BIG NOT-EASY

Return now to the first weeks of novitiate, inching by as we approached the Big Muddy, Big Ditch—name your obstacle course—the Long Retreat.

We had arrived August 8, another group arrived on September 2.  We and a few novice brothers, who had arrived one by one in the previous year on their own schedule, not in a class, were en route to a 30-day meditation fest that would end on the last Sunday of October, the feast of Christ the King, when we would emerge in all our glory, having survived a long initiation.

If it sounds grueling, consider the fraternity initiation I and one other of us had undergone at Loyola—six weeks of programmed humiliation and physical punishment that led us to brotherhood and in some cases lifelong friendship.  Those were the days.

Youth was wasted on the young, Shaw said, calling it a pity.  Not so this coming novitiate event.  Rather, it was to be life-changing.

The retreat would be the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the 16th-century hidalgo with an itchy sword arm turned dedicated religionist.  Disabled by a cannon

shot in a siege of the Basque city of Pamplona in northern Spain, at 30, he underwent painful surgery for vanity’s sake, so he could wear snappy boots.  While recuperating, he ran out of inspiring stories of military derring-do and turned to lives of Jesus and the saints.  These inspired him in quite another direction.  He began to reassess himself.  From dreams of earthly glory he turned to heavenly.  Accustomed to kingship as going concern, he pictured Jesus as his king, his beau ideal, his general.  Two years after his wounding, he found himself in a cave at Manresa in northeastern Spain, fasting and doing penance and taking on noonday devils and all others that showed up. He had a close call getting to Manresa.  He ran into a Moor and discussed religion as they rode along.  It was almost fatal for his newfound spiritual intentions and for the Moor, who spoke disrespectfully of the Blessed Mother.  Ignatius had to think twice about that and came within a hair’s breadth of chasing the fellow and sticking him with his dagger.  The story, a good one, is that he left it to the mule, who took a different road, away from the Moor. In the cave, wrestling with himself more than with devils for 10 months, not all of it in the cave, he was born again.  He came from the experience a changed man.  Not all of it in the cave, because he had to get out and do odd jobs for food, in which respect he was a sort of Thoreau at Walden Pond, but he did not eat as well.  Out of the 10 months also came a scheme of spiritual rebirth and renewal, the Spiritual Exercises, which in a few years took shape as a little book that shook the world, a sort of blueprint for self-examination and conversion.  It was these exercises, all 30 days of them, to which we 50 young Americans gave ourselves in the month of October, 1950.  Let us consider that experience.

DOWN TO BASICS 

On the first day of the first week, we went at the meaning of life, rehearsing what we already had heard and absorbed, most of us, from our youngest days.  It was simple stuff, reminiscent of the Baltimore Catechism: God made us, we are meant for his purposes.  More precisely, “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.”  Basic stuff, bread and butter Christianity, worth repeating.  We heard it in conferences with “Father Master” in our little third-floor chapel, with its dark walls, dark kneelers, dark chairs.  In the conferences he provided “points” for meditation.  The schedule was “points and meditation” four times a day, with points for the morning given the night before, the better to fall asleep thinking about them, the better to wake up still thinking about them.  It was an exercise in thought control.  We were concentrating mightily. Father Master was also “the master,” as we commonly referred to him, without embarrassment at using a phrase from Eastern religious discipline, not even thinking about it.  For one thing, he was in no way Eastern.  He was Bernard “Bernie” Wernert from Toledo, Ohio.  Gaunt, dark-complexioned, big-eyed, intense even when his face broke into lines with the broadest of smiles, he sat facing us at a little table on which he laid notes on typed half-sheets.  He never looked unprepared and always seemed to say just what he intended. We looked at that face four times a day for 30 days, minus three break days separating the “weeks” of the Exercises—divisions of meditation material rather than seven-day periods.  We meditated also on break days but far less, being given the morning and afternoon for hiking and playing.  The news of a break day came on the second-floor bulletin board after breakfast.  The first of these was the tenth day, after nine days thinking about life and death.  One of us, a high-strung track man who had special permission to go off running on his own to let off steam, burst out almost hysterically at the news.

