{"id":50,"date":"2012-04-27T14:38:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-27T20:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/04\/stop-killing-the-wabbit-a-one-day-fast-from-catholic-opera\/"},"modified":"2016-05-02T11:34:24","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T17:34:24","slug":"stop-killing-the-wabbit-a-one-day-fast-from-catholic-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/04\/stop-killing-the-wabbit-a-one-day-fast-from-catholic-opera.html","title":{"rendered":"Stop Killing the Wabbit! A One-Day Fast from Catholic Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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Catholics are reminded to keep Friday as a day of penance, a little Lent all year long. Although it\u2019s no longer the abstinence fest it was in my childhood\u2013pining here for the fleshpots of Mom\u2019s tuna noodle casserole and \u201cWelsh rarebit\u201d (Velveeta on English muffins, run under the broiler)\u2013Friday still offers a weekly 24-hour window of opportunity to review my life and make better choices. Today, I\u2019m giving up opera.<\/p>\n

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Not real opera, of which I am deeply fond, having been inducted into it by Mom over those tuna casseroles of yore. My grandmother Maggie Kinsman had the pipes to have been a Met soprano, if her working-class Boston Irish parents (who named her for Faust<\/i>\u2018s Marguerite, but that was as far as it went) would have let her train, and she raised her children to love music above their station. Mom\u2019s favorite was Madama Butterfly<\/i>, and I came thisclose to playing Cho-Cho San\u2019s young son in an LA performance when I was 4 and my aunt was the administrative assistant to the Philharmonic. My friends Donald Ham (God rest him) and Todd Berry have done lots, over my lifetime, to add to my knowledge and appreciation of this art form.<\/div>\n
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No, in spite of the less-than-uplifting plots of many operas, it\u2019s not musical opera that\u2019s posing a danger to my spiritual life lately. It\u2019s what Elizabeth Scalia has brilliantly (as usual) diagnosed<\/a><\/b> as ecclesiastical opera, the tendency for Catholics to take any Church news and blow it into a libretto of internecine squabbling that out-operas Verdi at his grandest. Wagnerian thundering. Death scenes, prolonged with cadenzas<\/i>. Litanies of blame and countercharge that rival the elephant-studded Triumphal March from Aida<\/i>. And none of it ever in a voce<\/i> that\u2019s sotto<\/i>.<\/div>\n
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The recent release of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith\u2019s doctrinal criticism of positions taken by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious provided the impetus for Elizabeth\u2019s analogy. Not for us the simple story\u2013starving artist falls in love with tubercular girl, or, in this case, head office issues corrective on brand loyalty to middle management. We have to ditch the just-the-facts-Sister and go all Boheme<\/i> on it. I confess to having been a chorus member in that performance, jumping onstage early to throw my spear<\/a><\/b> instead of just carrying it. I made a quick reversal<\/a><\/b>, a caballetta<\/i> of sorts, but the opera goes on. And on. And on. Just when I think it\u2019s quieted down, it pops up again, like that unfortunate soprano playing Tosca whose stage managers, weary of the prima donna<\/i>\u2018s prima donna<\/i> ways, replaced the mattress meant to catch her after the tragic heroine\u2019s death leap from the battlements of the Castel Sant\u2019Angelo with a trampoline. She\u2019s gone. She\u2019s back. She\u2019s gone, she\u2019s back . . .<\/div>\n
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But that comparison, with its comic overtones, doesn\u2019t do justice to the vitriolic reality of so much Catholic opera. We aren\u2019t content to add ruffles and flourishes; we have to declare war. There is only one theme in this Catholic opera, no matter what the topic, no matter which side of the issue, no matter who the commenter: my umbrage, and what you (he, she, they, it) have\/has done to make me take it. I used to play a kind of drinking game whenever Pope Paul VI used the phrase We are deeply grieved<\/i>. Compared to today\u2019s Catholics, he was a cockeyed optimist. If I took a drink every time some Catholic admitted to being deeply grieved now (even if I limited it to being deeply grieved at another Catholic) my liver wouldn\u2019t last the day.<\/div>\n
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There\u2019s nothing wrong with good solid disagreement, or with expressing sincere grief at the many threats and challenges to the Church\u2019s unity and mission that the world presents us with. But when the onstage combatants begin aiming live ammunition at one another, it\u2019s time to turn in my tickets. This week, in the wake of the CDF-LCWR story, I saw an example of that kind of fratricide that sickened me. Fr James Martin, SJ, a popular author and blogger at America<\/i>, asked his readers to tweet their messages of thanks to sisters who\u2019ve made a difference in their lives, using the Twitter hashtag #WhatSistersMeanToMe. He was clear (though, yes, disingenuous) in saying this was not meant to be an anti-CDF campaign, and he didn\u2019t limit the expression of thanks to \u201cliberal\u201d communities. The MSM picked up on it, and (naturally) tried to make it about sisters rule, bishops drool; Fr Martin resisted. Then Fr John Zuhlsdorf, a popular traditionalist who blogs as Fr Z, picked up on it and urged his readers to coopt Fr Martin\u2019s Twitter feed, using the same hashtag to tweet examples of how liberal nuns were heretical baby-killers. Fr Z wasn\u2019t content to have his readers weigh in on American sisters; he called Fr Martin \u201can acolyte of the Magisterium of Nuns.\u201d It got ugly, but not, as Fr Martin graciously put it, because the Internet just has a natural tendency to get ugly. It got ugly because one priest incited ugliness against another.<\/div>\n
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That\u2019s way off-key. That\u2019s the kind of thing that, when it starts showing up in the Catholic opera that Elizabeth Scalia rightly says is conducted creatively and confoundingly by the Holy Spirit, makes me recognize that the guy in the next box over, the one eating popcorn and yelling Bravo!<\/i>, has got horns.<\/div>\n
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So I\u2019m not attending today\u2019s performance of Agita Furiosa<\/i>. And though I know myself well enough that I can\u2019t promise I won\u2019t come back to it, or even keep auditioning for bigger roles, I am going to try to exercise more discretion about whose performances I\u2019ll applaud. I will, for example, no longer link to Fr Z\u2019s blog\u2013or anyone else\u2019s, no matter what side they\u2019re on or how well they swell the chorus of my own umbrage, who sings\u00a0Kill the wabbit!<\/i>\u00a0about another Catholic and means it. And I will link to things like this post<\/a><\/b> from Frank Weathers which, while on another topic, proposes harmony, not harangue, as the way to go.<\/div>\n
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Today, for my little Lent, I\u2019ll listen to the last act of Poulenc\u2019s Dialogues of the Carmelites<\/i>, which intersperses the joyful singing of the Veni Creator Spiritus<\/i> by French nuns condemned during the Reign of Terror with the sound of the guillotine executing them one by one. Now there<\/i>\u2018s some Catholic opera about real heroic witness for you. Nuns rule, backbiters drool.<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Catholics are reminded to keep Friday as a day of penance, a little Lent all year long. Although it\u2019s no longer the abstinence fest it was in my childhood\u2013pining here for the fleshpots of Mom\u2019s tuna noodle casserole and \u201cWelsh rarebit\u201d (Velveeta on English muffins, run under the broiler)\u2013Friday still offers a weekly 24-hour window […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nStop Killing the Wabbit! A One-Day Fast from Catholic Opera<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Catholics are reminded to keep Friday as a day of penance, a little Lent all year long. 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