I have been racking my brain for a few days trying to come up with a new post. In 6 posts I will hit 400 writings of The Catholic Bard. Post 400 I plan on publishing on The Catholic Bard’s 2nd year anniversary. I also stayed up till after 3:30 AM when I should be sleeping as I have to get up to go to work at 9:30 AM. I did however make it to 8:30 AM Mass.

Even though I sometimes press my mind to work and write, oftentimes my brain is blank. This is probably because I am tired from never getting enough sleep. This added with ADHD, potential scrupulosity, indecisiveness and ordinary everyday life consisting of working, hanging out with my wife, and prayer prevents my mind from doing the hard thinking that I am supposed to do as a writer/blogger content creator.

This is why I often rely on posts with lots of quotes. I also love to share good well-crafted thoughts from the Broad Chorus of Catholic Voices.

The diversity of thought within Catholic teaching, like variety within the strictures of sonnets, is one of its most beautiful features. It is nevertheless important to listen, as much as we can, to a broad chorus of Catholic thinkers. I have found great consolation in the fact that someone holier and smarter than myself has likely asked my questions already; my job is to find them and to listen, and then to make as many people as possible read block quotations about it.
Sharon Kabel , OSB vs. UFO: Stanley Jaki and the Theology of Aliens (June 16, 2021) OnePeterFive

And sometimes I like to focus in on a particular voice and give a whole article dedicated to them to showcase their creative writing talent.

I have written posts focusing on Mark Shea Fr. Stephanos Pedrano ,Jimmy Akin , Rebecca Bratten Weiss , Fr. Casey Cole Steve Skojec Independent Recording Artist Katie Curtis Fr. James Martin, Dave Armstrong, Scott Eric Alt, Thomas Howard and Fr. Matthew P. Schneider LC and others in posts featuring more then one person.

For this post I wanted to highlight The Very Extraordinary Graceful Solid Steel Magnificat authored by my fellow Patheos blogger the great creative talented Catholic writer Mary Pezzulo.

Her posts are dripping with deep seated Catholic spirituality, hard hitting social commentary, colorful creative descriptions of everyday life and culture, warm descriptions of her family life, living the interesting life in Steubenville Ohio and also the heart-aching pain of being in a fallen world of sinful neighbors. whom we are commanded to love as our selves.

If you’ve read her before, here is a brief look back at some of her work over the course of time when she first started publishing on Patheos till the present day. If you’ve never read her before here is your introduction. I hope you like what you read and you will click on her blog to read more.

2016

Crying With Trees

When life is difficult, I go for a walk in Union Cemetery. I lean on my beech tree and cry. A cemetery is a good place to cry; no human visitor bothers you or asks you why you are crying. The tree offers no hollow consolation or advice. It remains alive, present, listening in its way, in the way that all of nature listens. The graves are old and silent–the ones surrounding my beech were filled a hundred years ago. There is no sound but my sobs, and the crunch of beech leaves under my feet.

Mary Pezzulo Parable of the Beech Tree | March 23 (2016) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

Harry Potter

In any case, I went to the Pottermore website. I let them sort me into a house, and I took the admittedly lovely Patronus quiz. I didn’t like some of the dichotomies– I’ve never liked the idea that “free” and “safe” are mutually exclusive– but I played along.

And now I’m a Hufflepuff with a buffalo for a patronus, and I feel that there’s no point in going on.

I’m serious. The quiz assigned me a buffalo. My patronus, according to the Pottermore quiz, is a big fat hairy male American buffalo cavorting around the forest clearing with an awkward dangling scrotal sac and a clumsy gait. My friends have eagles and thestrals, and I have a buffalo. I’d be the least imposing young witch at Hogwarts. Students would probably sneak up behind me dressed as dementors, to make me summon my patronus so they could laugh at me.

I’m afraid to take the wand quiz, for fear I’ll find out my wand is a rubber chicken.

Mary Pezzulo Huffle-puffle-buffal-uffle (September 23, 2016) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

2017

So, what are you doing for Lent?

