Yes, it's been a whole week

Some of it was spent being pushier than I've ever (with a few semi-regrettable exceptions) been in my life, telling strangers, in so many words, that what I wanted from them was more important than whatever else they were doing just then.

A lot of time was spent recovering -- physically -- from the effects of my own pushiness.

A few seconds were even spent talking with an A-list blogger who has a hard time believing anyone reads his blog.

"Nobody told me there'd be weeks like these . . . " Well, they probably did, only I didn't believe them. Still, strange weeks indeed.

Ad lib exorcism?

I'm ignoring the scare quotes, because that's not what I want to talk about:

The Catholic Church's leading 'exorcist' is calling for all priests to be allowed to conduct the ritual after Pope Francis apparently performed one in St Peter's Square last week.

On one festive occasion, someone asked our former parish priest if he went in for exorcisms, and he said he'd never attempt one himself, because an exorcist has to spend so much time in front of the Blessed Sacrament, just for protection, that he doesn't really have time for anything else.

Let's take it that Pope Francis knew the risk he was taking -- and let's leave the impromptu demon expulsions to him. 

Good news, at last, from Oklahoma

Not quite so many people dead as they thought at first.

As always, the disaster has brought people's religious beliefs to the surface -- and for some people, that's Global Warming/Climate Change. In the hard copy of today's Sun, the last word in this headline was not "debate" but "denial" -- "Tornadoes strike at the heart of climate change denial".  

And what about the snow in Newfoundland last weekend --  did that strike at the heart of anything? Nah, just a freak storm.

Holy Father does exorcism on the fly?

There's video here -- it doesn't show much if any of the actual deliverance, which is why I haven't bothered embedding it. Still. "Lord, in your name, even the demons were subject to us."

Three bits

• Say prayers of courage, says Pope Francis, “Not prayers of courtesy: 'Ah, I will pray for you,' I say an Our Father, a Hail Mary and then I forget.”
•  And in South Africa: "The Catholic Church says charging people to use existing roads is not acceptable."
• No, this time the priest was not really asking for money: "Some Springfield residents received an e-mail plea for help that appears to have come from their former pastor . . . KY3 News looked up that address in London, and it appears to be a Laundromat."

Worst of both worlds

Selley on the government's mistake in keeping abortion off the order paper by any means necessary:

All the muzzling and machinations haven’t stopped the hysterics from accusing Mr. Harper of a theocratic agenda to keep Canadian women barefoot and pregnant; meanwhile, they have quite rightly bolstered his reputation as an abuser of democracy. Surely this government’s thuggish reputation is a bigger problem at this point than the “social-conservative conspiracy” burden it has always successfully shouldered.

Not exactly astute, and I say that as one who usually votes Tory for lack of any better choice (uh-oh, that word again).

Murder, the Feds say

From RTV6:

According to a federal arrest affidavit, Weldon swapped out his girlfriend's antibiotics with abortion pills . . .

He's charged with first degree murder.

Of course, his ex, poor woman, has made it clear she very much wanted this baby, and that's what's supposed to make all the difference. Still, we have an agency of the U.S. government saying it's possible that killing an unborn child is murder.

Don't go postal there

Me, filling out an overly inquisitive field trip permission slip: Why do they need to know our postal code to be able to reach me by phone? What are they going to do, call up and ask "Are you the Unpronounceables who live in AKA L8R?"

"Mr. Gumble, you're upsetting me." "No, I'm not!"

Over the weekend, I learned the difference between major depression and dysthymia -- no, not from Wikipedia, from a doctor who had a lot to get through in a presentation of a couple hours.

If there's a quick way to tell them apart, it's this: Dysthymic people can be in denial over their pain. Major depressives (if that's what you call us) can't.The doctor said this is the only time denial is ever good or useful.

But I don't think it's necessarily good or useful even then. What happens when there are dysthymic deniers and major depressives in the same family? The dysthymics may deny the pain of seeing someone they love sunk in major depression -- which means they're denying that person's pain too. And depressed people need empathy.

