Today I saw three tweets that enraged me, and then they made me sad. I was enraged because they comparison they were drawing was so ridiculous. And then I was sad, because the error made plain to me so much about what caused the priestly sexual abuse crisis in the first place and why I have little hope that it can be stopped any time soon. These tweets were composed by the famous apologist Patrick Madrid, of which a... Read more
I’m going to have the comments off today, because I’m going to talk about a topic that always gets me an enormous amount of fury from every corner of the internet. It might have come to your attention that this weekend, the New York Times ran an article wherein Catholic priests who are attracted to men spoke honestly about their struggles and the discrimination they face. Some of these priests spoke under their own names, and many under strict anonymity... Read more
A Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke: Jesus came down with the twelve and stood on a stretch of level ground with a great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon. And raising his eyes toward his disciples he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are now hungry, for... Read more
Last night I got into an argument with someone who kept talking about “Sodomites.” He crashed a thread that wasn’t to do with sodomy at all; it was about Donald Trump Junior, college professors or socialism, I’m still not sure which. And he started talking about “Sodomites” and gay agendas being pushed in public schools and people who let their little sons dress in drag. He went on for quite a long time. Finally, I asked him what he thought... Read more
April is not the cruelest month, at least not in the Ohio Valley. February is. Lilacs don’t grow out of the dead land in February. Nothing grows at all, in February. Even my indoor plants go limp. Outside is gray on gray– mottled gray sky above, mottled gray snow beneath. The snow isn’t clean enough to suck on, like I did on Snow Days when I was Rosie’s age; not clean enough to make maple candy or to admire... Read more
I didn’t really want to talk about blackface again this month, or at all. Still, the news runs in cycles and so do bloggers. Everyone’s talking about blackface now, so I’ll stay on the topic. Today, my attention was drawn to a very short op ed put out by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights on their website. It’s penned by the inimitable grouch Bill Donohue, whom I called a boiled ham a couple of years ago... Read more
I was trying to watch the State of the Union address. The president declared that the 19th amendment recognizing a woman’s right to vote was ratified “exactly 100 years ago,” which is false; the 19th amendment was ratified in on August 18th, 1920, between 98 and 99 years ago. My eyelid started to twitch when I realized he’d mixed up “19th amendment” with “1919.” Sadly, that was not my biggest annoyance of the evening. Shortly after mixing up the... Read more
It has been a whole year since I’ve been to an Eastern Divine Liturgy. We ended up across the river in West Virginia this Sunday– not at our old Eastern church, though. I miss that more than anything in the world, but we still have no way to get there. We were at a Latin church in a different part of that city: a large building with a pink marble interior, neither very beautiful nor very ugly, as close... Read more
Questions, I get questions. I get so many interesting questions on my blog posts that I’ve considered having a weekly column that is just Q and A, but I’m nervous that once I officially established such a thing I’d be too absentminded to keep it up. In the past 24 hours I’ve gotten a slew of questions on what I thought was a pretty straightforward post about Governor Ralph Northam. I’m going to pick a few of them and give... Read more
The figurative ink is not yet dry on my blog post clarifying remarks by Virginia’s governor Ralph Northam, and now he’s in the news again. This time, there’s nothing nice I can say about him. Somehow, today, a medical school yearbook photo surfaced showing Governor Northam and an accomplice dressed as an African-American in blackface and a KKK member, holding what the news keeps referring to as “canned drinks.” The caption read “Interest: Pediatrics” and supplies the quote, “there are... Read more
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