Delivering

• I cut over 125 words today with my bare hands.
• At least I'm not a midwife in Scotland, though the headline "Catholic midwives must assist in abortion, judge rules" makes the ruling sound more nightmarish than it is. It's bad enough; what they have to do is "supervise staff involved in terminations" because "all medical terminations were moved to the labour ward in 2007". Who thought that was a good idea?
• I will have to midwife another grit-my-teeth article tomorrow; if anyone's reading this, please, pray for me.
  
  
  

Reverent Disposal

Speaking of books, how are you supposed to destroy a worn-out Koran, especially one that's been turned to worldly purposes like messages between prisoners scribbled in the margins?

I haven't seen any mention of what would've been the right thing to do. Bury them? Get a Muslim to do the burning?

If I were, ahem, "detained", I'm afraid I'd at least think of using my Bible for something like that.

"1500 year-old ‘ Syriac ‘ Bible found in Ankara, Turkey : Vatican in shock !"

Well, no, not quite. All the National Turk goes on to say about the Vatican is, "The Vatican reportedly placed an official request to examine the scripture . . ."

It's a beautiful book with gold letters on dark leather -- but they're not sure it's not a fake.

Now if we had the Gospels in Aramaic . . . people would probably still argue over what they really meant.

Small Mercies

Yesterday I had a nasty piece of work to do -- I'd been dreading it because my first glance at the article told me I'd disagree on moral grounds with everything in it except -- maybe -- the punctuation. Yet I had to polish it up and send it out into the world.

Turned out it had other issues which required a decision from higher up and some problem solving from me. And that was what occupied my mind much of the afternoon, instead of discomfort and moral outrage, thanks be to God.

Spirit and Flesh

The Battle Between Carnival and Lent Pieter Bruegel The Elder Buy From Art.com

Again from ashes

I know "Ashes" is (writing that makes me feel ungrammatical) justly derided as a hymn -- but it always reminds me of one Ash Wednesday when, as we dragged through all those lyrics, including "though spring has turned to winter", it actually started to snow.

No U-Turn

I've been reading Street Saints by Barbara J. Elliott; there's a story about a man who was shooting up heroin in a gas station washroom while his baby daughter lay on the floor tangled in toilet paper. He'd taken the girl on holdups; on his first date with her mother, they'd knocked over a convenience store together. Now, it occurred to him to wonder if maybe he wasn't quite father of the year material . . . Anyway, he's turned his life around and had a lot of success helping other addicts quit.

Guys like this, though -- "professional, successful on the surface, with a good job, a steady relationship, a mortgage, nice holidays, lots of friends" can go their whole lives thinking they are father of the year. There may never be a turnaround for them; their kids will have to do it instead -- if they realize they have to.

Monday Morning in No Particular Order

• Do some people really believe Christianity is a sinister outside influence that only recently invaded our world? Something like red light cameras?
• That's possible; some people (the kind who never read Catholic blogs) seem to believe every Catholic in the U.S. is firmly behind Santorum.
• The most frequent question, by a landslide, at a Catholic conference on a Saturday: "Is this an anticipated Mass?"

A "Firmer Peace?"

In Charlotte Bronte's Villette, Lucy Snowe is given a Catholic booklet she finds unconvincing. For one thing, it says it's comforting to pray for your beloved dead in Purgatory. "The writer did not touch on the firmer peace of those whose belief dispenses with purgatory altogether."

No Purgatory for anyone, Lucy? Infuriating Paul, who gave you the booklet? Devious Madame Beck, shallow Dr. John, ditzy Ginevra? Whoever it was that made your teens a "shipwreck"? Yourself with your pathological tendency to withhold information? Everyone who's not downright wicked, as is, for all eternity.

Look, Lucy, if your average person goes straight to Heaven, then nobody really goes to Heaven, just a version of Earth that never ends.

What does it mean when you find yourself wanting to pray for the conversion of a fictional character? Maybe it'd be good to say a quick one for the repose of the soul of Charlotte Bronte, a great writer and in many ways a wise woman, cut off early by morning sickness.

If you're looking for a sign from God, keep moving.

"The dishwasher’s morning-after pill"

Father de Souza, once again, sets the world straight:

According to U.S. President Barack Obama, if a Catholic soup kitchen serves a meal to a non-Catholic poor person, it ceases to be a Catholic agency, and so must pay for the dishwasher’s morning-after pill.

The larger issue is not contraception or even abortion, but whether "religion" can be legally defined as only what you do in church on Sunday. Which increases the ever-present danger of its turning into just a time-consuming weekend game, and eventually being quietly dropped by everyone but the most zealous.

Another point: These have only recently -- in world history terms -- been defined as Catholic issues. (I remember someone in my college newspaper's answering the Church's objection to abortion with: "But what about Protestants and Jews?" as if this were an article of faith with them.)

[Rev. Debra W. Haffner]explains: “The mainstream religious voice has supported contraception for decades, at least for the last 40 years.” A theological opinion which stretches back to 1972? Goodness, that was even before Apple was founded. The mainstream religious voice is not quite as venerable as say, Calvin or Luther or the teaching of the apostles found in the Didache, but if the world began in 1968 and discovered sex soon thereafter, 40 years is as traditional as it gets.

But who knows, maybe the world did begin in 1968, and the Six-Day War, the Apollo 1 fire, and Petula Clark singing "Downtown" are all products of my overheated Catholic imagination.

Just a picture for today

Saint Valentine baptizing Saint Lucilla by Jacopo Bassano

Comments I've Foreborne from Making

• Y'know, speaking from experience, it's possible to have a somewhat meaningful life even if your mother didn't finish high school.
• "Ron Paul is the only Christian presidential candidate"? I guess I should feel offended on behalf of Newt Gingrich . . . but somehow, I'm having a hard time.
• "A Catholic President would be taking his orders from the Pope"? Citizen Know Nothing telegraphed, he wants his spurious platform back.

First Amendment 1, Obama 0

Rex Murphy:

Nothing less that (sic) the great guarantee of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the free exercise of religion, now stands in his way.

And this is coming from a Canadian.

It's good to see the First Amendment in action.

Beginning

Right -- time to explain myself.

This is my sort of token Catholic blog; this is where I establish my identity in case I want to comment on Catholic sites (which, I'm sure, I'll suddenly find myself with time to do).

The thing is, I'm an editor on the fringes of the secular media -- nothing well-known, yet -- and some of the articles that pass under my cursor might be seen as depriving me of any Catholic cred. My job is to hold writers to my employer's standards, not my own, and those standards are "common decency" rather than "Catholic fidelity".


So I've let through some stuff that I violently disagree with, changing nothing but the grammar and spelling. And there are other things that might disqualify me from what Red Cardigan calls "happyshinycatholicwomen.com".


Anyway, I wonder how much credibility St. Eunice herself -- the real Eunike -- would've had as a Catholic blogger. After all, she was married to a Greek who may have believed in the true God, but if so, that was all. She didn't manage to get her son circumcised. (Probably where her husband drew the line: "You want to cut off his what? Look, I don't mind you refusing to cook pork or do housework on Saturdays, but this is too much!") She leaned heavily on her mother for help raising that son, especially his religious instruction. That same mother had given her the name of a pagan god's daughter.


But Eunike must have done something right.