At Least The French Like Cheese

It's been a while since either ninme or I chanted "Die, Boomers, Die," but if the Sec. of State sending a mix tape to France to make amends for not showing up for the anti-terror rally in Paris doesn't convince you, you probably ARE a Boomer.

Kevin Williamson with more on that. 

A word of advice: Next time, send Slayer.
Seriously: If you’re going to send a past-its-prime musical act to an ally in distress — instead of showing up to join the rest of the heads of state in a show of solidarity — then send in the wild boys from Huntington Park, Calif., who are, like the last effective foreign policy maintained by this country, born of the 1980s. James Taylor tells France, “You’ve got a friend.” Slayer tells the world, “You’ve got a problem.” And there’s something in the Slayer catalog for everybody: “Jihad” for the most literal-minded; “Evil Has No Boundaries,” a sentiment that social conservatives could surely endorse; “War Ensemble” for the neocons; and President John Bolton’s agenda for his first 100 days in office: “Raining Blood.” (“Endless war?” President Bolton scoffs. “Try three weeks.”) If you find yourself in a fight, you want to know that you’ve got a friend. But do you really want that friend to be James Taylor?

Noted Boomer Dies

Intellectually, which is all I'm asking. Here is former atheist A. N. Wilson's jeremiad against what his generation hath wrought.

I imbibed all the liberationist sexual mores of the Sixties as far as sexual morality was concerned. 
I made myself and dozens of people extremely unhappy — including, of course, my children and other people’s children.

Not only has he died as a boomer, he predicts imminent Boomer death.

My guess is that the backlash will be even greater in the wake of the whole Jimmy Savile affair, and in reaction against the miserable world which my generation has handed on to our children — with our confused sexual morality, and our broken homes.
Our generation, who started to grow up ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP’ got it all so horribly wrong.
We ignored the obvious fact that moral conventions develop in human societies for a reason.
We may have thought it was ‘hypocritical’ to condemn any form of sexual behaviour, and we may have dismissed the undoubted happiness felt by married people as stuffy, repressed and old hat. 
But we were wrong, wrong, wrong. 
Two generations have grown up — comprising children of selfish grown-ups who put their own momentary emotional needs and impulses before family stability and the needs of their children. 
However, I don’t think this behaviour can last much longer. The price we all pay for the fragmentation of society, caused by the break-up of so many homes, will surely lead to a massive rethink. 
At least, let’s hope so.

That from the Daily Mail. The Guardian, by contrast, wants to normalize pedophilia.

Related: (in a go home and rethink your life kind of way) Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts her One-Night Stand of a Life; (in a here's how reasonable people get to weirdly divergent conclusions about the same sex-scandal kind of way): The Revenge of Conscience.

Building a Culture of Religious Liberty

Chaput the Great hits it out of the park. Have we crossed the Rubicon? Do believing Catholics now find themselves in opposition to the American spirit? RTWT, but here's part:

Critics often accuse faithful Christians of pursuing a “culture war” on issues such as abortion, sexuality, marriage and the family, and religious liberty. And in a sense, they’re right. We are fighting for what we believe. But of course, so are advocates on the other side of all these issues—and neither they nor we should feel uneasy about it. Democracy thrives on the struggle of competing ideas. We steal from ourselves and from everyone else if we try to avoid that struggle. In fact, two of the worst qualities in any human being are cowardice and acedia—and by acedia I mean the kind of moral sloth that masquerades as “tolerance” and leaves a human soul so empty of courage and character that even the devil Screwtape would spit it out.⁵
In real life, democracy is built on two practical pillars: cooperation and conflict. It requires both. Cooperation, because people have a natural hunger for solidarity that makes all community possible. And conflict, because people have competing visions of what is right and true. The more deeply they hold their convictions, the more naturally people seek to have those convictions shape society.
What that means for Catholics is this: We have a duty to treat all persons with charity and justice. We have a duty to seek common ground where possible. But that’s never an excuse for compromising with grave evil. It’s never an excuse for being naive. And it’s never an excuse for standing idly by while our liberty to preach and serve God in the public square is whittled away.

 As an aside, here's his gentle version of Die, Boomers, Die:

In many ways I believe my own generation, the boomer generation, has been one of the most problematic in our nation’s history because of our spirit of entitlement and moral superiority; our appetite for material comfort unmoored from humility; our refusal to acknowledge personal sin and accept our obligations to the past.

