I haven’t been on the blog for awhile, in large part because I spent the last week at a conference at Princeton, discussing the work of Elizabeth Anscombe. As usual when I’m away for awhile, I came home with lots of ideas for potential posts, many of which will probably never be written. But one in particular seemed salient to life on this blog. It was inspired by an argument I had with another student at the conference, concerning philosophy and polemics. The question is: is it always better to be patient and respectful in discussion of another’s ideas? Or can there be a place for sarcasm, snarkiness, or even a little self-conscious unfairness in addressing other views?

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Though we don’t yet know John McCain’s running mate, it’s clear, I think, that he is the best choice if we want to have any hope of adding strict constructionist judges to the Supreme Court, with the aim in mind of overturning Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, I feel that McCain is far from a safe pick on such an issue – that is, the appointment of justices – but even Bush (in some ways, more of a conservative than McCain), who did very well by us in the end (Roberts & Alito), nearly screwed the whole thing up with his initial nominee, Harriet Myers. Even if Obama were really the man to “make America strong again”, with him in office, there’s zero chance of getting the justices we need. This all is, I think, one reasonable, Catholic approach to the coming election: McCain isn’t the perfect conservative, but most anyone will be better than Obama.

But now here is another approach to voting in the fall, which comes to us from the St. John Mary Vianney Latin Mass community bulletin (an apostolate of the FSSP): Continue reading

Iacobus will be relieved to know that I finally tracked down the Latin hexameters with which P. G. Wodehouse was made a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, by the University of Oxford in June 1939. (If you’ve never read Wodehouse before, I’d encourage you to do so. I’d also recommend, if you’re so inclined, to begin by listening to one of his novels, rather than encountering him through the written word. Jonathan Cecil has recorded quite a few of the Jeeves novels; his interpretation of the characters and the voices he supplies them have often had me crying laughing.)

Anyway – the verses! I had been trying to get them the hard way, through inter-library loan. Surprisingly, my library did not have Frances Donaldson’s P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography. So I inter-library loaned that as well. When Donaldson’s book came, I was perusing it and found that she had included in an appendix the Latin address to Wodehouse on the occasion of his honorary doctorate. This led me to the further discovery that the verses were already available online: someone had copied them from Donaldson’s book. That this person had copied them from her book (and not from the Oxford Gazette) was clear because they had preserved a typo in lines 2 and 12. I guess that means that this person had done better than Donaldson! I’ve marked my corrections with a bold font.
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In case some of you didn’t see this – the Frenchies had a wonderful find in the Rhone:

They believe the life-sized representation, showing a balding man in his fifties, dates from about 46 B.C., two years before his assassination.

A spokesman for the French culture ministry said it was “the oldest representation yet known of Caesar” and “typical of a series of realistic portraits from the period of the (Roman) republic.”

Ever since Iacobus and I discovered St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori’s The History of Heresies & Their Refutation, I’ve done little more with this wonderful work than to make it my own – in that very weak sense of buying it and settling it permanently upon my bookshelf. Moved, however, by a chain of inspiration too random to recount here, I picked it up tonight and began to read the “Author’s Preface”. Though it is only the preface, Liguori gives a succinct defense of the claims of the Catholic Church in the space of a few paragraphs. In support of this task, he adduces several interesting quotations, especially intriguing because of their author.

We all know that protestants like to make much of Augustine – historically they did, and in my experience at Cornell, he remains a favorite among those in no way prepared to countenance the claims of the Church. But we know – if we’ve ever been to St. Peter’s basilica – that Augustine is among the four great doctors who are holding up the Chair of Peter. Despite the magnificent statuary in St. Peter’s, my feeling has often been: let’s hear it from Augustine himself! If he’s the great Catholic doctor, let’s hear him defending the claims of the Church.
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It’s often noted in conservative circles that the government spends money like a drunken sailor, but aside from the obvious massive outlays that go to things like welfare or Medicare, you might wonder sometimes where the fat in the budget goes. Well, I know of one rather amusing place: it goes to providing anyone who claims to be a physicist a free pocket diary annually. The Particle Data Group, run out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, mails a nice paperback diary to me annually in addition to the Particle Data Book, which is a very useful and handy summary of everything known about elementary particles. The book is pictured here.

