Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1398

The Internet

Where any idiot with a webcam can make the gospel look repellent and silly:



Christian, you gots your choices. You can, in a pluralist culture, insist that Jesus is the reason for the season. If you do (and you should) then you also have to face the fact that lots of your countrymen aren't as insistent on that proposition as you are and basically regard it as a commercial holiday and a chance for some gauzy sentiment about Family, Fireside, and Friends. When this happens, you can either continue to observe the day in love and peace with your mind on Jesus in the hope that "good will toward men" will eventually penetrate the hearts and minds of your less religiously committed neighbors or...

You can idiotically telegraph "I think the Taliban have the right idea, just the wrong religion" like these maroons, thereby driving all normal people away with the thought, "If this is Christianity, I want nothing to do with it."

The one upside to this video is this: Christian Taliban shoot pinatas, not people. But still: sheesh!

I'm not supposed to laugh, I know

...but Joe Hargrave's completely unhinged rant, which manages to use my suggestion that we not use Christmas as an excuse for completely unhinged culture war rhetoric, has to win some kind of prize. Seriously:

Now I turn to Mark Shea, who prides himself on navigating between what he thinks are the extremes, the radical secular left and the supposedly "fundie" right, Catholic and Protestant. In this post he complains about the "Christmas Inquisitors" who are supposedly just as offended by the absence of religious terms and images during Christmas as the secularists are offended by their presence, and both need to chill out. Well, that isn't going to happen. And let me tell you why.

First of all, seemingly little things matter. Seemingly little things add up. There is quality, and there is quantity. When quantities reach a critical mass, they transform qualitatively. When you add up enough little incidents, enough little setbacks, enough little unbalanced and one-sided compromises, eventually they add up to one massive defeat. You reach a point at which there are no inches left for you to take a step back into, when you are finally up against the wall or the sea, and you have no choice but to fight. We aren't there today, but we're being pushed there, and we aren't pushing back hard enough. The Christmas battle is one of many fronts in the culture war that we cannot afford to lose. If there is no Christian culture, there is no Christianity.

You think it's too much. You're rational, you're calm. Maybe you attended Jon Stewart's "Restore Sanity" rally. Maybe you think you're a conservative and you thought David Frum's patronizing sham "No Labels" was a good idea. Maybe you think that the people out there who hate Christianity, who hate children and treat pregnancy as a disease and a threat to the environment, who hate home schools and private schools and want to corral the children you do have into government-run pornography sessions called "sex education classes" are reasonable and rational and clam like you.

Well, I hear Eichmann was clam as he gave the orders to gas the Jews. I hear that some of the men who pulled the levers and turned the spigots that released the gas into the chambers did their jobs very calmly. That's why the philosopher Hanna Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil", and yes I'm aware that the phrase has been used to the death to the point where it has become banal, but you need to hear it again and again because most of you still associate evil with growling monsters and flames and men with thin mustaches who rub their hands together after they tie the helpless girl to the railroad tracks.

Oh, there he goes, comparing people who have a problem with "Merry Christmas" to the Nazis. Don't we have enough of that in our society? Well, I'm not comparing them in any way other than the banality of their evil. No, acting like a fascist psychopath to try and silence a simple religious phrase or make people feel guilty about it is not the equivalent of acting like a fascist psychopath who actually murders thousands or millions of people. But it's on the same spectrum, and it's time you wake up and understand that. Only a fascist psychopath has a problem with the phrase "Merry Christmas." Only the victim of a fascist psychopath hesitates before using the phrase because images of persecution and lawsuits and ridicule flash through their mind before the words come out.

Soooo.... difficulty finding a Christmas card leads to Eichmann? Or something.

What I love is how, sensing the awkward silence in the room as he soars into his rhetorical flight of fancy about gas chambers and monsters, Hargrave hastily tries to pull a Nixon and say, "I'm not comparing anybody with Nazis" but then immediately lapses into the invocations of Nazis, fascists, psychopaths and all the rest--all because I made fun of a site devoted to obsessing over perceived slights from shopkeepers. A magnificently unhinged performance that, you know, pretty much illustrates my point.

Oh, and I also love Hargrave's remark that Christmas Inquisitors are "supposedly just as offended by the absence of religious terms and images during Christmas as the secularists are offended by their presence. I think that, in Hargrave's case, there's no "supposedly" about it. The leap from Nina Totenberg's jitters about offending her circle of snooty friends to THE HOLOCAUST!!!! has to beat anything ever done by an Olympic Gold Medalist.

