Month: April 2010

Wheeling's bishop gets his land?

The Catholic archdiocese’s Wheeling Hospital is to acquire the Mount de Chantal property which was mentioned as property Bishop Michael Bransfield wanted but found Wheeling Jesuit University president Rev. Julio Giulietti, SJ, in his way?

Rumor has it that the Mount property is now owned or has been optioned by Wheeling Hospital; the hospital also has announced that it was adding a $50 million wing [wrote Timothy F. Cogan in a letter to the Wheeling Intelligencer/News-Register].

“First and foremost” among reasons alleged by WJU alum and former fund-raiser Steve Haid in his letter of protest over Giulietti’s peremptory firing after two years in office, “Father Julio’s lynching was the handiwork of Bishop Michael Bransfield, who wanted to slap down a Jesuit priest who sought to acquire the Mount de Chantal property for Wheeling Jesuit.”

Cogan wrote to object to a $50–million planned addition [not] to the “beautiful old” Mount de Chantal building which stands next to the WJU campus, for historic-preservation and other reasons. [Rather, to the hospital, per comment below]

The bishop

repeatedly denied involvement in Giulietti’s firing, but did confirm to [National Catholic Reporter] that he wanted the sale of the Mount de Chantal property stopped. The sale never went through.

“I was not in favor of the sale of property to Wheeling Jesuit because the price they offered the sisters was half of the price offered by competing bidders,” Bransfield wrote in a message to NCR.

But the bishop was not involved in the Giulietti firing, said then-acting WJU President Davitt McAteer: “We’re seeing the effects of the anonymous Web and the efforts of a small clique who are unhappy. It’s the guy in the theater yelling fire.”

The search for a Giulietti replacement has stalled.  Sister Francis Marie Thrailkill has hired on as interim president for an estimated 18 months.

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For Cardinal George, Pfleger's the man

Putting the microscope to the Chicago archdiocese as a pit of corruption:

So much that you need to know about the Catholic Church’s social policy problems can be summed up in one word: Chicago. On race, abortion, guns, immigration and “community organizing,” Catholic Church officials in the Windy City have forged unholy alliances with radical left-wingers and enablers who undermine the faith—and the faithful.

Beginning with the (latest) Pfleger debacle:

Exhibit A: the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Office for Racial Justice and one of its most notorious priests, the Rev. Michael Pfleger. This week, Chicago Cardinal Francis George—who also happens to be president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops—presided over a gala ceremony honoring Pfleger with a “lifetime achievement award” for his “service in pursuit of dismantling racism, injustice and inequalities on behalf of African Americans and all people of color.

Michelle Malkin doesn’t get it:

How, pray tell, has Pfleger achieved the officially sanctioned Catholic vision of “racial justice”? By aligning himself with the nation’s worst racial demagogues and using his pulpit at the St. Sabina Catholic Church on Chicago’s Southside to promote poisonous identity politics.

Read on about Pfleger and Wright, Farrakhan, screaming about Hillary the white woman, raging against the U.S., threatening a gun-dealer, going behind a critic’s back to neutralize him, etc.

Malkin quoted his words back to him in an e-mail.  Pfleger called her “mean-spirited.”

And the amazing Cardinal George goes along with honoring such a great man.  And he’s the top bishop in the U.S.  He came to Chicago, he saw, he was conquered.

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Obama would call them "folks"

The redoubtable Abigail Thernstrom, whom an irritated President Clinton cheekily called “Abigail” in a long-ago discussion of race, does some math about Tea Party racism:

What will it take to persuade the political class to abandon its racism-is-still-everywhere picture? It remains a politically promising strategy; . . . . But playing the race card may not be such a swift idea when it comes to tea partiers.

A just-released Gallup poll found tea-party members to be quite representative demographically of the American public at large — the exception being blacks, who comprise only 6 percent of participants. But 6 percent is about half of the black population! A real surprise. [Congr. John] Lewis, Pelosi, et al., take note.

So?

