Level Wise

A reply to Shawn McElhinney:

“Authentic Traditionalism is not found in externals Jeff. It is akin to an authentic observation of the Law which Our Lord commanded and which those who were obsessed with external rituals (i.e. Pharisees) did not react to well.”

Catholicism requires externals, Shawn. Lex orandi, lex credendi. But I don’t recall anyone here advocating a restoration in externals alone. Indeed, the compromised externals we are living with today signify a catastrophic decline of belief.

“This is not to say that those attending the Latin mass are Pharisees of course; however, the attachment to externals to the extent many of them have is not spiritually healthy.”

Or, at least they get close. After days of reading ignorant headlines about a “comatose woman”, CNN has upgraded Terri Schiavo’s condition to “disabled”. I say they get close. The article still describes her as being in a “coma-like” state and does not make it clear that Terri is verifiably conscious.

Meanwhile, Greg Krehbiel reminds us that the executive branch is not helpless in the face of bad court decisions:

“Gov. Bush has swallowed the lie of the imperial court. Who, after all, controls the police in the state of Florida? Isn’t it the governor? By the wise design of our founders, judges have no power at all to enforce their decisions. They rely entirely on the executive branch. It’s one of those checks that was supposed to keep us from tyranny, but the check has bounced. Executives act as if they’re captive to courts.

It just gets better and better. Bryan Baldwin of Catholic Light has the following report:

“This afternoon at the Hospice Center Terri Schiavo, whose feeding tube was removed on Wednesday, was denied Viaticum. Monsignor Malanowski was told by police and the attorney for her husband that she could not receive the 1/4 Host he had brought her. (Mrs. Schiavo is fully capable of swallowing.) She has been visited by Msgr. Malanowski for over three years and today, as always, she reacted with joy at his presence as she sat in her chair and turned to greet him.

Here’s an inspiring story of small private businesses making a big difference:

“In a boycott that may be the first of its kind, a group of builders and contractors in Austin, Texas have banded together to stop construction on a new abortion business. Workers were slated to begin construction on Tuesday of a new $6.2 million Planned Parenthood abortion facility.

‘We’re going to do everything we can to stop it, slow it down and make it more expensive,’ said Chris Danze, owner of Maldonado and Danze, Inc. an Austin concrete contractor. Danze is chairman of the Austin Area Pro-Life Concrete Contractors and Suppliers Association. He said every concrete supplier within 60 miles of Austin has indicated it will not supply materials or labor to the project …”

I. Shawn McElhinney, combining the insights of theology and philosophy, takes on the enemies of Catholic print shops everywhere in his latest commentary. As always, Shawn’s treatment is comprehensive and thought provoking.

While I greatly appreciate his stalwart defense of my rights as a printer, nevertheless I am uncomfortable with the classical liberal formulations that seem to cement his argument. He writes:

“For one cannot demand liberty for a particular faculty for themselves which they then turn around and deny to others: this stance is blatantly hypocritical … if one demands liberty for their own conscience, then they must extend the same to the consciences of others who do not agree with them. Thus, the homosexual activists who would appeal to not being coerced against their conscience -by enemies either real or imagined- cannot be credible in their complaints if they are hypocritically trying to coerce the consciences of those who do not agree with them.”

I received one more phone call this morning from a polite lady who also wanted to “confirm” the story, saying “Maybe you don’t realize how big this is and how many people are talking about it.” At one point she asked what I would do if I found out one of my children was homosexual. “Would you throw him out?”, she asked.

A fellow who says he owns a “4 million dollar business” left a message wanting to talk about “last week’s incident”.

Someone sent an e-mail from the franchise website saying I must be “gay” because “homophobes are closet gays”.

Yesterday, my wife discovered that the back of my car had been vandalized with a key, but we don’t know when this happened.

A new blogger asks, “Why is it that some Catholics enjoy Latin so much?”:

“I was born in 1966 and so grew up in the post-Vatican 2 church. I went to public school, and we didn’t learn any foreign languages there. And there was no Latin instruction in CCD. So I don’t know a word of Latin. And when Latin is used at Mass, I find myself getting annoyed at not being able to understand, to participate (and I do not go to Mass to be a spectator). It might as well be Arabic, Russian or Chinese. Apart from nostalgia, what’s the attraction? At my former parish we did some statistics and learned the median age was around 37, so half of the people there were essentially born after Vatican 2. If all this sounds like ranting, that’s probably a fair analysis.”

“It was the Irish Catholics who came up with the idea to remember somehow those souls who did not live by the Faith in this life. It became customary for these Irish to bang on pots and pans on All Hallow’s Eve to let the damned know that they were not forgotten. In Ireland, then, all the dead came to be remembered. This, however, is still not exactly like our celebration of Halloween.