The complementary aspect that is not dealt with here is how Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, President of Notre Dame University from 1952 to 1987 (and still living at age 91), the man who began the process of “self-secularization” of Catholic universities in 1967, became close to the Rockefeller family in the early 1960s and on two occasions between 1963 and 1967 sponsored at Notre Dame “by invitation only” conferences (funded by Planned Parenthood) whose purpose was to devise a rationale for reversing the Church’s teaching on contraception. (Known conservative theologians were deliberately excluded from these meetings.) Hesburgh arranged a papal audience in 1966 or 1967 with one of the Rockefellers with Paul VI, and at that meeting he even offered to draft a document for the pope by which the Church would abandon its opposition to contraception. The pope refused, with some indignation, and at this point all these folks (the theologians named below in the article you forwarded, plus Hesburgh and other Catholic university presidents and administrators) began their increasingly concerted efforts to create an alternative “academic magisterium” of theologians and “progressive intellectuals” to “blaze the way” for changes in Church teaching on contraception (and sexual ethics generally), women’s ordination and the “primacy of individual conscience” in all moral decision-making (e.g., the decision to remarry after divorce, to practice contraception, to form “same-sex partnerships” and the like). The tragedy is, that for years the American Catholic bishops refused to see the problem, and often treated these dissenting theologians as “respected authorities,” and ignored those layfolk, clergy and even the few bishops who discerned what was going on.
IOW having arrived in American society they wanted to be mainline Protestants but on their own cultural terms (as described perfectly by Thomas Day).
What’s funny is the only practising RCs who still think like Fr Hesburgh are around his age: all those liberal causes are that generation’s hobby issues. The kids who go to Mass are teaching themselves to do things our way.
Christians can be theologically conservative and yet at the same time reject the Republican Party, the Religious Right, and many aspects of the conservative movement.
Rebuttal. It is ultimately a Protestant church, which means according to its worldview there’s no truth, only what the ruling classes want, so everything is up for a vote. The losing conservatives can either become Catholic or, as has happened dramatically with whole dioceses leaving, start another denomination, which only restarts the row really. More.
Church of England fundamentalism is impossible because you can’t have: ‘You must have tea and cake with the vicar... or you die!’
Doubt I’m impressed: not the heavy-handed jab at the church I feared and half-expected (leftish priest good, traddie nun bad). Complex characters well acted in a story full of the subtlely of the title. How personally involved can priests and nuns become in their charges’ lives without compromising their work? When does righteous anger about the priestly underage gay sex scandal become harassment and a witch-hunt? For good measure add race and a dash of feminism.
The historical-period re-enactment seems spot-on except for a few liturgical and other ecclesiastical clangers, mostly anachronisms. The real Sister James (still in Mother Seton’s order — whence come the film’s unusual nuns’ habits with the early-1800s widow’s cap — but no longer using her name in religion) was the technical adviser. The Masses strike a traditional Catholic much like the setting and people in the sci-fi film Dark City (which were almost but not quite the 1940s for a reason), seeming to come from Sister’s muddled memories over several decades. It gets the general feel of the old Mass but lots of little things wrong:
The so-called Benedictine wearing of the stole over the chasuble, unthinkable in a big-city neighbourhood parish in 1964.
A pro-life rose lapel patch on a chasuble, and in ’64 at that? No. I think somebody vaguely recalled that as something RCs wear and threw it in.
The chasubles at the second and third Masses look very Novusy.
A choir singing the Old Hundredth at the offertory? Possible but not likely. I can imagine Irish-American parishioners in ’64 recoiling in horror: ‘That’s Protestant!’
Speaking of things Protestant, the ‘Christian flag’ on the stage?! (Where the papal flag, actually just the flag of the Vatican city-state, is used in the US.)
The consecration at Mass seemed bizarre: altar boys IIRC in the wrong places and Fr Flynn was still saying the words quietly while genuflecting.
Interesting breviary Father’s got: the modern Liturgy of the Hours in English, which of course didn’t exist in ’64.
Philip Seymour Hoffman looks perfectly cast as an RC priest especially of the period.
Would that a little intellectual subtlety in sermons, friendly priests and singing ‘Frosty the Snowman’ at a Christmas pageant were all there were to self-identified ‘progressive’ RCs today.
BTW the perfectly Catholic answer to ‘I have doubts’ is ‘Of course!’