One small quibble with something that was mostly excellent. I left knowing more about myself and my own family.

Lines of the day

• Recorded message: "This message will now be repeated . . . " followed by silence
• Dollar Tree flyer: "All luau supplies $1.25!"
• CDC: "CDC is not a clinic or hospital. CDC is a public health institution that is a part of the federal government. CDC cannot refer patients to specific health care providers or treat or prescribe medication." The things people expect you to be able to do just because you're called the Center for Disease Control!

It also says mental health is a human right

Today's Post has one of those Mediaplanet inserts, this one on mental health, which perforce is one of my areas of interest. Of course it says it's important to spot and treat mental illness in kids, good and early. In Ontario, it seems, people who deal with kids actually work together to make sure this happens.

Here in Non-Tario?

School: You have to get your child assessed.
Mental Health: We don't have to assess him.

 

If you have anything to offer up today --

Think about offering it up for Charlotte's mother, who has died suddenly, and for the family.

Line of the day

"It's probably been a long day, and now you get to listen to three hours of sex abuse prevention."

-- Guest speaker getting real with her audience

More irresolutions

• I will not clean with microfibre cloths and plain water -- until they invent one that's insecticidal
• I will not conclude my spiritual exercises by imagining the guests at Cana or the Last Supper singing "The Parting Glass"
• On the other hand, to quote Lucy van Pelt, who knows what I'll do?

Irresolute resolutions

• To post every -- er, more often
• To walk my post in a military manner -- wait, that's something else
• To vote for any party that promises to mandate that calls to Mental Health are returned
• To remember when I've written an article and when I've merely uploaded one written by someone else and adjust the author settings as needed
• To stop worrying that I'm turning Our Lord into my therapist
• To refrain from making a lame joke about Our Lord's ethnicity and His putative role as my therapist
• To revoke any of these resolutions that seem like a bad idea tomorrow

Haggard versus Chesterton . . . and the Boston bombers

Throughout an otherwise unusually restful weekend, I had an earworm: A Merle Haggard song called "Mama Tried". Catchy, but ominous. I'll get to it in a moment, but first here's Chesterton:

Many of the country songs describing crime and death have refrains of a startling joviality like cock crow, just as if the whole company were coming in with a shout of protest against so sombre a view of existence. 

"Mama Tried" is one country song that's the inverse of that. Here are the first words of the first verse:

The first thing I remember knowing,
Was a lonesome whistle blowing,
And a young un's dream of growing up to ride . . .

Cute, right? But here's the chorus, sung to music every bit as jaunty as the verses:

And I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole.
No-one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried.
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied.
That leaves only me to blame 'cos Mama tried.

Ever since I first heard this song a few months ago, I've wondered on and off what appalling bloodbath took place to land someone so young in the lockup with the key thrown away, since the song never tells us. (And in my opinion it's somewhat cheap to leave that part out and skip straight from the moderately difficult little boy to the convicted arch-villain.)

Well, since the bombing, I have some idea what it could've been like.

Line of the Day

Man at church, speaking of my sons: "They're good boys. There's much worse trouble they could be getting into."

What I've been doing instead of posting

• Serving on the Benevolent Committee for the Giving Away of Other People's Hard-Earned Money
• Waiting for a government worker to return my call. Long ago, I read about a lady who, circa 1955, got a vague idea that as the widow of a veteran she was entitled to some kind of pension. She duly applied and they told her to "go home and wait". So she . . . quit her job. And waited several months till they told her she didn't qualify for enough to live on. After the last few days, I don't look down on that lady quite so much.
• Being careful the articles I edited which mentioned Boston were above suspicion of exploiting it

Breaking: Bombing suspect spotted in video (?)

Tried to embed the CNN video but seemed to get the wrong one -- anyway, here's the story.

Gotta keep going

Though what I have to keep at seems suddenly so trivial as to be insulting to the people who unknowingly ran into an explosion in a crowded square in a peaceful city.