Gentle because he prefers conversion to death:

But we can change that. Nothing about life is predetermined except the victory of Jesus Christ. We create the future. We do it not just by our actions, but by what we really believe—because what we believe shapes the kind of people we are. In a way, “growing a culture of religious freedom” is the better title for these comments. A culture is more than what we make or do or build. A culture grows organically out of the spirit of a people—how we live, what we cherish, what we’re willing to die for.

Preferential Option for the Iceberg

Social Security & Medicare slipping closer to insolvency, reports the Chicago Tribune. How do liberal bishops and Lefty Catholic academics wish to solve the problem? By attacking the only guy whose plan is to steer away from the oncoming debt iceberg rather than steaming into it full boor. The liberal plan is to hit the iceberg but reserve three seats in each lifeboat for the folks in steerage. "He hates the poor!" they cry about the only serious proposal to save everyone.

I am so dang tired of the Left acting as if it owns Catholic social teaching -- especially "solidarity," which is about each soul's personal commitment to the dignity of all others in society. It is the exact opposite of creating class and race warfare.

Even on their own terms, exactly what are the Democrats doing for the poor? Obamacare is funded by gutting Medicare: so we destroy the safety net so Sandra Fluke doesn't have to pay for The Pill out of pocket?  In the House they voted unanimously against the President's budget and the Democrats in the House and Senate have neither proposed nor passed a budget in three years. So where are the similar letters of outrage that the Dems do not have the backs of the poor since they are neither bothering to care for them by budgeting for their programs not ceasing to spend money we don't have, which is, as the Pope says in Light of the World, a refusal to live in reality and an insistence that the world's poor shoulder the burden of our refusal to live within our means?

Moreover, have any of these folks actually read the Ryan plan? Because if they had, they would know it doesn't call for any specific cuts. It budgets money in blocks and then leaves it to the Appropriations Committee to fund specific programs. And it cuts no dollars to programs for the poor, it simply slows the rate of increase.

This goes beyond partisanship; this is old-timers unable to think anew in a new situation. These academics and these bishops simply eye a program or two they like and resolutely refuse to focus on the impending collapse of the entire economy. (Die, Boomers, Die! We are tired of fighting your generation's fights.)

The SSPX & The LCWR

Apart from the Resurrection, which stands alone, the two big Catholic stories so far this month are the hint that the break-away Traditionalist group the Society of St. Pius X might be reconciled with Rome and the   stern rebuke to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (one of the 3-4 umbrella groups of nuns in the U.S., infamous for its leadership's dissent from essential Catholic teaching).

Each is a big story and each in its way (presuming the former pans turns out to be more than a rumor) is the happy news of reconciliation with the Church -- although the processes are distinct.

There's been unseemly hand-wringing on the Left about letting the Traditionalists back in and equally unseemly crowing on the Right about the nutty sisters getting slapped down. Both responses are predictable and neither is completely wrong. Reconciliation is hard. Repentance and change are hard.

I've been most edified, however, by The Anchoress' response. She offers an eloquent defense of the "hippie" nuns -- not denying problems with their leadership, but pointing out the immense love and fidelity that shouldn't be overlooked either. At the heart of both matters I think, is really the Catholic version of "Die, Boomers, Die." People attached to the Way Things Were need a little goosing to move it along.

These new interactions between the “liberal hippie nuns” and the ubertraditionalists and Rome, emotions aside, are simply means to an end – God’s end. He makes all things new, continually. Nothing can be made new while in stasis. Movement is required, and intention. When we worship a Being whose ways and thoughts are not ours, it’s easy to get emotional. But we know all things work for God’s glory, and we know that all things have their times and seasons toward that end. 40 years ago, it was the season for religious sisters reach out with new vibrancy, even as others said, “but I liked it the other way!” Now, their petals are waning and new growth is having its day, who knows for how long? And when what is new today fades, someone will wring the hands and stomp the foot and say, “but I liked them that way!”

To an extent I am glad for these busy waters. They tell me the church is full of life, and not safe-but-dead. The Barque of Peter has always traveled rough waters and her skippers will shift right, then left, correct and over-correct as we sail her toward Eternity.

(Read what she says about obedience to boot.)

Then she links to an essay at Happy Catholic that itself links to something amazing and beautiful. One Joanne McPortland, a "liberal" Catholic revert whose sensibilities are clearly 180 degrees from my own rants about the "smackdown" of the nuns. But then the next day, after she's had a chance to pray and think about it, she has a different and highly edifying reaction.