DEATH’S STING

No wonder.  After creation and our purpose in life on the first day, we heard about sin, death, hell, with a little bit of heaven tossed in at the end.  We pictured ourselves on our death beds, kneeling with shades drawn and lights dimmed.  The sun still shone outside or didn’t, I can’t remember.  But I remember the meditation and recalled it years later, when I told a psychiatrist about it.  He wasn’t treating me.  My wife and I were at dinner with others of his profession prior to a talk by the famous death-and-dying expert Elizabeth Kubler Ross.  When talk with the professionals came to imagining oneself dying, it came to me: I had done that, in the First Week. Into such a week, put your more than usually pious, relatively sensitive 18-year-old.  Put him in a dark room and have him meditate on his death as if it were then and there, and you have the potential of a soul-searing experience—Billy Graham, who had his own life-changing episode, and John Wesley, founder of Methodism, would recognize it.  I shrink from too dramatic a designation, but I do know that tossing hell into the mix in another of the first nine days—before or after, I do not recall—gives a young man pause.  It was certainly geared to help a back-sliding novice think twice about leaving the novitiate, “checking out,” as we put it, or just “checking.”  Neither fear of ostracism on leaving—for most of us, there would have been none—nor precipitate ending of a chosen career (we were young enough to start over, so what?) nor a dipping of one’s personal flag with accompanying sense of failure (again, so what at this stage?) did the job on the dark days of the 22 novitiate months yet to come.  It was the fear of hell that hung in the minds and hearts of some of the weary and disconsolate. So much for hell.  The first week had heaven too.  We pictured torment and loss in meditating the one and joy without end in the other.  Even death had its light moments.  Demonstrating how we know neither the day nor the hour, Father Master listed Jesuits he knew who had cashed in without a moment’s notice.  As he did so, Charley O., Marine vet and highly motivated spirituality practitioner, got a giggly fit, he said later.  He kept it bottled in at the time, and many men together could not have spied it, I’m sure.  It was the image of those Jesuits dropping like flies, he said later.  Which goes to show, you can find a laugh in just about anything if you just let the spirit move you.

No if-possible about it.

Via Ronald Knox, 1 Cor 6:1-11:

1 Are you prepared to go to law before a profane court, when one of you has a quarrel with another, instead of bringing it before the saints?
2 You know well enough that it is the saints who will pass judgement on the world; and if a world is to abide your judgement, are you unfit to take cognizance of trifling matters?
3 You have been told that we shall sit in judgement on angels; how much more, then, over the things of common life?
4 You would do better to appoint the most insignificant of your own number as judges, when you have these common quarrels to decide.?
5 That I say to humble you. What, have you really not a single man among you wise enough to decide a claim brought by his own brother?
6 Must two brethren go to law over it, and before a profane court?
7 And indeed, it is a defect in you at the best of times, that you should have quarrels among you at all. How is it that you do not prefer to put up with wrong, prefer to suffer loss?
8 Instead of that you commit wrong, you inflict loss, and at a brother’s expense.
9 Yet you know well enough that wrong-doers will not inherit God’s kingdom. Make no mistake about it; it is not the debauched, the idolaters, the adulterous,
10 it is not the effeminate, the sinners against nature, the dishonest, the misers, the drunkards, the bitter of speech, the extortioners that will inherit the kingdom of God.
11 That is what some of you once were; but now you have been washed clean, now you have been sanctified, now you have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, by the Spirit of the God we serve.

Think about it.

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

We novices waited table, washed dishes, set tables.  A brother was in charge of the refectory and scullery, “triclinium” in Latin, where dishes and glasses and placeware were washed in super-sized machines and then dried by hand.  Another was in charge of the kitchen, “culina” as in “culinary.”  He was the head cook.  The kitchen had its own wash, for pots and pans.

