Ding dong, the bells are gonna chime

Tomorrow, I get to walk my Virtuous and Excellent Daughter down the aisle and hand her over to her new husband. She's his problem source of joy now.

One down, seven to go.

A credit to his cassock

Father Andrew Greeley travels in elephants.

A highly-regarded sociologist, preternaturally prolific author and unabashedly liberal Chicago priest, the Rev. Greeley regularly took his church to task in both his fiction and his scholarly work. His non-fiction books covered topics from Catholic education to Irish history to Jesus' relationships with women.

The Rev. Greeley authored some 50 best-selling novels and more than 100 works of non-fiction that were translated into 12 languages.

His racy novels and detective stories, which often closely paralleled real events, aired out Catholic controversies and hummed with detailed bedroom romps that kept readers rapt and coming back for more. Best-sellers like "The Cardinal Sins" in 1981 earned him millions of dollars, much of which he donated to the church and charities.

I'll be honest: Father Greeley was generally a mediocre novelist, with two or three passable plotlines that he recycled perpetually. His politics were as opposite mine as you can get. His theology (or that of his leading characters, anyway) has often struck me as borderline heretical.

None of that matters a whit to me. Shortly before I started looking seriously into the Catholic Church myself, I read several of his novels. The faith that pervaded them was tangible. It was human. Even priests (and at that time, I'd never actually even met one) were ordinary people in his books. Catholicism was simply a central fact of life. (So were his heritage and hometown. In his books, everybody who was anybody was either from Chicago or Irish, and usually both.)

It was that matter-of-fact approach to the Church that made it seem more accessible to me later. By the time I began my journey to Rome, I had reference points for some of the things I was about to encounter for the first time. God used Father Greeley to soften me up, as it were, for the plans He had for me.

The other quality I absorbed from his books was a certain integrity. Two-dimensional though his characters often were, they were true to themselves. His priests really believed what they preached, and if they strayed from their vows, they did so knowing it was wrong. His laypeople sinned, but they knew right from wrong. I could have done with less sex in the books, but even there, the moral dimension was always present. As too few writers do (Orson Scott Card is another), he knew how to treat religion as more than just a personality quirk. That's because to him, it really was everything.

And finally, he had an optimism and friendliness about him that may be priestly, or it may simply be Irish. I dunno. But in spite of the critical things I said about him in this post, I think I'd have liked him immensely.

Thanks, Father. Partly thanks to you, I'll see you 'round.

Note: This is one of the few Andrew Greeley novels I can recommend. Yeah, it's not great literature, but I still enjoy rereading it now and then. Sappy, romantic, and genuine.

Re: Joyce!

I just discovered via Mark Shea that my high-school Sunday School teacher, Joyce Crain, is not only a Catholic convert, but is leading a plethora of ministries at St. Francis Parish in the San Juan Islands. She was an awesome teacher in the 1980s (and especially patient with the teenage pissant I was back then) and I have no doubt she's just as wonderful today. Her husband was the one who gave me the copy of "Mere Christianity" that triggered my decision to embrace the faith I'd been raised in. Otherwise, I shudder to think where I would have wound up.

Joyce blogs here. I've just started reading it, but she's got some rich material. Check it out!

Finally! Now we can tell what they're saying

Jim Goad at Taki's has bridged the gap between liberals and ordinary people with the Progressive Glossary. Never let a conversation be derailed again through vague terminology!

DIVERSITY—A magical incantation used to divert your attention from the fact that it is strikingly similar to the words “divide” and “division.”
DOG WHISTLE—A high-pitched screech from the enemy that only progressives are able to hear. Lately this term has been deemed offensive to canines and should therefore be replaced with “coded speech” wherever possible.
ELITES—Wealthy people on the political right. This term is never used to describe wealthy people on the left who control much of the media, government, and academia.
EMPOWERED—Loud and annoying.
GUN NUT—Anyone who owns a gun yet doesn’t belong to the group that actually commits the majority of American gun violence.
HATRED—Anything that we hate.
HERSTORY—The part of history that is usually ignored because not much really happened.
HETERONORMATIVE—Sexually normal.
HOMOPHOBE—Someone with a distaste for sex that involves feces and AIDS.
LOOKISM—A term used by ugly people to explain why beautiful people won’t [fornicate with] them.
REDNECK—A racial slur used to describe people we assume are always using racial slurs.
SOCIOPATH—A non-socialist.
STARTING A DIALOGUE—Starting a monologue.

Go read the whole thing. Ambrose Bierce would be proud.

Yes!

Arlene's is fighting back!