Dorian Electra *really* likes Hayek

Teh Binks on the Wexford Carol

Binksy does all mankind a favor by posting this gem from Alison Krauss and Yo Yo Ma:



He writes:

First thought: here is a taste of the sweetness and power of the Good News, that God's Son was born for us. The original Irish carol arose in the 1100s in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, and is considered the oldest Christmas carol out of Europe. Thank God for that soul 900 years ago who captured the thought, and set it to Gaelic and music.

Second, just how cranky would the 16th- and 17th-century wrecker-haters be (the Protesters and the later Talibanist Puritanizers) to know this relic of ancient Catholic Christianity survived, and is still touching souls and preaching Christ and reminding us of 2000 years of God's love across the years? Muwahahahaha! Despite the smashing of glass and marble, the burning of books and roods, the desecration of relics and graves and churches and history, the truth will out, even if by fragile threads and secret ways... and long memories.

Part of what was smashed in the English 'Reformation' was the focus on real communities, feasts and fasts, the local versus the state, and cottage/ monastery industry versus taxation and bigger government. The tremendous creativity and dazzling diversity of what later sneerers called 'The Middle Ages' is a living gift to the world, to art, music, architecture, literature, philosophy, science, theology, and – well – everything else besides.

So enjoy the Wexford Carol – for the beauty, for the talent of the musicians and arrangers, and for those of you who are Christians, as an abiding gift of praise unto the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three persons and one God, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Please keep Binksy in your prayers, both for his health and that the Soft Totalitarians of the Great Brownshirt North do not smother him but rather that he fight on for the gospel and for freedom of speech.

Merry Christmas, Binks!

Questioning God

In which we discuss the venerable biblical tradition of drawing near to and interrogating God.

I stand corrected

Way back in August 2009 I wrote concerning the in partu inviolability of Our Lady (i.e, that her hymen was unbroken by the birth of Christ) that "Rome acknowledges this opinion but does not commit us to it".

Turns out I was wrong. This is more than a pious opinion. A reader writes:

I'm not an expert on anatomy but I take it that there are significant physical changes that take place in a virgin's body after she marries and engages in the marital act for the first time—and especially after she gives birth for the first time. The traditional Catholic understanding of Mary's virginity is a very robust notion and includes not only so called "sex-act virginity" and "seed-act virginity" but also freedom from those physical changes I've just mentioned. This is what the Fathers meant when they talked about Mary being "incorrupt" in her giving birth to the Lord. For the purposes of this discussion, I'll refer to this "incorruption" with the phrase "physical virginal integrity". The traditional Catholic doctrine of Mary's in partu virginity involves just this "physical virginal integrity". So that even after Mary gave birth to Our Lord, her physical virginal integrity was preserved. This is obviously impossible according to the natural course of things. So this retention of her physical virginal integrity is traditionally regarded as miraculous.


Now we find direct and indirect evidence that Mary's in partu virginity, in the sense I have specified above, was believed in before the 4th century. BUT it is especially during the 4th century that it becomes all the more steadfastly held because it was at that time that it begun to be contested by various heretics. In the fourth century Fathers, whenever Mary's total life-long virginity is defended, so her in-partu virginity is either explicitly asserted or assumed. You can see this in Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Epiphanius, etc. (I'm getting all this from Luigi Gambero's Mary and the Fathers of the Church. This is a great book that is a must buy for your Mariology library.)

Sometimes Jerome is brought out as the exception. It is said that Jerome wrote that it is possible that Mary even suffered and bled when she gave birth to Christ (this would be contrary to the traditional understanding of Mary's in partu virginity). But this is the exception that proves the rule. This is what I mean. The Heretic Helvidius argued that the "brothers of the Lord" we read of in the gospels were other sons of Mary. Jerome defended Mary's life-long virginity in his treatise "On the Perpetual Virginity of Mary Against Helvidius." It is in this treatise that Jerome entertains the possibility that Mary suffered and bled when giving birth to the Lord. But then the synod of Milan was held in AD 390 and it condemned Jovinian, another heretic who denied Mary's perpetual virginity. But this synod also upheld Mary's in partu virginity. So Jerome's friends notified him of this and it is interesting to note that when Jerome writes against Jovinius (after having been informed about the synod of Milan), Jerome is silent about the issue of Mary's in partu virginity. In his later writings you then find him interpreting Scripture in conformity with and making statements about Mary's in partu virginity. I think it is clear that he deliberately changed his mind on this issue when he saw Ambrose and others continuing to uphold the traditional doctrine. I think the only reason Jerome in his younger years felt free to question the doctrine is because it was found in the apocryphal second century Proto-gospel of James (Jerome would also go on to deny the idea that the "brothers" of the Lord were sons of Joseph from a previous marriage, another idea that is found in the Proto-gospel of James.)