STRATEGIC RETREAT Another probation, newly established in the early ‘50s, was at Bellarmine Hall, a men’s retreat house in Chicago suburban Barrington.  Second-year novices, having completed the required year spent entirely in the novitiate, went off in twos to wait tables, wash dishes, make beds, clean toilets, and the like.  Getting there was an adventure.  In the absence of expressways, you had to drive through city and suburban streets.

The driver for my partner and me, a brother stationed at the retreat house, took a route from the train station through west suburban Oak Park.  I was thrilled to go down Washington Boulevard — pre-expressway days — past Lombard Avenue, a half block from the family house.  But I knew that was all we would do.

There was not the slightest chance the driver would go even a block off his course, if only to drive down Lombard, much less stop to let me have even a short visit.  Not for another three and a half years, five years after I’d left home, was I to darken its door and sit at its dining room table and eat and drink and enjoy good time with family.  This was detachment from earthly delights.  We didn’t fool around.

The month in Barrington was a major change of pace, exhilarating if tiring.  The priest in charge was a big redheaded guy of nervous intensity who gave me quite a message at the end of the month, telling me I’d turn out all right if I were as good as my father, whom he knew.  That would have been a wonderful thing to hear if I didn’t suspect he thought I was lazy or otherwise deficient.  However, even if I were prone to calling out my superiors, which I was not, I was in no position to object to his comment, even when I took it as a slam.

A word about the two years of novitiate and the “canonical” first year.  Jesuits’ two-year requirement was unique.  All other religious communities—orders, congregations—imposed only one, as required by the church.  The Dominicans, for instance, at the time accepted novices no earlier than after two years of college and ordained them to the priesthood after seven years, for ordination if on schedule at 27.  Jesuits accepted candidates after high school, for ordination at 31, but with two years of training scheduled after that, for a delay of full-time priestly work to age 33.

As for the retreat house, Bellarmine Hall welcomed 50 or 60 men a weekend for a Friday-to-Sunday “closed” retreat.  That is, the retreatants were out in the country far from the madding crowds they were used to, and were expected to keep silent and show up for four or five group “conferences” a day for lecture-sermons by the retreat master.  Years later, I was to be a retreat master at this very place.  The men would file in and listen.  The retreat master and one or two other priests who lived there would be available for individual conferences and, of course, confession.

My father had been going to Barrington since it opened a few years earlier.  He had made retreats in St. Louis, where the Jesuits had “the White House,” and before that at the Franciscans’ retreat house in Mayslake, near Hillside, a western suburb.  The Mayslake retreats were loose affairs, with silence not observed and, as I heard, card games at night for those who were interested.

Not so among the Jesuits, whose retreats were serious refueling operations.  My father took them very seriously.  They satisfied a spiritual hunger for him, though he’d never have put it that way.  He’d had two years of Catholic schooling, just before confirmation at 12 or 13, on the West Side, and two years or so at Chicago’s Austin High before becoming an apprentice printer.

From Joe, the retreat-house cook, I got a chance to be like Jesus, taking it on the chin and smiling.  Joe was a rough-hewn character who found me eminently unlikable and tore into me once for saying something along pacifist lines that sounded unduly idealistic to him.  He practically tore my head off as I washed dishes, yelling in my ear about war never ending, always was, always will be, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Someone, probably a fellow novice, mentioned it to the novice master when we got back.  The master asked me about it nervously and was relieved when I brushed it off as Joe’s just not liking me, without reference to what Joe might do to the next novice he didn’t like.  The novice master apparently took it as a case of a novice’s being willing to put up with shit.  We weren’t supposed to respond in kind and were supposed to rejoice in it for the sake of the kingdom and to be like Jesus.

On the other hand, he couldn’t be matter-of-fact about this fellow at Barrington.  He hadn’t relished the idea of complaining about him to the priest in charge, though I’m sure he would have done so if necessary, and I can’t say I blame him.  I know I didn’t blame him at the time.  I was reshaping and steeling my soul and couldn’t be bothered.

