In a recent South Park episode, an anti-statist milita group decides to strike a blow at the federal government, so its members arm themselves and seize a Federal Express store. The gag works because it’s plausible — some intelligent adults are just literal-minded enough to make a mistake like that. I belong in the Amelia Bedelia club as much as anyone. When I first joined the Church, I thought National Catholic Reporter was the official organ, or any rate an... Read more
It’s a shame nobody’s given Cardinal George credit for rhetorical restraint. When he warned of the gay rights movement evolving “into something like the Ku Klux Klan, protesting in the streets against Catholicism,” he might have been guilty of alarmism, but he was also evoking the Klan at its most endearing. It’s done worse — much worse. Given that one of the LGTB advocacy groups planning to protest the cathedral calls itself the Rainbow Sash Movement, George might more accurately... Read more
Among the regulars on the right-wing discussion board where I provided some of the loyal opposition, no group was held in greater contempt than college students studying the fine arts. They were godless, self-indulgent, pampered parasites. The men wore women’s underwear; the women, who wore none, had boyfriends and parents arrested on false rape charges. Everyone celebrated Kwaanza. If a high-school education sufficed to make an artist out of Don Knotts, the conventional wisdom held, it should suffice for everyone.... Read more
In his big-screen debut, Tintin won’t be picketing any abortion clinics, or testifying before Congress on health care and freedom of conscience. More’s the pity, too, because at a certain early point in his life, he might have jumped at the chance to do either. Like so many of us, the globetrotting boy reporter is a lapsed Catholic. In the comic strips, Tintin never discusses his family, but the character’s true father was Belgian cartoonist Georges Rémi, who worked under... Read more
Seven years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin hit the shelves, a German psychiatrist named Heinrich Hoffmann published a compelling plea for racial tolerance. In Der Struwwelpeter, which promises “Merry Tales and Funny Pictures” for children, we find a gang of young Aryan ruffians teasing “a woolly-headed black-a-moor.” St. Nicholas (for some reason, called “Agrippa” in the English translation) sees what’s going on and warns them: “Boys, leave the Black-a-moor alone!/For, if he tries with all his might/ He cannot change from... Read more
Bob, my mother’s boyfriend, will argue that Happy Days jumped the shark several seasons before Fonzie actually strapped on his water skis. In his view, the show’s lethal injection with schmaltz came the moment the Fonz sat down with the Cunninghams around their Christmas tree and read “The Night Before Christmas.” When the onetime breakout character paused between stanzas to ask, “Can you dig it,” Bob saw the handwriting on the wall. “That,” he’ll say, “was when you knew they... Read more
With a second miracle to her credit, Kateri Tekawitha’s 331-year wait for sainthood is finally over. It’s a great day for her and all the constituencies she represents, including Native Americans, women, laypeople, those suffering from facial deformities, Canadians and – I add with special pride – New Yorkers. Kateri’s birthplace, near present-day Auriesville in Montgomery County, isn’t exactly Gotham City. But then, in Kateri’s day, Manhattan wasn’t much more than a bedroom community, either. I’m absolutely over the moon... Read more
Oscar Wilde was a people person. When Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera spoofing the aesthetic movement, was due to tour America, Wilde contracted with Richard d’Oyly Carte to tour with it as a kind of undercard fighter. Before performances, he appeared onstage in knee breeches and lectured on the “English renaissance.” Whether or not American audiences bought Wilde’s ideas, it was hoped, he’d at least give them some idea of what Gilbert and Sullivan were roasting. In the event, Wilde... Read more
Last night, the Anchoress blogged on a peculiar prank that parents, in collusion with the faculty of a Minnesota high school, played on their kids. First, the kids, all star athletes, were given blindfolds and led into the school’s crowded gym. Next, each blindfolded jock received a kiss from what the write-up describes as his or her “opposite-sex parent.” At least to all appearances, many of the kisses were distinctly other than parental. Still blindfolded, each blushing kissee then guessed... Read more
Today in Slate, Torie Bosch describes how non-religious parents are using the children’s book Elf on the Shelf to teach their kids terror of supernatural judges. The story, as the title suggests, features an elf who acts as Tsar Santa’s Third Section. The creature “keeps an eye on a family during the day, then flies back to the North Pole at night to give Santa a sitrep.” To hammer home the point for less imaginative audiences, the book comes with... Read more
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In