Lord have mercy.

And may those who are left hear someone say the right thing, whatever it may be for them.

Chant

With all the posts flying around about Some Traditionalists, I'm reminded that I once had my own Bruising Online Encounter With A Trad. But I'm not getting into it here and now. I'm only going to react to the memory by parodying Jonathan Coulton's song "Shop Vac".

But that's all right
'Cause I'll be mostly 
At Novus Ordo
Call me neo and I prob'ly won't hear you
Because it's loud with the tambourines. 

Yesterday, early troubles seemed not far away

I had a long, emphatic post going about a "new" book now called How to Drink Like a Mad Man. Not a book of cocktail recipes from the 60's, but a reissue of something from the year I was born, The 24-Hour Drink Book: A Guide to Executive Survival, which tells you how to be a functioning alcoholic. As we said back then, more fun than a barrel of monkeys. 

My own insights were personal, bitter, and all around an occasion of sin, so I'm leaving them out. Mostly.

Line of the Day

"I argued aloud with the radio, television, and newspaper, but for some strange reason, nobody thought to call me and ask for my opinion." 

-- Monica Perry

Tweak

It's bad enough (in an entertaining way, but still) when readers who are probably nice, reasonable, intelligent people think a fake story is real.

But today I had to edit a review of a non-fiction book by a  nice, reasonable, intelligent person who thought it was a novel.

Striving to be a nice, reasonable person myself (I can't do anything about the intelligence), I decided I had no need to fire off an email saying, "Hey, that's a true story!!"

But the review needed some tweaking. Oh well, that's what I'm there for.

"On the front porch, all year long"

Was going to post on Easter vs. Christmas in the eyes of the world, having heard a good point about it at the Vigil, but I ended up just commenting on Charlotte's post about it. C'mon. I can't be expected to comment and post, can I?

But I'll add, on the subject of leaving Christmas lights up late -- somewhere I have a folder full of photos of Christmas decorations that's called "signs of spring".

Background check

Our Lord and an Angel

See those two tiny people in the background near Jesus's left elbow?

Adriano and Cariola de Armada

No?

Look:

This is Adriano de Armada and his wife Cariola, donors of the painting, and they were not very happy about being so obscurely included in it.

I just made that up. I don' t know who paid for this painting. I don't even know who painted it. April Fool. There, that's over with for another year.

Which is also how I feel about Holy Week and Easter at this point.

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 . . .

Beasts of the Northern Wild

This is how a fishing village dies -- not, usually, in a wall of water, any more than a farming community dies in an earthquake:

 Now, the crab plant is long gone, every shop in town is shuttered and the population has plummeted to 72 from a one-time high of almost 800. Aside from a toddler and a pair of young teenagers, virtually the only islanders left are a few dozen widows and seniors, many of whom don’t have the money to leave.

And in reality it started with people going off to Halifax or Toronto "to work" and coming back, and going again and eventually not coming back. Once that starts happening, a place, no matter how hard to get to, really no longer is cut off from the outside world. And it has to take the consequences.

My contribution on the veil question

Beasts of the Southern Wild

In lieu of a post on Bomb Girls, which is still on hiatus, I give you: Sparkler Girl, aka Hushpuppy, heroine of Beasts of the Southern Wild, a new-to-me movie until a few nights ago.

You most likely already know it's about Hushpuppy and her daddy (every Southern father is a daddy) and how this tiny, very poor family and its neighbours weather a hurricane. So I won't go over that, but just the things I didn't know before I saw the movie:

• Hushpuppy probably has a real name, -- I thought I heard her father call her by it a few times, but I couldn't make it out. Their last name is Doucette -- French for "small sweet thing", or maybe just a mispronunciation of Doucet, as in Isle Charles Doucet, off the coast of Louisiana, where they live.
• They're at the low end of the scale even for the place they live in. The neighbours mostly seem to have cars and houses (rundown, for sure, but still standard modern construction). A couple of them even run a small store.The Doucettes live in a trailer+shack and get around in a boat improvised from a pickup truck bed.
•  Hushpuppy's father keeps calling her by misplaced masculine words even when he's trying to encourage her ("You da man"). As I grew up, I was also on the receiving end of a lot of this and it annoyed me. Couldn't he see . . .? or didn't he want to?