Clem’s 150 years on Ages ago somebody (not at all unorthodox — he ‘went over to Rome’ a few years later and is a priest) warned me about this place (many relics, Latin, obscure old-fashioned practices) so naturally I went! Last week a brother in England, actually the first ‘Clementine’ I ever met, reminded me that 150 years ago today it had its first Sunday service. Bittersweet now that the Anglo-Catholic movement in that denomination is finished. (No Catholic bishops mean no movement and more important no church.)
Long story short: A mid-19th-century Philadelphian builder decides to hike up the value of his new project by putting a church in the neighbourhood, irreligiously picking a name from one of his relations. So a big brown sort-of Romanesque stone Protestant preaching barn goes up. (Providentially the Romanesqueness and the saint’s name will suit what it will become.) Ten years later an AC priest shows up and starts teaching that religion and nudging the services in that direction. By 1900 it’s a model of American ACism, retrofitted for that kind of worship, and is even run by an English religious order (no longer there and I understand on its last legs in England). Until the mid-early C20 it’s a real neighbourhood parish of working-class folk back when there are such among the Episcopalians in big cities. (Families and thus a Sunday school, now gone, with fully habited nuns teaching it.) Two unrelated things happen about 75-80 years ago: the rector (more), an American, takes it up a notch so it’s like English Anglo-Papalism at the time (Tridentine RC ways: Missal not Prayer Book) and a big new boulevard wipes out the houses that made up the old parish. (There is also an engineering feat when 20th Street is widened: all of S. Clement’s buildings are put on rails and pushed back, landing on new foundations!) With only a hiccup in between — going mainstreamish Episcopal from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s — it’s been a Tridentine AC ‘shrine’, a magnet for YFs and a few others, ever since.
Been a happy non-communicant part-timer there for nearly six years. My native tradition revved up to square with the Catholic faith, with doses of high culture (classical music) and that AC sense of fun that Huw describes (as did Sir John Betjeman). (I’m barely old enough to have caught the tail end of old-time religion in Anglicanism and have identified as Catholic since I was about 13.)
‘Extreme’ colonial bishops leading us in song... The fiddle-back vestments a-glitter with morning rays, Our Lady’s image, in multiple-candled brightness, The bells and banners — those were the waking days When Faith was taught and fanned to a golden blaze.
— the late Sir John
These places are rarer than hen’s teeth now and I imagine it’s only a matter of time before the Episcopalians, committed to being a liberal Protestant denomination, shut it down at least as we know it. (Without ‘at least as we know it’ it would have no reason to be.) I don’t think they’re plotting to but I do believe that their amused toleration won’t last much longer. Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival among younger RCs is poised to pick up where it leaves off but I fear something culturally will be lost. If resistance, as described perfectly by Thomas Day, can be overcome perhaps the Hymnal 1940 and English Hymnal can cross over along with, more important, public recitation of the office. (Yes, orthodox and singable hymns [though I prefer chant], the office in church and the cultural ephemera Huw describes are what Catholic ex-Anglicans miss.) We shall see.
The list of banished words for ’09 Neologisms and overused buzzwords: certain uses of green followed by carbon footprint are first and second respectively
Just because a writer recognizes something does not make it an icon (a visual symbol or representation which inspires worship or veneration) or iconic. It just means that the writer has seen it before.
Since 2005 Israel, which is still punishing the original inhabitants of the lands it rules or occupies, has killed 150 Palestinians for each Israeli killed these last eight years. Just think of it. Seventeen Israeli lives have been expunged by the murder of 2550 Palestinian ones. That’s doing much better than the Nazis.
Minimal prognostications. Prominent neoconservatives will fax their resumes to the Obama administration, offering the president the same skill and sophistication in foreign policy which led to success in Iraq. Canadian leftist nationalists who have spent eight years decrying the ideological hegemony of Caesar Augustus Bush will desperately embrace any idea or afterthought that drops from the Obama White House. The works of Ann Coulter will continue to outsell those of Russell Kirk among young GOP activists.
Where have all the bloggers gone? Fr Methodius and I have been online long enough to see the social part of the Internet move from Usenet and BBSes to e-mail circles (like those GIF-laden e-mails full of old jokes and urban legends that one’s granny still sends) to message boards to blogs to things like Facebook (meh), MySpace (badly made sites by and for teen-agers) and Twitter. I’ll add elaborate personal sites/home pages (how I cut my teeth learning basic HTML coding starting nine years ago) to the casualties of ’Net fashion.
