Nate Knows Nada

BF referred me to the site Whispers in the Loggia a little while ago. It’s a kind of gossip column about al things Vatican. It’s like reading Army Archerd crossed with Vatican Radio (or some such thing).

But Rocco refers us to a site where you can dress-up a priest in garbs liturgical.

Here’s the lede:

“A website for children has proved popular in an unexpected quarter. It is designed to allow the user to decide what a priest will wear and seems to have taken off in a big way among Anglo-Catholic priests in the Church of England.”

If you find this surprising, you haven’t been paying attention.

Maybe, though, in the deigning of Providence, it’ll encourage more Anglo-Catholics to swim the Tiber. As if the dressiness isn’t enough incentive, a senior post at ICEL should seal the deal.

One senior high church cleric said that it’s important to remind the “children” (and, ostensibly, high Anglican clerics as well) that “Priesthood is much more than dressing up.”

That is the most heterodox thing I’ve ever heard. What an insult.

Apparently, our government does not “recognize” Wiccan paganism as a religion. And thus, Nevada National Guard Sgt. Patrick Stewart may not have the symbol of his beliefs placed on his marker.

I thought the literal text of the Constitution read, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”

Apparently, that doesn’t matter to the executive branch. Small wonder.

A repeat of last year’s post…but it’s appropriate.

From “Ash Wednesday” by Thomas Stearns Eliot:

…And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death….

I’ve been writing a big (hopefully) near-final piece of my proposal, so my writing energy has been consumed elsewhere of late.

But a few things to throw out for your consideration.

First, BF is participating in a “Catholic Smackdown” over at BustedHalo, a Gen X Catholic website. You can check it out for yourself.

Second, we have of late been enamored of Olympic speedskater Joey Cheek (below). We love speedskaters in general. Just like with bicyclists, massive quads are sexy. And when they’re as hot as Joey, we sigh and flutter our eyelashes a bit.

Third, we may be a little sporadic over the next couple of days, but hopefully less than the last few.

Got this article just recently about the growth of Protestant evangelicalism in Boston.

Park Street defies the myth that Boston and the rest of New England have shed their religious heritage for a secular society. It also defies the institutional hold that the Catholic church has on America’s most Catholic city. In fact, evangelical Christianity is thriving in Boston. During the past 30 years, church growth, fueled by evangelical university groups and immigrant communities, has dramatically outpaced population growth. At the same time, mainline denominations have dwindled and the abuse scandal in the Catholic church has forced the closing of dozens of parishes. Evangelical leaders expect this “quiet revival” not only to continue, but to blossom into another Great Awakening….

Catholic collapse

The Catholic church is to Boston what evangelicals are to Wheaton or Colorado Springs, says Harrell. The influence of the Catholic church is everywhere from parishes to politics. Harrell says Catholics often did not leave the church because of the abuse scandal, but they were shocked at how the church handled it. “That’s what sent people through the roof,” he says.

A recent survey found that only one-third of Catholics attend mass weekly. Despite the low attendance, Catholics tend to stick it out with the church they grew up in, Harrell says. At least, they are reluctant to attend church elsewhere.

But many do find themselves at evangelical churches like Park Street. “We get a lot of recovering Catholics,” Harrell says.

There is rarely a direct move from the Catholic Church to Park Street, Harrell says. Rather people spend years disenchanted with church before trying out a new one. They are also looking for something more demanding than the church they grew up in.

I replied with the following to the correspondent who sent it to me:

The CT article is largely good, and I think it’s accurate. One exception I take is in what seems a somewhat slight bias against Roman Catholic Christianity. For example, the measures of faithfulness that it uses (weekly church attendance) isn’t really appropriate to Roman Catholics, both for cultural and semi-theological reasons. If they measured how long individual people stayed faithful and committed to one church community as the measure here, the RCs would win, as they don’t change churches as often. It’s subtle, but I think there’s an argument that some bias is there. Not that this should entirely surprise: both evangelicals and mainline Protestants have historically considered Catholics as somehow distinct from “Christians.” I even remember hearing stuff like this in church and school as I grew up. Probably this has as much to do with lingering ethnic reasons as theological ones. It’s ironic, considering that we as Protestants came from the Roman church, and that the Roman church, for example, has reformed the problems that gave rise to the Reformation (the Roman Catholic church and the Lutheran World Congress have even signed a joint statement emphasizing that they have the same understanding of the role of grace in salvation, which ends up being essentially Luther’s position).

