Day: June 16, 2008

From the streets a message

A very good Chi Trib rundown on Rev. Michael Pfleger has a neighborhood co-worker offering him some very bad advice:

“Father Pfleger has always been a community activist first and a Catholic priest second,” said Tio Hardiman, a longtime Chicago activist who has worked with Pfleger on anti-violence campaigns. “The black community accepts Father Pfleger as one of their own. But now I think he’s going to have to make a decision about whether he’s going to be a black community activist or a Catholic priest.”

Why bad?  Because Fr. P. ain’t nothin’ without holy mother church as his sponsor, and with all his fulmination and histrionics he knows it.

Meanwhile, if there’s a fellow member of the cloth who can get through to him, he has not done so as far as the general public knows.  Except the cardinal, who seems somehow to have made his point.  Maybe, maybe not.

Or maybe there’s no getting to him by anyone.

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Let us now praise a famous man

You knew an orgy was on its way, when this man died.

Here’s one thing you can say about journalists: Surely no one loves us as much as we love ourselves.

That’s one lesson of the Tim Russert coverage.

A friend told me Sunday: “I now know more about Tim Russert than I do many members of my family.”

After Russert’s shocking death Friday at age 58, television kept serving up witnesses to his expertise, intelligence, diligence, kindness, faith, love of family, Buffalo and the Buffalo Bills. The self-indulgence was breathtaking.

On Monday’s “Today,” Matt Lauer interviewed Russert’s son, Luke. The show basically gave over the first half-hour to the Russert story. Presidential candidates aren’t questioned at such length on morning programs.

And the children of America’s fallen heroes don’t receive such a platform, either.

Etc.

On NBC yesterday, the gathered commentators seemed eager to cover themselves with Russert glory.  The more they praised him, the better they looked.

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Latin for everyone

No exceptions, apparently:

The traditional Latin Mass – effectively banned by Rome for 40 years – is to be reintroduced into every Roman Catholic parish in England and Wales, the senior Vatican cardinal in charge of Latin liturgy said at a press conference in London today.

And sems will have to teach future priests how to do it, said the senior Vatican cardinal in charge of Latin liturgy, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, in London.  Not just England and Wales either:

[A]sked . . . if the pope wanted to see “many ordinary parishes” making provision for the Tridentine Mass, Cardinal Castrillon, a Colombian, said: “All the parishes. Not many, all the parishes, because this is a gift of God.”

He also said:

his commission . . .  was in the process of writing to seminaries not only to equip seminarians to celebrate Mass in Latin but to understand the theology, the philosophy and the language of such Masses.

It would take as few as “three or four people who were not necessarily drawn from the same parish” to request it, at which point the priest would be required to do it.

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Later, from Reader M: 

Re the work of seminaries to teach the Latin Mass:
 
If it was true, as Father Rick Simon said at Catholic Citizens Forum last week, that in the years after Vatican II seminaries concentrated on teaching priests-to-be how to help Catholics in confession side-step the precepts of Humanae Vitae — they shouldn’t have problems teaching seminarians the Latin Mass. It’s less subjective — less work for the right side of the brain.
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