Around the Internets, Vol. 4

There is only so much time in the day, and yet there are so many people weighing in on the so-called Benedict Option, that there is only one thing we can do. Yes, you guessed it. It's time for... (drum roll) ...Around the Internets Volume 4!!!

For you newer readers, this is a feature I started over a year ago, at which time I described it as "A quick digest of stuff which I've seen, read, noticed, thought 'Gee I ought to blog that', etc. over the last 4 or 5 months."

This time I'm not going back months, but only several days. It seems like all kinds of people have felt the urge to weigh in on the so-called Benedict Option despite Tyrell Northcutt's recent recommendation that this topic be discussed only by "friends around a common table". First we hear from Cleveland's own Tom Piatak who coincidentally showed up in AtI, v2. It's fairly short; here are some pertinent excerpts:

It is a little hard to tell exactly what “The Benedict Option” is, but it does seem to involve at least some withdrawal from public life by conservative Christians.

...

....One of the reasons the Republicans find the abortion status quo convenient is because abortion remains a live issue.  They know that millions of people vote for Republican candidates because of their pro-life convictions, and they also know that many of these people would stop voting Republican if the party officially became pro-abortion or authoritatively conceded that the battle to give legal protection to the unborn was over.  No matter how cynically politicians treat abortion, it is hard to say that any position has become dominant in America when a major political party claims to take the opposite position, its presidents and presidential candidates profess to support the opposite position, and at least some of the justices on the Supreme Court continue to dissent from the decision that is the focus of the opposition.   Indeed, no one who pays any attention at all to American life can fail to notice that a substantial portion of the population does not accept the morality of abortion.

If “The Benedict Option” means a withdrawal from public life, that is where I fear it will l lead: with the issue addressed by Obergefell treated as a dead one, both politically and morally.  That is not where we are today, whatever the New York Times and the Washington Post may want us to believe.  Advocates of “The Benedict Option” may want to consider this before heading for the hills.

It's refreshing to hear someone pointing out the facts we're dealing with here and looking at the consequences of accepting defeat. This dovetails with my belief that although some type of flight from the world might be the only way of salvation for some, having every Christian adopt this withdrawal attitude would mean certain good ideas would be simply cast aside, e.g., starting a Catholic radio station like our new one in Cleveland, or a Catholic publishing company, an outreach group at your parish, etc.

But it is possible that the Benedict Option attitude may have even more disastrous consequences, as pointed out by Thomas O. Meehan in a post today. Excerpt:

Rod Dreher's hobbyhorse snapped under him today.  His horse is the "Benedict Option."  It is his pathetic attempt to have something to say after he gave up on Christians retaking their own societies.  The Benedict option is a call for Christians to withdraw from the public square just as he withdrew to rural Louisiana.  It's a cold cruel post Christian world out there so let's just keep a low profile and tend our little common spiritual garden. I don't know if he really believes this, but he has to write something to stay in business.

Today, oblivious to the obvious, he came out with a call for the US to save the remaining Christians of the Middle East.  The headline:  THE GENOCIDE OF CHRISTIANS

Can Dreher really be so un-selfaware as to miss the message here? 

Clearly, if any group of Christians followed the so called Benedict Option, it is these very victims on the point of extinction.  They kept a low profile.  They kept to themselves.  They cultivated their Christian tradition. They were kind to others. They are the perfect exemplar of the Dreher's mealy-mouth mentality and now they face extinction.

The answer to Tom's question in the third paragraph is: YES. He has no awareness of self, of consequences or of contradictions in his thinking.

Dreher doesn't seem to know who St. Benedict was in any detail.  The founder of Western Monasticism  is a poor model for a whole Christian society's withdrawal from an evil society.  By definition Monks are not the basis of a reproducing population.  Becoming a Monk is rather the point of Monasticism.  It depends on a Christian culture to feed it with more recruits.

A further and more important point here is that St. Benedict did not withdraw from a pagan society.  He operated in a largely Christian one that became more, not less Christian as time went by.  There was no organized opposition to the monastic movement until the reformation.

Mr. Meehan is spot on here, and the only defense that a Benedict Option defender has against his fact-based smack-down is the old standby of he doesn't understand what the BenOp really is.

Before I move from paleoconservative critiques to those of the Wall Street Journal and Crisis Magazine, you will all have to oblige me a comic parallel of which I'm forcibly reminded.

 

Bats are rodents, no matter how much they remind a little boy with an overactive imagination of insects. And becoming a monk is the point of monasticism, no matter how much monks remind a hipster of good food, homemade beer, cool architecture and a safe space on the campus of modern, secular America.

