Major Luther? He was a military chaplain?

All kidding aside, Reuters tells us "Germany Catholics wary about major Luther festivities". 2017 will be the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and the party is already in the works. Catholics are invited, but for some reason feel a little hesitant.

(RCIA inquirer: "Luther had some . . . interesting ideas." Me: "Well, we're a little biased about him here.")

And this:

Margot Kaessmann, a former Lutheran bishop who heads the preparations for the 2017 events, has said she wants Catholics to join in but turned down a Vatican suggestion both sides work out a common admission of guilt for the separation.

What does she object to, "common" or "guilt"? Or does she just not want to spoil the festive atmosphere?

Facilities

Plan Canada says:

Did you know that a lack of girls-only washrooms is one of the main reasons adolescent girls in the developing world stop attending school?

 Well, I never would've thought of it. But yes, I can believe that such a small thing can throw children's lives off course.

That said . . . Is it the girls themselves who want the separate washrooms, or their parents who are using it as justification to keep them out of school? Girls-only washrooms can be bad enough in their own way; I seldom went into the ones at my schools once I got into junior high as they tended to be de facto clubs for the girls who were skipping class to smoke. As I didn't indulge in either, I wasn't really entitled to relieve myself.

Still -- it comes back to things like this making a difference.

I'm way ahead of the SSPX

A few weeks ago, among the cassettes going spare from the parish library, I found some recording of Bishop Williamson's, and after consultation with the two other people present, threw it into the trash just hoping no one would fish it out.

Somewhere, I suppose, some rad-trad ladies are doing the same.

This is/was your life

A Catholics Come Home ad.
I like the way the people's lives are set before them as faded vintage home movies, only with sound. I love the intent and the presentation, but -- what exactly is supposed to be happening?

The first man's age and confusion suggest that he might be dying or newly dead when he wanders into the hangar (or is it a barn?) and sits down in the armchair to watch himself yelling at his wife back in the 60s. But many of the other people (well,  not the girl who sees herself shooting up) are statistically unlikely to find themselves dying.

So -- are they all just looking back on their lives, before it's too late, to ask Jesus to "edit" them and "give them the ideal ending"? What is the hangar and how did they all get there, one by one?

Not the most important thing about the ad, but it distracts.

Anyway, I still like it.

Can prayer save this town?

Looking for something else, I found this poll in the Winnipeg Free Press: "Could the collective power of prayer help combat violent crime in Winnipeg?"

Plain "Yes" is in second place as of now, just behind "I find this suggestion inappropriate or offensive".

The city's motto is Unum Cum Virtute Multorum, One with the Strength of Many. Ut unum sint, Deo gratias.

St. Kateri

by Claude Chauchetiere, SJ

Saint as of yesterday. Her latter miracle was curing a child of another tribe.











(This is late, I know, but I spent most of the morning in one of Mrs. Clinton's waiting rooms.)

Yes, but

Being in the first group takes up much more of your time.

Two admissions

from Dover

1. This is just for the sake of posting something today.
2. Dinotopia (TV version) used to be a guilty pleasure of mine.

It's official

"Calling Catholic groups ‘cult-like’ does not amount to discrimination: Ontario Human Rights Tribunal".

They determined the defendant's "anti-Catholic comments were offensive, but not akin to discrimination". Because . . . anti-Catholic comments offend everyone?

I don't know a thing about the student voluntourist program that was hit with the comments (their site is under construction, and seemingly has been for a couple of years) or the "Catholic groups connected to the program". For all I know, the "connected groups" may be cohorts of the Legion of Christ, which would make "cult-like" a very mild descriptor.

But look at this:

Although the complainant was treated differently due to his religious beliefs, the tribunal wrote: “I cannot see how the respondent’s comments about him were vexatious, or known or ought reasonably to be known to be unwelcome, no matter how personally offensive and hurtful he found them to be. Accordingly, the respondent’s comments did not amount to substantive discrimination.”

No vexation here or discrimination here, no, just plain talk, friendly constructive criticism. The sort the defendant would just shrug off if someone made them about her favourite subjects, feminist thought and environmental justice.

Right?

 

Bleak retrospective

In Bleak House, our heroine/part-time narrator Esther Summerson catches smallpox. Not that Dickens ever names it; apparently naming diseases in those days was like mentioning the outhouse. (And speaking of names, you know Esther's not going to marry Mr. Guppy, because she's got a more or less realistic name and he's got a joke name. You know that even before you figure out who her parents are.)

Anyway, after Esther sickens:

. . .everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life . . .I had never known before how short life really was and into how small a space the mind could put it.

I once read of a man who almost drowned escaping from a wrecked submarine, who felt he relived every moment of his life as he struggled up to the surface. Bad enough, though he was only 19. When the body seems to be saying life is ending, the mind for some reason gives it a quick once-over and packs it into a small space.

Another time, I dreamt I'd found out that in Purgatory, we have to undergo this for the life of everyone we've ever known. I was trying to look on the bright side and see it as time travel and figure out how far back it would take me -- the 1880's, I figured, for my great-grandmother's childhood.