The torch of the Church has been passed to a new generation, and it ain't mine. Hard as it is to admit, God did not call me back to the Church to relive the glory days of Corita Kent and Dan Berrigan, but to put the energy of those days to use in the service of raising up the next generation and preparing it for the joys and dangers that will inevitably arise. The lesson of these late years is the lesson we all must come to in the end, the curriculum of the Baptist: "I must decrease, that He may increase."

There's suffering in that letting go. There's humiliation--the emptying out of pride, the returning of ego to the dust, which will be done to us by others if we cannot do it ourselves. To expect otherwise is to mistake the mission. And to expect praise for what is past, or even acknowledgment, is foolish. "When you have done all you have been commanded, say, 'We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do'" (Luke 17:10).

But there is joy in this acceptance, too. I realized this morning, after hearing the phrase applied over and over to the late Dick Clark, that I don't want to be remembered as "the world's oldest teenager." In my Italian literature class this afternoon, we read Petrarch's note-to-self, scribbled in the margins of his copy of Virgil, after the death of his muse, Laura. In his grief, Petrarch experienced conversion, an awakening to the brevity of time and the need to turn his energies toward the Love that is eternal. "It is high time to flee from Babylon," he wrote--to let go of the gratification of the self, the quest for fame, the need to be right and to be loved that can tempt all of us, poets and nuns and bloggers alike.

RTWT but lo, I believe we have found a Boomer who need not die!

The Secret Lives of Middle-Aged Women

If you are my mother or one of her peers, look away. I wish you not to know I've even **heard** of what I'm about to discuss. And if you're my child, ditto, as I wish you not to know about such things yet.

Are they gone? OK.

I turned 40 more than a couple but not yet several years ago. The main difference besides joint pain after heavy exercise and suffering fools less easily has been in the nature of the catalogs that come unsolicited to our mailbox.

Catalogs full of helpful gizmos for the lady who wishes not to go gently into that good night, they offer sparkly lotions to "deflect" light from your wrinkles, fade creams and bleaches for your age spots and unwanted hairs respectively, frighteningly stiff foundation garments, orthotic devices for your feet, more diabetes-related products than one could imagine, vitamins for vitality, and wardrobe items designed to disguise the spreading middles and derrieres of the mature woman (mostly consisting of tunics, peasant skirts and clothing with sequins).

Everything you need to be fabulous, and look not a day over 35.

I'm all for being fabulous, but you know what else is always in these catalogs? A product category that used to be either not there or was at most a single item tucked in an obscure inner page and described with pictures and language such that naive persons such as myself did not understand what it was.

Boy, howdy, there's no missing the point now, though (sorry, that was written innocently, I promise). Now the catalogs all have a 2-3 page spread of these "personal" devices, and they're so anatomically correct as to be completely dangerous to have in a house full of innocent children. Today I received a Solutions catalog, for example. It used to be an innocent purveyor of home gadgetry, but recently it started including a full page of items for "intimate health," including one which, I'm assured, is so splendiferous it is sure to become "one of my favorites."

One of?

Salesmen respond to markets, so I can only assume this is what the retiring female Boomers are asking for. I've come to see these catalogs as a saddening window into what the aging boomers actually expect from life: An endless effort to look younger, and a life lived alone and utterly self-absorbed. It's not a very pretty commentary on the culture they built for themselves when they were young. Certainly not fabulous and full of opportunities and choice.

BXVI, Prophet Pope

Joseph Ratzinger, 1969:

The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.

She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members….

It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek . . .

The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain . . .

But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.

Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty.

Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals.

But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

What an extraordinary mind and person! Curtsy: Fr. Z.

Make Friends & Money, Quick

Or Dutch doctors will kill you. "Loneliness" and poor finance are now justifications for euthanasia. As Wesley Smith says, once you feed the Culture of Death, "it is never satiated, the categories of the killable, never finally enough."

Note to Boomers: the expression is Die, Boomers, Die not Kill, Boomers, Kill

Die, Boomers, Die --Hollywood & Race Edition

Disappointingly, Morgan Freeman made dippy remarks about racist opposition to Obama a little while ago. Now he's been invited to a tea party by one of the movement's original organizers, Ali Akbar. Behold how he reveals the race question to be a sub-set of the Boomer question in an open letter:

I do believe that you are wrong in what you said about the tea party, but I would rather prove it to you than castigate you for your comments.
I also understand that your reflexive comments came from experience. You grew up in a different America than the one that I was blessed to be born into. We both grew up in the south, but I never saw ‘White Only’ signs. I’ve been called a name or two in my three decades, but racism has always been the exception in my life, not the rule, as it probably was in your youth. I understand your suspicion of conservative political movements. It is rooted in pain and fear and memory, and though I never saw the horrors of segregation that you did, we share that cultural heritage.

