder. These three- and four-year-old children who are going to school and spending all this time with teachers aren't spending time with whom? Oh, with their parents.

Why exactly does the government want to take children away from their parents? Maybe it's because the primary error of the modern state is that it seeks to be all things; it can spend your money better than you, it can manage your healthcare better than you, it can get the crab grass out of your yard, and it can even raise your children. When you expand programs such as this beyond the level of charity for the desperately needy, you cease to help people, and begin robbing them. You rob them of their childhood, which should be spent in the warmth and care of their parents' house -- even, or perhaps especially, if those parents will teach them things inimical to the values, official or de facto, of the state or society. You rob parents of their rightful labor -- we hear lots about right to work, but what about the right to do the most fundamental work, the work that God willed man do "from the beginning"? The familial labor of love was the single labor inherent in man's nature and required of him prior to the Fall. To paraphrase George Bailey, the government isn't selling, the government's buying.

What's even more troubling is that Catholic schools have jumped on the bandwagon. They likely aren't consciously motivated by the same insidious statism that drives public programs, but that doesn't make the end result any better. Maybe they think they're providing a top-quality program; maybe they think they're making themselves better able to compete in the non-existent academic marketplace. They quite certainly are using their pre-K programs as gold mines by preferencing pre-K students for real school admissions, forcing parishioners to enroll their children as a practical matter even if they disapprove of the concept. And with parochial schools willingly constricting class sizes and enrollments, to the point of turning away paying students, Protestant and Catholic, in the name of some God-forsaken accreditation or perhaps just shameless pandering to Those Who Know About Such Things. Given that even in places where Catholic populations are growing parochial school teachers are just as likely not to be Catholic as to be, and almost guaranteed to be incapable of giving real instruction in the Faith, homeschooling looks better all the time.

Second Amendment News

2007-03-09T13:43:00.000-06:00

In what could be a landmark case, the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia threw out DC's longstanding handgun ban, overturning a District Court ruling from last year. The District has long maintained that the Second Amendment applies only to organized militias, a line of reasoning rejected both by the Court of Appeals and by the tradition of American constitutionalism. The decision is overdue and highly welcome.

What boggles my mind, however, is this comment from the dissent (itself taken from an earlier case, Seegers v. Ashcroft): "the District of Columbia is not a state within the meaning of the Second Amendment and therefore the Second Amendment’s reach does not extend to it."

This statement ignores several key facts. Most importantly, it assumes that the Court has incorporated the Second Amendment through the application of the 14th Amendment, so as to apply its provisions to the states. The Court has never done this, but has rather held on several occasions that the Second Amendment's protection of the right to bear arms is NOT covered by the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. (Of course, one could argue, as an even more fundamental point, that the entire incorporation doctrine itself is bunk -- but that's another discussion). So, saying that the Second Amendment doesn't apply to the District of Columbia because it's not a state is pointless -- the Second Amendment wouldn't apply to the District even if it were a state.

In fact, the status of the District of Columbia as Federal territory, and its NOT being a state, is what causes the Second Amendment to apply there. The Bill of Rights, along with the rest of the Constitution, binds first and foremost the Federal government. Congress lacks the authority to prohibit the bearing of arms. Yet the District of Columbia's administration, which Congress created and vested with powers, believes that it can. From where has it received such power? Congressus non supplet quod Congressus non habet (to adapt a phrase).

The case is Parker, et al v. District of Columbia.

Pray

2007-03-08T22:28:00.000-06:00

If you're reading this, you probably already know about Dom and Melanie and the blow they were dealt this week. I just wanted to add a gentle reminder from our little corner of the Catholic blogosphere to storm heaven with prayers for the Bettinellis. They're asking particularly that we ask for the intercession of Bl. Teresa of Calcutta.

Chimpanzees?

2007-03-08T20:10:00.000-06:00

I've been doing some research for a big paper here recently, and it's led me to dig through law reviews. In general, I've always thought that law reviews were reserved for serious legal scholarship. Not anymore. At least, not if you go to Golden Gate University School of Law, in whose Winter 2007 Law Review appeared an article entitled "The Entitlement of Chimpanzees to the Common Law Writs of Habeus Corpus and De Homine Replegiando," in which the author argues "that individual chimpanzees are entitled to use that common law writ [of Habeus Corpus] to bring their claims to bodily liberty before common law courts."

Now, tell you what -- you find me a chimpanzee that can bring ANY claim, of bodily liberty or otherwise, or do anything that even remotely begins to resemble using the common law, and not only will I eat my hat, I'll agree with this fellow.

Pets aren't people, folks.

Dodgeball

2007-03-07T23:19:00.000-06:00

I found this picture in a Facebook* group called "Catholics for Clerics in Cassocks," and simply had to share. I hope the individual who posted it, whoever he may be, doesn't mind. I think, in many ways, it sums up Catholicism: Tradition, a good time, and (at least after Father wings someone with that ball) a little well-deserved suffering. The caption didn't say where the picture was taken, but judging from the other pictures with it, I think the priests are members of the FSSP or ICRSP, and might be in St. Louis -- there were a lot of pictures of His Excellency, Archbishop Burke.

For those readers who aren't college students, Facebook is something like an online interactive address book on steroids -- you can upload pictures and information to let friends know what you're up to, and there are "groups" people can make and join for . . . well, mainly just for the sake of doing so.

I can't get no satisfaction

2007-03-04T23:31:00.000-06:00

The National Registry of Gregorian Scholas gives a little clue as to why good ecclesiastical music is so hard to come by in the mid-south.

(ht NLM)

A Word from Pope Leo XIII

2007-02-24T12:06:00.000-06:00

"According to the Fathers of the Church, the Eucharist must be thought of as a certain continuation and extension of the Incarnation. Through it, the substance of the incarnate Word is linked with individual men and women, and, in an admirable manner, the supreme sacrifice of Calvary is renewed, as was foretold by the prophet Malachi, 'In every place a clean oblation is sacrificed and offered to my Name.' This miracle, the very greatest of its kind, is accompanied by innumerable miracles, for here all the laws of nature are suspended. The whole substance of bread and wine is converted into the Body and Blood of Christ; the appearances of bread and wine, subjects of no reality, are sustained by divine power."

--Leo XIII, Mirae Caritatis, 1902

Housekeeping

2007-02-22T21:35:00.000-06:00

Blogger finally forced me to convert to the new version today. Fortunately everything transferred it seems. Since we didn't lose anything, upgrading is good because now we have blogger tags instead of having to use the old technorati ones (which I hadn't been able to use since about September because my computer crashed and I lost the links to the site for creating them). I'll fiddle with the sidebar here soon so you can access both the old and the new thematic archives.

Germans like the pope

2007-02-22T21:19:00.000-06:00

The Germans seem to like them their Pope. The German periodical Spiegal has published a very interesting article discussing why Benedict, whose election was met with wailing and gnashing of teeth in so many quarters, is actually making inroads in efforts to reawaken the faith in Europe.