Barronelle Stutzman has decided that the best defense is a good offense. Stutzman, 68, is the owner of Arlene’s Flowers and Gifts, the Richland, Washington, business being sued by state Attorney General Bob Ferguson.
Ferguson is suing Arlene’s because Stutzman declined to violate her faith by doing the floral decorations for the wedding of longtime customer Robert Ingersoll and his partner Curt Freed.
Stutzman filed a countersuit yesterday against the attorney general, arguing that his suit violates her rights under both the United States and Washington State Constitutions, as well as violating the federal Civil Rights Act.

Bullies have to be stood up to or they'll keep finding new victims and new ways to torment them. Read the whole thing.

If only teachers could marry! If only women could be teachers!

This sort of thing would never happen.

What she said!

I thought I had a pretty good command of invective, but Heroditus Huxley comes up with phrases here I'd never have thought of. I'm in awe. Also in agreement with every unrepeatable word of it.

A shot at the new frontier

If I were twenty years younger and had no family responsibilities, I'd be doing whatever it took to be in on this. Yeah, yeah, nine chances out of ten it'll never go anywhere. But that tenth... ah, to be one of the first.

Heard around Boston

"Hey, I've got the day off. Wanna go downtown and get legless?"

Horrible. Stipulated. But sometimes grim laughter is all you can manage in the face of the need to weep. And I don't know when I'll have much more to say after spending yesterday afternoon in the newsroom waiting to hear if the runners from the Moses Lake area had come out safe. As of now, we've heard that two of the four are fine.

They're just cops

What could they possibly know about guns and crime?

Today's prize...

... for the most fatheaded claim about the Catholic Church goes to Slate. See, it doesn't matter how far-fetched a statement is, if it involves the Church trying to take all the fun out of sex, people will believe it implicitly.

Akubra tip to Creative Minority Report.

"Maybe it’s time for the Catholic Church ... to come out swinging"

This has needed to be said for years, but nobody outside of a few Catholic bloggers (and who listens to them?) dared utter it above a whisper:

Almost everything the media say about the Catholic Church is a lie. A deliberate slander intended to obscure the facts and besmirch good people with the filthiest possible stigma.

So why isn’t the Church launching a counteroffensive? For every accusation of molestation, why aren’t they publicizing the very existence of false accusations? What sort of misguided piety and humility prevents it from publicizing case after case after case of priests who were exonerated after falsely being accused?

If they really wanted to fight fire with fire, they should issue weekly press releases about the fact that the president of an organization that’s been antagonizing them ceaselessly—the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests—neglected to call the policewhen his older brother, a priest, was accused of molestation. Why are they sitting on that bombshell?

And since many of their antagonists are of a secular socialist bent who’d like to portray themselves as the sole protectors of the poor and disadvantaged, why doesn’t the Church shed a layer or two of humility and more aggressively publicize its global charitable work? Why does it shy away from quantifying the billions it spends to feed the hungry and heal the sick? Why doesn’t it challenge the socialist types to demonstrate they’re doing remotely as much to uplift the poor?

Read it all.

Bergoglio?

That surprised me. I really expected somebody younger.

Habemus papam!

Watching Twitter, Google News and AP feed to find out who it is. No name yet.

Nope.

Smoke is still black. Next voting will be at 9:20 Pacific.

And... they're off!

The conclave begins and the world will wait with bated breath to see which cardinal will be reviled by the news media as a terrible disappointment.

Let's be honest: the new pope is not going to make any of the changes that the media are so frantically insisting the entire Catholic Church desperately wants. Catholics know this. Orthodox Protestants know this. Mormons know this. Atheists (those who actually have read anything more informative than The God Delusion) know this. The only people who don't know it are muttonheaded media mavens who have no concept that religion is anything but a fashion statement.

So for those folks, here it is in simple words: The pope has enormous authority but relatively little power. He appoints bishops to their respective dioceses. He acts as a symbol of the eternal, universal Church. And occasionally he defines some point of doctrine that has been in dispute, usually for centuries. What he does not do is change doctrines already defined, nor does he pull fresh doctrines out of his... er... cassock.

Gay "marriage" ain't-a-gonna happen. Neither is female "ordination." Those things aren't even issues. No matter how "liberal" (read, trendy) a pope might be personally, he can't screw around with sacraments. At the very least, he'd engender a schism that would make 1054 look like a squabble over what color to carpet the sanctuary in.

That's not to say he can't make an enormous impact. When John Paul the Great was elected, it started the communist bloc on its inexorable slide onto the ash heaps of history. The Poles had held (one might even say clung bitterly) to their Catholic faith despite being sandwiched between a Protestant power and an Orthodox one for centuries. That went a long way toward making them the weak link in the red chain. Even at that, their vibrant, colorful Catholic faith was slowly being dulled by the drab sameness of Marxism, coupled with a sense that the rest of the world just didn't give a damn what happened to a bunch of Polacks.