One of the great things about the Roman church is that it holds the Great Tradition of the Church and that it has the historical memory that we Protestants often lack. The result seems to be that we sometimes teach things that contradict that faith: for example, I can think of some things I learned in church and school that, if not heretical, skirted the edge of heresy. (Like a Donatist understanding of the effects of the purity of ministers and clergy on the effectiveness of the sacraments, for example.) Having a theologian as a partner has made me realize that my own theological beliefs are not too far afield from the large tradition of the Western Church, and it has made me much more comfortable in the Roman church. It’s probably why I stay on the Anglican via media, halfway between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

Here’s the dance we chaperone tonight….

No pictures allowed, because of the scandal that might create.

Although, I don’t think our students care if people see them doing almost anything. Someone recently pointed out to us some photos of some of our students, on facebook.com, wherein they are dancing about their common room in their underwear. Hardly the most revealing thing one can find on the facebook, to be honest. But it gives some idea of what goes on behind closed doors around here.

Tonight we’re just opening the doors, I guess.

I thoroughly enjoyed this:

Subject: Former President Bill Klinton uses Voagra!

Everybody knows the great sexual scandal known as “Klinton-Levinsky”.

After the relations like this Klintons popularity raised a lot!

It is a natural phenomenon, because Bill as a real man in order not to

shame himself when he was with Monica regularly used Voagra.

What happened you see. His political figure became more bright and more attractive.

It is very important for a man to be respected as a man!

This leads me to wonder: Is Clinton misspelled because his name now sets off spam filters?

I’m glad to see someone moving to confront the RC Church’s hangup over sex and sexuality. And the content of the lawsuit is potentially explosive:

…Halfway through the 44-page complaint, the priest-turned-advocate drops a bomb on the cardinal: He alleges that [New York archbishop Edward Cardinal] Egan is “actively homosexual,” and that he has “personal knowledge of this.” His suit names two other top Catholic clerics in the region as actively gay—Albany bishop Howard Hubbard and Newark archbishop John Myers.

It’s not that Hoatson has a problem with, as the suit puts it, “consensual, adult private sexual behavior by these defendants.”

No, what Hoatson claims is that, as leaders of a church requiring celibacy and condemning homosexuality, actively gay bishops are too afraid of being exposed themselves to turn in pedophile priests. The bishops’ closeted homosexuality, as the lawsuit states, “has compromised defendants’ ability to supervise and control predators, and has served as a reason for the retaliation.”

Does any serious person believe that Catholic priests are straight? Cardinals and bishops seem even more likely. Do straight men say, “I fell in love with the liturgy at a young age” (as Benedict XVI has said)?

None that I can think of.

I’ve been using ecto lately as a weblog editor, and I’ve really liked it. Much better than MarsEdit, from the people who make the best Mac RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire. ecto has a nice set of features, and moves nicely back and forth between WYSIWYG and HTML modes (just to name the one I’ve used most so far). But it supports deli.cio.us tags, all sorts of inserts and attachments, and other stuff I haven’t used yet. I’d recommend it to anyone who needs an editor besides the web interface of most blogs (say, if you want to blog offline and upload later when you find a hotspot).

I think I will probably pony up the $18 for a license, so I can keep using it….

Excellent point from the NYTimes Blog “Opinionator”:

Citing Roger Ebert and other critics who have proclaimed “Brokeback Mountain” to be a “universal” love story, Daniel Mendelsohn writes in the New York Review of Books that such critics are “well-meaning but seriously misguided” when they ignore the movie’s status as “a specifically gay tragedy.” He writes:

For to see ‘Brokeback Mountain’ as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously—and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.

Both narratively and visually, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the ‘closet’ — about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. … If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it’s not because they’re gay, but because they pretend not to be; it’s the lie that poisons everyone they touch.

Mendelsohn concludes, “If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they’re not really homosexual — that they’re more like the heart of America than like ‘gay people’ — you’re pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.”

The Baptized Pagan made a similar point a few weeks ago:

I haven’t seen this in print anywhere yet, so here goes my take on Brokeback’s theological anthropology: Brokeback Mountain, besides being a romantic tragedy set in a beautiful landscape, is also a natural law argument for the acceptance of homosexuality. The not-so-subtle entree into this position is the slogan at the bottom of the ads: “Love is a Force of Nature”. One can notice that all of the bad things that happen in the film — the adultery, the alcohol abuse, the materialism, the dishonesty, the hurt that comes not only to these two men but to those in their lives — comes about not because they’re in a same-sex relationship, but because they’re in a same-sex relationship but trying their dardnest not to be. If, as many gay people, particularly gay men, describe their experience, their homosexuality is something discovered as a part of them, rather than a choice or a deviation from heterosexuality, then a good Thomist, if (and this is a big “if”), if she were open to hearing that first premise and accepted it as probable, then it makes sense to follow one’s nature where it leads into human flourishing.