But in any event, by the end of the fourth century and into the fifth, Mary's in partu virginity is upheld unanimously. We can see this in the declarations of various ancient synods and papal letters especially. Here is a list of authorities I have taken from Juan Luis Bastero's book Mary, Mother of the Redeemer (by the way, I recommend Bastero as the best book on Mariology that can currently be purchased. It's a must buy):

1. (DS 291): Pope Leo in his Dogmatic Letter to Flavian (AD 449), patriarch of Constantinople, against Monophysite heresy, worded Catholic belief on Mary's virginity in Christ's conception and birth as follows: "He was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mother, who gave him birth without losing her virginity as she conceived him without losing her virginity…"

2. (DS 294): Here is more from the same Letter to Flavian. "And so, the Son of God, descending from his heavenly throne, yet not leaving the glory of the Father, enters into this lowly world. (He comes) in a new order, generated by a new birth…the miraculous manner of the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ born from the womb of a virgin does not make his nature different from ours." (This dogmatic letter, also called the Tome of Leo, has always been taken as an authentic formula of faith. The 500 Fathers of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon received it enthusiastically and exclaimed, "This is the faith of the Fathers, the faith of the Apostles. This is what we believe it to be, and with us all who think rightly. Let those who say the contrary be anathema. Peter has spoken through the mouth of Leo!")

3. (DS 442): The profession of faith of Pope Pelagius (AD 557): "The virginal integrity of the mother was safeguarded, because in the same way as she had conceived him virginally, she gave birth to him preserving her virginity intact."

4. (DS 503): The Lateran Synod of AD 649, presided over by Pope St. Martin I: "If anyone does not, according to the holy Fathers, confess truly and properly that holy Mary, ever virgin and immaculate, is Mother of God since in this latter age she conceived in true reality without human seed from the Holy Spirit, God the Word himself, who before the ages was born of God the Father, and gave birth to him without corruption, her virginity remaining equally inviolate after the birth, let him be condemned." (This third canon of the Lateran Synod, although not an Ecumenical Council canon, is nonetheless considered to be a true ex cathedra dogmatic definition by Pope Martin I. The reasons which support this are: the council was presided over and sanctioned by the Pope, who proposed this doctrine as a condition for being in communion with the Roman See and condemned its denial as anathema; furthermore, the Third Council of Constantinople (Denzinger 555) fully accepted the faith formulated in this canon.)

5. The Eleventh Council of Toledo (AD 675) includes the following doctrine in its Creed: "the Son alone assumed a true human nature, a sinless nature, from the holy and immaculate Virgin Mary for the liberation of the human race. He was born from her in a new manner and with a new birth: in a new manner because, though invisible in his divinity, he appears visibly in his humanity, and with a new birth because an undefiled Virgin who did not have intercourse with man was made fruitful by the Holy Spirit and so furnished the substance for his human flesh. This Virgin Birth can neither be fully understood nor can another example of it be pointed out; were it fully understood, it would not be miraculous; were there another example, it would cease to be unique."

6. In 1555 Paul IV published a bull, Cum quorumdam, to counter Protestant errors of the time; the document rejected the views of those who say that "Our Lord was not conceived from the Holy Spirit according to the flesh in the womb of the Blessed Mary ever Virgin but, as other men, from the seed of Joseph, or that the same Blessed Virgin Mary is not truly the mother of God and did not retain her virginity intact before the birth, in the birth, and perpetually after the birth". (Denzinger 1880)

7. Clement VIII provided an authentic explanation of the mystery of Mary's virginity in the Motu proprio Pastoralis Romani apropos of the third article of the Creed. He taught that when it says "born of the virgin Mary", it means that here too there is something very exceptional "since the Son of God came out of the womb of the Mother at the end of the ninth month, without pain or loss on the part of the mother herself, leaving no sign whatsoever of his emergence…and therefore it is said that the Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ was virgin before the birth, in the birth and after the birth."