Coming up, the 30-day retreat . . .

The source of our problems: You’ve heard of blaming it all on television, especially when Elvis danced on Ed Sullivan. Or on Prohibition or the Reformation or the Edict of Constantine. Well I have found one who blames it on the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621-83), that well-known apostle of sentimentalism, which I define as the mood that makes one unable to understand a news story without “human interest” thrown in.

Sentimentalism is only half the problem, however. The other half is association-of-ideas, a philosophical doctrine from Hobbes and Locke and a hot item of discussion by 18th-century talk-show hosts.

The pinpointer of these seminal ailments is Yvor Winters (1900-68), a U.S. literary critic who shook up his Stanford students in the ’30s and ’40s, etc. with anti-Romanticism and would be strung up by students or other teachers if he tried it today.

Winters’ problem would be the primacy he gives reason — in poetry but one suspects in all of life — over emotion. For him emotion is a deep pit, something faced as “the brink of darkness,” as he called his only short story, published the year his friend the poet Hart Crane jumped ship in mid-ocean without a lifejacket in 1932.

Crane, a tortured soul by any measure, ordered (and apparently ate) a big breakfast before taking the final leap of despair, a victim of what Winters identified as rampant emotionalism. What do you expect? asked Winters about Crane and any number of other mad poets, the 18th century’s William Blake among them, who bought the primacy of feeling and scorned reason.

This idea was “to break the minds of . . . men with sufficient talent to take the theory seriously.” One is reminded of Janis Joplin and other performers, tragic spirits, who give their all for chaos, saints “of the wrong religion,” as Winters identified Hart Crane.

The crime of sentimentalism: This association of ideas idea seems to absolve the thinker of a need for coherence and unity, leaving him with nothing but emphasis — lots or less of it depending on the weather. In other words, your ideas are great, kid, even if they don’t hold water. They’re yours, aren’t they? And who am I to say you’re wrong? Etc.

Romantic poets — one of whom coined or made memorable the phrase “blithe spirit” — looked in their hearts and wrote (as the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney was advised by his muse when worried what he would tell his girl friend). Winters favored “a logical, plain-spoken poetic,” as reviewer-commentator David Yezzi put it in the New Criterion. This meant he vastly preferred the far less known and honored Barnabe Googe to Sidney, both 16th-century poets, which is like preferring the plain-spoken Harry Truman to the oratorical FDR in political terms, or whole wheat to raisin walnut in Prairie Bread Kitchen terms.

In his poem “Of Money,” Googe says he’d rather have money than friends because with the first he’d always have the second but not vice versa, which is an arresting consideration:

Fair face show friends, when riches do abound;

Come time of proof, fare well they must away.

The appeal of this to Winters lay in its restraint of feeling and rhetoric “to the minimum required by the subject,” as opposed to “rhetoric for its own sake” as practiced by other Elizabethans.

Another of Winters’ favorites, Fulke Greville, a good friend of Sidney, said his own “creeping genius” was “more fixed upon the images of life, than the images of wit” and thus wrote for “those that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world.” An earthier sort, in other words, and not sentimentalistic by any stretch.

In Winters, discontent: Winters’ own poetry was on the money in Greville terms. In his “A Grave,” he has this: “Life it seems is this:/ To learn to shorten what has moved amiss;/ To temper motion till a mean is hit . . . ”

And translating from the 17th-century French of Mme. des Houlieres: “Pathetic plaything of a witless chance,/ Victim of evils and of laws,/ Man . . . must suffer life’s impertinence.” Facing death, he is to “regard it with unhurried breath,/ And know this outrage for the last.”

Or the stunning motto on the back of a bicycling youngster the other day in River Forest: “It’s not the pace of life that bothers me, but the sudden stop at the end.” Only in River Forest.