 Altogether not a typical Hollywood movie, which was why I wanted to see it -- except for the way it idealized the poor. These people couldn't wait to "escape" from the hospital/shelter they were taken to and get back to their squalid homes; I couldn't help thinking if I'd been among them I would more likely have hidden in the hospital and stayed there till someone made me leave. 

The middle class half of me thought, "But it's their world, where they can be themselves" and the hardscrabble half of me said, "Ha! They don't know when they've got it good!"

If you can live with that, see it.

Laypeople's vetoes

With the papers speculating on who'll be the next Pope, and even declaring who should or shouldn't (in the article I linked below, Dershowitz says quite rightly that as a Jew he has a right to speak out against the possible election of an anti-Semite), we should be aware that this isn't some modern trend, that laypeople, influential or otherwise, have only lately begun to dare to voice their opinions on this.

For a long time, in fact:

Three leading Catholic heads of state claimed the power of veto: the King of France, the King of Spain, and the Holy Roman Emperor (the Emperor of Austria after the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire). This was rarely exercised; however, no candidate against whom the veto was claimed had ever been elected Pope in that same conclave.  (Wikipedia)

 The veto was last used by Austria in 1903. That conclave ended up electing Pius X, who promptly abolished the veto though he owed his election to it.

Even earlier , a mob crashed the conclave of 1378 yelling (at least as I've read in other sources): "Lo volemo Romano!", saying they'd only accept a Pope from their own city. The cardinals threw a white cloak on one of them who came from a Roman family and forced him out on the balcony to mislead the crowd. It didn't say what happened when people found out there actually was  no election, and later that they now had a Pope from a place called Itri.

So let them hold forth in the papers, it's nothing to the way it once was.

Stories I can't say anything charitable about

"Manitoba poised to demand faith-based independent schools allow gay-straight alliances" because a girl in BC killed herself after being sexually blackmailed by a grown man.

"Virulent anti-Semite on short list to become next pope" --  whoa. If what's said there is true, the man shouldn't even have a vote.

Lines of the Day

From some sitcom rerun I glanced at yesterday while folding laundry (I'm such a meticulous researcher of my sources):

Priest: Christina, you don't need me to tell you to do the right thing.

Woman (hopefully): Any decision I make is the right one for me?

Priest: Okay, apparently you do need me to tell you to do the right thing.

Real reconciliation is great, but . . .

Emily Yoffe ("Dear Prudence") brings up the unpopular truth that reconciliation needs to come from both sides, and we really have no control over whether the other person even feels they've done anything to be forgiven for.

Loved ones and friends – sometimes even therapists – who urge reconnecting with a parent often speak as if forgiveness will be a psychic aloe vera, a balm that will heal the wounds of the past . . . What these people fail to take into account is the potential psychological cost of reconnecting, of dredging up painful memories and reviving destructive patterns.

She's writing about parents (and it's hard both to be estranged from such a close relation, and to forgive someone who devoted their life to staying drunk when they should've been helping you grow up), but reconnecting with anyone you've broken with can have its cost.

And yes, I think you can forgive someone and still "leave them alone except in prayer"  as Marie Luttrell once wrote. No embraces, no chance to say magnanimously, "I forgive you", just a moving on from your own anger. 

No Bomb Girls again tonight, but . . .

I want to speculate a little, since it seems from the last few episodes that Carol is going the Frank Burns route. Naturally her next step would be to pair off with another unlikeable character. Donald, the all-purpose jerk, has already helped her embarrass Vera, but he's too low-rent for someone as aggressively snobby as Carol. So . . . I may have been too quick to match up Detective Prentice with Kate. A Mountie is still not quite on Carol's level, but like all official types he's been given a little extra importance by the war. Besides, he could use a snitch to keep an eye on Marco.