David Skeel seems to take a more empathetic and nuanced approach to the BO in his WSJ piece, but his conclusion is the same: this is not a time to flee the fight. Excerpt:

It isn’t clear what effect the Benedict Option would have on American political life. Even if one envisions the Benedict Option as “strategic attentiveness” to the cultivation of virtue, rather than “strategic retreat,” as Alan Jacobs, another prominent Christian writer has advocated, the Benedict Option implies a reduced engagement in the messy business of politics. At a time when religious freedom is viewed by many as expendable, and appears in scare quotes or their equivalent in major U.S. newspapers for the first time in American history, the practical consequences of reduced engagement could be considerable.

Then he states something which sounds a lot like what I said in my Family Option post. I even mentioned turning off network television.

Yet even those of us who are skeptical of the Benedict Option can acknowledge the benefits of cultivating virtue, engaging more fully in our local communities and perhaps turning off the TV more often. Given the sometimes judgmental tendencies of theologically conservative Christians during the culture wars of the recent past, traditional Christians also might do well to focus a little more on showing what Christian morality looks like, and less on how others conduct their lives.

The problem is that the left is extremely focused on "how others conduct their lives", especially Christians, and in my experience, they are the real busy-bodies. Liberals make Christians look like complete noobs by comparison at trashing reputations. Whether it's public shaming like these sued and fined bakeries are enduring or the application of Alinsky's rule 4, the left has always been more publicly moralistic. You can't convince me otherwise.

Lastly I have to point to Austin Ruse's excellect article in Crisis where he proposes that the real model for confronting the problems in the modern world is Opus Dei, not monasticism. Excerpt:

Something happened to lay spirituality around the time of the rise of monasteries. As important as their work in maintaining Catholic culture, they also tended to create a clericalism that is with us even today. For centuries it came to be known that spiritual perfection was only for the vowed or ordained. Such perfection was not for the laymen. His perfection came almost as scraps from the table of the monks and priests. With the exception of St. Frances de Sales’s “Introduction to the Devout Life,” most of the great classics in spirituality were written not for laymen but for the vowed and ordained.

So little were the laity considered by the hierarchical Church that prior to the Second Vatican Council the laity were defined by what they weren’t, not ordained or vowed, and with no recognized unique vocation.

And even today you see this clericalism whenever an obviously devout young man is told he ought to be a priest.

The ancient Church would not have shared this view. And neither did St. Josemaria. His vision was that laymen were called to the same heights of spiritual perfection as the vowed and ordained and that such a unique lay vocation was on par with the others.

Escriva taught something the earliest Church knew quite well, the universal call to holiness, something that became, under his influence, a key teaching in the Second Vatican Council. At least a part of the Protestant Reformation was related to a rejection of this spiritual elitism.

Escriva said laymen need not remove themselves to monasteries to achieve perfection and that the places they would find Christ were precisely in the home and in the workplace. And it was there they would bring others to the Gospel.

The seeming revolutionary nature of this proposal is recognized by the reception St. Josemaria received when he first took it to Rome. They said he was 100 years too early.

My experience with negative reactions to Opus Dei from religious Catholics has been mostly that there is a lack of the dramatic, e.g., leaving a 6-figure job and moving back to an old family farm. If you get involved with Opus Dei, you'll hear things put in a very matter of fact and practical way. It's all pretty much "meat and potatoes" Catholicism. You're not going to hear a lot of complaints about the clergy around an Opus Dei center. Instead you'll hear things like "What can we as the laity do to help?" St. Escriva himself famously said "It is very much our mission to turn the prose of this life into poetry, into heroic verse." He also pointed out many times that Christ lived 30 years in private life "passing unnoticed". Ask yourself: is this the ideal of the rock star, of the movie star, of the famous internet blogger, of the journalist coming up with the way to save Christendom:

You want to be a martyr. I will place a martyrdom within your reach: to be an apostle and not to call yourself an apostle, to be a missionary — with a mission — and not to call yourself a missionary, to be a man of God and to seem a man of the world: to pass unnoticed!

Well, Jesus said something which sounded very, very similar. But to the modern wordsmith this is not cool, not cool at all. They might think something like "Well, maybe it would be cool if other people passed unnoticed—like Noah Millman, for example—but not me and my BenOp. I have a book to sell, dang it!"

