Apologies for the week of lull time here at the Cornell Society for a Good Time. I can’t speak for the other bloggers, but the Doctor and I went away for a few days to spend Thanksgiving with some friends, and we didn’t get a lot of opportunity for posting while we were away. I’ll try to get some things up in the next few days — I have a few different ideas of things I’ve been wanting to post — but I should mention that we are going away again this next weekend for the annual conference of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture. (And I still haven’t finished the paper I’m supposed to give at this conference, so it might be a busy week.) However, I will try very hard to write a post tomorrow or the next day about an unexpected delight that we encountered our trip back home today. We got caught filling our Mass obligation at… the Christ the King Teen Life Mass in Lexington, KY. More details on this harrowing experience to come.
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I just received a letter from the Friends of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation informing me that they hope to finish gathering evidence about Archbishop Sheen by the end the of this year, with the intention of making a presentation to the Congregation for the Causes of All Saints for the canonization of Archbishop Sheen. I am further told that there will be a special Mass on Sunday, February 3, 2008, at the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria, Illinois. Here the documents collected on Archbishop Sheen’s behalf will be certified in the ceremony of the Postrema Session, after which all will be forwarded to the offices of the Pope.
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While reading the Confessiones tonight, I came across a couple of interesting passages (from elsewhere in Augustine’s massive corpus) cited by O’Donnell in his commentary on Book IX of the Confessiones. I relate them both because they’re generally interesting, but also because I have question about the translation of a word at the end of the first.

In the Enchiridion de fide, spe, et caritate 29.110, Augustine writes:

Neque negandum est defunctorum animas pietate suorum viventium relevari, cum pro illis sacrificium Mediatoris offertur vel eleemosynae in Ecclesia fiunt. Nor ought it to be denied that the souls of the deceased are refreshed by the piety of those who survive them when on their behalf the sacrifice of the Christ is offered or alms are given in the Church. Sed eis haec prosunt qui cum viverent haec ut sibi postea possent prodesse meruerunt. But these things benefit those who, while they lived, merited that these things might benefit them after death. Est enim quidam vivendi modus, nec tam bonus ut non requirat ista post mortem, nec tam malus ut ei non prosint ista post mortem; est vero talis in bono ut ista non requirat, et est rursus talis in malo ut nec his valeat cum ex hac vita transierit adiuvari. For there is a certain way of living that is neither so good that it does not need those helps after death nor so bad that those helps do not benefit it after death; but there is also a life holy enough not to need those helps, and again a life so bad that it is beyond the reach of such helps after it has left this earth.

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An interesting interview with Fr. de Tanouarn of the Institute of the Good Shepherd. This particularly caught my eye:

What specific role does the Good Shepherd Institute play in this whole context?

The way I see it, we have a double function. We are quite near the bishops as we meet lots of them. Real relations can be built that way little by little –at least with some of them. It takes time, but scars from the past can be healed and mutual trust can develop between individuals, beyond personal agendas. Another thing we do is we try to unify all the forces on favor of Benedict XVI’s ecclesial policy, by organizing public events – such as the congress we’re planning in Paris next January to thank the pope, at the occasion of which there may be a little surprise.

There may be a little surprise? These are the kind of surprises I look forward to.

“Latin” means unity, loyalty to the Pope:

It is possible to imagine a western Church with local languages in its liturgy, as in the East, where, joined to the Greek, were also used Syrian, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian and Ethiopian. In every way the situation in the West was fundamentally different; the unifying force of the papacy was such that Latin became the sole liturgical language. This was an important factor favoring ecclesiastic, cultural and political cohesion.

(Translation by Fr. Anthony Forte.) Could we have read a piece like this in l’Osservatore Romano only a few years ago? Surely not!

Petition for the Restoration of the Tridentine Mass for the US Armed Forces.

Please help us to distribute this widely among those serving in our armed forces.

While trowling through the blogosphere today I ran across a link to Karl Keating’s World’s Toughest Catholic Quiz. Apparently this was first published in 1993 in This Rock (which is, I guess, a Catholic magazine of some kind?) There is now a link to it on the Catholic Answers website; they report there that it is one of their most frequently requested articles. I took a look.

I should say from the outset that I went into this with no strong views about Karl Keating. I knew that he was some kind of Novus Catholic apologist, but that’s about it; as a relatively recent convert, and never having been a Novus Catholic myself, this is the kind of cultural knowledge that I tend to have missed. Anyway, so I pulled up the quiz with an open mind, but as I read through the questions I became more and more irate. I’m just going to put this plainly: this is terrible apologetics.

In the introduction to the quiz, Keating reports that he gave it to an audience full of “well-informed Catholic business leaders and their spouses” and that few got more than half right. Well, that’s not too good… but do you think they might have been thrown off by the fact that some of Keating’s answers are ambiguous, misleading, or just plain wrong?

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Yesterday was Veterans’ Day here in America, and the Doctor and I observed this day in a fitting fashion by watching the final installment of The War, Ken Burns’ latest documentary about WWII. I like Ken Burns, and this series exemplifies all the things that he does so well. As much as I enjoyed his famous Civil War series, it lacked one advantage that this one has — actual living veterans who are able to tell their stories on film. But as with all of his documentaries, he excels less at filling the viewer’s head with facts and battle plans (though you do get some of those, of course) and more at causing one to reflect on what it would have been like to be alive in that historical period, and on the moral implications of events that actually took place in the not-so-distant past. This was, of course, an unapologetically American telling of the story. I reflected afterwards that it would be fascinating to see a similar production made by other participants in that war. A German documentary would probably be tiresome — merely an exercise in self-flagellation — but what would the Japanese do with it? Or the Russians?
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The spiritual advice is modern, but I thought the style incomparable. From a card found several weeks ago at St. Alphonsus in Baltimore:

It is well for you to consider what you lose every morning that you pass up Holy Communion:

With Ecclesiastical Approval
Chicago, December 6th, 1940
Compliments of the CRUSADERS For The VIRGIN MARY

Many of you probably read a few weeks ago about the Holy Father’s suggestion to the Italians that pharmacists should be permitted to refuse to dispense particular drugs — obviously contraceptives and abortifacients were the main things he had in mind — if they have moral objections to their use. Under current Italian law, pharmacists are required to fill any prescription given by a doctor (I’m not sure how this works exactly, since it seems strange that they should be required by law to stock every drug a doctor might conceivably prescribe, but perhaps they’re required either to supply on demand, or else to order anything they don’t immediately have available.) Now the Holy Father suggests that Catholics should be permitted to be conscientious objectors against medical practices that they deem immoral.

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