Line of the day

From Louis Ginzburg's Legends of the Jews:

In the east, the west, and the south, heaven and earth touch each other, but the north God left unfinished, that any man who announced himself as a god might be set the task of supplying the deficiency, and stand convicted as a pretender.

Let me keep reminding myself that Jesus has finished the north and made it touch heaven.

"Andrew Bennett, a canary in the coal mine"

That's what Michael den Tandt calls the new Ambassador of Religious Freedom.

(He might call me  a member of "the urban chattering classes" because I have a degree and live within an easy walk of a Starbuck's, but I'm going to overlook that because I agree with him.)

. . . there is a blithe assumption in mass media culture, evidenced again recently by the widespread social media mirth surrounding the recent resignation/retirement of Pope Benedict XVI, that religion is passé. And indeed for many, as declining traditional church attendance shows, it is.

But only for many,  not for all, in Canada. And certainly not for many in places like the Middle East.

The idea that religion is passé is not new, either. Pope Benedict himself ran into it during WW II -- "Pick something else, we won't need priests in the New Germany" his army commander advised him.

Hey, it's been around at least since Karl Marx. 

Whether the Office of Religious Freedom makes any kind of difference remains to be seen -- Den Tandt has his doubts, as poor  Mr. Bennett has "only" five million a year to work with. Maybe it can do a little instructing of the ignorant -- that secularism is not the state religion of Canada. 

Lone Licia

Licia Corbella has come across the Physicians’ Alliance for Total Refusal of Euthanasia -- which not only exists, but includes some doctors influential enough to be taken seriously. You would think so, anyway. But:

“You’re the first journalist of a major news outlet to call me,” revealed [Dr. Catherine] Ferrier.
. . .
It really is shameful how the side in favour of physicians killing their patients must rely on suppression of the other side of the debate and misinformation to push their insidious agenda.

Watch everyone pile on her now for criticizing a recently dead woman -- who didn't have to die.

Papal names for Card. Ouellet

In the event, of course. He might want to name himself after one of the Canadian Martyrs, so I've helpfully sorted their first names into categories:

Already Papal: John. (This one too.)

Not Papal but Mainstream: Anthony.  Charles.

A Little Out There: Noel.  Gabriel. 

Really Out There: Isaac.

And My Recommendation: René.

Ashes to infinity

Yesterday's Mass was just a little more penitential . . .

Let's start again on "Ashes"

That's all we're going to sing

There may be more Ash Wednesday hymns

But we've rehearsed nothing.

By the fourth repeat of "Ashes"

You'll know you should repent

Begin again on "Ashes"

You might as well, it's Lent.

Well, that was the best I could come up with while doing the dishes.      

The Ash Wednesday Effect

It's too early in the day for me to be feeling the effects of the fast -- but I am. Slow, disoriented and generally low blood-sugary. Maybe just because I expected to?

It even seems to have started yesterday. Fortunately my editor in chief is in a good mood.

Happy Lincoln's Birthday

The Peacemakers by George Healy

On this day in 1809, Lincoln's life had an unpromising start. Of course it also had an abrupt and violent end. In between, it's the story of "how a human being, by cultivating the virtues of prudence and charity, achieves human greatness" (Christopher S. Morrissey).

Papa Ouellet?

First it was just the entirely unbiased opinion of various Canadian papers -- them plus the Wall Street Journal -- but now ABC News says it too.

A hockey player. Someone who believes in writing to your political leaders and holding them to account. Hey, I've actually attended a Mass he said.

Nobody's mentioning the French-"English" divide right now. When it comes to something world class, we're all just Canadian.

"Il sait porter la croix . . ."

Whirling thoughts

Wiedersehn!

