Maundy (updated)

First there wasn't going to be any washing at our church tonight, then there was, then the Vicar-General was coming . . . with all the last-minute changes, and the Pope including a couple of girls in his celebration (obligatory not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that), I took the precaution of wearing tights so I could beg off if anyone got any ideas about including me.

There. I admit it. 

(ETA: Turned out there was no chance of me being pulled in -- it was viri selecti, same as last year.)

Why I'm posting so late

To quote Delbert McClinton, "Seems like the devil's always tryin' to get in my door."
With:

• bugs that bite, not me, but my husband
• things that go beep in the night
• cats that meow ditto

All adding up to lost sleep. There was another disturbance -- a nightmare about a sketchy ponytailed guy who kept aggressively hitting on me, kind of strange at my age let alone his -- but I count that as a sign the devil was giving up for a while, because it ended in the guy disappearing and leaving a suicide note. I remember feeling sorry for his wife (yes, he had one), but thinking she was better off without him.

"Reasons that we may never know or fully understand"

The McAleese Report on the Magdalen Laundries hadn't come to my attention till someone in Mark Shea's combox (wish I could find the comment again, but he gets so many) mentioned it. I found it and think I could easily end up reading it all, though it's over a thousand pages. As always, I'm still both fascinated and horrified by the knowledge that I shared a country, for however short a time, with these places. 

Bad as they were, however, they weren't quite what we've been told.

For one thing, the majority of the girls spent less than a year there. For the ones who'd come from orphanages or reform schools, the laundries were halfway houses/probation, and the girls were let out when they seemed ready. Only nobody told them that was going to happen. All they knew was that some older women had been there for years and apparently weren't going, ever -- though this was usually because these women had decided to stay,  or just didn't have anywhere else to go.

By the way, it sounds as if the older, voluntary residents were way rougher on the young girls than the nuns were. 

The introduction notes that many girls were placed in the laundries by their own families "for reasons that we may never know or fully understand" including "familial abuse". Later the report tells about one of them who refused to go home with her father when he came for her, and another who wrote asking her mother to get her out, only to get a reply that her mother hoped they'd keep her there for 20 years. Those are the stories that stick in my mind.

When I gave my annual talk on family law in Canada for immigrant parents, I told them that, yes, it seems as if parents don't have much authority left under the law -- but there was a time not long ago when they had too much. I told the story (one more thing I wish I had a link for) of the old lady who got an apology from one of the provincial governments or other because, back around 1943, the police had obliged her father by arresting her to get her away from the Chinese man she was living with. It seems any woman under 25 who was doing things her parents disapproved could be legally dragged home by the cops. The risk that this might be misused by unfit parents was apparently discounted by whoever made that law -- or they figured the few girls who got wrongly caught in it would just have to make the sacrifice for the good of society.

Bombs away

Yeah, Bomb Girls is back tonight -- but. As well as moving it to Monday, they've pushed it to 9:00, when the front room is full of people sitting quietly and reading so as to be unwound enough to sleep that night. 

I'll have to catch it later online. More then.

Mustard seeds

Just plain sick, that's what I was yesterday and today, and editing an antireligious article didn't make me feel any better, but it gave me an idea:

Let's keep in mind all those people who say that if Jesus came back, he'd condemn all us "hateful" Christians and tell everyone love (in any form) was all they needed. Let's zoom in on that little bit of respect they apparently have for Our Lord as a man and for His teaching (the parts they agree with) and pray that, like a mustard seed, it grows into something much bigger and better -- faith. 

And when we see it in them, let's help it grow.

Why I didn' t post yesterday

Didn't feel smart enough, because I found myself:

1. Laughing uncontrollably at Comic Book Guy's Book of Pop Culture
2. Wanting to beat a dead horse by citing yet another precedent for Pope Francis'  asking the people to pray for him ("Bishop Challoner says St. Jerome says St. John asked the early Church to help him write his Gospel by holding a fast for him -- it worked, too")
3. Attempting to join the 200 Club (you give in to that little prompting feeling the next 200 times you get it, and this is supposed to help you learn to recognize the Holy Spirit) and, through a second-grade level error in simple math, printing myself a chart that instead put me in the 2000 club. Maybe that means the Holy Spirit finds me 10 times harder to get through to than the average sinner?

Thank you, St. Joseph

Marriage of the Virgin, Alexandre-Francois Caminade

 

 

 

. . . on your feast day, for your prayers for my son, who has found work he can do well, at a decent wage, a simple thing but hard to come by.

Comic book thoughts at conclave

Macleans:

“Every time I heard my name being uttered during the vote count I was thinking to myself, ‘What are these people thinking? The Romans are crazy!’” Ouellet told Montreal La Presse, using a playful turn of phrase borrowed from the cartoon “Asterix and Obelix.”