Of course, if our fearless leaders were to admit that tea partiers are just ordinary Americans, quite representative of the population as a whole, they would be acknowledging an unpleasant truth: Congress was not carrying out the people’s business in passing that wretched health-care bill.

You mean they pushed it through, Chicago way?

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He believes in government

H.L. Mencken demurred on the bluff-democrat image of Teddy Roosevelt, who he said, 

for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words, democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master, had no such faith in his heart of hearts. 

He didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.  His remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a dispersion of authority, but a hard concentration of authority. 

He was not in favor of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a rigid control from above, a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen.”*

To economist Donald J. Boudreaux, applying the description to our current president, it seems “as if Mr. Obama is already channeling T.R. – and, in doing so, is endangering our freedom and our prosperity.”

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It happened on Austin Blvd.

Got shot and stabbed the other day at West Sub. I.e., got frozen with a local and had my squamous cell carcinoma excised by an expert plastic man. Felt a tug and twinge here and there, but was out on the street in an hour or so walking down Ontario. No problem.

My mother called it a “thing.” Had a “thing” removed, she explained, unwilling to dignify it further. Having a college education, I must do so.

So I look it up and read in Wikipedia and find this:

Squamous cell carcinoma is the second most common cancer of the skin (after basal cell carcinoma but more common than melanoma). It usually occurs in areas exposed to the sun.

Like my upper right cheek, q.v. if you’re in the vicinity. Quod vide, “have a look,” for the (tragically) Latin-deprived.

Sunlight exposure and immunosuppression are risk factors for SCC of the skin with chronic sun exposure being the strongest environmental risk factor.

Conundrum: sunshine gives me Vitamin D, currently a hot vitamin, but also maybe SCC.

Now. What if Doc couldn’t get all my SCC? I had to wait a half hour for the lab to decide that, lying on my bed of comfort. What if I lived where single-payer rules — Canada, UK? — and though covered could not get care and had to wait till my cheek was exploding?

I would have to check in with my detachment philosophy. This would be my father’s “A hundred years from now, nobody will know the difference,” which he applied to minor irritations, followed in my experience with Ignatius Loyola’s requiring 15 minutes to accept a hypothetical disolution of his Society of Jesus (Jesuits).

That’s right. The great man said it would take him 15 minutes. To accept the crushing loss of his life’s work. It’s what he preached, of course, variously known as detachment, indifference, abandonment (to Divine Providence), and other Stoic virtues.

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Two Holy Thursdays

Had a very good one-two punch Holy Thursday., with attendance first at my Tridentine-mass church, where some 125 or so people huddled in a church that is really a chapel for the potentially long and boring service that turned out rather good and second at my neighborhood RC church, cathedral-like and all Gothic, where I had the same experience.

It helped that I came late to the mainstreamer, missing the ridiculous foot-washing (and no doubt, ahem, problematic sermon) but catching the guts of it — offertory to end of mass — in church with six or seven hundred people.  The culmination was the parade of the Host back and forth up and down aisles, people genuflecting as the main priest carried it past them in their pews.  I had the feeling of that drama that comes when the great man passes the crowd massed at the curbs, waving, little kids held up to see, etc.

This was a good solid boost to faith.  Music fit the situation, etc.  We were all with it, a churchful of attentive, even (quietly) enthusiastic people.  It didn’t hurt any that the priest on parade is a Jesuit I have known since we were novices together in 1950 and, more important, that he is a transparent guy without apparent agenda except to do the work of the moment.

Walked out of there with a sense of having been at worship that works, to use a largely Unitarian expression with wide usage elsewhere, as in this Lutheran publication with the essay fascinatingly titled, “’Blended Worship That Works’ or Cuisinart Worship That Sucks,” which I will have to read.  I attribute my reaction in good part to my few-hours-earlier experience in the severe, almost puritanical atmosphere of the tridentine-mass service, with its overriding sense of the importance of doing things right in matters large and small. 