But when one of their own was set on the throne of Peter, it galvanized the Poles. Here was a man who had worked as slave labor under the Nazis, studied in underground seminaries during the war and walked the razor's edge of being an archbishop in the Soviet shadow before becoming the moral lodestone of the world. For the first time in centuries, Poland had a national hero.

I expect the next pope will be chosen for similar reasons. So what's the big bugaboo menacing Christendom today? Islam. Yeah, yeah, I know. Religion of peace and all that. And I'm sure that holds true for individuals Muslims, and I mean no disrespect to them. But Christians in Muslim countries are currently getting pretty universally crushed. Even Egypt, which until recently was pretty decent to the Copts who predated Islam by centuries, has begun abandoning Christians to Muslim mob justice.

Now, I could be totally wrong. In fact, I've been thinking all along that the most likely candidate would be Angelo Scola, Archbishop of Milan. (Not my preference, but nobody asked me.)  But what if the cardinals are smarter than I give them credit for? What if we get, say, Jean-Louis Tauran, currently the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue? His homeland of France has a large culture war going with Islam. Even more provocative would be John Onaiyekan of Nigeria or Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines. Can you hear the heads explode across the Islamosphere if the dhimmis suddenly had their own pope?

The next few days could well be the most significant in the 21st century. Pray hard. (Note: Check out the semi-complete slate here, by one of the best-informed Vatican-watchers in the world.)

Update: The smoke is black. No big surprise there. More voting tomorrow morning.

A good neighbor moves out

Richard Briers travels in elephants. The Telegraph has the best memorial I've seen so far.



 The Good Life (or as it was called over here, Good Neighbors) was probably the first Brit-com I saw, and the one that got me hooked on them. Penelope Keith and Paul Edgerton as the beleaguered and sorta-snooty neighbors were all right, but it was the chemistry between Briers and the adorable Felicity Kendal that made the show worth watching, and whetted my appetite for all things televised and British.

Thank you, Tom, for making the good life look a little bit better.

Sounds reasonable to me

Quote of the day:

"Given Sandy Hook, you have to make reasonable compromises."

Accepted. In exchange, gay men should make reasonable compromises over Penn State. They will simply have to accept being registered and kept a safe distance from children. This isn't a violation of their rights. It's just common sense.

RTWT.

Keeping Faith

The other day, I got into a discussion on Facebook with an agnostic friend (shameless plug for her business) about Jehovah's Witnesses and blood transfusions. She related an anecdote she'd heard about a Witness church leader (I'm not sure of his actual role) who was in the hospital, and loudly and publicly refused to receive a life-saving transfusion. But later, when it was just him and his family, he accepted the procedure secretly.

Now, obviously I don't share his scruples about transfusions. If I ever need it, a hospital can pump my veins full of walrus piss for all I care. It's not about blood. It's about faith.

Faith is one of the most misused words in the language. If you ask a non-believer, they'll usually say that faith is believing something with no evidence. (And if they're a Fundamentalist Atheist, when they say "evidence," as often as not they mean "absolute proof." If you can't prove a religious tenet beyond any possible doubt, they consider it proven false and worthy of ridicule. But I digress.)

Even Christians often think of faith as a set of statements. A person being baptized will affirm the Apostles' Creed and we say "This is the faith of the Church." And in that context, I guess it's applicable. But it's only one small aspect.

Faith isn't about things you believe. Faith is commitment. Faith is loyalty, to a person or an institution, placed ahead of one's own welfare. We use it idiomatically all the time: keeping the faith, acting in good faith, and so on. Faith isn't just believing; it's sticking to what you're committed to. Faith is a man sticking by his wife as she's dying. Faith is a soldier obeying orders that may well get him killed. Faith is St Damien of Molokai, taking on certain slow, miserable death to take care of people who would never be able to repay him. "I know Whom I have believed," says St. Paul. Not "what," but "Whom." Faith is, at bottom, faithfulness.

That's where this guy failed. He may well have believed all the religious doctrines about transfusions, but when the rubber met the road, he wimped out. He had committed his life to his God, but when it was actually required of him, he broke that commitment.

(Mind you, I'm not saying I'd have done better if I'd been in his shoes. I hope I would, but I've never had to find out.)

When it came to the Crucifixion, only one disciple, John, stayed with Jesus. Peter may have famously denied Him, but all of them ran away. In that, they broke faith as well. But in the years that followed, all of them (again, except John) died violent deaths. Andrew was crucified. Peter was crucified upside-down. Jude and Simon were beheaded. Thomas was martyred nearly three thousand miles away, in India. (So much for "Doubting Thomas.") They could have saved their own skins easily enough. Most people would say they were fools not to. But they didn't. They were committed to a Person, not to a set of beliefs. And for that Person, they would face anything.

That's what faith is. That's the real faith of the Church. We are proud to profess it.

The irony?

How much you wanna bet a lot of these are Feminist Studies majors?