I have a feeling it's only a matter of time before we find out what comics Pope Francis reads.

Jesuit relations

Late yesterday, I remembered that I'd once heard another Jesuit -- an ordinary one, visiting our parish for a mission -- ask the people to pray for him before he started speaking to us. He said we were to "ask the Holy Spirit to zap me" or something like that.

So it may be a habit of their Society. Not that that'll excuse the Pope to the kind of people who think he's unduly humble (unduly humble?). It'll just condemn the rest of the SJ's for them, if something hasn't already. "See? the whole order's like that!"

FRANCIS?? Francis!

"I am about to do a new thing upon the earth . . ."

• He laughed as he spoke from the balcony
• led a plain old Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be
• took a never-before name
• as a novice, must've taken one of those living-rough pilgrimages
• was born in a different country from his parents (which makes him a wanderer on the earth)
• will probably lapse into Spanish often as he tries to make "home talk" his working language

Today, in La Motte, Québec . . .

. . . nothing is happening. 

Well, it was snowing, the last time I saw it on TV. 

But the Ouellets, least of all the Cardinal's mother (yes, she's still alive) are not talking till the election's over.

"Literary horror"

That's what this review by Matthew J. Trafford calls The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper, finishing with 

I dare you to read it. The Demonologist might just scare the lit out of you.

Well, I got the free sample bit of it onto my Kindle -- and it made me laugh. But then I'm easily amused.The demonologist -- who doesn't think of himself as one, but as a man who "reads dead white guy poetry and undergraduate papers for a living" has come to the end of Paradise Lost with his class. He asks them a Deep Question: "Where will you go now that Eden has been left behind?"

An arm almost instantly shoots up. A kid near the back I've never called on, never even noticed, before now.

"Yes?"

"Is that question going to be on the exam?"

He's an expert on religious narratives without believing in any. He says they "bear meaning, culturally speaking, without actually existing." 

His thoughts and words on the way back to his office show a healthy respect for the sixth commandment and a desire to be worthy of the fourth, anyway. If the events of the book, which involve a child being terrorized, change his mind about the reality of the other world, I'm not going to crow over him. 

I'm not even sure I'll ever read the book. I don't feel the need to scare myself, and besides, someone's always trying to do it for me -- the headline writers at the women's magazines if no one else. But I'll admit to wondering what happens in it -- and whether I'd get any more laughs out of it.

  

No flaming sword required

"Uh-uh-uh, I'll just get that forbidden fruit from you -- you really don't want it."

One-to-two-liners for a busy day

• . . . my disgust at how such a large and powerful organisation – one always lecturing the rest of us on morals – could be so full of sexual wrongdoers. But that shouldn’t negate all the good work that the BBC does . . . -- Ed West
• If people are asking the church to change its teaching, that's not going to happen. -- Bishop Gary Gordon of Whitehorse
• I don't want to talk about Hell as if I'd been there. -- me

The Post is right on top of the religious and life issues today -- and by religious I don' t mean only the conclave, though they're on top of that too.

• George "not even religious" Jonas takes aim at people who believe "God Himself becomes irrelevant unless he can be used to rubber stamp human desires". He says if he were religious (instead of being Jewish in an "ascribed community" sense), he'd be more worried about his own relevance to God. Well, of course we're all relevant to God, but it's good to have a healthy fear that He may ultimately leave us to our own devices.
• A woman in Quebec is finally told she doesn't have to pay a fine for using her city property rental for the sinister purposes of "a religious video, mass, hymns and a potluck lunch". Oh, they were also selling rosaries.
• Breaking her contract is the only right thing to do: A surrogate mother flees from the (disabled) baby's parents after they tell her to abort their child. "They said I should try to be God-like and have mercy on the child and let her go. I told them that they had chosen me to carry and protect this child, and that was exactly what I was going to do. I told them it wasn’t their decision to play God."

No betting on the papal election in Quebec

Says the Globe and Mail:

The organization [Quebec's lottery commission] isn’t swayed by the fact that a fellow Quebecker, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, just so happens to be among the top picks according to bookmakers.

Bone to pick: Do they have to call him "Mr. Ouellet"? It reminds me of what the Elect were told at RCIA before they went to meet the archbishop: "Call him Your Grace, not Mr. Bishop or Mr. Boanerges or Father Jim . . . " That's one thing, but with a national newspaper it's willful ignorance.

Commentariat

Three times now, I've edited an article about a reality show -- not the same show, you know what I mean -- and had a commenter ask for some favour from the show's stars, as if our little TV review site were the place to do that.

Of course, I'm glad to get any comments at all. Of course, I tell them we're not actually the producers of Hoarders or whatever, but they may be able to find help (which two out of three of them really need) at this link . . . of course it may not be any real help, but I may just have to be content with letting them know they're not being ignored.

All I have time for today . . .