I don’t like to talk about “What are you giving up for Lent?” because in my experience it puts me in the wrong head space. As if the spiritual life was primarily about getting rid of stuff instead of about being filled. Of course, you have to give things up in order to be filled; only the hungry can be filled with good things. The rich are always sent away empty, not because God hates the rich but because the rich have no room. But I’ve found that, for me, “giving things up” can lead to filling myself with more things that aren’t of God.

I decide, for example, that I’m going to give up chocolate– not just the good chocolate, but the crappy chocolate as well. No candy, no chocolate milk, no chocolate-covered granola bars. I clean out the cupboards and stuff all the chocolate in the freezer. It goes well for a few days. Then I start to crack. I dream about chocolate and wake up feeling guilty.

I’ve learned that penance doesn’t just mean giving something up. Penance means turning around. It means turning your gaze away from the idol and onto the icon– directing myself away from the object I’ve valued too much or in the wrong way, not to stare pointlessly into space but to set my sight on the Lord. Not to empty myself except in such a way that I’m filled with good things.

So, what are you doing for Lent?

Mary Pezzulo What Are You Doing for Lent? (February 20, 2017) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

Life at the Beginning and End

Our life begins with the closed-eyed dark of the womb and the cliff’s edge of that ordeal we call birth. Maybe we all cry for our Father to come and save us, then. Next thing you know we’re tumbling with no control, plummeting to a sudden stop we know is coming but can’t say when. We can’t direct what happens next, not really; we can’t control whether we land on our head or our feet. Our only choice is whether we will cry “My Lord and my God” and leave the whole matter up to Him before it’s too late.

Next thing we know, it’s over, and we wake up before the Throne of Mercy.
My Lord and my God.
– Mary Pezzulo A Plummeting Ghost (October 16, 2017) Steel Magnificat

2018

Be Like Magdalene at Easter

Laugh. Laugh til your sides ache. Laugh til you cry like a Magdalene– then go forth and preach like a Magdalene. Spread the word til the ends of the Earth. Nothing will be as it was before. All was transformed into grace by the Passion of Christ, and this morning all was transformed into glory by His resurrection. The gates of Heaven stand open. The Bridegroom has returned with the Light of Life.

Why do you seek the living among the dead? Christ is not dead; He is risen! Alleluia! He is risen indeed!
Mary Pezzulo, Laugh Like a Magdalene (April 1, 2018) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

In Defense of Libraries

Libraries are about far more than just getting a book you need quickly. An online store like Amazon can do that itself, if you’ve got the money, but libraries are better than online stores even if online stores were taxpayer-funded and free to use. Libraries are spaces for people who need spaces to go. They are places where people with children can meet for the children’s benefit and their own relief. They have people inside them whose job it is to help and teach, and those people make mistakes just often enough to be good for educating the public. Libraries are public spaces that educate everyone from babies up to grouchy old men, for free, in more ways than just turning up the book you wanted when you wanted it. They provide for mental health by providing fun things to do with no admission fee. They provide people with quiet places to read when they don’t want to drink a bottomless cup of diet Coke. They are a necessary part of communities for all of these reasons, and as far as tax dollars go they do it remarkably cheaply. Mary Pezzulo In Defense of Libraries (July 25, 2018) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

2019

Value of Life

As a Catholic, and as a person who strives to be ethical in general, I believe that all life has value and human life in particular has great value. The lives of the most helpless deserve special consideration, which means that killing babies at any stage of their development is gravely wrong. The number of abortions I would be happy to see in the world is zero.
Mary Pezzulo Let’s Look at the Latest Abortion Legislation (May 19, 2019) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

9/11

Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist during the 9/11 attacks, and I don’t think memes as such really did either. Email existed, but not everyone had one. Cell phones were relatively new, and comically small– at their invention they were the size of milk cartons and only rich people hand them, and over the next few decades they shrunk and became cheaper. By 9/11 they were a few inches long, and you almost had to choose between holding one to your mouth or your ear. We joked that they would just keep shrinking until they got stuck in your ear canal, but instead they got bigger to accommodate touch screens, and we use them to share memes and tweets.

At the time, we used them to make phone calls. Their use was beginning to be so widespread that we stopped seeing pay phones in public places. And on 9/11, all the cell phones in Manhattan stopped working. People desperate to call a loved one and see if they were all right couldn’t get through. They tried to find pay phones, but those had already grown so rare.