Akbar has looked to Freeman as a father-figure:

I idolized you as a boy. Growing up without a father, you were one of the strong black men in my life who gave me a model to follow. Each of the characters you played had dignity and confidence. I tried to emulate the strength you projected. While many of my friends headed down the all-too-familiar path of drugs, unwed pregnancies and crime, I’ve striven to live a life with dignity, be an example for my brothers and make my mother proud.

And that makes the stupid comments painful:

Your comments about the tea party have caused me physical pain. You’ve rekindled the old painful paradigm of Uncle Tom – that any black man who votes Republican is some kind of sellout. It’s not true. I work hard, pay my taxes, love Jesus, and I’m good to my family and community. In effect, your comments have stereotyped an entire group of people. And I know in my soul that you must regret that on some level.

He winds up with this:

Mr. Freeman, I’m not asking you to adopt my political views. You’re in your seventies, and a political shift is not in your future. I’m reaching out to you because I want you to think better of your fellow countrymen. Barack Obama is in the White House, and Herman Cain just won the Florida straw poll. America is the land of opportunity for black Americans like never before.
I’m hoping that you’ll come to a tea party in Tennessee — the place of your birth. Really anywhere in the country that works for you; I’ll set it up with the one of the thousands of activists I know around our great country. I’d be delighted to introduce you to good people who will welcome you with open arms, disagree with you, and then feed you some of the best barbeque you’ve ever tasted.
Racism is an ugly thing, but I assure you that it is part of our past, not our present.

Good on 'im, and RTWT.

Tom Friedman's House

 

Shamelessly pinched from here.

I don't know why I tortured myself on a Sunday morning by reading Tom Friedman, except that My Spy in New York pointed out that the first third of this column appears to get it right: future generations of Greeks are being robbed by the current generation, which ran up debt lavishing perks on itself, with no concern for justice to anyone else. Could Tom Friedman of all people have gotten on the Die, Boomers, Die bandwagon?

Sounded promising, but no, the fault turns out to be Capitalism's. I actually agree with him, because he's describing crony capitalism, which ain't capitalism at all, but Big Business' corrupt collusion with federal regulators to make actual free markets impossible. Friedman thinks the solution is more federal regulation and less liberty, and that Eric Cantor is the epitome of Boomer self-indulgence.

Let's just all picture Friedman's house in our minds whenever he lectures us about such matters.

Caustic-Free February

There are several writers in the commentariat who at one time or another have said things so revealing of paucity of soul or judgment that I just stopped reading them or reading anything by other people responding to them. It's not animus on my part, merely time management. As soon as I see certain names I know nothing serious, but only self-absorption, will follow, and I look for actual news or ideas.

That people I respect in public life don't do the same utterly mystifies me. Why, for example, anyone pays any attention whatever to the ramblings of the ladies on a little-watched daytime television show like The View I've no idea. I would not know who any of them were, nor have heard of the program, without people I like constantly calling them to my attention. Why their silly utterances are considered worth dignifying with responses and furthering with publicity I can't imagine. Mr. Darcy once knew better than to engage Mrs. Bennett in conversation beyond civil formalities. Today she has a tiny talk show and Mr. Darcy issues breathless point by point refutations, ever in high dudgeon over her follies.

Ordinarily Dana Milbank is one of the creatures on my "Don't Read" list, but his Palin-Free February idea is catching everyone's attention and for once I agree with his general idea --though I suggest it be employed not against Sarah Palin, but against all the habitually petty. I really, really wish my favorite columnists and bloggers would learn from Dana Milbank and quit giving importance to people who never break news or engage any important ideas, but only make catty, self-centered comments.

The tone of our public discourse wears me, but it's not anger that troubles me. Where important matters are at stake, there will be high feelings and frustrations, and sometimes the real trouble is that we are not angry enough -- our senses of justice, liberty and basic decency having been corrupted and our love of the noble seriously debased. I love an elegant polemic, provided it marshals facts into an argument. ("F--- you" does not qualify, nor does "Ha-ha, you misspoke that time.")