• He deserves a rest
• But we'll miss him
•  It was so good to have a Pope who spoke so forthrightly -- like a German
• But we couldn't have had a German Pope any earlier
• God send us someone as good as him
• What a Lent this is going to be
• What's even the protocol for this?
• People who believe in the St. Malachy prophecy must be on edge

Cuio regio, not ours

Father de Souza says, more or less, that during all the time (1688 till today, IIRC) that it was illegal for the king or queen to be Catholic, or married to a Catholic -- well, no Catholic would've wanted to be in those positions anyway, so there. 

I would have preferred that the prohibition against marrying Catholics remain. Not as a relic of prejudicial attitudes that have now greatly diminished, but as a reminder that at the heart of the British constitutional settlement lies a matter of greatest consequence . . . The Crown in Parliament speaks, and the church kneels.

In fact, he thinks (with more charity than I can muster) that under the old rules, Britain was actually doing us a favour:

The fact that Catholics were formally barred from this arrangement was an implicit acknowledgment of their dissent from that settlement. 

"This arrangement" -- which I believe is called regalism -- is the problem, not the off chance of some Catholic getting entangled in it.

But of course I'm not biased by being Irish. Or having spent a quarter century married to a non-Catholic whose faith in secularism has suffered much more than my faith in God.

Weekly semi-compulsive Bomb Girls post

The preview for tonight's episode shows Gladys lamely admitting she hasn't "done right" by her fiancé, Betty reaffirming her crush on Kate, and Eugene about to fling himself off a building. Based on how misleading the previews have been lately, I predict:

Gladys lying her head off as she claims she's been a good girl, playing cards with Betty every Saturday night. Betty happily serving as maid of honour at Kate's wedding to, oh, let's say Detective Prentice, the Mountie who's started persecuting Marco. Eugene painting his parents' fence and then watching it dry.

Found while looking for the official Obama skeet shooting photo

If he had any boys in the family, he'd be used to this kind of thing.

Things I learned over the weekend

1. I've been compromising with God
2. Of greater general interest -- Jesuit novices all have to make a month-long pilgrimage, which, for the priest who was telling us about this, meant getting $35 and a one-way bus ticket

Being realistic

When I choose a Region of the Month for a publication, I should not base my choice on little things like climate, scenery, historical interest or tourist-friendliness. No, my only criterion should be availability of a large number of royalty-free photos.

Not partial to partial victory

"Because as every good activist Canadian knows, admitting partial victory constitutes defeat."

-- Chris Selley

You don' t have to be Canadian, or even an activist -- I knew back when I was still just an American schoolgirl that some people thought this way. That "That's not good enough!", if repeated too often, stops sounding like a stern but fair evaluation and starts sounding like a tiny kid's whining. Just as my father's voice, snapping out at me, sounds higher and more nasal every time I remember it.

But it's one of those sins I can easily get "caustic" about, as Fr. Vincent Hawkswell says, because I'm not much tempted to it myself.   

I'm more tempted to try to disguise defeat as partial victory. Which is good enough for me, right?

Or to try to tell myself and everyone else that I don't need victory, it's stupid and I wouldn't like it anyway. Like those grapes I can't reach . . .

Usual compulsive Bomb Girls post

Well, let's see, last week was all about people in strange new places. German POW's at large in Toronto, Vera at the Posh Ladies' Club, some woman I'd never seen before (supposed to be an upstairs neighbour? Maybe this bit was originally written for Edith) making herself at home in Lorna's kitchen, Dr. "Just Call Me Ned" Patel at Lorna's roast beef dinner, Lorna's son Eugene missing from that same dinner and turning up at the girls' rooming house, and finally pale redheaded Kate singing in the choir at Leon's all-black church.

Carol said the worst thing yet to Vera and got smacked down by the Head Posh Lady. "Miss Demers! Any shoulder put to the wheel is one worthy of respect!"  I can just imagine her answering "If you insist, ma'am, I'll respect her shoulder. One of them. The rest of her, however . . ."

Was that a turning point for Carol, or is she just going to be the Major Frank Burns of Victory Munitions?

