I’m in the City of Angels this week—not (only) because it’s about as far from the Republican convention as I can get, but because my heart is here year-round: son, daughter-in-law, grandson and all the rest of my earthly family, which includes the Dodgers and many of my Panda sisters. I’m sure I’ll find a few things to blog about, the twaddling here being at all times egregious, but it will be a slow week. That applies to comments, too:... Read more
Listening to MSNBC, Planned Parenthood, and other devout partisans of the new American sacrament of abortion rant about the reignited War on Women (if I have to hear Rachel Maddow repeat, grim frown in place, “THE GOP IS FORCING WOMEN TO BEAR THEIR RAPISTS’ BABIES!!!” one more time . . .), one claim stands out: No man has a right to tell a woman what to do with her body. Funny thing is, it’s a claim with which I agree... Read more
Is it always Or? Is it never And? ~ Stephen Sondheim, “Moments in the Woods,” from Into the Woods Fr Robert Barron weighs in today against “the worst kind of exaggerated hoo-hah” in politics and religion, rejecting the imbalanced reactions on both sides to the choice of Paul Ryan as Republican vice-presidential candidate and reminding Ryan—and all of us—that we are not a Church of one-sided extremists. There are checks and balances built into Catholic social morality, and juggling the values... Read more
Over at The Deacon’s Bench, Greg Kandra has shared a piece by John Cornwell from The Tablet on the decline of confession among Catholics worldwide. It’s a fascinating article, reflecting the research Cornwell has done for a forthcoming book. For reverts of a certain age, like me, there’s much that resonates. Among the reasons Cornwell posits for the decline (which in itself is more a presumption than a matter of fact, as statistics aren’t tracked for confessions the way they... Read more
When I was exactly three weeks old, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary to be a truth of the Catholic faith. The year I turned 12, Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl. I have to admit that for most of our lives, women my age—Catholic or not, for good or for ill—have been more influenced by the latter event than by the former. Today, on the Vigil of the Solemnity of the... Read more
UPDATE: I wrote this reflection on St Clare two years ago, at the start of the Nun Wars. The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and its head-butting with the Vatican are in the news again, and on the feast of St Clare it’s worth looking at (and praying for the intercession of) this singular woman religious who both challenged and obeyed the Church. At root, the word religious means “one who binds herself again.” To what—and to whom—do... Read more
There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie. ~ Robert Greene, The Groatsworth of Wit, 1597 Robert Greene’s oft-quoted smackdown of a rookie Renaissance playwright, generally assumed to be one of the first public... Read more
[Mea culpa UPDATE: Although I stand by the substance of this post, I recognize that I was out of line in the cheap shots I took at Fr Jim Martin’s public persona. I have edited those out of this post, and deleted comments that found in my post an occasion of the sin of ad hominem attacks. I still disagree with Fr Martin’s support of the LCWR against the CDF, but making it personal was inexcusable. Please go here... Read more
“Sikhism is a religion that originated about 500 years ago in Italy [sic].” ~ CBS This Morning reporter on the shootings at a Wisconsin Sikh temple I’ve been bemoaning the media’s inability to get Catholicism right for a very long time, but it struck me this morning that maybe there really isn’t a specifically anti-Catholic bias out there in journalism land. The media’s talent for being tone-deaf on religion appears to be wide-ranging and indiscriminate. The reporting on the tragic... Read more
Warning: Excessively long post. If I were a better writer and less actively involved in wrestling with the topic, I could write a lot shorter. I really wasn’t going to post on this past week’s Tempest in a Chickenfryer. As if we weren’t polarized enough around the issue of marriage and what it means to society and to religion! The blogosphere has been a-boil with a dipping sauce comprising equal parts of vitriol, grandstanding, and pain, into which we dunk... Read more
Egregious Twaddle
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