OK, now let's look at our most recent Catechism. Here is what it says at 499:

Mary - "ever-virgin"

499 The deepening of faith in the virginal motherhood led the Church to confess Mary's real and perpetual virginity even in the act of giving birth to the Son of God made man.154 In fact, Christ's birth "did not diminish his mother's virginal integrity but sanctified it."155 And so the liturgy of the Church celebrates Mary as Aeiparthenos, the "Ever-virgin".156

Now let's check the footnotes (always important to do):

Footnote 154 lists seven texts out of Denzinger:

DS 291: This is first quote listed above from Pope Leo's letter to Flavian

DS 294: This is the second quote listed above from Pope Leo's letter

DS 427: This is a citation from the ecumenical council of Constantinople that call's Mary "ever-Virgin"

DS 442: This is the third quote listed above from Pope Pelagius

DS 503: This is the fourth quote listed above from the Lateran Synod

DS 571: This is a quote from the Council of Toledo XVI (AD 693). It says, "And as the Virgin acquired the modesty of virginity before conception, so also she experienced no loss of her integrity; for she conceived a virgin, gave birth a virgin, and after birth retained the uninterrupted modesty of an intact virgin…" (This Council of Toledo is not to be confused with the one cited above at number five.)

DS 1880: This is a quote from the Ecumenical Council of Trent that distinguishes the three stages of Mary's virginity.

Footnote 155 lists one text from Vatican II's Lumen gentium:

LG 57: "This union of the Mother with the Son in the work of salvation is made manifest from the time of Christ's virginal conception up to His death it is shown first of all when Mary, arising in haste to go to visit Elizabeth, is greeted by her as blessed because of her belief in the promise of salvation and the precursor leaped with joy in the womb of his mother. This union is manifest also at the birth of Our Lord, who did not diminish His mother's virginal integrity but sanctified it,(*) when the Mother of God joyfully showed her firstborn Son to the shepherds and Magi. [* here is a foot note that back's up Mary's in partu virginity with citations from the Lateran Synod and the Letter from Pope Leo to Flavian, the same two texts we've seen above, and also a text from St. Ambrose]

Footnote 156 lists another text from Lumen Gentium:

LG 52: This text simply refers to Mary as "Ever-Virgin".

So what can we say after looking at all these authorities? Well, for sure, Mary's in partu virginity, in the traditional sense, is a dogma of the faith. The universal and ordinary Magisterium of the Church has infallibly transmitted it to us. There is a moral majority of 4th century Fathers who assent to it as part of the catholic faith and this is enough evidence to show that the 4th century universal and ordinary Magisterium taught it as being of faith. Then you have all these other councils (albeit local councils) that put it forth as a dogma of the faith. The fourth citation above, the third canon of the Lateran Synod, is probably also an ex cathedra definition. So not only do we have the universal and ordinary Magisterium passing this doctrine on to us as a dogma, we probably also have the extraordinary Magisterium defining it for us (via a Papal ex cathedra statement from Pope Martin I). At least though, it is a dogma of the faith passed on by the universal and ordinary Magisterium. Really all we need to prove this is the 7th citation above, Clement VIII's authentic explanation of the article in the creed that says, "born of the virgin Mary". This virginal birth is a distinct mystery from the virginal conception. This virginal birth, in the traditional sense, is part of the creed. So it's a dogma, passed on to us by the universal and ordinary Magisterium.

What about the CCC? Well, it just repeats these authorities and so from the CCC we also learn that this doctrine is a dogma of the faith. It's clear.

Now here is the kicker. Why has this dogma ever been questioned? Why is it so little understood today? Starting in the 50s, we had a number of catholic theologians who basically just pulled a modernist move. They started invoking "scientific progress" in the explanation of our dogmas. So we have guys like Messenger (1948), Mitterer (1952), Clifford (1953), Rahner (1960), Galot (1960), and Gonzalez (1988) arguing that we need no longer hold up Mary's in partu virginity in the traditional sense. (I'm getting all this from Bastero…)

Their argument has caught on like wildfire. I think it's popularity is due to that perennial fear of "science" that we moderns all so subject to. Just label something "science" and immediately we lose our heads, start trembling and ask no questions. But here we are fearing where there is no need to fear. So what if our current understanding of virginity usually excludes physical virginal integrity? The meaning of our dogmas is not determined by current conventions but by the Church's perpetual understanding of her own formulas. This is the clear teaching of Vatican I and Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors. No pretentious appeal to "science" can change this. In this case, the Church has always included in the definition of Mary's virginity not just "sex-act virginity" and "seed-act virginity" (as our modernists say) but also physical virginal integrity.