What I have no patience for is protracted arguments about unimportant matters, and the tone which now passes for sophistication which is actually more suited to mean teenaged girls and flamboyantly gay men. 

I guess this is actually another Die, Boomers, Die rant on my part. The last two weeks of hostile exchanges about civility have appeared to me utterly detached from reality. The folks in Tucson behaved quite wonderfully, actually --they didn't need a lecture. And civility entails a great deal more than refraining from the argument ad hitleram. It means being the sort of person who, confronted with a tragic death, is capable of an impulse other than, "The world needs me to comment," thus drawing attention away from the dead and grieving and toward the self.

The utter self-absorption and lack of impulse control of the chattering classes who tell us what to think about is what's truly uncivil. I'm distressed not only by those making shameful and preposterous accusations, but also those who could not hold their fire a few days until the bodies were cold to defend what didn't need defending, as no one was fooled or persuaded. The only right response was, "Hush, we can debate later, a moment of silence for the dead."

I begin to understand the real reason we can't have prayer at public events. We'd have to shut up for a moment.

I Think I Heard A Head Explode

...and it was poor Christopher Hitchens', reading that the Pope is the George Orwell of our time. And from a fellow atheist, no less.

A great deal of the hostility to the Pope’s visit was likewise caused by his having been right, at least in some things, such as the insufficiency of consumerist materialism as a basis for a satisfactory existence. There are few human types less attractive, surely, than failed materialists, which is what the British, or at least so many of them, now are. They consume without discrimination what they have not earned: which is why many of them are so grotesquely fat as well as so deeply indebted. Indeed, there is scarcely any kind of debt or deficit to which we as a nation have not resorted in order to continue (at least for a time) on our vulgar and degraded way. A nation that behaves thus is quite without honour or self-respect, collective or individual. All this Benedict XVI has seen with a perfectly clear eye; and if what George Orwell once wrote, that we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men, we might even call the Pope the George Orwell of our time.

The important part of the essay is Dalrymple's assertion that hatred for the pope stems from the fact not that he stands athwart any particular policy, but against an entire Weltanschauung. He says what Benedict is doing is forcing a crisis of confidence in the dominant culture, akin to that described by J.S. Mill when he asked himself a question:

Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be erected this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness answered ‘No!’At this my heart sank within me; the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been founded in the continued pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

But I'm feeling puckish, and therefore skip to the yummy (because keenly observed) insult to the "arrest the pope" crowd:

the very resort of some liberals to the language of arrest shows how, not very far beneath a veneer of libertarianism, lies an authoritarianism that makes Benedict XVI look very liberal indeed. They want arguments to be settled by arrest: in other words, who can arrest whom, assuming that they will always be the ones to wield the handcuffs.

 The pope is the real liberal.

Great News For The White House

Narcissism no longer a psychiatric disorder. Self-esteem movement triumphant.

Sigh. Note category this is filed under.

"Imagine" Rational Thinking. It's Easy If You Try

And now for another round of Die, Boomers, Die! In which boomerism is dissected line by line, without any insult to children's poetry; and John Lennon's "Imagine" gets a second round of scoffing.

Supplemental Theology

Shamelessly pinched from here,
curtsy Kaching!

Potpourri of Popery, Catholic Sundance Edition

Happy Ascension Thursday Sunday for those to whom it applies. The Pope travelled to Portugal last week, where his spokesman had promised us he would deliver an "intense message" at Fatima, which he did, so let's get to it.

Popery 

Benedict made headlines before even disembarking from his plane with his in-flight comments. It is clear he considers the Fatima message and his preaching there an essential moment of grace and purification --the beginning of casting off the "filth" (as he called abusing priests and enabling bishops in 2005) of the 1970s generation of clergy. I am tempted to say the message of the entire pilgrimage was "Die, Boomers, Die," but of course that is not the way he put it. The overall message of the pilgrimage was cling to Christ, renew your faith and embrace penance as the only way some devils are cast out.  

In an interview with reporters, I liked his succinct formulation of Europe's mission:

I think that the precise task and mission of Europe in this situation is to create this dialogue, to integrate faith and modern rationality in a single anthropological vision which approaches the human being as a whole and thus also makes human cultures communicable. So I would say that the presence of secularism is something normal, but the separation and the opposition between secularism and a culture of faith is something anomalous and must be transcended. The great challenge of the present moment is for the two to come together, and in this way to discover their true identity. This, as I have said, is Europe’s mission and mankind’s need in our history.