Buona lasagna: I know but I like it anyway New Year’s Eve dinner with Donna. I know: chain-restaurant cliché, the camp humour with stereotypes bordering on offensive and the food’s not really Italian; I’ve been to ‘more authentic’ places including people’s homes. But I like this anyway. The family-style concept, sharing your food (a standard-sized item serves two), is wonderful. It all appeals shamelessly to ‘the sentimentally hungry’ as one reviewer wrote, and I think it works. I choose to see most of the presentation as a tribute and they even acknowledge Catholicism’s place in Italians’ and Italian-Americans’ cultures (more), hardly a wimpy PC move. Donna, an Italian New Yorker complete with a marvellous family and their cooking traditions, doesn’t mind the décor and can rip apart the menu (‘they don’t know Italian cooking’, ‘alfredo and marinara sauce in one dish — are they crazy?’ — that does sound awful!); we agree on the sheer goodness of their lasagna, a nine-layered log-sized serving. The real thing seems to have less cheese on top than in the photo, which is fine with me. Half of this and a pint glass of orange Italian soda (is that cane sugar?) and I’m in the zone. (Also good: sharing the other half of the large version the next night along with a bottle of Georgian wine.)
It is amusing though to go to the company’s website and see how the number of stores in parts of the US is inversely proportional to the Italian population in those places.
The more things ‘change’. Among Jack Hunter’s 12 prognostications: Affirmative-action GOP rising star Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will become most popular amongst Republicans who once thought it silly anyone might vote for Obama because he was black. Ron Paul will continue to be right about almost everything.
Tom Piatak’s predictions. Those who are right about America’s condition will continue to be ignored and marginalized, and those who are wrong will continue to dominate our national discourse. Obama will continue George Bush’s free-spending ways, and then some, but the the American people will blame Bush for our economic woes, partly because the media will continue to serve as Obama’s cheerleader. The left will continue to make progress in remaking America in its image, while the “mainstream conservative” opposition continues to ignore, belittle, or mishandle important cultural and social issues. The United States will continue spending money we don’t have to inject ourselves in conflicts that are none of our concern, despite the preference of most Americans for a foreign policy more in line with George Washington’s than George Bush’s.
John Zmirak: the year of the piñata. The U.S. government will continue to try to electrify our dead-frog economy by spending money it doesn’t have. The Chinese government will keep its currency devalued, taking advantage of that culture’s longer time-preference — its willingness to delay gratification. So the Chi-Coms will continue to keep their people working very hard, stashing away wealth (instead of consuming it) to buy up American debt. Expect more feel-good, low-cost interventions along the lines of our attack on Yugoslavia. Immigration will drop off the political radar for a while. We’ll continue to huff and puff while Israel turns Gaza into a kinder, gentler version of the medieval Jewish ghetto and dusty Bantustans.
Paul Gottfried’s pennorth: Sarah Palin’s popularity among Republicans will continue to soar. The media will continue to slime Bush with the hope of diverting attention from the ineptitude of his successor. Perhaps by the end of this year the new president will start acting like a Republican. The only permissible political positions will continue to be leftist ones, namely the opinions of left-liberals and neocons.
George McGovern conservatives. Though not ideal he was more sensible on a lot of things (get out of Vietnam, leave abortion to the states not Scotus) than were the neocons who switched parties because of him.
Revolt against the masses or elitism isn’t necessarily snobbery and egalitarianism is a lie that harms people and society. To use an example from the cinema recently think of the aristocratic patriot von Stauffenberg versus the ‘populism’ of Hitler. And: real conservatism and libertarianism don’t pretend to be complete worldviews like a religion. The Old Right, whose history has been written by, among others, Murray Rothbard and Justin Raimondo, was never a political organization per se — and it certainly never resembled the partisan racket Buckley’s conservative movement has become.
The C of E invests in Al Gore. Whether you drive a Chrysler or a Smart Car (these days the ultimate SWPLmobile to show off, even more than the Prius?) the road to hell is paved with... ‘I thank thee you, Lord, that I am not like that SUV-driver over there and do not have to use public transport that is a bus...’
Time is cheesed off at Rockwell. Fake conservatives and libertarians versus real ones. Like the way Frank Chodorov was purged from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute as was the word Individualists from the name (as the staff associated it with those dirty hippies). More.