This understanding of virginity is also not just the traditional catholic understanding but also the scriptural and patristic understanding of virginity. See Deuteronomy 22:13-21:

[13] "If any man takes a wife, and goes in to her, and then spurns her, [14] and charges her with shameful conduct, and brings an evil name upon her, saying, `I took this woman, and when I came near her, I did not find in her the tokens of virginity,' [15] then the father of the young woman and her mother shall take and bring out the tokens of her virginity to the elders of the city in the gate; [16] and the father of the young woman shall say to the elders, `I gave my daughter to this man to wife, and he spurns her; [17] and lo, he has made shameful charges against her, saying, "I did not find in your daughter the tokens of virginity." And yet these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity.' And they shall spread the garment before the elders of the city. [18] Then the elders of that city shall take the man and whip him; [19] and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver, and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought an evil name upon a virgin of Israel; and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. [20] But if the thing is true, that the tokens of virginity were not found in the young woman, [21] then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has wrought folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father's house; so you shall purge the evil from the midst of you.

What are these "tokens of virginity" that the angry father is showing to the elders? He's showing them the bed sheets with blood on them. This blood is the result of his daughter's first marital act she engaged in with her new husband on their wedding night. For modesty's sake, I don't need to get any more explicit.

Also, to this day, I hear that certain groups of Orthodox Jews bring forth the sheets with the blood on them after their daughter's wedding night and they actually celebrate and show these sheets off and like dance around with them…as proof that their daughter remained a virgin all the way up until her marriage.

In any event, this scriptural understanding of virginity as including physical virginal integrity is also certainly the view of the Fathers.

And it is in terms of this understanding of virginity that the Church has taught that Mary remained a virgin not only before but also during her giving birth to the Lord Jesus. All the above cited authorities are clear on this. The only way we can understand this in partu virginity is that it is miraculous. This is the dogma.

Now what about the text from Ludwig Ott that Ted references? Well, Ott is a pretty good place to start when studying Catholic dogma, but he is not infallible and you just need to read more widely. Ott unfortunately caves in to this modernist tendency and he's writing just at the time it is coming into vogue. In fact he cites as his authority for it Mitterer (1952), one of the prime architects of this error.

his heretical re-interpretation of the dogma of Mary's in partu virginity has not escaped the radar of the Magisterium over the past 60 years. Here is an excerpt again from Bastero:

"In 1961, the Holy Office (now the CDF) took issue with the teachings of some modern authors who treat of the dogma of virginity in partu "clashing clearly with the traditional doctrine of the Church and with the pious feeling of the faithful" (cf. EphMar 11 (1961) 137-138). In a recent document, issued on the occasion of the 16th centenary of the plenary council of Capua where Pope Siricius condemned Bonosus for denying the perpetual virginity of Mary, John Paul II sums up the teaching of the Magisterium by saying that Mary "gave birth truly and in a virginal way, whereby after her delivery she was still a virgin; a virgin […] also as regards what affect her physical integrity". (JP II Address, 'The Virginity of Mary', no 6, Osservatore Romano, 25/26 May 1992, p. 13)"

So those warning shots were fired in 1961 and 1992. And then the Catechism came out. As we see above, it is careful to uphold the dogma.

Here are some further and more explicitly articulated reasons why the re-interpreters of this dogma are wrong:

1. According to Church tradition and the teaching of the Magisterium it is not enough to accept just that Jesus' conception was virginal; his virginal birth must also be professed. (If the "virgin birth" just meant the sort of birth a woman underwent who conceived virginally (which is what our modernists are saying), it would be superfluous and redundant for the tradition to make a point out of how the virginal birth is a distinct marvel from the virginal conception. If the former is reducible to the latter, why bother mentioning it?)

2. These authors exclude physical integrity from the notion of virginity, but for Scripture, the Fathers and the tradition, it is an essential part of it. Any invocation of natural science is just bluff. This is not an issue about science. There are some things in life that are up to human convention and socialization. What virginity is and is not is one of these. The understanding of virginity that excludes physical virginal integrity is no more objective or "scientific" or true than the understanding that includes it. And the Church understands Mary's virginity in terms of the later understanding and not the former.