And as the Head Posh Lady has taken a liking to Vera, I really hope she gives Vera some mentoring on how to be not completely tacky.

Line of the Day

In response to a talk I gave (by request) on "how marriage helps me live my faith":

"Thank you, Eunike, you make me gladder than ever that I'm single."

Things I wanted to post about while we were offline

• I admit to having done my spiritual exercises on the bus.
• I also took out my resentment at having to be at a meeting with a school district committee by going through a language arts teacher's statement and circling all the spelling and grammar mistakes. There were eight, in less than a page. I left it there as it was when I went.
• A businessman in Texas is trying to get over his fear of rejection by asking strangers to do silly things he figures they'll refuse. I was afraid I'd read this and feel I had to try something like it myself. But it turns out lots of them unexpectedly say sure, like the cop who let him sit in the driver's seat of the squad car. So is it working? Well, he's learning a lot . . . 
• (Get ready for multiple links.) In this post, this reader asked Charlotte if she'd heard lately about anything "very cool that someone has done or is doing - something that makes me sit up and thank God for making my fellow human beings so brilliant or loving or insightful". If someone had asked me, I'd have mentioned this blog post on how the blogger's mother paints portraits of people who've died tragically and sends them to the families -- "to do something in her own small way to push back against the darkness". 

Comics respect life (sort of)

Human peanuts in Doonesbury . . . and Mary Worth endorses NFP, though of course she calls it by its old name.

Catholic Universe?

Such A Pretty Bubble provokes thought again, this time on whether a subset of American Catholics is letting its religion turn into more of a brand -- about getting the right look, the right toys and videos for your kids, the right whatever. I'm not commenting simply because I've lived away from the U.S. so long, and Catholicism is in a different position in Canada -- different, also, in French Canada than "English" Canada.

What I do want to say here: What's the intention behind starting up acceptably Catholic businesses/industries? Just to have decent choices to make for our families? Or to construct a parallel Catholic universe where we can feel we're not of the world, but hey, not missing any of the fun either?

As I've mentioned, I edit for a secular company. Even so, my job sometimes means cleaning up writers' language. It's partly to keep the advertisers happy and partly because we just don't want to be that kind of site. There are plenty of them already. Would I be doing more good working for Catholic media? I don't think so. We have a part in keeping the outer world clean too.

Findings

Bomb Girls night again -- last week was all about people finding things.

• Marco found his dad had developed Fascist tendencies during his internment (which will now probably last for the duration, what with old Mr. Moretti throwing his arm up and yelling "Viva Il Duce!" in front of the guards).
• Kate found a bottle of booze in the desk in the warehouse.
• Betty found God. (But I hope Leon's not turning into a Magical Negro.)
• Lorna found that, as she told Mr. Aikins, "Witham and Moretti both booked off without permission." Also, nobody liked her "life skills seminar" (did they even use those words back then?) on how to grind up beef tongue into your meatloaf and pass it off as sirloin.
• Vera found that there were soldiers even she wouldn't want to go with. Or, at least, that she'd feel sorry she'd gone with.
• Bob found a new career as an entrepreneur.
• One of Bob and Lorna's sons found his way home on a war bond tour.
• I found out why Gladys went with Marco and his mama to the internment camp: They needed her to drive them.

Now -- who was that "some guy" who interrogated Marco all night, then let him go after getting a phone call? Anyone we'd recognize? Not Gladys' fiancé, he's American -- maybe her other fiancé?

Back!

Back from working on borrowed bandwidth, camping in the corner of the library where I could plug in my old laptop whose battery won't hold a charge. (A guy came by a couple of times, looked at me intently, and seemed to want to say something -- at my age, you respond to that  by telling him you'll be leaving in a minute and then he can have the electrical outlet.)

Back with the same provider only because they offered Theosebus a ton of free services to make up for the long outage.

Back to being able to send email -- except to people whose email doesn' t accept messages from dynamic IP's.

But all in all, glad to be back.

