David Russell Mosley

Ordinary Time
8 November 2016
The Edge of Elfland
Hudson, New Hampshire

Dear Readers,

Eventually, I promise to return to my series on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. But today, I would feel remiss if I did not write to you about two things. One I want only to mention briefly and to send you on to other writers as I have promised myself not to write about it. I am talking about the atrocities surrounding Fr. Frank Pavone leader of Priests for Life.

While Pavone has, for some time now, been obliquely and more directly campaigning for Donald Trump as a pro-life candidate, things came rather to a head yesterday. Fr. Pavone posted a video of himself placing an actually aborted baby on an altar. There are numerous things wrong, sacrilegious, immoral, despicable, and diabolical about this act. I’m not sure which is higher, desecrating (literally de-sacralizing) an altar meant for the celebration of the Eucharist by enjoining people to vote for a particular candidate/party or the abuse of this poor child. All of this is made worse by the fact that Fr. Pavone has now posted a video defending his actions by suggesting that this election is the most important, and therefore, Donald Trump the most important person you could ever elect to the presidency. If you want to read more about it, see pretty much all of Steel Magnificat’s most recent posts, concluding in this one, “An Open Letter To Bishop Patrick Zurek,” this post by Keith Michael Estrada, “Breaking: Fr. Frank Pavone defends sacrilege: “The issue is not how I’m treating a baby,”” and this post by Scott Eric Alt, “After Sick Political Stunt, Fr. Pavone’s Faculties Should Be Suspended.” I refuse to link to Fr. Pavone’s page or Priest’s for Life, but both may be found on Facebook.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I want to slightly shift gears, away from national politics, or at least the presidential race, and to local politics. I’ve just come back from voting and while the sunshine, the beautiful leaves, and the crisp air made me smile, I was and am not terribly happy with myself. You see I like to claim to be a distributist. I believe in its twin pillars of solidarity and subsidiarity, or at least I claim to. And yet, this morning as I looked through what would be on my ballot before I voted, I realized that there were half a dozen or more positions on which I was voting that I had not researched until this morning. I spent what I could of my morning doing that research so I could at least partially make an informed decision. But it left a bad taste in mouth that I had allowed myself to get so swept up in national politics, particularly the presidential race, that I had not stopped to think about state or local politics.

My wife and I have begun reading through James K.A. Smith’s book, You Are What You Love, which could probably be re-titled, read more Augustine (Smith would probably add some Reformed theologians, and I’ve mostly forgiven him for that). The whole point of his book (which I’ve already read), is that our loves form our habits and our habits form our loves. In other words, what we think about a given idea is not preeminent in whether or not that idea truly resides in us. Watching videos and reading articles about skateboarding was not enough for me to learn how to ollie, only practice could do that (and since I didn’t practice, I still cannot ollie). For some time now I have given intellectual assent to notions of localism, subsidiarity, etc., but they have affected how I live very little. That needs to change and I am hoping that this election will help change that. It helps that in this election I had a friend running for office and so came to know more about a state level position that, frankly, I doubt most Granite Staters know much about. But I still knew nothing about the men running for sheriff, or the women running for County Register of Deeds, or the eleven people I was meant to select for the state House of Representatives. I made as informed decisions as I could once I did realize that all these things existed on my ballot, but that’s not enough. I needed to know well in advance and I didn’t, and that’s my fault.

I hope you’re better than I am. I hope you knew more about your local elections than I did. I am embarrassed to have called myself a distributist and yet to have ignored my local elections. I will not let this happen again, or so I hope. Only time and a change in habits will tell if my loves have changed and been redirected to their right and proper end.

Sincerely,
David