Wonder what he would say America's mission is? But that's not what made headlines. This is what made headlines:

the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church. This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice. Forgiveness does not replace justice.

Stung by the just accusations that they'd gone way too far in their Holy Week feeding frenzy on the Pope, they eagerly embraced his absolution in worldwide headlines. Didn't see too much coverage of the remainder of the thought, however:

In a word, we need to relearn precisely this essential: conversion, prayer, penance and the theological virtues. This is our response, we are realists in expecting that evil always attacks, attacks from within and without, yet that the forces of good are also ever present and that, in the end, the Lord is more powerful than evil and Our Lady is for us the visible, motherly guarantee of God’s goodness, which is always the last word in history.

Blah-de-blah, don't bore us with that hope and salvation stuff. Despair! Despair!  Anyway...good stuff, too, on the Greek economic crisis, but at this rate we'll  never leave the plane.

The Pope did what he normally does on pilgrimages. He celebrated Mass with the faithful (beautiful homilies in Lisbon, Fatima, and Porto); he prayed with them (vespers with priests & religious, consecration of all priests to the Immaculate Heart, candlelight rosary); and he met with various groups. His meetings with the faithful are always both challenging and encouraging, and frequently quite beautiful too: the beauty that springs from a profound personal life of prayer. 

This visit was no exception, but I'm going to skip the general homilies and focus on the meetings with groups, where the pope can be, in a good way, quite tough. He is always gentle, but equally direct. The iron hand in the velvet glove as they say.

I sometimes get a kick out of Vaticanese. Where Americans would say, "Meeting with leaders of the arts and sciences," the Vatican has the Pope "meeting with the world of culture." At any rate, here's what he told 'em. It's lengthy but will repay careful attention.

Society continues to respect and appreciate [the Church's] service to the common good but distances itself from that “wisdom” which is part of her legacy. This “conflict” between tradition and the present finds expression in the crisis of truth, yet only truth can provide direction and trace the path of a fulfilled existence both for individuals and for a people. Indeed, a people no longer conscious of its own truth ends up by being lost in the maze of time and history, deprived of clearly defined values and lacking great and clearly formulated goals. Dear friends, much still needs to be learned about the form in which the Church takes her place in the world, helping society to understand that the proclamation of truth is a service which she offers to society, and opening new horizons for the future, horizons of grandeur and dignity. The Church, in effect, has “a mission of truth to accomplish, in every time and circumstance, for a society that is attuned to man, to his dignity, to his vocation. […] Fidelity to man requires fidelity to the truth, which alone is the guarantee of freedom (cf. Jn 8:32) and of the possibility of integral human development. For this reason the Church searches for truth, proclaims it tirelessly and recognizes it wherever it is manifested. This mission of truth is something that the Church can never renounce” (Caritas in Veritate, 9). For a society made up mainly of Catholics, and whose culture has been profoundly marked by Christianity, the search for truth apart from Christ proves dramatic. For Christians, Truth is divine; it is the eternal “Logos” which found human expression in Jesus Christ, who could objectively state: “I am the truth” (Jn 14:6). The Church, in her adherence to the eternal character of truth, is in the process of learning how to live with respect for other “truths” and for the truth of others. Through this respect, open to dialogue, new doors can be opened to the transmission of truth.

He is not saying the Church is open to relativism, under whose tyranny we all currently labor. He is saying that the Church is at one and the same time both the guardian and teacher of Truth and herself learning how to present that truth to the current age. She does not, in other words, stand above the culture in judgment as if her members were not themselves part of their own culture, but seeks and is willing to be enriched by it. Love this line:

Given the reality of cultural diversity, people need not only to accept the existence of the culture of others, but also to aspire to be enriched by it and to offer to it whatever they possess that is good, true and beautiful. 

In other words, the Church is not afraid of what science and the arts have to offer that is true, good and beautiful, and he challenges artists and scientists not to be afraid of what the Church has to offer. Have a little courage, folks!

Ours is a time which calls for the best of our efforts, prophetic courage and a renewed capacity to “point out new worlds to the world”, to use the words of your national poet (Luís de Camões, Os Lusíades, II, 45). You who are representatives of culture in all its forms, forgers of thought and opinion, “thanks to your talent, have the opportunity to speak to the heart of humanity, to touch individual and collective sensibilities, to call forth dreams and hopes, to broaden the horizons of knowledge and of human engagement. […] Do not be afraid to approach the first and last source of beauty, to enter into dialogue with believers, with those who, like yourselves, consider that they are pilgrims in this world and in history towards infinite Beauty!”

