Mysterious Things

Well, that is as plain as one can be.  Professor Perry 'dissents'.  Oremus pro invicem.

As a result of the conscientious and enlightened efforts of its legislators in Albany; Professor Althouse via Andrea Harris.  Dr Utopia's allies in Congress will want to extend this initiative to the rest of us, sooner or later. It is true that I add plentiful amounts of salt to the fries I buy at McDonald's: that the cooks aren't permitted to add any is not terribly gastronomically upsetting but....

Recent decision to bar a child's re-enrollment in Catholic school because of the unmarriable status of his two female parents (how's that for an oblique description?) and has found it necessary, in order to do this, to reject the indivisible unity that exists between the teaching of Our Lord in the four Gospels and the authoritative magisterium of the Church.  (Professor Robert George has responded to that post; I know I sent Professor Perry an e.mail last night myself.)  Professor Perry has defended his thesis today.

There are, putting this as simply as I can, three issues ongoing here.

First, the party of so-called 'gay rights' is loud, active and well-entrenched on 'the Left side' of the Church political, and its professedly Catholic adherents are incapable of placing the demands of the Catholic religion above and beyond its demands. 

Second, large numbers of professedly Catholic people are woefully uneducated in the truths of the Christian Faith authoritatively taught by the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. 

Third, large numbers of professedly Catholic people have substituted a worldview more inspired by materialist rationalism than by Revelation and modern, post-modern and 'modernist' pseudo-truths for the authentic propositions of the Catholic Faith. 

Having written all that, I suspect that Professor Perry may well be right in speculating that this can't be the last word Mons Chaput utters on this issue.

Update on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 5:48AM by Marc

Professor George responds to Professor Perry, more thoroughly than I would or perhaps could have done; should have had to actually read whatever letter or note Mons Chaput issued, in the first place, ahem, instead of relying on the virtual representations thereof. 

Comment at face value (i.e. without thinking much about either text or source), this is pretty amusing.

This is a CCTV photograph taken of the two year old child James Bulger being walked away to his death by one of the convicted murderers, Jon Venables... who was ten.  There is a scandal in England at the moment because Mr Venables, who had been released from custody in 2001, was recently retaken to prison on account of several unspecified offenses.  The terms of his release in 2001 provided him with a new identity and have prevented the media from reporting Venables' new crimes. 

(Note also the Times's stellar reporting: the Catholic priest named is Father Raymond Blake, not Michael. That Father Blake expressed sympathy for both child killers as well as the child victim is apparently too much for the barbarians to comprehend.)

It appears to have marked Opposite Day, as noted by Howard Bashman at How Appealing.

M. Michel Janva at Le Salon Beige wonders if perhaps the folks at La Croix (scarcely a bastion of professed adherents of Tradition, ahem) have read the signs of the times correctly, as evidenced by Mlle Isabelle de Gaulmyn on her blog there; she writes:

... In short, it has become more and more difficult to justly describe those who hear Mass in the chapels of the Fraternity of St Pius X as 'integrists', which term, moreover, implies a sort of militancy which they do not, in fact, share....

Speculators seems to be anticipating an ecclesiasitcal reconciliation (at least in France) between the Hierarchy and the Lefebvrists in the not too distant future.  We shall see.

O wise Euripedes!  Perceptive reader and doctor of letters Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has been reading the poet's Andromache.  The translator is David Kovacs, in Loeb. 

οὐ βαρβάρων νόμοισιν οἰκοῦμεν πόλιν.

I have to admit to being able, now in these days of my dotage, only to construe very badly; the 'ou barbaron nomoisin' is the 'not according to barbarian customs' part of the sentence, and 'oikoumen' must be 'we living as a community' but I cannot recall 'polin' at all, and so most likely have most of it screwed up.

Who manages (he 'covers' the Vatican for the Times) to translate boxing students' ears (as the expression goes) in the '70s and before into "hitting" in the context of allegations of abuse and, worse, sexual abuse. 

And so far as I've been able to tell, with my elementary Italian, Mons Ratzinger is in no way anywhere near being at the "center" of the current German scandal, nor is the Regensburg Cathedral choir school he directed for many years. 

This is only one in a long series of misleading articles that the Times has published about the Popes, the Holy See and the Church--although, Heaven knows, certain other widely-circulated UK papers' correspondents are not a hell of a lot more objective or accurate than Mr Owen--and one has to judge, having read years' worth of such nonsense, that the publishers and editors intend such distortions.  So it is as well that the online Times is free; I should otherwise not be able to read even some of the decent writing that appears there.

Devoted to keeping us safe and healthy and perfect: I wonder which jurisdictions in the United States require dog insurance?

Telegraph, including several witty observations and a certain modicum of insight; poor Mr Obama.  Some of it is nonsense but not much online or in print these days is without some of that.

Suffers from a severe case of moral obliquity, remember Rwanda and the genocide there.

From Classical Values, and all I got was politics.  Tsk.