They printed off photos of the people they couldn’t find, along with their names and contact information, and they pasted them to walls around the city. I think that was against the law, but nobody cared.

We knew that the people whose photos were pasted on the walls were dead, but it wasn’t polite to say so. People put candles and flowers by the impromptu patchwork wall memorials.

That was eighteen years ago.

Between that time and this, an entire generation grew up.

Mary Pezzulo To the Generation that has Grown Up Since 9/11 (September 11, 2019) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

Lions

Looking at a photo doesn’t carry the same weight, just as hearing a recording of a lion’s roar can’t convey the experience of hearing it behind you when you didn’t know there was a lion nearby. It’s partly to do with the symmetry of that face: the white patches under the eyes, the dark triangle of the nose, the crowning halo of the mane. A lion doesn’t look like a real animal. A lion looks like an icon of God, painted by some alien race.
Mary Pezzulo The Lion is Not Real: a Lesson About Faith (November 30, 2019) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

2020

Meditations on the Way of the Cross by Mary Pezzulo

I began meditating on the Way of the Cross when I went to graduate school. At Franciscan University, there is a beautiful walking Way of the Cross, on a hill near the adoration chapel. I walked that trail, meditating, many times. Later, when I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and stuck at home most of the time, I found a great deal of consolation on meditating on the Way of the Cross from bed, without walking.

I hope that in publishing my own meditations on the Way of the Cross in the form of a book, I can inspire people to remember that Christ walked that terrible road for them and with them, in their own lives and their own sufferings. And I hope that I can show you that in doing so, Christ triumphed —and in the end, so will you. You will triumph because Christ already triumphed over your cross. The Way of the Cross is a sorrowful prayer but also a joyful one, because of the Resurrection.

Voting 2020

On November 3rd, I am going to go to the polls and vote against the party that has driven abortions up and caused thousands of other preventable deaths as well. I don’t like the democratic candidates hardly at all. I can’t stand Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. but in my estimation, they’ll kill fewer people. And then, I’ll spend the other 525599 minutes of my year finding ways to help people that will probably be a lot more effective than voting.
Mary Pezzulo, Save Lives or Punish People? Which is Pro-Life? (August 19, 2020) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

Christmas

You can watch all the Christmas movies you like, and there are hundreds. Some people like Hallmark Christmas cheese. Some people like to watch The Nutcracker. My favorite challenge is to watch as many different versions of A Christmas Carol as you can get your hands on. There’s a big-budget musical starring Albert Finney that I love, there’s a version with Patrick Stewart that’s faithful to the book, a cartoon by the person who made The Snowman, there’s a Flintstones one, a five-minute Warner Brothers cartoon with Yosemite Sam as Scrooge, there’s Mr. Magoo, the Muppets, there must be a hundred or more. Watch a new version of A Christmas Carol every night in your PJ’s if you want to. Get a group of your friends to watch at the same time and live tweet it on social media. It could be great.

You can still cook a Christmas dinner for your immediate household. Have a great big Italian feast like we Pezzulos always do even though we’re barely Italian in spite of the name. I make lasagna bolognese and spaghetti and meatballs and fetuccini alfredo and Italian sausage and risotto. If Italian isn’t your thing, you can have roast goose and plum pudding, or tamales or Tikka Masala or anything you like. Make mulled wine and egg nog. Bake cookies and cakes. Eat your feast in front of A Christmas Carol if you want to.
Mary Pezzulo, No, Christmas is Not Canceled (November 16, 2020) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

Life With the Holy Family

The Holy Family must not have been nearly as tranquil as we’ve been led to believe. The home at Nazareth must have been a zoo. The story about Aaron the Little Drummer Boy itself is not true, but you can be sure there were sometimes children playing drums there, and having tantrums, and climbing the walls, and singing annoying songs over and over for the fun of it. There were poor neighborhood children who came over to play with Jesus, and He let the little children come to Him and made them feel happy.