He has just told a roomful of artists and scientists that they are not necessarily the open-minded ones in our time. Heh. 

Now, keeping that in mind, look at how he delivers that same message --courage in pursuit of the true, good and beautiful-- in his meeting with bishops.

the times in which we live demand a new missionary vigour on the part of Christians, who are called to form a mature laity, identified with the Church and sensitive to the complex transformations taking place in our world. Authentic witnesses to Jesus Christ are needed, above all in those human situations where the silence of the faith is most widely and deeply felt: among politicians, intellectuals, communications professionals who profess and who promote a monocultural ideal, with disdain for the religious and contemplative dimension of life. In such circles are found some believers who are ashamed of their beliefs and who even give a helping hand to this type of secularism, which builds barriers before Christian inspiration.

Courage is needed, and the bishops are to encourage the brave souls at work in all those fields --but fire and brimstone and anathemas are not what's called for:

The courageous and integral appeal to principles is essential and indispensable; yet simply proclaiming the message does not penetrate to the depths of people’s hearts, it does not touch their freedom, it does not change their lives. What attracts is, above all, the encounter with believing persons who, through their faith, draw others to the grace of Christ by bearing witness to him. The words of Pope John Paul II come to mind: “The Church needs above all great currents, movements and witnesses of holiness among the ‘Christifideles’ because it is from holiness that is born every authentic renewal of the Church, all intelligent enrichment of the faith and of the Christian life,

Simply going back to the way things once were, to some imagined golden age of Churchdom is insufficient --the Church has to find its way of touching men's hearts today. This made me laugh:

One could say, “the Church has need of these great currents, movements and witnesses of holiness…, but there are none!”

Oh yes there are, he says: new movements, and you bishops must walk the delicate path of truly being open to them and to learning from them, while at the same time correcting their defects and slapping down their excesses. 

we must feel responsibility for welcoming these impulses which are gifts for the Church and which give her new vitality, but, on the other hand, we must also help the movements to find the right way, making some corrections with understanding – with the spiritual and human understanding that is able to combine guidance, gratitude and a certain openness and a willingness to learn. 

This seems to signal the Holy Father's attitude about troublesome movements --don't be quick to shut them down, correct the problematic elements. Then he gets to priests and to their own ministry: begone, bishops-as-administrators model!

In this Year for Priests now drawing to a close, rediscover, dear brothers, the role of the Bishop as father, especially with regard to your priests. For all too long the responsibility of authority as a service aimed at the growth of others and in the first place of priests, has been given second place. 

He has already, at the start of the speech, told us what ought to have first place:

fearing nothing except the loss of eternal salvation for your people

He also asks for renewed attention to the poorest of the poor --again, thinking anew about the methods, not just doing the same old --the Church has to find its way:

I would like to ask you, in your role as leaders and ministers of charity in the Church, to rekindle, in yourselves as individuals and as a group, a sense of mercy and of compassion, in order to respond to grave social needs. New organizations must be established, and those already existing perfected, so that they can be capable of responding creatively to every form of poverty, including those experienced as a lack of the meaningfulness in life and the absence of hope [emphasis added].

B16's address to people working for charitable organizations is instructive both as to the nature and the limits of works of charity. I love this definition of charity:

You have heard Jesus say: “Go and do likewise” (Lk 10:37). He exhorts us to imitate the example of the Good Samaritan, which was just now proclaimed, when approaching situations which call for fraternal assistance. And what is this example? It is that of “a heart which sees.” “This heart sees where love is needed and acts accordingly.”

He is there to praise and encourage their work, but adds some subtle cautions as well:

Conscious, as the Church, of not being able to provide practical solutions to each concrete problem, and lacking any kind of power, yet determined to serve the common good, you are ready to assist and to offer the means of salvation to all.

The Church doesn't think she has political solutions to offer, in other words, and is suspicious of efforts to do everything for everybody. Be sure you are acting out of love:

The pressure exerted by the prevailing culture, which constantly holds up a lifestyle based on the law of the stronger, on easy and attractive gain, ends up influencing our ways of thinking, our projects and the goals of our service, and risks emptying them of the motivation of faith and Christian hope which had originally inspired them. The many pressing requests which we receive for support and assistance from the poor and marginalized of society impel us to look for solutions which correspond to the logic of efficiency, quantifiable effects and publicity.

