Fr. Z on Universal Indult

HT to Brian Kopp over at the UI Blog. Father Z provides 5 "rules of engagement" in regards to the motu proprio.

Fr. Z’s 5 Rules of Engagement for When and If the Motu Proprio Comes:

1) Rejoice because our liturgical life has been enriched, not because "we win". Everyone wins when the Church’s life is enriched. This is not a "zero sum game".

2) Do not strut. Let us be gracious to those who have in the past not been gracious in regard to our "legitimate aspirations".

3) Show genuine Christian joy. If you want to attract people to what gives you so much consolation and happiness, be inviting and be joyful. Avoid the sourness some of the more traditional stamp have sadly worn for so long.

4) Be engaged in the whole life of your parishes, especially in works of mercy organized by the same. If you want the whole Church to benefit from the use of the older liturgy, then you who are shaped by the older form of Mass should be of benefit to the whole Church in concrete terms.

5) If the document doesn’t say everything we might hope for, don’t bitch about it like a whiner. Speak less of our rights and what we deserve, or what it ought to have been, as if we were our own little popes, and more about our gratitude, gratitude, gratitude for what God gives us.

Brian's entire post is worth reading also. Charity is the highest virtue, thank you St. Paul. As can be seen in the comments for my a recent religious post, guns are loaded and cocked and hair triggers abound.

Futuristic Postcards Circa 1900

Well, they were pretty close, uhh, yeah, other than the preponderance of women wearing dresses and men wearing mustachios and top-hats. And that weather control machine. And the moving sidewalk. Well, maybe they weren't so close....


This ship/train reminds me that the new Transformers movie is coming out in a few months. I'm there, dude.

HT Jonah.

Friday Fun, etc.

One for the "heh" file:

Rod Dreher, the Andrew Sullivan who likes girls. Calm your pretty little head down and finish shopping at Wild Oats for those overpriced organic corn nibblets.

I've read your stuff since you were pro-Bush and even back then I thought you were overly excitable. You lack historical perspective. You reaction to both major and minor things is an overreaction that borders on a hissy fit. You really should adhere to the rule of writing something and then letting it rest for a day before you post it.

pchuck 04.27.07 - 8:53 am #

The advice to "let it rest a day" puts me in mind of the age-old "if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down". Sheryl Crow would agree.

We're also having a little discussion over here 'bout good ol' Rod Dreher and his self-imposed gag rule on certain items like Iraq budget bill, Orthodox scandals -- well, that might not be self-imposed. Also the proxy war on Jonah Goldberg, etc.

Speaking of "gag rules", some people are having trouble with logging in to blogger so they can sound off. Here's a help page on this. If that doesn't work, email me and I'll forward your email to Bubba.

My Back Blogs

For some reason, this bootleg video sums up how I'm feeling right now, poor quality included. And that lighting for when he takes the mike is perfect.


Don't you hate it when you're trying to make a bootleg at the Dylan show and your girlfriend keeps trying to make out with you, causing the camcorder to flop around wildly? Oh, well....

I love the "oh, by the way" harmonica solo at the end.

Also - maybe I'm really late to the game here, but I just found out you can take still "snap-shots" of youtube videos with ALT-PRNT-SCRN. Pretty neat.

Rosie: Leaving or Fired?

I report, you decide. Either way it's beautiful news that Rosie O'Donnell is going to be off Barbara Walters's popular morning show, "The View". Here's NewsMax's piece. Excerpts:

O'Donnell may have broken the proverbial camel's back this week when she used the F-word and grabbed her crotch when she emceed a gala awards presentation in New York .... According to the New York Post’s Page Six column, Barbara Walters "lowered her head on the dais and covered her face with her hand” when Rosie dropped the F-bomb.

[snip]

O’Donnell ended a rant about Donald Trump by grabbing her crotch and shouting, "Eat me!" .... She also called Trump an "old, bald billionaire” and made a crude reference to his private parts.

Laura Ingraham reported the news on her show this morning with much celebration. She said that during the announcement the token conservative on the show, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, had a huge smile and was silently beaming. Laura speculates that Rosie will pull out all the stops on her verbal atrociousness in her final days. Nevertheless, the departure does seem to be a victory for sensibility and decorum.


Supposedly O'Donnell's presence was good for ratings, but it's being speculated that the recent crescendo in her crude behavior and anti-Catholic, anti-American vitriol is being seen as a liability regardless. My mother-in-law had been a faithful fan of the show but she quit watching it soon after Rosie joined. It was just too offensive for her after the poison contributed to the dialogue by O'Donnell. My opinion is that the show has always celebrated a mindless liberal viewpoint; the little I've seen of it has been enough to verify that.

A Very Funny Post Re: Hell and Who Gets to Go There

Poking around on the Universal Indult blog and I found this piece of heavenly common sense on the hellishly complicated topic of the fate of those who die in infancy.