Now sometimes I think, it's so sternly fitting, I may just find out someday that it's true. 

Slacking off, I know

Too many late nights and early mornings. And my last post was awfully slapdash, and I was afraid the next wouldn't be any better.

But just to tie in with both Mrs. Jellyby and myself: I think the whole let's-get-Mom-a-job trend of my childhood and ever since was based on the faulty premise that convenience food was healthy and delicious. When that idea was given up, it was too late: most mothers were frequently too tired to cook. So families turned to eating out instead, restaurant food presumably being freshly cooked, and if not, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. Of course, restaurant food is much more expensive than at-home convenience food . . . but there was no help for it, it was too late.

I speak in gross generalizations, of course. Still, if the cookbooks and my own memory are any guide, home cooks between about 1965 and 1980 relied heavily, trustingly, and with great savings of time and effort, on packaged mixes and frozen everything. Bland, laden with chemicals, but hey -- quick and easy. And of course it would always be that way, as far as anyone knew . . .

Bleaker House

I started out reading what Chesterton didn't like about David Copperfield (at the end, all the fascinatingly weird people take off for Australia, leaving just Dave and his boring second wife) and found myself reading Bleak House and hoping I wasn't really like Mrs. Jellyby.

She's the one pursuing a plan to resettle "the surplus population" in Africa and get them to teach the natives to make piano legs. Meanwhile, her house is in chaos, the kids are in actual danger, the food isn't cooked, her eldest has never learned to do anything but take dictation, and a houseguest has to wash his hands in a pie plate.

Yes, being middle class, she has servants who are supposed to do the housework. But they're the kind who won't unless they're checked up on. It's all Mrs. Jellyby's fault, of course -- and the fault of the people who praise her for her "good works", which seem to be still  at the letter-dictating and flyer-mailing stage.

West of the Canaries

Another free sample from Dover

Someone who bothered to watch the debate ...

namely Jonathan Kay, says  "Romney sounded like a normal human being who cares about real flesh-and-blood people".

Where I wondered whether Romney was being his real self and inadvertently showing how out of touch he was, Kay thinks he both showed his real self ("Real-life Romney’s destruction of Cardboard Romney") and proved that real self was "humane".

You don't quite pick that up from the transcript. 

I really don't know this

Because I didn't watch the debate (didn't remember it was on and not sure I would've given it the time anyway), just read a bit of the transcript.

But when Romney said, "And I'd bring that pipeline in from Canada. And I like coal" -- was he trying to be funny? Or is he so out of touch that he didn't know how he was living up to his stereotype? Or was he just being unapologetically himself? There's something to be said for someone who does that last one, though on its own it's not enough to make me vote for anyone. Real selves can be pretty bad, after all. 

Credit where it's due -- that was a U.S. Army photo before I started messing with it. 

Coffee, not poison

Licia Corbella starts out by denouncing people who say there's no euthanasian "slippery slope":

The people who say that are, inarguably, bald-faced liars, ill informed or delusional. There are no other options.

Good for her -- she's going to get ripped to shreds over it -- but what I really want to highlight is something later on in her column:
 

 Maybe instead of killing lonely people, the staff in these mobile [euthanasia] units should go around and visit them, give them a hug and take them for coffee rather than hand them a lethal prescription so they can die in lonely desperation.

Yes yes yes, and I say that even as a non-coffee drinker. Help them do something that has the stamp of ordinary life, that normal people do with other people. That may not be all they want. But it's part of what they're missing, almost surely.

Befriending people has always been lots of work. But until recently, society didn't have the alternative of helping them do away with themselves -- because that was wrong. Not wrong anymore, so what the hey, bye-bye.

Casual Friday, Casual Vacancy, Casual Labour, But Not Casual Sex

Got indefinitely detained in the dentist's waiting room this morning, dragging into this afternoon. (When I was finally ushered in to see him, he greeted me with "Are you still speaking to me?")

Anyway, in a magazine I'd never have read otherwise, I found an interview with Tracy McMillan, author of this book, which apparently doesn't mince words.(Chapters entitled You're a Liar, You're Selfish, and it gets into namecalling.)

The article I read isn't online anywhere I can find it, so I'll have to paraphrase freely. In the Amazon interview, she says, "We wish we could just date and have sex casually, but many many of us just can't. It has nothing to do with morality, we just don't seem to be able to. And there's nothing wrong with that." In the other article, she more or less said it was impossible for sex to be casual -- we think it can be because we've found a way to keep it from leading to babies, but we can't even manage that much of the time. And it can still make people kill each other and "abdicate the throne". And, as she says at Amazon, "I will be drunk-dialing you for sure about three weeks after I start having sex with you."

Babies, death, The King's Speech, drunken phone calls in the middle of the night -- these things are not brought on by a harmless pastime.

 

Memento

In less than a week, I've visited a dental office, a hospital, and a funeral home, and I think it was okay that I didn't have the energy to do anything about the disoriented man walking along the other side of the street swearing loudly as I went home from Mass yesterday. I was worn out and agitated from all those reminders that an essential part of us can and does get wrecked and used up.

Get yours today!