Aside from advertising this government service — and certainly not to encourage you all to run to their website to order yourself one –I was glancing through my new copy today and was surprised and pleased to note that they mark August 15th as “The Assumption of Our Lady.” Now, this is gratifying, but I should note that they also mark Kwanzaa and the birthday of, for instance, William Rowan Hamilton with the same font and placement, so it’s not exactly triumphalist Catholicism, but it’s better than nothing.

What is it with these exorcists?! I hope that you remember when Fr. Gabriel Amorth condemned the Harry Potter series as tending to enable the designs of the Evil One. Now, we have Fr. Jeremy Davies of the Archdiocese of Westminster doing everything he can to damn (perhaps I shouldn’t use that word in these circumstances) most anything and everything that’s dear to Lefties (and a whole lot of other people). Acupuncture? Satanic. Yoga? Satanic. Eastern religion? Satanic. Get this:

Fr. Davies also warns in his book against so-called New Age and occult practices, as well as trendy exercise and “spiritual healing” regimens derived from eastern religions.

“The thin end of the wedge (soft drugs, yoga for relaxation, horoscopes just for fun and so on) is more dangerous than the thick end because it is more deceptive – an evil spirit tries to make his entry as unobtrusively as possible.”
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The irony has become very old and tiresome by now, but it isn’t that often that it’s illustrated by someone as high-profile as Mark Shea, in a forum like InsideCatholic.com. So, one of the most frequently heard criticisms of traditional Catholics is that they’re angry, bitter and uncharitable. It’s by no means a totally unfounded complaint. But, for my money, I think the angriest of the angry trads are at least matched in unreasoned bitterness by the angry, bitter anti-trads. Shea has always been prone to bitter outbursts; it’s just one of his foibles. But his recent piece on “Angry Traditionalists” was really over the top, the kind of hateful, offensive language for which he ought to apologize, if only to salvage his own credibility. Like I say, what’s really absurd is the irony: his main contention is that Trads are scaring people away from the Church by their bitter, angry attitudes, but the piece itself is exactly the sort of rhetoric to make me think that “I wouldn’t touch the faith with a barge pole” if I thought that were at all representative of what the Catholic church is like.

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I tend to lose track of the dates during these summer months. In the dentist’s office yesterday morning, I was filling out forms and hazarded a guess that it was sometime around August 9. I was slightly startled, therefore, when my computer calendar informed me later in the evening that it was in fact August twelfth, which means that 1) I had missed the feast day of my patroness, and 2) it was my mother’s birthday. So, although this is a bit belated, I wanted to pay a tribute to them both.

St. Clare is a somewhat retiring figure compared to her colorful male counterpart. She seems to make her reputation largely as St. Francis’ sidekick, famous mostly for her inclusion in the Assisi crowd but far behind Francis when it comes to colorful stories and amazing miracles. There is, of course, the famous monstrance story, but where Francis wandered around, preached to birds, stripped naked for beggars, tamed violent animals, traveled to the Middle East, etc etc, Clare seems mainly to have settled down in Assisi, gathered her Poor Ladies around her, and quietly assumed the mantle of responsibility. It was the custom of the Poor Ladies (they assumed the name “Poor Clares” only on her death) to keep silence most of the time, to hold their eyes downcast, and, of course, to live always in great poverty. And behind that mantle of silence and poverty, St. Clare largely vanishes. The impact of her firm and loving leadership can be seen in the order she established, which gathered scores of women in her lifetime (including her own mother and sister) and continued into the centuries afterwards. But in the drama of Assisi, she remains largely a background figure, always present but usually taken for granted.

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The Dallas Morning News has a story about how a Mexican man is posing as a bishop in order to “sell” the “sacraments” to unwitting Hispanics in the Dallas area. The local ecclesiastical authorities, having been alerted to this menace, have warned their flock to beware. When asked to comment for the Dallas Morning News, Sister Guadalupe Ramirez, director of the diocese’s Department of Catechetical Services, explained why Catholics can’t just settle for a layman in a collar:

“Sacraments aren’t like a Dairy Queen drive-thru. It is a life long experience.”

Right on, Sista!
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