Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1388

Tom Kreitzberg is back!

And he is characteristically lucid and realistic as he reflects on the Mass readings.

The man makes it very difficult to be a comfy plump suburbanite.

Sherry Weddell Notes...

some Mormon poaching over at Rome Reports.

Speaking of the Narrowing of Postmodern Vision

Just as a word that means "univeral" is narrowed in modern parlance to mean "sect" so (as Natalie Portman demonstrates) postmodern culture now expands the narrowest and most boring form of barnyard rutting to be something wider than love, commitment, and the intertwining of lives in the mystery of love and family:

Natalie Portman may be preparing herself for a life of domesticity with fiancé Benjamin Millepied and a baby on the way, but she admitted that the reason she was drawn to character Emma Kurtzman in her latest film "No Strings Attached" was because the leading lady was simply seeking a no-romance bed buddy as opposed to the whole nine yards.

"Emma wants a relationship without the relationship. She just wants the sex. It's unusual but funny," Portman told FOX411's Pop Tarts. "I love romantic comedies, but I'm tired of seeing girls who want to get married all the time and that's all they're interested in. I think there is a wider vision of how women can conduct their lives and what they want."

Empty sex = wider vision
Love, commitment, family = cramped and stifling

Celebrities: Is there anything they don't know?

Defining "Catholic"...

...is tricky.

It is the genius of post-Reformation polemic that a word meaning "universal" has taken on the connotation of something as narrow as a sect. Of course, the Prophet Chesterton gets what's really going on:

But in a much more profound and philosophical sense this notion that the Church is one of the sects is the great fallacy of the whole affair. It is a matter more psychological and more difficult to describe. But it is perhaps the most sensational of the silent upheavals or reversals in the mind that constitute the revolution called conversion. Every man conceives himself as moving about in a cosmos of some kind; and the man of the days of my youth walked about in a kind of vast and airy Crystal Palace in which there were exhibits set side by side. The cosmos, being made of glass and iron, was partly transparent and partly colourless; anyhow, there was something negative about it; arching over all our heads, a roof as remote as a sky, it seemed to be impartial and impersonal. Our attention was fixed on the exhibits, which were all carefully ticketed and arranged in rows; for it was the age of science. Here stood all the religions in a row--the churches or sects or whatever we called them; and towards the end of the row there
was a particularly dingy and dismal one, with a pointed roof half fallen in and pointed windows most broken with stones by passers-by; and we were told that this particular exhibit was the Roman Catholic Church. Some of us were sorry for it and even fancied it had been rather badly used; most of us regarded it as dirty and disreputable; a few of us even pointed out that many details in the ruin were artistically beautiful or architecturally important. But most people preferred to deal at other and more business-like
booths; at the Quaker shop of Peace and Plenty or the Salvation Army store where the showman beats the big drum outside. Now conversion consists very largely, on its intellectual side, in the discovery that all that picture of equal creeds inside an indifferent cosmos is quite false. It is not a question of comparing the merits and defects of the Quaker meeting-house set beside the Catholic cathedral. It is the Quaker meeting-house that is inside the Catholic cathedral; it is the Catholic cathedral that covers everything like the vault of the Crystal Palace; and it is when we look up at the vast distant dome covering all the exhibits that we trace the Gothic roof and the pointed windows. In other words, Quakerism is but a temporary form of Quietism which has arisen technically outside the Church as the Quietism of Fenelon appeared technically inside the Church. But both were in themselves temporary and would have, like Fenelon, sooner or later to return to the Church in order to live. The principle of life in all these variations of Protestantism, in so far as it is not a principle of death, consists of what remained in them of Catholic Christendom; and to Catholic Christendom they have always returned to be recharged with vitality. I know that this will sound like a statement to be challenged; but it is true. The return of
Catholic ideas to the separated parts of Christendom was often indeed indirect. But though the influence came through many, centrest it always came from one. It came through the Romantic Movement, a glimpse of the mere picturesqueness of mediaevalism; but it is something more than an accident that Romances, like Romance languages, are named after Rome. Or it came through the instinctive reaction of old-fashioned people like Johnson or Scott or Cobbett, wishing to save old elements that had originally been Catholic against a progress that was merely Capitalist. But it led them to denounce that Capitalist progress and become, like Cobbett, practical foes of Protestantism without being practising followers of Catholicism. Or it came from the Pre-Raphaelites or the opening of continental art and culture by Matthew Arnold and Morris and Ruskin and the rest. But examine the actual make-up of the mind of a good Quaker or Congregational minister at this moment, and compare it with the mind of such a dissenter in the Little Bethel before such culture came. And you will see how much of his health and happiness he owes to Ruskin and what Ruskin owed to Giotto; to Morris and what Morris owed to Chaucer; to fine scholars of his own school like Philip Wicksteed, and what they owe to Dante and St. Thomas. Such a man will still sometimes talk of the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages. But the Dark Ages have improved the wallpaper on his wall and the dress on his wife and all the whole dingy and vulgar life which he lived in the days of Stiggins and Brother Tadger. For he also is a Christian and lives only by the life of Christendom.

Mike Flynn Tells the Rest of the Story...

...about Galileo. Turn out he did other stuff besides inadvertantly be the poster boy for proponents of scientism centuries after his death. He was what our ancestors used to call "irrascible" (i.e., a pain in the neck) and made enemies, not so much for being a valiant champion of Scientific Truth as for being said pain in neck.

The difficulty with the worship of Science proposed in the 19th Century and adopted by many people in the 20th is that scientists turn out to be, not gleaming robots of rational efficiency, but thoroughly human beings.

Good to hear

Pat Madrid reports that the Legionaries are selling the Register. I'm glad. Dunno who's buying, but Pat seems happy, so that's good enough for me.

If I get my wish, the Legionaries will sell off all their assets, the leaders who enabled Maciel will be sent to clean toilets in penance for the rest of their days, and the whole machinery Maciel constructed to protect himself will be dismantled nut by bolt till there is nothing left. The machine was designed to perform the function of protecting Maciel. It will go on doing what it was designed to do unless some organizational genius can figure out a way to retool the machine. We'll see.

Prayer Request

A reader writes:

I hope this is not too late. I am asking for intercession from Terence Cardinal Cooke for my little cousin, Julien, who is gravely ill with graft-vs-host disease from a bone marrow transplant that he received a couple of years ago. He was suffering from the same sort of cancer that Cardinal Cooke had. Please pray for him, and all the family and friends who love him.

Father, hear our prayer for Julien's complete healing through Jesus Christ. Mother Mary and Cardinal Cooke, pray for him, his caregivers, and all who love him!

Prayers please

for a dear friend whose sister is battling cancer.

Many thanks!

Scott P. Richert writes...

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On the About.com Catholicism Readers' Choice Awards Nomination Form, you will find ten categories:
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Good luck, and may the best Catholic products (and people) win!

Check thou it out!

Reporter Seriously Claims to Know...

...what an immensely complex system that nobody understands will be doing in a thousand years.

I wonder if he thinks anybody who believes in biblical prophecy is a superstitious fool.

Speaking of utter credulity before the prophets of science, here is the invaluable John C. Wright on Reverse Malthusianism and on the Prophets of Science and what they have wrought in the past with their cocksure pontifications.