This past Saturday I had occasion to spend some time looking around historic St. Aloysius church in the District of Columbia. This large church was dedicated in 1859, by the Jesuits, to be associated with Gonzaga College, well-known today as Gonzaga College High School. The nicest feature, by far, is the altar painting of St. Aloysius receiving first communion from St. Charles Borromeo, which was done by Constantino Brumidi, notable for his frescoes in the Capitol building.

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It was lovely to read Cardinal George’s remarks about Notre Dame’s decision to honor Barack Obama. Cardinal George both condemned Notre Dame’s decision and spoke slightingly of the USCCB, of which he’s currently the president. That’s a nice combination! I don’t suppose that he took himself to be disparaging the group, but he did remind us that in Catholic ecclesiology, there’s is no place for a so-called “conference of bishops”:

Cardinal George prefaced his remarks by noting that as USCCB president he does not have jurisdiction or authority over other bishops, but nonetheless has “some moral authority, without any kind of jurisdiction or any sort of real authority.”

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Since two of our authors participated in the program, from time to time we get emails from people looking for information about Fr. Reginald Foster’s summer Latin course in Rome. In this connection, I’m passing along an email from the Reggie listserve. Unfortunately, due to the slowness of Reggie’s recovery from various ailments, the course won’t take place this summer.

Romae in Italia vi Kal. Aprilis

Dear students and scholars interested in the Latin language and things,

As you can see the calendar has not favored our summer projects. A broken thigh followed by an infinity of complications both here and in the USA has totally impeded my recovery, so, in fact, I am many months late.

Some of my best friends and advisers have given me counsel to cancel the summer school this year. It is simply too late to calmly and intelligently organize the matter and the layout of summer school, which you know is extremely dear to me.
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Another week in Lent, another cool Gregorian melody. This week, a doubly cool one: not only is there text painting — dramatically rising and falling notes appearing on the word “Montes”, mountains, but as a bonus the notes that begin the word are the same first three notes as the theme from the original series of Star Trek; listen for yourself!

Especially when I blog about things that I’m seeing in the Roman Breviary, I do wonder whether I haven’t written about them before – but no matter! If I have, I’ve forgotten, and I’ve certainly forgotten whether anyone has some insight to shed on the following remark of St. Ignatius of Antioch (via St. Jerome). In Book 1 of his commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jerome gives four reasons why it should have been the case that Mary was espoused when she conceived of the Holy Ghost. Jerome says that his fourth reason comes from Ignatius: “so that the birth might be hidden from the devil, who would think that Jesus had been born not of a virgin, but of a married woman.”
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Does it border on bad taste to write an absolutely hilarious article about that unfortunate Canadian who was cannabalized by another rider on the same bus? I kinda think it does, but Mark Steyn, as usual, makes all of the right points. Not for the first time, the people near the stabbing victim decided that it was better to high-tail it than to come to the dying man’s assistance. Contrast this with the actions of Liviu Lebrescu: “He was a 76-year old Holocaust survivor who was teaching a class at Virginia Tech one Monday morning in 2007 when gunshots were heard. He reacted immediately. He threw himself against the door and told his students to climb out the windows. He used his body as a barricade as long as he could, and was shot dead when the killer finally broke through.”

Which got me thinking: in this age of school shootings (they seem to be the plumpest of targets), is it prudent to take measures to be prepared in the event of such an incident? Of course, despite the sensation that these horrible events cause, they’re extremely rare; it would be like winning an awful lottery to find yourself at the center of one of them. But since Mark Steyn’s point is so often that individuals ought to take responsibility for themselves (and their helpless neighbors, as the occasion demands), is there anything that can reasonably be done to prepare for the unthinkable?
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I’m pleased to share with our readers an article which appears in the just mailed issue of The Remnant, an installment of Dr. John Rao’s regular column, A View From Rocco’s. His article concerns Pope Benedict XVI’s recent letter to the world’s bishops on the lifting of the decree of excommunication against the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X. You can find more of Dr. Rao’s writings here. The hyperlinks in the article are my own.

