Level Wise

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.

In a recent discussion with Pansy Moss, I said that I would try to post some research on divorce and domestic violence that specifically refutes certain commonly accepted “facts”. Due to lack of time my own comments will be brief. With respect to divorce, Dr. Steven Baskerville writeshere in Catholic World Report:

“Arizona State University psychologist Sanford Braver has shown that at least two-thirds of American divorces are initiated by women. Moreover, few of these divorces involve grounds such as desertion, adultery, or violence. The reasons most often given are ‘growing apart’ or ‘not feeling loved or appreciated.’ Other studies have reached similar conclusions. The proportion of divorces initiated by women climbed to more than 70 percent when no-fault divorce was introduced, according to Margaret Brinig of the University of Iowa and Douglas Allen of Simon Fraser University. Mothers ‘are more likely to instigate separation, despite a deep attachment to their children and the evidence that many divorces harm children.’”

I’ll bet that most of you think an increasing Gross National Product is a good thing for the country. Or maybe you don’t, and you’ve come to realize that GNP stands for Going Nowhere Prettyfast. Anyway, considering how GNP figures are calculated, it is clear that GNP may well be inversely proportional to national quality of life from a Catholic perspective:

Although contradiction, complexity, and paradox await anyone bold enough to make sweeping generalizations about the generations, a sober assessment of our present circumstances requires that we make them. Richard Weaver traces the slow decline of the West to the nominalism of William of Occam in the 13th century, and perhaps he is right. But in our time the pace of generational decline has been staggering and begs for more of an explanation than Weaver proposes.

The main event of the 20th century is this: the Greatest Generation failed to pass the baton.

“The child who has been exposed from his earliest years to good classical music, and has seen his soul being developed by it, will not be nearly as tempted by the crude rhythm and message of rock and other contemporary forms of pseudo-music as someone who has grown up without a musical education. Such a musical education, as several of the Optina Elders have said, refines the soul and prepares it for the reception of spiritual impressions.

The child who has been educated in good literature, drama, and poetry and has felt their effect on his soul — that is, has really enjoyed them — will not easily become an addict of contemporary movies and television programs and cheap novels that devastate the soul and take it away from the Christian path.

Is this finally the last straw? Are EWTN and the History Channel really worth risking the slightest exposure of your children to such images as you accidently hit Fox News on the remote?

I’m with Mr. Aaron Wolf, who says it is long past time to smash your television here:

“There is an invader in your home, and it sits like a god in your living room, in the place of the family hearth. It may hurt your vision, cause brain cells to die, and even keep you from reading a good book. But the worse thing about it is that it is an ambassador for the Culture of Death, a ‘big, bright, green pleasure machine’ whose goal is to introduce you and keep you attached to the world which hated Christ and against which Judgment is coming. It is impossible to shield yourself or your children from all evil (since we are born with Original Sin) but that does not mean that we should leave a 26-inch window into Hell open in the living room …”

“The story is told of Cardinal Kaspar, who heads the Vatican Congregation for Dialogue with other religions. He recently attended a Greek Orthodox service. Some of you may know that their services go on for a very long time. Afterwards the celebrant said to him, ‘I hope that you were not bored’. The Cardinal replied, ‘no, not at all’. ‘It did not go on too long for you then? Perhaps you think we might modernise it or make it simpler’, the celebrant asked. ‘No’, replied the Cardinal. ‘It should stay exactly as it is. It is very beautiful’. So the celebrant said, ’so why did you do all that you have done to your Mass then’? And it is quite true of course, that many people now look towards the east to recover that sense of the mysterious and spiritual in a religion that has sometimes been stripped bare to its essentials and sometimes even beyond. That’s why we need the traditional liturgy…”

The submission of wives to their husbands has got to be one of the least popular teachings of the Catholic Church today — and the case can be made that the Catholic Church isn’t teaching this today at all. The folks at Heart, Mind, and Strength are busy finessing this doctrine into oblivion where it shall die the Death of a Thousand Nuances. For instance, Greg Popcak writes:

“BUT, when the man stops listening to the voice of God speaking through the needs of his wife and children, he becomes not a leader, but a despot. And obedience to such a husband would not be Christian obedience, but rather, idolatry … A husband can only claim authority to the degree that he is aware of the specific needs God has written on the heart of his wife and children and spends his days finding godly ways those needs can be fulfilled.”

How disappointing. To appease his anti-Catholic critics, it appears that Mel Gibson has decided to depart from the Gospels where the Jews are shown in a less than favorable light see. :

“Paul Lauer, marketing director for Gibson’s Icon Productions company, said Gibson has edited the film to show more ’sympathetic’ Jewish characters who were not calling for Jesus to be crucified. ‘We believe we have softened the story compared to the way the Gospel has told it,’ Lauer said in an interview. He pointed to Matthew 27:25, in which the Jewish mob calls for Jesus’ blood ‘to be on us and on our children.’ ‘That’s in the Gospel,’ he said. ‘It’s not in our film.’”