Mary did likewise. She set aside what she was doing and was a good hostess. Surely, sometimes the guests needed something more than play, and Mary and Joseph tried to get them what they needed: clothing, meals, a listening ear, housework, wise advice, a place to hide. Surely, at least once, there was a child who had nowhere to go, who used the Holy Family’s house as a foster home for a time. There must have been. Mary Pezzulo, The Blessed Mother Was a Perfect Mother, and Her Home Must Have Been a Zoo (December 28, 2020) – Catholic Herald

2021

Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy (2021) by Mary Pezzulo

When I started my blog at Patheos, I didn’t expect to speak about poverty and abuse so often, but now that’s what I’m known for. And I have so many stories about how people have fought back to help the poor and the abused, the people our social structures, systems, and networks tend not to see or, worse, deem worthless. I realized that day as I listened to the gospel that I have discovered the mercy of God in the very way he meant it to be discovered—through the mercy of people. I’ve found God again and again in my own life when I’ve been helped and when I’ve been able to help other people.

I had come out to this wilderness to learn about God so that I could teach others. I tried to learn about God from textbooks and teachers. I dropped out of school due to sickness and was in darkness for a long, long time. But along the way, I learned about God. I learned about God in the Works of Mercy. I discovered what I should have known all along—that God comes to us through others when they care for us, and that we bring God to others when we care for them.

Narnia

You are invited to supper by an over-sized beaver, who catches live fish and then skins and fries them while his wife boils and butters potatoes and bakes a marmalade roll. This ought to disturb you. Beavers are herbivores. The teeth aren’t designed for trapping prey but gnawing fibrous plants; they exclusively eat bark, roots, and aquatic weeds It could be that this creature isn’t really a beaver. You’re in another world, after all. Nothing is as it seems. It ought to occur to you to wonder what other kinds of flesh this rodent has been nibbling, but it doesn’t because the fish is yummy.

You also never think to question how talking beavers in a land of eternal winter have butter and potatoes to go with their fish. Mary Pezzulo, Always Dinner and Never Breakfast: How to Tell You’re in Narnia -(March 10, 2021) Catholic Herald

LGBTQ Catholics

I have a message for the Catholics around me who responded to the Vatican statement on not blessing same sex unions yesterday, and to other such statements, by gloating. And to the people who gloat whenever the Vatican releases such a statement. Not to the people who just fully realize this was re-stating Church teaching and then go about their business, but to the people who were excited that it hurt the feelings of LGBTQ Catholics whether they’re living chastely or not.

Some LGBTQ Catholics are striving to live chastely alone or with partners they don’t have sex with– and yes, that’s been done throughout history as well. Some are in convents or monasteries or your church rectory, following the rules. And yes, some LGBTQ Catholics live in relationships the Church teaches are gravely sinful, and I’m not saying they should. Many heterosexual people also live together in partnerships the Church teaches us are gravely sinful. Think of all the Catholic couples who use birth control.

The Catholic Church teaches us that homosexual intercourse is a sin, and that two men or two women aren’t a married couple. That’s what we’re supposed to believe. It’s NOT the official teaching of the Catholic Church that LGBTQ people are scary perverted infiltrators who ruin everything they touch.

Mary Pezzulo, Those Who Gloat When LGBTQ People Leave the Church (March 16, 2021) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

God’s Creation of You

The Father didn’t create you and me because He needed priests or nuns or married people, because of the sex we’d have or not have, because of the children we would or would not parent, because of the hours we’d put in serving at the soup kitchen or kneeling in the Adoration chapel. The Father created you and me because He loved the idea of you and me, and felt that His creation wasn’t complete without you and me. He deeply desired to make you and me perfectly happy by drawing us into the life of the Holy Trinity, adopted by the Father, spouse to the Son, forever alive in the Heartbeat that is the Holy Ghost. The Father thought that we would be the most beautiful and perfect gift that He could arrange for His beloved Son. That’s who we are. That is our vocation. Mine is to be Mary Pezzulo and yours is to be you. If I were someone other than Mary Pezzulo, then the particular facet of the infinite God I reflect would not be visible to the world. And if you were not you, it would be a similar tragedy. Mary Pezzulo, The First Vocation is to Exist (April 25, 2021) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