Winters held feeling in suspicion and wanted it served up with restraint. This is art, to tell the tale, describe the experience, emotion and all, trying to understand it and then presenting it with the feeling it deserves and not a gulp more.

It’s the poet’s duty to take a fix on the feeling and put it in its place. He is to control emotion, “releasing it through constraint,” in Yezzi’s words.

An excess of emotion “obscured the experience” to be communicated, which is why we call sentimentalism sloppy. Bad poems are “slipshod” in their rendering of experience. They are inaccurate.

Ralph Waldo who? Winters clearly thought there was something to be said about the world. Unlike those theorists engaged in “the killing of history” as Keith Windschuttle tells it in his book of that name, he thinks we can get at the truth, or at least get close.

He defended an “absolutist” theory of literature, by which literature “approximates a real apprehension and communication of . . . objective truth.” This alone would get him laughed out of many a classroom today, if we are to believe higher education’s critics.

Interestingly, one of his absolute bad guys in the literary realm was Ralph W. Emerson, who said things like “No man, no matter how ignorant of books, need be perplexed in his speculations.” Oh? This is somewhat like what current educationists say, “Every child can learn,” without saying what it is he or she can learn. But theirs is a slogan.

Emerson saw art, Winters said, as resting “on the assumption that man should express what he is at any given moment,” regardless (apparently) of what he is at that moment. Spit it out, and it’s good, because it’s you. Makes one wonder what did happen to the handsome Narcissus when he fell in love with his reflection in the pond. He pined away and died, that’s what.

. . . reviewed at the time by the late Paul Likoudis:

The unprecedented manner in which Pope Paul VI imposed the Novus Ordo of the Mass created tragic consequences for the Roman Catholic Church, says Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in his new autobiography.

Speaking boldly, like a private citizen, before holding elective office.

Not only did the banning of the old Mass represent a severe departure from tradition, but the revolutionary manner in which the new Mass was imposed has created the impression that liturgy is something each community creates on its own, not something which “is given.”

Not Paul’s finest hour.

Rather than being a force for unity in the Church, the new Mass has been the source of liturgical anarchy, dividing Catholics “into opposing party positions” and creating a situation in which the Church is “lacerating herself.”

Tough language.

Formally imposed after a six-month period of “liturgical experimentation” in which anything -and everything-did go, the Roman Catholic Mass has never attained a universality, stability-or even an element of predictability — for most Catholics around the world; but instead has been a stimulus for never-ending innovations-from altar girls to dancing girls to women priests.

See or have seen the first and second, not the third.

While the Missal of Paul VI “brought with it some authentic improvements and a real enrichment,” the banning of the old Mass caused some “extremely serious damages for us,” he wrote in La Mia Vita, released in mid-April in its Italian translation.

Here’s the nub, the banning.

“I was dismayed by the banning of the old Missal,” he wrote, “seeing that a similar thing had never happened in the entire history of the liturgy….

A blot on the historical landscape?

“The promulgation of the banning of the Missal that had been developed in the course of centuries. starting from the time of the sacramentaries of the ancient Church, has brought with it a break in the history of the liturgy whose consequences could be tragic…. The old structure was broken to pieces and another was constructed admittedly with material of which the old structure had been made and using also the preceding models….

But . . .

“. . . the fact that [the liturgy] was presented as a new structure, set up against what had been formed in the course of history and was now prohibited, and that the liturgy was made to appear in some ways no longer as a living process but as a product of specialized knowledge and juridical competence, has brought with it some extremely serious damages for us.

A manufactured product.

“In this way, in fact, the impression has arisen that the liturgy is ‘made,’ that it is not something that exists before us, something ‘given,’ but that it depends on our decisions.

It follows as a consequence that this decision-making capacity is recognized not only in specialists or in a central authority, but that, in the final analysis, each ‘community’ wants to give itself its own liturgy.

Gallicanism?

