Having what a vocations director might describe as an active temperament, I have always, half-consciously, thought of prayer as a minimal, low-risk, nearly symbolic response to necessity or catastrophe. Like the person who hands a nickel to one of the ticket agents at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the person who offers to pray for the recovery of a sick friend, or the raising of funds for a new basilica, meets the requirements, but barely. Yesterday, good news arrived that... Read more
The folks at Fox have been wondering whether the Muppets are trying to “brainwash kids against capitalism.” If they’d done their homework – if they’d checked the Verona Project transcripts – they wouldn’t have to ask. KGB officers gave me a few prominent (if coded) mentions. They did as much for a number of my friends. Fact is, for a few decades, I was a true comrade – a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the Communist Party. But, like the late... Read more
This evening, in honor of Fr. Jim Martin’s new book, Between Heaven and Mirth, my editor, Elizabeth Scalia, has put out an APB for Catholic jokes. Well, as it happens, I have a few to share. The first one I heard from the Dominican priest who baptized me. It goes like this: What’s the difference between the Order of Preachers and the Society of Jesus? One was founded in the 13th century to fight the Albigensian heresy; the second, in... Read more
Can anyone hear the song “Bells of St. Mary’s” without remembering the scene in Goodfellas where Joe Pesci drills Samuel L. Jackson through his occipital bone (just north of his sutura lambdodeia) with a silenced .45? Pesci fires; Jackson grunts and falls forward into a puddle of his own brains; Pesci hustles his partner, Frank Sivero, out the door. On the soundtrack, just when Pesci turns back and empties his pistol into Jackson’s body, we hear the Drifters singing as... Read more
Well, having lived through it once, I have to say that the new Mass translation isn’t so bad; isn’t so bad; isn’t so grievously bad. Of course, I’m not speaking here as a Latin scholar. I already managed to tackle one language — Russian — where nouns come in an unnatural variety of genders. Frankly, the idea of trying another sounds nowhere near as much fun as that of standing naked in front of my bathroom mirror and punching myself... Read more
My mother lives on the second floor of a high-rise apartment building on West End Avenue. Back in the 1990s, she and her boyfriend bought themselves a bird feeder built in the style of a Swiss chalet, and hung it outside their kitchen window. One of the first regular diners was a resplendent male cardinal, whom they named “John O’Connor” after New York‘s archbishop. Whenever the bird put in an appearance, my mother would cry out, “Faith, ‘t’is none other... Read more
Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams thinks very highly of the “Pepper-Spray Cop” internet meme, which in its various forms spoofs UC Davis police officer John Pike. Last Wednesday, Pike was captured on video, pepper-spraying a row of demonstrators, who were sitting with limbs interlocked to protest the removal of their tents. Now, thanks to Photoshop and the muse, Pike gets up to all sorts of monkeyshines. Visitors to one Tumblr account, for example, can catch him blasting Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son, and... Read more
If you’re Jenny McCarthy, you blame autism on vaccinations. If you’re Michael Savage, you blame it on a decline in Yiddish Billingsgate among fathers. Now, if you’re Cambridge University professor Simon Baron-Cohen — yes, cousin of Sacha, the genius behind Ali G., Borat and Bruno — you believe it might result from interbreeding among members of the techie family. Previous studies, reports the UK’s Daily Mail, have shown high rates of autism among “‘systemisers’ – those who do jobs relating... Read more
My father learned about sex — the theory, that is, not the practice — from reading Irv Shulman’s Amboy Dukes. Published in 1947, two years before the old man was bar mitzvah, it billed itself as “The Toughest Novel Ever Written About Juvenile Delinquent Gangs.” Several years later, my mother learned the facts of life through more official channels — namely, the nuns of St. Anthony’s grammar school and their lectures on the martyrdom of Maria Goretti. The contrast to... Read more
You know you’re in extremis as far as marriageability goes when you find yourself composing sonnets to the memories of women you met and knew — against your own wishes, exclusively — through social media: The first “Like” after each posting is mine; A blogger self-promotion makes or breaks. Far more than talent, moxie’s what it takes. Neglected posts are pickled as by brine — Preserved and yet grotesque, in time confined: All sapient pretensions shown for fakes, All judgments... Read more
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
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