Breakfast

There are many different kinds of breakfast, and all of them are delicious. Continental breakfast is classy. Full English breakfast is greasy and satisfying, and an American farmer’s breakfast is even more so. Pancakes and waffles are dessert cleverly disguised as a meal, to say nothing of muffins and doughnuts. Children’s cereal is an innocent treat. The French have Cafe au lait and croissants. The Dutch sprinkle chocolate jimmies on everything. Russians have sausage and buckwheat kasha. The Japanese enjoy a nice piece of fresh fish and a soup made of MSG. The Spanish eat fried dough with cinnamon and cholate. The Chinese eat fried dough with salt, soymilk and scallion cakes. Breakfast is so good that on special occasions, people will make their culture’s version of an enormous decadent breakfast for dinner just for the fun of it. – Mary Pezzulo, Traditionalists, Breakfast, and the Beatific Vision (May 5, 2021) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

St. Maria Goretti’s Sanctity

Why is the first thing that happens when you’re raped, that people refuse to believe you and rush in to tell you what actually happened?

Why are they desperate to find a reason why it wasn’t rape?

Why have we as a culture spent so much time glorifying the virtue of people who fight the rapist off, even if it costs them their lives, and assuming that rape victims did something to merit it?

And then it hit me: is this why people insist that Maria Goretti’s sanctity wasn’t in enduring suffering patiently and forgiving her abuser, but in the fact that she was so virtuous, she managed to die without being penetrated? Her skin penetrated with an awl, yes, but not another part penetrated with anything else? Impossible. She was a good girl. Such a good girl that she protected herself from the ultimate dishonor, at the cost of her life. Is that whole line of thought a form of denial?

Is this why victims of sexual violence are told over and over again that they must have been asking for it or it never would have happened? Or if they clearly weren’t asking for it, that it wasn’t so bad or that they made it up for attention?
-Mary Pezzulo On The Feast of the Intact (July 09, 2021) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

Helping Others

Right now, right here in America where we feel that everything is so shiny and free, right in your city or town, I promise you, there are poor people. And it is our job as Christians to seek them out, and help. This can be tricky, because poverty doesn’t always look like you think it will. But we need to try. I don’t know that there’s a single person in hell. I hope there isn’t. But if anybody goes to hell, we have it on good authority that refusing to help these people is how you get there.

Through our sin, we’ve chosen a society where the poor are always with us. Through God’s mercy, He will meet us there. The Son of Man Who has no place to lay His head is waiting for us, in the people who don’t have anywhere to sleep.

We need to go out and help these people.

Their lives depend on it, and so do the lives of our souls.

Mary Pezzulo The People With Nowhere to Sleep (November 10, 2021) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

2022

The Sorrows and Joys of Mary by Mary Pezzulo

Sister Mary Thomasina was an expert in teaching Catechism. We prayed at least a decade of the Rosary per day, with Sister Mary Thomasina introducing each mystery and a child volunteer leading the Hail Marys on a great big knotted cord. Sister Mary Thomasina wouldn’t just say the name of the mystery. She would take several minutes to tell a lively, animated, improvised version of each Mystery for us to think about while we prayed our ten Hail Marys. And that is still the way that I pray.

One year, during Advent, I started to write these lively Gospel meditations down. I meditated on the mysteries of the Rosary of the Seven Sorrows and on the particular set of Seven Joys that is known as the Franciscan Crown. That left me with fourteen meditations on the life of the Virgin Mary, seven of them sad and seven of them happy. I posted them to my blog during the four weeks of Lent, and they were popular. I decided to put them down in a book, in case anybody else wanted to meditate on the Seven Sorrows and the Seven Joys.

But it looked so strange to just write seven sad meditations, then go back to the beginning and write seven happy ones. So I decided to meditate on the Sorrows and Joys in chronological order in the life of the Mother of God: three joys, then some sorrows, then back to joy, then a whole string of the most terrible sorrows on the Via Dolorosa, and then the purest joy.

Fatimaniacs

It’s time for FAAAAATIMAAAAAANIACS!
We have backpacks filled with tracts!
We’ll hit you with an ax!
We are apparition hacks!
We’re Fatimaaaaaaaniacs!

Come join the Patrick Coffin
And his brother Remnant Mag
Just for fun we claim the third prophecy was a gag
We claim the real Lucia was replaced with some old hag
We’re Fatimaaaaaniacs!!!

