After a week of quiet for prayer, work, and celebration, I’m back with a First Saturday’s worth of joyful mysteries. 5 It’s been stormy in Catholicland, so I am delighted that we are going into this weekend under the doubly papally invoked protection of St Michael the Archangel. He’s been my personal patron since my journey away from and back to the Church began, always leading and prompting me toward home again. I don’t think it’s coincidental that many of... Read more
This is an apology, but not a retraction. My most recent post—confessing to mixed emotions about the Supreme Court’s decisions on same-sex marriage—seems to have created as much confusion in my readers as there is in my head. Some people are concerned that I personally believe what I said I feared: that my Church sees homosexual persons not as sinners, but as sin itself. I know that’s not Church teaching, far from it. But it is, in my experience... Read more
I haven’t blogged since Wednesday. Struggling too much with what to say and how to say it, taking my pain to the cross. That pain, I have to be honest, does not come from the rulings the Supreme Court made on same-sex marriage, which the US leadership of my Church—to whose mysteries, including the sacramentality of marriage, I give full assent, though I have a devil of a time with the way those mysteries are proclaimed—called “tragic.” It’s far... Read more
In sorting the tangled threads of response to today’s Court decisions on marriage and states’ rights, it occurred to me to look at a somewhat related issue from an earlier time in our nation’s history. In the late 19th century, the federal government was embroiled in another battle over the definition of legal marriage. In the Utah Territory, settled almost entirely by Mormons, plural marriage (a practice accepted and even believed to be divinely ordained by mainstream Mormons at... Read more
There will be lots of heat burning up the interwebz regarding today’s SCOTUS decisions in Windsor and Perry. Knowing that Supreme Court decisions are never what their most avid proponents or their most ardent opponents think they are, I’m waiting till the dust settles and looking for sources of light—calm, reasoned reflection—in the meantime. The Catholic Telegraph of the Cincinnati Archdiocese is in early with clarity and hope. Neither decision will have the effect of requiring states to honor... Read more
. . . not Barack Obama—though of course there are 5 more days in June, so there’s still room for him to prompt a recount. No, despite the boffo traffic engendered by various Catholic bloggers and commenters reading the President’s remarks in Belfast last week as a call for The End of Catholic Education in Ireland and Possibly Everywhere, Mr Obama (who can generally be counted on to be a frontrunner in this sweepstakes) scratched at the gate. On the... Read more
The longing for religious freedom is as old as religion. On this Solemnity of the Nativity of John the Baptist, falling within the US Catholic Bishops’ Fortnight for Freedom, it’s worth looking at what that longing and that freedom really mean—and what working to protect that freedom and fulfill that longing may require of us. The Fortnight for Freedom, you might recall, was instituted last year as a period of prayer, fasting, and action to defend religious liberty in... Read more
My sister and I lost the last of our mother’s generation this month. Uncle Fred, born in 1918, was the eldest of our mother’s 5 brothers; at going-on-95, he outlived her and his younger brothers—as well as two wives—by years, even decades. His memorial service at the First Congregational Church in Eugene, OR, where he offered to God his glorious bass baritone every Sunday morning until he was too weak to stand, is going on right now. We aren’t there,... Read more
On the always sage advice of The Anchoress that the best way to recover from a fall off your blog is to climb right back on it with a little something every day, I’m back. Not quite George Costanza-style yet, but here I am. And because Saturday is a low readership day, I’m going to start with a collection of little bits, like the 7 Quick Takes Friday format popularized by Jen Fulwiller at Conversion Diary. I’m hoping to... Read more
Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life by Elizabeth Scalia Ave Maria Press, 2013 While over for dinner the other night with his parents, my going-on-4-year-old grandson was engaged in his usual sweeping of my apartment for Interesting Stuff. I’m trying to keep the acquisition of things to a rigorous minimum, but Luke can occasionally spot a new refrigerator magnet, a surprise toy, or something chocolate, so this surveillance is part of the arrival ritual. He paused at the... Read more
Egregious Twaddle
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