The digital divide. As appealing as using a potential peace dividend (but Obama’s not a peace president) to buy super Internet access for all sounds, of course, it is not a question of not being able to afford it — it’s a matter of priorities. The urban poor have satellite TV dishes or cable TV, cell phones, nice clothes, new cars, etc. The government uses its monopoly powers — of merger approval — to force another hidden tax onto productive people who actually earn what they have. And Obama wants to spread the love. Also, the three-card monte era of money-changing Ponzinomics (true) was not the free market.
If I decry the loss of folk religion, it is because I expect, for better or for worse, that (pace the Neo-Caths, Lefebvrists, crazy Orthodox converts, and religious bloggers) this is the only religion that most people will ever have.
The peril of extinction Samer al-Batal writes: The Christians of Iraq are not the only group whose numbers have been threatened by Mr Bush’s war. The Mandæans are in a much more perilous situation.
When American forces invaded in 2003, there were probably 60,000 Mandeans in Iraq; today, fewer than 5,000 remain.
Unlike Christian and Muslim refugees, the Mandeans do not belong to a larger religious community that can provide them with protection and aid. Fundamentally alone in the world, the Mandeans are even more vulnerable and fewer than the Yazidis, another Iraqi minority that has suffered tremendously, since the latter have their own villages in the generally safer north, while the Mandeans are scattered in pockets around the south. They are the only minority group in Iraq without a safe enclave.
If all Iraqi Mandeans are granted privileged status and allowed to enter the United States in significant numbers, it may just be enough to save them and their ancient culture from destruction. If not, after 2,000 years of history, of persecution and tenacious survival, the last Gnostics will finally disappear, victims of an extinction inadvertently set into motion by our nation’s negligence in Iraq.
Reminds me of a story that old friend Mark Bonocore told me of some vagante-ish New Agers deciding it’d be cool to spite orthodox Christianity by being Gnostics (much like the ‘Celtic’ thing today), bringing over the patriarch of one of these surviving real Middle Eastern Gnostic religions and being shocked when he told them what his faith really teaches (from being stricter on sex than Christian churches to dietary rules to having a moat around the church). The result was some Middle Eastern immigrants got to have the full practice of their religion in America; I don’t know where the New Agers ended up.
Back-to-back black-and-white British Christmas Carols, the awful 1935 Scrooge with Sir Seymour Hicks and 1951’s Scrooge with Alistair Sim, popular in America.
The first series of Bless Me, Father on English RC parish life in the early ’50s.
The Bishop’s Wife with Cary Grant being himself, Loretta Young beautiful even in a silly 1940s hat, David Niven as a quintessential Anglican bishop and a boys’ choir cast by somebody who’d never heard English church music in his life.
Photo: noble simplicity the Western monastic and legitimate liturgical-movement way.
St Andrew’s Antiochian Orthodox Church, Oklahoma City A former Charismatic Episcopal (not Anglican) parish. Nice but what’s with all the icons? A self-byzantinisation just like the self-latinisations of the Greek Catholics (putting up statues in a Ukrainian Catholic church for example). The ‘Liturgy of St Tikhon’ is essentially a traditional American Anglo-Catholic Mass (augmented US 1928 Book of Common Prayer).
A way to fit the Orthodox ethos without heavy-handed byzantinising:
In the midst of all the whining and begging for a bailout, the South has been declared the new enemy, along with the foreign-car manufacturers who are producing cars — in Southern plants — that consumers want to buy.
Understanding isn’t the same as forgiving. The history-be-my-judge interviews that Bush and Cheney have been giving recently help me understand why they acted with such contempt for our Constitution and our values but also reinforce my confident belief, and my fervent hope, that history will throw the book at them.
Watching the news shows, you’d think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza — a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin — and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force.
The original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza. That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it — Askalaan in Arabic — were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They — or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren — are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.
The roots of the Feast of the Seven Fishes (“La Vigilia”) are in southern Italy and the Roman Catholic Church.
Counterintuitively, the feast started as a fast. Traditionally, Catholics abstain from eating meat on holy days, which lead to the custom of preparing fish on holidays.
The vigil of Christmas — Christmas Eve — is a fast and a day of abstinence (no meat except fish) as well. Not the holy day itself.
Some jottings about the news
blog info
Been a happy non-communicant part-timer there for nearly six years. My native tradition revved up to square with the Catholic faith, with doses of high culture (classical music) and that AC sense of fun that 
