The Spirit works in mysterious ways. This isn’t one of them.

If you’re a daily Mass attendant, the odds are that you hear that norm violated a dozen times a week. Sunday Mass people typically hear it violated two or three times a week, at least.

Auto-editing or flat-out rewriting the prescribed text of the Mass is virtually epidemic among priests who attended seminary in the late Sixties, Seventies, or early Eighties; it’s less obvious among the younger clergy.

But whether indulged by old, middle-aged, or young, it’s obnoxious and it’s an obstacle to prayer.

I’m with this fellow, though less so since like Dr. Strangelove I have learned to stop worrying and love the — free-lancer.

Thing is, I can’t afford to be censorious in the matter. Talk about your obstacles to prayer. Been there, done that. No thanks.

Better to take it as part of the human comedy. Besides, currently I encounter far less of that lately: change of venue and all that, you know.

But I still encourage the writer, the eminent George Weigel, and applaud him.

Read more: Dear Father: Please stop the liturgical freelancing | Catholic World Report – Global Church news and views

Pepper spray, anyone? Not?

“Considering how many assaults occur on and around CTA property, I would think the CTA wouldn’t post ads reminding women not only how dangerous it is to use their services, but also that they’re on their own when it comes to personal safety,” [a woman] said.

Even when sometimes they are on their own?

Decades ago (in the mid-’60s), discussing the latest with women residents at the Near West Side high-rise project across the street from where I lived, at St. Ignatius High School, the instance arose of a woman raped on the elevator.

The women I talked to said the victim should have known better than to get on the elevator with a male rider (so that the two would be alone). They knew how this works and considered the victim foolhardy.

Being on your own is a regular condition for many.

(I write about life in the projects in my book Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968.)

Source: ‘Make a Grown Man Cry’ Pepper Spray CTA Ads Upset Women Commuters – Logan Square – DNAinfo.com Chicago

Case in point here: Trump is formidable not just because he’s good (bad?) in attack mode — good for Republicans, bad for Hillary, who needs a good whupping — but also because he’s quick on the trigger (sorry for the hidden meanings in case unintended as they are if they offend tender sensibilities anywhere in the world) with effective campaign ploys like this one.

We need a tough campaigner with quick fingers when facing the vast left-wing conspiracy, is my point. With Trump we wouldn’t have to feel put upon all the time, beaten to the draw (sorry again!!!).

And frankly, Cruz is something of a jerk, I fear. Annoying. (Now I’m really sorry, better be.)

“Mr. Trump would like all Americans to know the truth about what happened at Benghazi,” the GOP frontrunner’s Iowa co-chair said Thursday.

And in order to go around and over the heads of a corrupt DC Media that has covered up this truth for years, Trump is offering Iowans free screenings of Michael Bay’s  superb “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.”

Think of all the campaign spending by Jeb and how ineffective it is, then think of this latest from Trump, whose cost per vote has to be niggardly.

Source: Trump Goes Around the Media: Offers Free Screenings of ’13 Hours’ to Iowans – Breitbart

Catholic journalist Heidi Schlumpf introduces the new CEO (under Publisher-Archbishop Cupich) of the Catholic New World. He is Grant Gallicho, late of Commonweal Magazine. (Say “Gallico,” as long-ago sports writer-novelist Paul wrote his name.)

His goals are intriguing.

[I]ncreasing both the print and digital audiences, by offering more and unique content and better promoting the publications, especially through social media.

Already, he’s signed Christopher Lamb, who also writes from Rome for the English magazine The Tablet, to do a monthly column about the Vatican.

A book review section and a redesign of the paper and website are also in the works.

Well. And letters to editor, long missing from the CNW? Voice from the Pew, that sort of thing? Let us piously hope.

Below is Gallicho and his editor Joyce Duriga, discussing things.

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While she’s at it, the writer, long-time Catholic journalist Heidi Schlumpf, also gives more than a nod of appreciation for CNW’s just retired Dolores Madlener, whose “benevolent gossip” column and other regular offerings offered meaty stuff for decades — one silk purse made of sow’s ear after another.

From my own less-extensive experience, I must endorse her warm regard for Madlener.

Source: Journalists find a home in Chicago archdiocese | National Catholic Reporter