3. According to the Fathers, the uninterrupted physical virginal integrity of Mary in her giving birth to the Lord is not something merely bodily. It is seen as a sign of supernatural realities. It testifies to the miracle of the virginal conception and in so doing testifies to Christ's Deity. If Mary lost her physical virginal integrity, there would be no proof/sign that she conceived Jesus virginally and so there would be one less highly powerful proof/sign that Jesus was the Son of God. This would be a state of affairs that would be highly unfitting.

4. Mary is exempt from the curse of original sin. Even death itself comes to her in as much as she is naturally mortal, not as a punishment for sin. So if pain in child birth is a result of original sin, then why would Mary have to undergo this curse? She is not cursed. She is blessed above all women because she is the immaculate Mother of God.

5. Physical integrity as a constitutive element in virginity is explicitly mention in canon 3 of the Lateran Synod: "The ever-virgin Mary conceived without seed through the action of the Holy Spirit…and incorruptibiliter gave him birth without any detriment to her virginity, which remained inviolable even after his birth". You really can't get around the word incorruptibiliter. It upholds the traditional understanding of Mary's in partu virginity. Other texts could be cited to the same effect.

My apologies for my ignorance.  Thanks for the abundance of information on this point!  Merry Feast of the Incarnation!

Turns out disabled babies have a "right" to be aborted

Expendable Babies

ROME, DEC. 19, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Abortion advocates have long argued for a woman's right to control her body and to be able to dispose of the unborn child if she wishes. In a bizarre decision, a Belgian court has extended that reasoning to say that a child has a right to be aborted.

A Belgian journal, "Revue Générale des Assurances et Responsabilités," has just published the decision handed down by the Brussels Court of Appeal on Sept. 21 regarding the case of a child born disabled after an erroneous prenatal diagnosis, according to the Gènéthique press review for Nov. 29-Dec. 3.

The court ruled that the child's parents could claim damages from the doctors who failed to detect the disability. They said that by making therapeutic abortion legal, the legislators intended to allow women to avoid giving birth to seriously handicapped children, "having regard not only to the interests of the mother, but also to those of the unborn child itself."

Thus, the judges considered that the child would have had the "right"

I think we should let the babies be born and then wait till they can talk. Then ask them if they want to die. My money is on "no".

I also think that the Brussels Court of Appeals needs to volunteer to be euthanized to set an example for the rest of us. Just the court, mind you, not the humans who comprise it.

Lenny Bruce Vindicated Again

He once observed that "The Catholic Church is the only 'the Church'". When you want to know what "the Church" thinks about something, you don't turn to the Nebraska Missionary Alliance or the Seventh Seed in the Spirit Peculiar Baptists.

So today, the bishop of Phoenix told a Catholic hospital that was not practicing medicine according to Catholic principles that it could not call itself Catholic anymore. Bully for him! Lovely to see this display of episcopal vertebrae.

What's fascinating to me, however, is how this purely internal matter of Catholic housekeeping obsesses ex-Catholics like, for instance, Anne Rice, who has been sucking the oxygen out of the comboxes on Jimmy Akin's blog here, here, here, here, and here, screaming about all this.

What never fails to amaze me is how haunted ex-Catholics like Anne are. They "leave" the Church and then obsess over matters of purely internal housekeeping like whether a bishop regards a Catholic hospital system as Catholic. They never really leave. Just hang around and throw rocks through the windows of the old Church while stridently telling the world that the Church has no hold over them. Some of them are from the pelvic left, like Anne Rice. Some of them are from the kooky fundamentalist Right. But the thing they all have in common is that they never can really bring themselves to *leave*. They linger around for years, proclaiming their freedom from the Church while living in tidal lock orbit around it, perpetually facing it as the moon faces the earth, unable all their lives to stop obsessing over it. A peculiar doom for the sin of apostasy.

The Increasingly Demented Kevin O'Brien...

...offers us A Stanford Nutting Christmas. Be sure to check out the awesome Atheist's Prayer to the Periodic Table at the climax:



I think this was caused by the crab we fed him last summer. Midwestern people just don't have the constitution to deal with too much seafood deliciousness. Something about the combination of iodine and salt air just sets them off and they go twonky. Just look at the sad case of Dale Ahlquist (seen here on the right devolving into Neanderthal dementia):



Years of taking him to Ivar's has reduced him to this pitiable state. How do you think I manipulated him into letting me do Manalive?

Marcel LeJeune...

...loves Fr. Robert Barron.

Me too!