But when the liturgy is something each one makes by himself, then it no longer gives us what is its true quality: encounter with the mystery which is not our product but our origin and the wellspring of our life….

The sort of thing you cherish.

He carries the idea further.

“I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis [!] in which we find ourselves depends in great part upon the collapse of the liturgy, which at times is actually being conceived of etsi Deus non daretur: as though in the liturgy it did not matter any more whether God exists and whether He speaks to us and listens to us.

A sort of navel-gazing?

“But if in the liturgy the communion of faith no longer appears . . . where [does] the Church appear in her spiritual substance?,” he asked.

The spiritual gets downplayed or left out.

Too often, Ratzinger lamented, “the community is only celebrating itself without its being worthwhile to do so.”

Waste of time, he’s saying. You can do that at a birthday party.

He’d already said things like this.

On at least two other occasions, Cardinal Ratzinger has criticized specific liturgical abuses [at] other highly publicized events, [where] he has praised the beauty of the old Mass.

But this newly released autobiography is “the first prolonged lament over the wholesale replacement of one liturgy with another.”

In 1969, in his General Instruction of the Roman Missal, Paul VI revised the the Mass and related prayers and banned, with few exceptions, the Mass rite, effective after a transition period of several months.”

The die was cast.

The Mass had undergone “evolutionary changes” throughout history, but always with a sense of “continuity,” Ratzinger wrote, including when Pius V, after reworking the Missal in 1570 following the Council of Trent, allowed for continued use of some liturgies “with centuries-long traditions.”

Not this time, and aiming at recoverying that sense of continuity, he called for “a new liturgical movement to call back to life the true heritage of Vatican Council II.”

“It is dramatically urgent,” he wrote, “to have a renewal of liturgical awareness” and “understands Vatican II not as a break, but as a developing moment.“

Few talk that way in our day. Quite the contrary.

Dear Diary(!) – Man stops to let small white dog come up to Jim on bench, man is staked out, 7 a.m. of a Sunday, book at ready. Dog says nothing. Neither does Jim. Owner man says good morning, takes dog away. Good.

Moments later, “Good morning” from woman with another little white dog, also silent, she from a few yards away, not yet abreast of Jim. He looks up and nods with a half wave, looks back down again, she takes her dog away.

Two up, two down in the early-morning Grumpy Jim game. Third person moments later with little black dog. Jim looks up as they approach, sees smiling off-white face of short-haired friendly woman, smiles good morning. Her little black dog, a poodle with no personality, stops before Jim and stares.

“Phoebe, he doesn’t want to play,” woman says but does not pull Phoebe away. Instead, she tells Phoebe again that Jim does not want to play. Phoebe, unconvinced, stays there. A third time Phoebe has it explained to her and finally she gets it and goes her way. Inning over.

But no. Comes fourth batter, mahogany-skinned younger woman with pop eyes brings her little brown dog, who also finds Jim interesting. This woman says nothing, seems rather more anxious than the others, who seemed not anxious at all. Her little brown dog she too is reluctant to force away but dog is allowed, anxiously, to stand before Jim, curious and possibly seeking a touch on his little brown head accompanied by mild tickling of chin. But he or she too is taken away.

Down the path, there is a flurry and Jim looks up and sees little brown dog approached by little black one with much yip-yapping and then little white dog on leash and then other little white one off leash and now four little dogs in mish-mash of growls and yip-yaps.

Off-white woman, older, with short hair, is clearly gratified by this turn. Owner man of off-leash little white dog calls from other side of park and in due time the congress is dispersed and crickets are heard again, also aeroplane overhead. Also, homeless pair across the park are heard yip-yapping with occasional growl.

It was morning in America, Austin Gardens-Oak Park IL, 2013 A.D.

First of all, there are such married priests, as we many if not most know already. Not Roman Catholics but Eastern Rite, long-ago created in all-systems-go efforts at unification with once-schismatic Orthodox worshipers.