Charlotte answers all our questions

Here. Very kind of her to take the time, as I realize when I read about her everyday routine (70 miles? Every day? That's a couple months' worth of driving for me.)

Yes, I asked the "are you friends with the neighbors yet" question. I'm always interested in how these processes work, or don't, even though I think it's never the same twice. I'm someone who can talk about our neighbors' "annual big party they never invite us to", and laugh, and mean it, but it took me a long time to get to this point.

(And we've got other neighbors who have an annual big party they always invite us to, who in fact felt they had to drop a card in our mailbox this year to say it was pre-empted because of renovations, just in case we got the idea it was on and we weren't invited. So.)

Char was also asked about having any anger at the Church, and ended up writing also about her anger at some Catholics. God knows there're some I'm mad at -- whether it would be a good idea for me to write about that, or whether it would be the top of the slippery slope into mortal sin via whining, I don't know yet.

Anyway, once again, if anyone's reading this, go read her.

Edith the Inadvertent

Bomb Girls night again, and before I go watch Marco visit his dad in the internment camp (where, it seems from the preview, Gladys inexplicably goes with him and gets threatened with indefinite detention herself), I want to think for a moment about another minor character, Edith McAllum.

Her story, though it's just as dramatic as anyone's -- fired, rehired, widowed, unable to tell her kids their father's dead -- doesn't get much screen time. Instead, she is to Lorna Corbett what Carol (q.v.) is to Gladys -- her friend from before the show, lest the viewer think she had none. Edith is also the inadvertent revealer of devastating things. She's the one who let slip to Lorna's husband, Bob, that Lorna was pregnant -- at a time when he knew it couldn't be his. Last week, she unknowingly introduced Bob to the baby's real father. After she'd left, someone got slugged. Not Bob the disabled veteran, either.

It's about time poor Edith got to see the consequences of her words, so she can learn something. If she unintentionally wreaks havoc one more time, I'll start wondering why none of the major characters got this task.

Line of the day

"Cedric the Entertainer as Father Doug Willliams"!

Came across this as I referred to Wikipedia while editing a review of A Haunted House. It seems Father Williams is an exorcist, and while he's also apparently a druggie and a convicted criminal, hey, at least he's given a real, full name. The New Age guy who also tries to cast out the demon is, by contrast, just called Chip the Psychic. Who says Hollywood has no respect for the Catholic priesthood?

Relics relinquished

Again with relics getting stolen, this time from a parish in Missouri -- the good news is, they've been brought back. In a Zip-Loc bag, but all's well etc. 

The priest is wondering whether it's "devotional" or whether the thief wanted to sell them -- but anybody who'd want them would know such things shouldn't be sold.

Most interesting thing I've got to say this evening

If anyone's out there, please take a look at Charlotte's new blog, Such A Pretty Bubble ("My, my, what a pretty Catholic Bubble you have!") 

I've sometimes wished to live in a Catholic bubble. But it's just as well I don't. Mine would be more like a zorb. This zorb.

Bomb (office) girl

On Bomb Girls night, I'd like to reflect for a moment on one of the minor characters, Carol Demers. If she weren't a fictional character, I'd feel slightly sorry for her -- even though she's young, rich, beautiful, and regularly unpleasant. 

What makes her pitiful is that she exists only to make her old friend Gladys, one of the major characters, look good. She does this, first of all, just by being there to show that Gladys had at least one friend before the series began and is not a complete social misfit. Then, her job is to say all the insensitive rich-girl things Gladys can't say because we're supposed to like her -- and get sassed for them.

When the bomb girls show up for a fundraiser at Gladys', Carol greets them with "This isn't the back door!" to which Vera says, "Damn right!"

Vera has grounds to be sassy -- earlier Carol had stopped her from meeting some visitors to the plant, inspectors or something, because Vera's scar might raise safety issues in their minds. You see what I mean.

No matter how it seems sometimes, no real human being is created to be harsh to others -- or to make someone else seem more loveable by comparison. We're all meant to be the best we can, which is usually better than we think . . .okay, time for TV.