Not yesterday, but nine months ago, at the height of Covid time, I arrived for holy Mass at one of the churches where I was a regular, and was confronted by a burly, unsmiling usher in brown sweater over white tee shirt who told me where to sit, pointing to the taped cross mark on the pew seat’s back.

He stood watching, waiting to see where I sat, not only in the right pew but in the right portion of it. Chilling time it was in those days.

Hitler row: a full transcript of what Andrew Graham-Dixon said at the Cambridge Union

The art historian and lecturer’s remarks last week have seen him ‘blacklisted’ by the student debating society

Makes a guy wonder what else they have been seeing lately.

A TIME TO PRAY . . .

In the spring of 2006, our parish collapsed the Sunday mass schedule from 8:30 and 10:30 to only 9:30, for reasons evident to anyone familiar with our shortage of priests and reduced mass attendance.

“Some of us will groan” at this, our pastor said in the bulletin, making the best of it: “Some have been going to [one
or other of these masses] for years and don’t know the parishioners at the other masses!” The change provides a chance for us “to see each other and know each other.”

There’s merit to that. The change would be an exercise in habit-changing for the sake of “unity.” The one-mass celebration will be “joyful,” he predicted, and will “remind us of our oneness in Christ.” A stick drawing had a crew in rowing shell and the words “Pull together.”

Prudent parish management for logistical reasons…

“Trial of the century,” heh, running into bump in road to justice:

To date, the trial has had a rocky rollout. Vatican prosecutors, known as the office of the Promoter of Justice, initially defied a court order to turn over video and audio recordings of witnesses, citing privacy rights.

The prosecution did this?

The Vatican tribunal rejected that claim, insisting evidence in a trial is, by definition, public.

Prosecutors this week turned over 52 DVDs full of recordings to the court, which will be available to defense lawyers, but included a list of 38 omissions justified only by “investigative interests.”

The deleted material could be as much as two hours long, and the cuts have elicited howls of protest from the defense.

The court had to explain to the prosecutors why not to hold evidence back? It’s a public trial, the court had to say. Vatican no…

Not the rich and famous.

Pope Francis, as all the regular surveys tell us, enjoys the goodwill and favor of ordinary Catholics, as every pope does.

Quite unlike the experience of John Paul or Benedict, he is highly popular with the heads of the Big Tech giants who regularly visit him, the international Davos elite, which considers him an ally on climate and immigration, the U.N. leadership, which welcomes his support for its global agenda,to say nothing of the international media consensus, which praises him as a courageous reformerupdating the Church in order to better conform to the 21st century.

Indeed, there has never been a pope so popular with the wealthy and influential — both without the Church and within, if one considers the immensely rich German bishops.

So.

Examined and eye-dropped by the kindly Kate, I sit and wait.

I do not stand, like the blind Milton, but I serve none the less, I guess.

Probably the most common, second to classroom deliveries, delivery of (more or less) planned oratory in the Western World, the sermon deserves our careful attention.

I gave it some, a while back, and came up with this:

Church Reporter: Tips for writing better sermons

(POSTED: 9/19/11) . . . What about (self-imposed) TIME LIMITS FOR SERMONS, say 12-15 minutes for Sunday, three or four for week days? This calls for TIGHT WRITING, a heavy dose of Strunk & White’s OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS. That’s onetime Cornell University English prof William Strunk Jr. and his onetime student, the essayist E.B. White, in their book The Elements of Style, which would make good reading for any preacher.

A few of the S&W rules, adapted to preaching:

* PLACE YOURSELF IN THE BACKGROUND: It’s the message not the messenger. Not “I was reading a book the other day, and it said . …