Never forget that the defense of genuine human liberty --including resisting abortion and defending marriage-- is indispensable to charity. (The Pope's repudiation of same-sex marriage was the only other headline to come out of Fatima --all the press got the vapors at the Pope being Catholic once again.)

The services you provide, and your educational and charitable activities, must all be crowned by projects of freedom whose goal is human promotion and universal fraternity. Here we can locate the urgent commitment of Christians in defence of human rights, with concern for the totality of the human person in its various dimensions.

And there you have it: Pope Benedict remakes the world in the image of Christ. This is so long I think we'll forgo the potpourri this time around.

Excellent pix of the whole pilgrimage here, and all the addresses are gathered here.

Photo credit

Gramma Is A Very Vulgar Woman

Because the father who fled into exile to escape the slaughter of innocents definitely backs this Herodian health care bill. I'm pretty sure St. Joseph is on Bart Stupak's side. Curtsy: RCP

St. Joseph the Just, pray for us!

Update: Fr. Z. points out this is a double fail, since it's the solemnity of St. Joseph, but St. Joseph the Worker is May 1st. The Anchoress enumerates the umpteen mistakes in this brief comment and really goes to town:

In her upside-down world, Pelosi may think that this monstrosity she is laboring so mightily to deliver is “life-affirming;” that is because she is -like so many of her generation- unable to imagine life after her own. It takes a “my life right now is more important than any future life” mentality to be this committed to abortion, and to insuring that every means of preventing or ending life, at every stage, is introduced into the public mind as a godly and enviable thing. It takes a mind that willfully misunderstands the nature of both light and life, as taught by the Church she professes to love, to stand there with a smug "unicorns and rainbows" demeanor and spout these deceitful platitudes that are not grounded in any sort of reality.

 I think I just heard The Anchoress say, "Die, Boomers, Die!"

Forgetting Obama Is Black

Great Post from Julie Ponzi on Chris Matthews' latest absurd comment.

The thing is, it isn't really Obama, per se, who is post-racial.  If anything, it is America.  And I'm rather tired of the argument that Obama is anything but the beneficiary of this fact.  He didn't make it so (and he's not old enough to have had anything to do with it); it just is so.  I think the thing that really shocks Chris Matthews is that most of America--that is, the only important or meaningful segments of America--really doesn't care about Barack Obama's race one way or the other.  He is accepted or criticized by most Americans in much the same way that any other president has been or would be.  The only outliers, as I say, are the knuckle-dragging and last remaining racist hold-outs (of no significant political importance) and the self-important, guilt-ridden, condescending, liberals of the Matthews variety.

Oh, yes, yes, yes! We are all tired of the old obsessions. Or as ninme (who started it) & I might put it: Die, Boomers, Die!
Update: Best headline on the topic.

Dying Boomers Dying

When dissident theologian Mary Daly passed January 3rd, it caught my eye mostly because I was in grad school at the height of the great hue and cry over her banning of men from her classes at Boston College. Our professor for a study of the Christian Democracy movement was one Charles R. Dechert, now emeritus, who observed in passing one day that he'd once dated Mary Daly...and sincerely hoped her career wasn't something he'd said. He seemed to think the poor thing was just crazy, flat out.

Charlotte Allen reflects that there is no second generation of Mary Dalys and explores why that might be. I think it's a problem of human nature: there is one, loud assertions to the contrary, and therefore even aberrance has an outer limit. Once you've transgressed absolutely everything, there is simply nothing left to protest and the whole intellectual enterprise becomes exceedingly boring. You have to drop out and start making crafts.

And Allen nails the flaw in the whole Catholic progressive plan:

most Catholics of her generation have not passed on the tenets of their faith to their children—the offspring of the Vatican II generation tend either to be churchless or not to go to church—or, in the case of academics, to their students. It's hard to rebel when you don't even know what you are rebelling against.

Die, Boomer Movies, Die

ninme has a round-up of Avatar smackdowns. The worst thing I've seen about it is that it's a film which gets the audience rooting for the brutal slaughter of the American military, which is a Hollywood first. Forgive me for not being shocked: Sex On A Boat was one of the worst movies ever made, technical accuracy notwithstanding.

However, the topic did allow nin to link to a worthwhile observation: When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"? which makes the trenchant point that white guilt movies are just another way for Boomers to talk about themselves.

Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white.

Oy, did that need to be said.