I stood chatting with one some time back a few blocks from where our two sons were living, upstairs from the art gallery they were running on California Ave., where the Ukrainian Catholic church was for which the priest was pastor.

As a one-time religion reporter and before that a Jesuit, I thought we might take a look inside. We did, but no more than a look. It was Easter Day, the pastor had been there since six o’clock, and he was closing shop. Had to join the wife and kids at home.

Yes. The man was a couple decades or so older than my sons. He had found his way in life that included two sacraments, Matrimony and Holy Orders. And I bless him to this day.

He and I and my son Pete had a pleasant half-hour chat and returned to the flat, joining his mother and others.

Another married-priest syndrome were the Anglicans who in the last several decades pulled a John Henry Newman on the Church of England and joined up with Roman Catholicism and now function as pastors throughout the U.S. and U.K.

These took Romanism on at the behest of our last pontiff but two, Benedict XIV, who in the year of Our Lord 2009 said come one, come all to Anglicans in search of old-time religion which they used to have in Merry England but had no more.

Alas, something went wrong with that invitation. It’s been withdrawn. By a pope named Francis, now gone for his reward, and not reinstated by his successor named Leo. No sir, no sirree.

One one single news day in the world of what this writer could find on his google, there a dozen links to the story about widespread former Anglicans become full-fletched Romans, lots of them, and one, 7-31-25, about Francis withdrawing same.

The Vatican has made a decisive move by ending a special provision that allowed Anglican priests to convert to Catholicism while retaining some of their traditions. This pathway, established under Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, was designed to welcome disillusioned Anglican clergy, particularly those opposed to the ordination of women and LGBTQ+ rights. [emphasis added]

Lot there, to be sure. The top man of Anglicans not happy with this doctrinal exposing as cause of hundreds of his people packing up for greener pastures in Rome. Come on, he says, you open your doors and we watch our people hustling through.

In hundreds, wives and families and all, as reported 11-21-25 as regards the United Kingdom, home of the worldwide English-speaking priests and bishops (!):

A new report reveals that significant numbers of Anglican clergy have converted to Catholicism in the United Kingdom since 1992.

The report, “Convert Clergy in the Catholic Church in Britain,” released 11-20-25, shows that approximately 700 clergy and religious of the Church of England, Church in Wales, and Scottish Episcopal Church have been received into the Catholic Church since 1992. The number includes 16 former Anglican bishops.

This equates to approximately a third of all Catholic priests ordained in England and Wales during this period.

And then there is the US and Canada situation.

1-1-12,

Benedict XVI announced creation of an ordinariate – similar to a diocese, but national in scope – for Anglican groups and clergy across the United States who wish to become Catholic. The ordinariate will be based in Houston.

Yes indeed, the Spirit moved Benedict to make it international. Anglicans shocked and disturbed by their religion and wanting out were given it.

The pope also named Father Jeffrey Steenson, a Catholic priest serving in Houston since 2009, to lead the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.

Married and the father of three children, Father Steenson was an Episcopal bishop before becoming Catholic in 2007.

He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe in 2009, the same year he came to Houston to teach patristics (the study of the Church fathers) at St. Mary’s Seminary.

Two years later, Benedict opened the gates.

Pope Benedict XVI promulgated the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, permitting erection of personal ordinariates equivalent to dioceses, on November 4, 2009.

By 2017, there were 43 ordinariate parishes and missions in the in U.S. and Canada, headed by priests named by the equivalent of monsignor but not bishops, who had to be unmarried.

So 43 married priests and parishes, what do you know about that? Adding to the Eastern Catholic pastors like him who took time for a half-hour chat in mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday but had to get back to his wife and kids.

It can be done. Holy Mother Church is pastored almost but not entirely by celibates including the same-sex-attractive who currently number as high as eight out of every ten, some of whom live up to their state of life but others who don’t.

For these same-sex attracted one might (I did) go to what’s said prolifically by a priest of long experience who makes this proposal: Mix up your (presumed) 80% of them with ministerial colleagues who have wife and kids and you have, shall we say, a calming effect on the church of today.