This tridentine service is serious worship, sans fooling around, improvising, or indulging in casual manner.  And the sermon goes with it.  Not a scolding word in it, but a matter-of-fact discussion of how worshipers are to respond to the mysteries.  He was instructed by “holy mother the church” not only in rubrics for this mass but also in the content of his sermon, the preacher-pastor said.

So he talked about the priesthood and only tangentially noted the current bad situation, making a point that has been made countless times, that one of the original 12 turned out bad.  He also noted that the current situation gives an opening for critics of the pope who don’t like the way he does things anyway.  (It’s occurred to me not that the current situation does not stink but that a John 23rd, lovable and permissive, would not be the same target for mediums around the Western world.)

In any case, the tridentine service supplies something that’s missing in the relatively new liturgy, that is, beginning in the 70s, and not just in the organized nature of foot washing on Holy Thursday, done with dispatch and strictly by the celebrant of a dozen men who are parishioners and not a dragged-out, chaotic affair such as extends the service too much.  It supplies a seriousness and an objectivity about what’s happening.

Current liturgy, on the other hand, is therapeutic.  Our neighborhood mainstream preacher on Friday night, for instance, was at pains to say the day was “not a downer,” that we die daily (implying that we should not fear death, I think: it was metaphor city in that obfuscatory sermon), that we have crosses enough to bear in daily life.  I agree with much of it that I could understand, but the good-natured morale-boosting of it all is thin gruel that insufficiently nourishes people.

Nonetheless, it was nice on Thursday to experience the two kinds of Catholic worship back to back, with good results at lease on one day of the holy triduum.  Now for midnight mass tridentine-style.

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Daddy-O knows best

I always said he was Cocky Locky.

In his latest show of chutzpah, Obama asks for patience with the law he rammed through.
By JAMES TARANTO

No, it was not an April Fool’s joke, but an actual headline from the Associated Press: “Obama Urges Patience as Health Care Law Kicks In.” Here’s what the president had to say Thursday in Portland, Maine:

“Every day since I signed reform into law, there’s another poll or headline that says, ‘Nation still divided on health reform, no great surge in public support.’ Well, yeah. It’s only been a week,” Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery. “Before we find out if people like health care reform, maybe we should wait until it actually happens. Just a thought.

Bullsheeeeet!!!!

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His eminence strikes back

What’s the good of being a shepherd if you can’t zap a sheep when he gets out of line?  Cardinal George, shepherd of all of us in Cook and Lake counties, spotted a sheep and zapped him.

He’s Tom Roeser, who gives new meaning to the term outspoken and has been first hinting at cardinalatial ignorance of current events and unseeming acquiescence in aides’ advice and more recently criticizing it directly.  He had to be taught a lesson, and the cardinal wrote a letter — to the board of a Catholic organization of which Roeser has been belwether, to use a flock-like term, I mean the Catholic Citizens of Illinois.

To these worthy people, Catholic to a fault and conservative in all things political, his eminence urged getting Roeser to put a sock in it:

Would it be possible for you to use your role as advisor to Catholic Citizens of Illinois to put an end to the hate literature produced by the Chairman? 

The chairman being Roeser and the hate literature being such critique of the cardinal as to wonder where he gets off demonstrating support (unconvincingly denied by an apparatchik, in R’s opinion) for ObamaCare except for its allowing federal expenditure for abortion-producing health care.

Yes.  Read all about it at Roeser’s blog.  See if the cardinal’s status among shepherds has not been diminished.  We (editorially) think so.

Sincerely,

James Bowman, flock member in more or less good standing but moving very carefully

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From Reader Nancy, inexplicably blocked from comment mechanism:

No one could ever silence Tom Roeser. He is his own man who is confident and well-schooled in his Catholic religion and is not hesitant to tell those who think of themselves as figures of authority that they are not all-knowing or above criticism. Trouble arises when those in power attempt to tell practicing Catholics how to think and feel, especially about the social issues of abortion and illegal immigration when they become political issues, thereby over reaching and undermining the underlying fundamentals of the Catholic Church.”

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