Traditionalist Catholics talk a lot about the abuse of language. Here I will protest that many traditionalist Catholics also abuse language in a particular instance. There is a movement afoot to say that Catholics “don’t date,” they “court.” The idea is that dating is what the world does — easy sex, no commitment or commitment entered into too hastily, no thought of marriage, contraception, abortion. “Courting” means that you are looking for marriage in a chaste way. Continue reading

Some atheists are saying that Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta should not be on a U.S. postal stamp because her work cannot be separated from her being a nun and a Roman Catholic. While Mother Teresa should be on a stamp, they are quite right that such a stamp can only possibly honor her work *as a nun,* for in truth her work is not separable from her religion. Some have noted that MLK and Malcolm X both have stamps. But they are honored for their secular work, not for being Baptists/Modernists or Black Moslems. Mother Teresa did not change the secular culture of Calcutta in any big way and never intended to. She performed Christian works of mercy and for that she deserves a stamp.

“Judge not lest ye be judged.” “The measure wherewith ye judge, by that measure shall ye be judged.” I am a judgmental person. I pretty much divide the world into two groups: the hopeless sinners I don’t like and the ones I do. Which category I place myself in depends on my caffeine and serotonin levels. Seriously, though, I have questions about judgmentalism. We are told not to try to read other people’s souls. We are told that this is one of the greatest commandments of all. And yet we are told to judge people’s motives — to determine whether someone did us wrong through ignorance, or weakness, or malice — when we make friends or do business with people.  But if we can determine malice — and hence intent — when making and keeping friends, does that not require us to judge? Continue reading

Protestants generally do not like crucifixes.  There are a number of reasons for this, but I will not deal with them.   I am interested in one lie they often tell in order to justify their strong tendency toward displaying crosses devoid  of a corpus.  The excuse they give is that Christ is risen — He is no longer on the Cross.  So they show the Cross from which Christ has been taken down, not Him hanging on it.  What a bunch of lamesauce.  I quote  I Cor. 1.23:  “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumblingblock, and unto the Gentiles foolishness.”  These Prots should cluck their tongues at St. Paul:  “Why preach Christ crucified?  He isn’t crucified any more!  He’s risen!  Preach not Christ crucified but rather Christ risen!”  If after the Resurrection the Crucifixion is still worth preaching about — worth representing by means of words – then it is worth representing by means of sculpture.  If the Prots have a problem with all sculpture, that is another objection altogether.  But a cross is itself sculpture, so that retort should not fly.  If a cross is worth displaying, then it is worth displaying the sufferings that took place upon that cross. The sad reality is that these anti-crucifix Protestants are guilty of what St. Paul accuses the Jews and Gentiles of:  treating the Crucifixion as a stumblingblock and foolishness.

Consider this a Steve Sailer-ish type post on culture and reproduction. By now we should all know that the new senator from Massachusetts’ position on abortion is ”nuanced” but still “pro-choice.”  I fear that thanks to his election there will be attempts by the Republicans to pick up more seats this year by selling out the unborn (even more). However, Scott Brown apparently favors some restrictions on abortion (there’s where the “nuance” comes in) and is not as extreme as Martha Coakley, aka the second coming of Geraldine Ferraro. And given that he will kill the health care bill, I think voting for Brown in the general election was probably worth it. But that’s not the topic of this post. I wish to point out a difference in the public image that Brown and Coakley presented and what it reveals about different constituencies in this country. Continue reading

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday was recently celebrated as a national holiday. Rather than go on about King’s plagiarism, or his Protestant and Modernist heresies, or his adulteries, or his socialism (as Clara has done in the past), I’ll attack the myth of his “non-violence.” King officially condemned violence on the part of his marchers. Many people may labor under the delusion that King’s project was largely to peacefully convert people to his position. Now, my father (R.I.P.), who was a young adult during the 1960s, said of King, “He preached peace but everywhere he went he started riots.” My dad was right. Here was King’s true project. Continue reading

Here is another one of my hit-and-run pieces, no footnotes, no citations. I propose that America has one of the most conservative political cultures in the Western World and the reason for this is that we are a “proposition nation.” This may surprise many so-called paleocons and fellow-travellers, and I consider myself in a few ways to be a paleocon fellow-traveller. What I mean is that almost everyone in this country justifies (or rationalizes) his political viewpoint with reference to the Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, and Constitution. They will distort the texts in any way they want, but they will still refer to the texts. Very few will appeal directly to Marx or any other political philosopher outside of the American tradition. We stick to our own. Continue reading

One of the problems with being Catholic is that all of us except Our Lord, Our Lady, and those saints who preserved their baptismal gown of grace unsullied by any and all actual sins (and I’ve never met any of the latter lucky so-and-so’s) are, by definition, hypocrites. We all advance standards which we do not live up to. This is a problem primarily for our sinful selves. However, the unbelievers and defenders of sin often use this unavoidable hypocrisy against us. Often this comes up in the area of sex. We believe that fornication, adultery, pornography, sodomy, masturbation, lustful thoughts, and artificial contraception are mortally sinful. Yet most of us (among the menfolk, anyway) are guilty of having committed at least some of these sins, often habitually. So we’re damned as hypocrites. Continue reading

So it seems to me that as Catholics we have to concede the possibility of witchcraft. Satan exists, he has certain super-human powers, and he contacts certain people. I therefore see no way that we can object in theory to the *possibility* of signing a pact with the devil or the idea that demons might lend their services to certain individuals (call them witches, sorcerors, warlocks, Rotarians, what have you) for a time in order to render them more beholden to evil. Continue reading

Aeneas Piccolomini was a humanistic scholar of the Renaissance who became Pope. Upon his election (1458) he chose to be named Pius II, Pius I having lived in the second century. I suggest that he chose his regnal name as a kind of joke. In the “Aeneid,” Vergil frequently refers to Aeneas as “pius,” which means “dutiful, righteous, devoted,” etc. So obviously an Aeneas elected to the Papacy would be Pius! Pius II tried to distance his papal persona from his accomplished but sometimes sordid past by saying words along the lines of, “Ignore Aeneas, pay attention only to Pius.”