— more to come on this unusual proposal —

From Peter A. Kwasniewski’s How the Liturgical Reform and the Contemporary Ars Celebrandi Are Remote Contributors to the Crisis on Marriage and Family© 2015:

It might be assumed that once the compilers of the new lectionary of readings decided on a three-year Sunday cycle and a two-year weekday cycle, they would not fail to include in their new lectionary all of the readings from the traditional Roman liturgy, and that, in their march through various books of the Bible, they would not omit any key passages.

You would think so.

Instead, they made a programmatic decision to avoid what they judged to be “difficult” biblical texts [in part because] such texts would be more difficult for the faithful to understand.

Huh. Spare the people conundrums.

Be that as it may, these verses from 1 Corinthians 11 did not make it past the cutting board, never appear in the new mass readings:

“. . . whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink of the chalice of the Lord unworthily,
shall be guilty of the Body and of the Blood of the Lord.

“But let a man prove himself; and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice.

“For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the Body of the Lord.” (verses 27-29)

Never appear? Never.

So the allowing of all and sundry to communion, a major issue in new-church politics, can’t readily be shot down by this presumably confusing passage at any new mass during the mere decades-old choice by some  apparatchiks of the 1960s?

Right.

Now what kind of organization would ignore, in this case erase, a basic statement that cuts at the heart of its existence?

Paul, with Peter one of the earthly very founders of the church as we know it, said it. The fixers paid no attention to it and made sure pew-sitters would not be reminded of it.

We are to ignore — misrepresent — something as crucial as who is worthy to take the Eucharist? Because it’s too hard a sell? So we have a liturgy cleansed of the hard-to-take?

Good luck with that, people. This be a counterfeit version meant to leave members undisturbed, relaxed, happy with themselves and they better be, or they be telling us goodbye?

It would seem so, in that for “almost half a century, St. Paul’s warning against receiving the Body and Blood of the Lord unworthily, unto one’s damnation, has not been read at any Ordinary Form Mass.

A warning that “in the traditional Latin Mass,” whose readings were called “too restricted,” these verses are heard “at least three times every year, once on Holy Thursday, and twice on Corpus Christi, in the Epistle and the Communion antiphon.”

Hmm.

 

 

We met each other in 3rd grade in St. Catherine of Siena school in Oak Park IL in 1939, stayed in touch over the years, more recently via telephone, Chicago to his house in California.

His son called the other day, suggested I might talk to him. Not that he was talking any more but he was listening, which I verified with the help of the son’s  wife, who had put her phone next to his ear and later told me he was reacting to my voice.

Hearing is the last thing to go, she said, and I can testify three other death beds over the years, when mourners-to-be addressed the soon-to-die, one of whom, another from our youth, bed-ridden on a coma, pressed my hand, showing he’d heard.

As I told our #1 daughter, I talked to Bill a lot over the last several years, hearing what he had to say about lots of thinks, toward the end doing a lot of listening, let me tell you, but from now on doing all the talking, to him in the next life.

I love that part. Already have my sister Mary Clare Penney, who much appreciated Bill by the way, from conversations at our house and told her children about him. Bill told me he appreciated seeing siblings relate to each other, having had none himself.

Bill and I in days gone by played baseball on Sam’s Lot, as we called a vacant stretch on a corner near us. He considered himself a pitcher and made an art creation of it. Very serious about it.

On another of our locations, Columbus Park, on the Chicago side of Austin from the el and metro tracks station on the south to tennis courts on the north.  We played on the southern-end open space with diamonds on either end. Commuters would stop to watch on their way home from work.

One of our games had a score in the twenties, leading a religious-order priest assigned to St. Catherine’s, who played touch ball with us on after-school hours, observed it had been a pitcher’s duel.

Let’s leave it for now. Praying that Bill rests in peace, of course . . .