Of course I totally agree with Mr. Ruse that Opus Dei is a much better model for Christian lay people than a so-called Benedict Option. At the very least people searching for answers should check it out. After all, it actually exists, and has been growing explosively since it's inception in 1928. There's a good reason for that.

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Around the internets, Vol. 3

Welcome to another installment of (dum-ta-da-DAAAAAHH...) Around the Internets! This awesome feature is one which I originally described as "[a] quick digest of stuff which I've seen, read, noticed, thought 'Gee I ought to blog that', etc. over the last 4 or 5 months." Actually the time-frame is a bit shorter this time. So without further ado....

Firstly, it's always a good idea to check in with Sistah Raccoon in St. Francisville, Louisiana. She always has something interestin' to share with us. Her latest:

Ain't you glad you not related to Lil Ray?

Lil Ray now telling the whole world how old an feeble an helpless Big Ray be now.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher...

Old age be a humiliation, say Lil Ray. Telling about old people like Big Ray crapping they pants in the hospital. Course he telling ever body all this about Big Ray out a LOVE, you understand, umh-hnh.

Slow down, Lil Ray. You gone get all that land in good time.

Just be glad Lil Ray not telling the world what happening in YOU pants.

Whoa. Let that be a warning to all y'all who be lettin' y'all's kids borrow those bloggin' computers, let alone willing them over all that land. They'll be puttin' up pictures on billboards of you sitting in wheelchairs next!

Meanwhile, in an entirely different part of the internets which Diane pointed out to us (thanks, Diane!), there is some discussion about animals and human sexuality and Rod Dreher's take on it. Near the end of the comments, our friend Owen White reminds us of an incident in Paris back in 2012. From the link provided by Owen:

The taste was electric, almost indescribably good. It was one of the few times in my life when the experience of tasting something delicious made me feel a sense of exaltation. They were like cold sea grenades exploding in my mouth, bursting with saline, iodine, and that metallic taste you only find in oysters. I slurped them from the half-shell, holding them in my mouth longer than usual to savor the new sensations. I have never, ever eaten oysters that prepared me for these glorious creatures. Later, I e-mailed Julie that eating French oysters was like licking the ta-tas of Poseidon’s favorite concubine. She was not amused. But it’s true! The aesthetic frisson was absolutely erotic. Dominique Strauss-Kahn lives around the corner, at the Place des Vosges; I think his proximity to Le Bar a Huitres (Oyster Bar) might explain a lot.

So why was Rod Dreher's wife not amused by his description of eating good oysters being like licking a concubine's breasts? I don't know; maybe it's because she is a Christian. Well, he went ahead and put it out there anyway, along with her reaction. I guess he has a shorter memory about this

So many times, I’ll put something on my blog, and my wife will say, “I wish you hadn’t done that.”

than we do. Just for a sanity check I read this to my wife. Fortunately the floor wasn't damaged when her jaw hit it. But I have to saw that Dreher has bigger ones than me; that doghouse don't be looking too good this time of year. The obvious takeaway is this: it's okay to have sex with animals if they are dead and being served by a Parisian cook. For the record, I'm still going to pass.

This all reminded me of the time (and you'll see why in a moment) that Dreher referred to conservatives as "mongoloids" and then made the weak excuse that he meant it in "the Ignatian sense", referring to the character named Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces. My memory had been jogged about a link Topix Pat provided to another man's experience with the book; excerpt:

One scene, near the beginning of the book, had an especially dizzying effect on me. (I’ve read it hundreds and hundreds of times.) It’s where we find Ignatius practicing a little "self-love" in his bed; an innocent, even saintly, wank to a happier time in his life. He had accessories nearby: a rubber glove, a piece of fabric from a silk umbrella, and a jar of Noxzema:

Ignatius manipulated and concentrated. At last a vision appeared, the familiar figure of the large devoted collie that had been his pet in high school...Ignatius’s eyes dilated, crossed, and closed, and he lay back among his four pillows, hoping that he had some Kleenex in his room.

This is the page where I went fag. The solitude and isolation, the very sadness of it all, didn’t turn me off—on the contrary, it was the hook. Sex scenes had always been filled with gorgeous people. Ignatius wasn’t gorgeous. But he was sexual. I think it must have been the first time, in literature or film or life, when it occurred to me these were two different things. It was loud and clear. I had been fooling myself. I wanted something else from the Ignatiuses of the world. Something if much more than hugs.