I strongly advise anyone, if you ever get a chance, to go to a healing mass for people who have lost children during pregnancies. My wife and I went to a beautiful evening mass -- in Parma of all places! -- after our miscarriage in 2003. We were given a candle that we still light during family gatherings.

The Heresy Meter

HT JohnMcG for this "Are you a heretic?" test. We used to joke whenever someone would say something theologically iffy, "Hey, let's pull out the heresy meter!" Well, here it is on the ol' World Wide Web.

I passed... actually I don't understand the graph nor why mine is different than John's. Obviously some heresies are "less unorthodox" than others and therefore preferable, I suppose. I'm not sure if that explains their placement on the list. But take this little quiz, it's a good refresher course on what Christians believe about who Jesus Christ is.

You scored as Chalcedon compliant. You are Chalcedon compliant. Congratulations, you're not a heretic. You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man and like us in every respect, apart from sin. Officially approved in 451. Chalcedon compliant 100% Nestorianism 33% Apollanarian 33% Pelagianism 33% Monophysitism 33% Arianism 0% Monarchianism 0% Adoptionist 0% Docetism 0% Donatism 0% Albigensianism 0% Modalism 0% Gnosticism 0% Socinianism 0% Are you a heretic? created with QuizFarm.com

A Valid Concern

"Catholic and Jewish experts are concerned about relations between their faiths if Vatican plans to revive the old Latin mass include long-forgotten prayers for converting the Jews or roll back respect for their heritage."

First of all, let me say that I believe it's a valid concern. Many Jews applaud the changes in the Catholic liturgy made in the 20th century. Michael Medved recently talked about this at a lunch at the conference I attended in Grove City, commending the removal of the accusation of perfidy ("Oremus et pro perfidis Judæis") from the Good Friday Prayers.

In regards to the words themselves, I would rather have someone praying for me who believed I was a faithless wretch than have no prayers from someone who wrongly assumed I was a living saint. Although pogroms and Good Friday killings of Jews cannot and should not be denied, I'm not sure that the peasants who murdered a Jew on Good Friday afternoon would have been stopped if an earlier Pope had made the liturgical changes which Pope John XXIII did in 1960, removing the adjective "perfidious". But that is speculation on my part; words do have consequences. And either way, the adjective is unnecessary for a valid prayer, so good call, J23, on removing the phrase "perfidious Jews".

It is interesting to note the earlier changes made in regards to these prayers which took place before and leading up to the institution of the Novus Ordo. The missal which is used in the Tridentine Indult Mass is from 1962, so the removal of perfidious had already taken place. This should be pointed out to anyone who makes a dichotomy of the two liturgies. There are still quite a few Catholics alive who went to mass pre-1955, but the indult masses being celebrated now have the new wording in place.


Now I'm not an expert in these matters, but if a reader (Andy?) knows more, please chime in. I will probably consult with a priest friend of mine on this who celebrates both masses and is very balanced on the matter. The above cited article does not point out the distinction between 1962 and 1955, so I feel as if someone did not do their homework on this issue. So ignorance might be responsible for this, but I suggest there might be at least a teensy-weensy bit of bias in the mix here. Some Catholics are embarrassed by the traditionalists and the Latin Mass and face it -- the so-called "rad-trads" have made the whole Latin Mass movement more controversial than it need be. One reason is that some of those people are without a doubt anti-Semitic. But let's try to avoid a "baby/bathwater backlash" which will impoverish the rich liturgical tradition of the Roman Catholic church.

Jackie M on Food Snobbery

Everyone needs to read Schmucks by Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder before they die. Luckily I didn't die laughing while reading it, but it is very funny. The duo takes on everyone from Bill Clinton to Larry Silverstein and every group from TV Weathermen to the ACLU.

Here's a short excerpt from his "Dumb Schmucks" section, the chapter entitled "Restaurant Critics. Talk about food and whine":

Food critics changed forever dining out from a pleasant, non-challenging, no-nonsense family gathering to a fancy-schmancy, status-conscious event where you had to have spent a year at Berlitz to understand the menu.

Waiters turned into poets, describing the dishes as "The lamb is boiled in a reduction of Australian beetle juice, and then is basted with a turkey gizzard mélange and lovingly caressed by an open flame for 30 seconds before being bathed in a 1946 crapola red wine which is assertive without being impertinent."

Suddenly, Da Bella Gypolla, out local Italian restaurant, became a "ristorante" and overnight, spaghetti became pasta, cheese transformed into formaggio, and every shmo diner started using the phrase "Al dente, per favore."

Later in the chapter he explains that burnt fish magically becomes "blackened" if it's served in the "dingy, depressing swamp country of southern Louisiana".

It's odd, but nobody eats a burnt bagel. The fad has stayed mainly in the fish area. But, as this concept becomes trendier, we envision the Cajun bagel, burnt to a crisp.

Funny. Well...OK. His food sensibility is probably not amusing to everyone.