Habemus Papam!

“Es war einmal ein Kaiser”
(Joseph Roth, 1928)

Some years ago, Dr. Alice von Hildebrand told me an anecdote about her husband’s presence in the crowd in Rome at a canonization ceremony. I do not remember the saint concerned, but that really does not matter. The point of her story was that Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand was in the company of the great Church historian, Ludwig von Pastor, and that that very fine scholar displayed a face running with tears.
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I was frustrated today by the reaction of some Catholic commentators to the Holy Father’s remarks about the helpfulness of condoms in regard to AIDS. In particular, Damian Thompson was horrified by the idea that the Pope might really have said that condoms would exacerbate the problem of AIDS in Africa. Not that Mr. Thompson thinks that we should airdrop condoms into Africa. Rather, we should stick, he thinks, to the moral argument and not involve ourselves in pseudoscience. The pseudoscience, in this case, is that the AIDS virus can somehow jump through the rubber.

But the Pope was absolutely right to have said what he did: it is quite reasonable to think that condoms would exacerbate the problem. Now to make such a claim, as we saw from the world’s reaction yesterday, sends people into a frenzy. They appear to understand the Pope’s words in the following way. The Pope was claiming that if a given couple has sex with a correctly used condom they are more likely to pass the AIDS virus between them than if they had sex without a condom. Such a claim is, of course, patently absurd and it is ridiculous to think that the Pope had such a claim in mind.
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To honor St. Patrick I hope that it’s not too late to share this fine line which I found on the title page of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record:

Ut Christiani, ita et Romani sitis.

This is ex dictis Sancti Patricii, Book of Armagh, folio 9. “As you are Christians, so ought you also to be Romans.”

This is amazing; from the old old Roman Breviary: “Ajunt enim, íntegrum quotídie Psaltérium, una cum Cánticis et Hymnis ducentísque oratiónibus, consuevísse recitáre, tercénties per dies síngulos fléxis génibus Deum adoráre, ac in quálibet Hora diéi canónica cénties se crucis signo muníre.” “They say that it was his custom to repeat every day the whole Book of Psalms, together with canticles and hymns, and two hundred prayers; that he bent his knees to God in worship three hundred times every day, and that he made on himself the sign of the Cross an hundred times at each of the seven canonical hours.”

With all the talk lately about Obama and stem cell research, I’ve been pondering a moral question that seems to me genuinely difficult. Of course, the question is not whether we should allow stem cell research. We should not. But all this talk about those thousands of frozen embryos that “have no chance whatsoever” of ever being allowed to mature into infants makes me think. What ought we to do with frozen embryos?

One part of the answer is easy, of course. We ought to stop making more of them. For those who aren’t as familiar with the issue, here’s my best assessment of what’s going on: frozen embryos are created by couples with fertility problems who try to have children through the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Basically, the woman’s eggs are harvested (through a very expensive medical procedure) and then fertilized in a test tube or petri dish or whatever (often using sperm from the woman’s husband, though if she doesn’t have one, or if his sperm isn’t viable for whatever reason, she could also ask a friend or just buy samples from sperm banks.) The result is a group of human embryos, a few of which are placed in the woman’s womb with the hope that at least one will implant and that a healthy pregnancy will follow. The majority of embryos fail to implant, which is why more than one is typically transferred into the womb at a time, as a means of increasing the odds. Even so, the procedure is often unsuccessful. But the process of harvesting the eggs and fertilizing them in vitro is very expensive, and this explains why most people have a whole host of embryos made at the outset. That way, if implantation doesn’t occur on the first try, they can revert to the “extras” and try again. Even after a healthy pregnancy is achieved, the remaining embryos are generally kept frozen to be used at a later time if the couple decides they want more children. (Although I should note here that this is not a reliable procedure either. Often embryos die in the thawing process.)

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