So we find out now that the inspiration for Dreher's famous referring to conservatives as "mongoloids" is a grown man with over-valued intelligence who thinks about the collie he had as a boy while he is "practicing a saintly wank". I don't know if everyone who reads A Confederacy of Dunces becomes a homosexual the way Giancarlo DiTrapano says he did, but it's probably not worth the risk. At any rate, this might explain why the topic of sex with animals is of interest to the Working Boy; it's been in his wheelhouse for a long time, or so it would seem.

By the way, you all might want to give that entire oysters post a read. It has a lot of interesting material about going to a Novus Ordo Mass celebrated in Latin in Paris and how great it was. I think it's just one more piece of evidence that, like Casella noted, Mr. Dreher remains "culturally Catholic" no matter how incessantly he insists that he's not.

Update: Pikkumatti has provided a pertinent link with this very interesting selfie. (Title translation: Ignatius, my love)

Around the internets, Vol. 2

A friend sent me this email last week. Here it is slightly edited:

I'm really not trying to get you to snap your molars off at the gum line, but I can't help but point out this followup, once again illustrating what a master manipulator Dreher is. As we saw, having baited the anti-Catholics with the Home babies story, he then quickly picked a fight with Andrew Sullivan both to provide himself with a "cutout" and to get himself linked up the food chain by provoking a response from Sullivan, which Sullivan duly supplied.

But the guy who TMFKS reminds us ostentatiously made up publicly with Sullivan only a year ago now decides to use him as his condom in two ways: first as cutout, and now as representative of Catholicism. The screaming subtext from the man who's still not going back to the Catholic Church is hardly subtle: if you really want a safely non-libertine, sodomy-free religion, better become Orthodox like him. Otherwise you might have to settle for Catholicism 3.5.

BTW, for any who might want to discuss Dante with Rod up close and personal in a hot, steamy environment, he helpfully discloses the specific YMCA where he now regularly works out and can be found:

It’s amazing that I can stand in the Y in Zachary, Louisiana....

Later my friend followed up with an earnest bleg for a Catholic to respond to this story and I said I toss something up. Which I didn't; I didn't find the time. However yesterday he got a major answer to his wish in the form of this fine article by fellow Clevelander, Tom Piatak titled "More Anti-Catholic Hysteria". Here's the meat of it:

It now turns out that the story has been grossly exaggerated. On Saturday, The Irish Times—a paper that is about as friendly to the Catholic Church as its New York namesake—reported that Catherine Corless told the paper that “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.” One of the boys who found the bones in the 1970s, Barry Sweeney, told the Times that "there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that.” When asked by the Times how many bodies were in the pit, he replied, “About 20.” Nor is it clear that the underground pit found by the boys ever was a septic tank, though it may have been; or that the bodies they saw there were from the home, though they may have been; or that the nuns were the ones who decided to put them there, though they may have been. The Times story also notes that the number of dead children from the institution is "a stark reflection of a period in Ireland when infant mortality in general was very much higher than today, particularly in institutions, where infection spread rapidly. At times during those 36 years the Tuam home housed more than 200 children and 100 mothers." Indeed, the Irish Catholic blog Lux Occulta calculated that the mortality figures at the home are in line with general infant mortality in Ireland at the time.

Four years ago, when the same papers and bloggers trumpeting this story were attempting to blame Benedict XVI for clerical sexual abuse in Milwaukee decades earlier, British atheist Brendan O'Neill made this telling point: “it might be unfashionable to say the following but it is true nonetheless: very, very small numbers of children in the care or teaching of the Catholic Church in Europe in recent decades were sexually abused, but very, very many of them actually received a decent standard of education.” Whatever may have happened at one home for unwed mothers and their children in Tuam, O'Neill's basic point also applies to the vast number of Irish nuns who served in countless schools and hospitals in Ireland and throughout the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Rod Dreher's desire to pass judgment on Irish Catholicism on the basis of one poorly sourced story, and Andrew Sullivan's desire to jettison sexual morality on the basis of that same story, tell us that they cannot be trusted when it comes to the Catholic Church. Nor, indeed, can the myriad of newspapers that gleefully ran with this story.

I'm glad Tom was the one who responded to this. It's a common sense correction using facts and the title is so accurate. It is hysteria—note how old the subject matter is. Bill Donohue is always pointing out that the abuseniks must consistently go further and further back in time to find the evidence demanded by their narrative. It is anti-Catholic; Rod Dreher is anti-Catholic, Andrew Sullivan is a Catholic who is always bashing the Catholic church for its core teachings so he is basically an enabler of anti-Catholicism. And the initial word more just reminds us that this is just the latest round of hysteria from the scandal machine which will emanate from the tares among the wheat until the end of time.