We’re FAAAATIMAAAAANIACS!
We’re unable to relax!
Those candles must be wax
And you’d better pray and fast
We’re Fatimaniacs!

Meet MAGA racist men who want to rule the universe
And prudish homeschool mothers who wear floor-length denim skirts
Antisemitic weirdos
Charismatics are the worst
When the Three Days of Darkness come you’re all gonna be cursed!

We’re FAAAAATIMAAAAANIACS!
We are absolutely whack!
We’re zany to the max!
There’s Vigano in our sacks

We’re Fatimani
Totally insaney
Consecration chainey

Fatimaniacs! Those are the facts!

Ba-dum dum.
And now I feel much better.

Mary Pezzulo, A Ditty for the Fatimaniacs (March 26, 2022) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

Driving to Pittsburgh

Driving to Pittsburgh from Steubenville is a bit like driving over the sets of several science fiction movies, one after the other.

Pittsburgh is a city out of a fantasy story, a hilarious jumble of buildings, one fascinating architectural wonder next to another wonder from a completely different school of architecture, fun things to look at heaped together in no comprehensible order. All the intersections are laid out like elaborate cursive letters. Every so often there’s a park with a fanciful playground and a hundred noisy children having the time of their lives. Mary Pezzulo A Great Day Out (APRIL 27, 2022) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

To be Catholic is to be who you are, in your body and your mind and your soul, in Christ.

If you are an interesting and courageous person, like a Saint Francis Xavier or a Saint Joan of Arc, you are that interesting person, in Christ. If you are a weak and boring person like me, you are weak and boring in Christ. If you are physically sick like Saint Therese and me, mentally ill like Catherine of Sienna and me, traumatized like Saint Josephine Bakhita, a victim of racism like Saint Martin DePorres, you are that in Christ as well. If you are lonely, you are lonely in Christ, and the loneliness itself becomes the loneliness of Christ, a prayer for the salvation of the whole world. If you are sick, you are sick in Christ, and your sickness is the sickness of Calvary. If you are anxious, you are anxious in Christ, and your anxiety becomes the anxiety of Gethsemane. If you are a victim of injustice, you are a victim with Christ. When things are going splendidly, you enjoy them in Christ. If nothing ever goes right for you, it doesn’t go right for Christ either. When you are awake, you keep watch with Christ. When you are asleep, you sleep in His arms. When you die, Christ dies with you, and then He rises from the dead and draws you back to life with Him.

Mary Pezzulo, To Be Yourself, In Christ (April 29, 2022) Steel Magnificat @ Patheos Catholic

Some Tweets

Mary Pezzulo@mary_pezzulo

Please remember that according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, a poor person shoplifting what they need to survive isn’t stealing and isn’t really sin, and we can’t tell who’s poor just by looking at them, so never snitch.

You know how you can write a secret message in white wax on an Easter egg and it won’t show until you dip it in dye? I think saints are like dye. People seeking the Lord wholeheartedly will reveal what’s written in the hearts of the outwardly pious.

If I had a bunch of money I didn’t need for something important just at the moment I would probably drive into Pittsburgh and treat myself to a nice sushi and a cold brew and an afternoon at the Carnegie museum. But some people’s idea of fun is buying Twitter.

The Lego robots just crash landed on an island inhabited by a vicious robot-eating giant guinea pig. We’ve promised McFluff some of the money when this episode becomes a major motion picture.

In Kindergarten, Sister Mary Thomasina taught us coin denominations by setting up a toy McDonald’s where everything was on a 99 cent special. When it was my turn to wear the McDonald’s uniform I ran out of pennies and started giving out dimes and quarters in change.

There are SO MANY SINS in the Catholic Church. So many. It flabbergasts me that some people really want to make up mo

In other news, Rose has discovered Super PupZ and I’ve never wanted to put a muzzle on a puppy so much in my life. That’s not a Scottish accent. It’s even less of a Scottish accent than Star Trek. There’s no reason a dog of Scottish heritage living in the United States would have a Scottish accent anyway. Accents aren’t genetic. I’m partly of Scottish heritage and I don’t have a Scottish accent. Why do the dogs even talk for that matter? STOP TALKING, HAGGIS. Haggis is a weird name.