Another reason I'm glad that a serious writer like Mr. Piatak responded was because it elicited this even more hysterical response from one of the aforementioned anti-Catholics in a lame partial-retraction:

It’s wrong to call all this “good news,” but to me, it is a relief to learn that the Church may be less culpable than the initial reports indicated. I posted the shocking first story, and have posted the debunking follow-ups as they’ve become available. That hasn’t stopped pious Tom Piatak, a stringer for a turgid Midwestern monthly, from losing his grip over my blogging. A “bitter apostate” he calls me, which is theologically ignorant; according to the Catechism, an “apostate” is one who totally repudiates Christianity, while a “schismatic” is one who affirms Christianity but who does not submit to the Roman pontiff. But this isn’t really about theology with him, but rather tribal breast-beating....

Who is losing their grip here? Sorry, but this verbal ad hominem assault on Tom Piatak is not going to go well for Rod Dreher. Tom Piatak is not some breast-beating neanderthal drone sent by the Catholic hierarchy. He is a nice guy and a smart, traditional conservative who writes for Vdare, Takimag, and ...oh, wait... lookie here! Seems like Mr. Piatak wrote for TAC once upon a time six years ago.

As Mark Levin once remarked in a similar situation, "Oh, the pain of it all."

Around the internets, Vol. 1

A quick digest of stuff which I've seen, read, noticed, thought "Gee I ought to blog that", etc. over the last 4 or 5 months. Maybe I'll make this a regular feature.... Please don't hold your breath.

There's an interesting albeit rambling post on the Ochlophobist blog in which our friend Diane really shines in the comments. I like reading Owen's stuff; he's a lot more "picky" than I — for lack of a better word — that is why it's sort of interesting that he became Catholic, left the Catholic Church for Eastern Orthodoxy for 10 years, and has now sort of come back to here comes everybody, but admits he still might receive communion at a Greek church. Which I don't really get, but I'm me and Owen is more fascinating that way. And plus I get the feeling that he is a genuinely good person who knows what he is doing even if I don't get him.

In the hilarity department we have this from Kathy Shaidle, her rather deprecatory take on our favorite (snort) book, The Little way of Ruthie Leming. Here's an excerpt from the aptly-titled "Why not just accept that your family are jerks and tell them to drop dead?":

“When I was younger, I left my hick family in their hick town and went to the big city where no one would laugh or yell at me for wanting to make something of myself.

“A family tragedy forced me to go back home, where my family and I were reconciled — which is what I thought I wanted cuz I read it in a book somewhere.

“Better yet, I got a book of my own out of it that sold a ton of copies.

“But now I’m miserable again because it turns out that my family is still a bunch of assholes.”

Last but not least, our favorite Paleo-Paleo-Conservative, Thomas O. Meehan, reports on the quest for meaning and purpose on the part of "The" "American" "Conservative".

The American Conservative has a reader survey up at the moment. Have they finally noticed their own pointlessness? Once an dreadnought of Paleoconservatism, they degenerated into a ship of fools in search of a heading. It's telling that a magazine founded by people with adamantine convictions should now be reduced to asking the readership what it wants to hear.

I encourage all readers to rush to the TAC site and put in your two cents. I did. Of course, I asked them to get rid of the most egregious barnacles (Dreher, McConnell) and stowaways, (Millman). I also added that they can do without the children they recruited (Coppage, Olmstead). Of course, I also suggested that they might return to the Paleoconservative roots from which they sprung. Finally I suggested that they try breaking some news rather than merely mooning over events as they do now. Phil Geraldi is the only one at TAC who tells readers things they don't already know.

It is important to recognize this survey for what it is. TAC realizes that having purged actual conservatives in order to forge some sort of new conservatism, they have created an amorphous symposium of nothing in articular. The point of conservatism is to preserve the best, even if unpopular. Nothing speaks more of TAC's lack of Conservatism than its flailing about for direction in this way.

At first I thought Mr. Meehan meant to write "an amorphous symposium of nothing in particular". Then I realized that the word articular refers to joints in a skeleton. So maybe he meant to write that, pointing out the lack of any specific structural shape. Every other analogy in it is naval, so the jury's out. Keith referenced this piece in a recent comment, but I always enjoy good ol' Odysseus on the Rocks so I thought we'd RTWT together. When this TAC ship finally sinks we'll consult Mr. Meehan's blog again to find out news regarding flotsam, jetsam, life rafts and especially whether any of those cool old brass telescopes were found.

LOL, "egregious barnacles"....