Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

What Hillsdale Can Teach Harvard

Manage without federal money and you can admit students as you wish. Harvard? Not so much. Hillsdale? No problem.

To put this in perspective, Hillsdale today has about 1,500 students, charges roughly $27,000 tuition for a first-rate liberal-arts education, and has a modest endowment of near $600 million. Harvard’s endowment clocks in at $39 billion.

If little Hillsdale can give up taxpayer dollars to remain true to its principles, surely big, wealthy Harvard can.

Harvard wants to have its policy and federal money too.

By the bye, Hillsdale’s history in the matter?

Back in the 1970s the federal government demanded the Michigan-based college begin counting its students by race and sex as a condition of the federal loans some of its students received.

For an institution whose founding charter made it the first college in the nation to declare itself open to all students “irrespective of nation, color, or sex,” and which boasted a long and noble history of color-blind admissions, this was insulting.

In 1956, for example, its undefeated football team refused an invitation to the Tangerine Bowl rather than comply with official demands that the college not field its black players.

So they made their “tough” decision and never looked back.

via WSJ

The day the (liturgical) music died, Vatican 2 in open session, 1963

When the aged and semi-blind Cardinal Ottaviani too the podium and had to take it on the chin.

During the first session of the Second Vatican Council, in the debate on the Liturgy Constitution, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani asked: “Are these Fathers planning a revolution?” The Cardinal was old and partly blind. He spoke from the heart without a text about a subject which moved him deeply, and continued:

Are we seeking to stir up wonder, or perhaps scandal among the Christian people, by introducing changes in so venerable a rite, that has been approved for so many centuries and is now so familiar? The rite of Holy Mass should not be treated as if it were a piece of cloth to be refashioned according to the whim of each generation.

So concerned was he at the revolutionary potential of the Constitution, and having no prepared text, the elderly Cardinal exceeded the ten-minute time limit for speeches. At a signal from Cardinal Alfrink, who was presiding at the session, a technician switched off the microphone, and Cardinal Ottaviani stumbled back to his seat in humiliation.

The Council Fathers [assembled bishops] clapped with glee, and the journalists to whose dictatorship Father Louis Bouyer claimed the Council had surrendered itself, were even more gleeful when they wrote their reports that night and when they wrote their books at the end of the session. When we laugh, we do not think, and, had they not been laughing, at least some of the bishops might have wondered whether, perhaps, Cardinal Ottaviani had a point.

He did indeed!

Such was the “progressive” atmosphere. It’s a designation dripping with irony, in that in the matter of liturgical “reform,” a key argument was to regress to the liturgical simplicity of the early church.

via The Liturgical Movement

Pope Francis at canonization of new saints Paul VI, Oscar Romero: ‘Jesus is radical’

Please get off it, Francis. It’s a tired theme (meme?), old at least since yesterday.

In what sense radical?

For starters, because he was a Jew who upset Judaism while relying on it entirely as foundation of his new religion.

See Galatians, last and this week’s readings source, where the essential Paul drives it home verse by verse: Jewish and Gentile converts were not to rely on The Law (Torah) and its observance for “justification,” that is, salvation. Another Jew who broke the traces and died for his trouble.

As for His vicar on earth in His year 2018, just what does he mean by this aimless, generic radical talk? Buying into the New Dispensation or embracing the (passing) radicalism of the day? He is maddeningly non-specific about this.

Except that he loves that “radical.” But we knew that.

via Pope Francis at canonization of new saints Paul VI, Oscar Romero: ‘Jesus is radical’

This day you are monitored — by a friend, says Hebrews

God knows all about you.

Brothers and sisters:
Indeed the word of God is living and effective,
sharper than any two-edged sword,
penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow,
and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.
No creature is concealed from him,
but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him
to whom we must render an account.

Good to keep this in mind. Thing is, he’s no accountant, as the good book implies. Rather, he’s on your side, which is equally important to keep in mind.

via Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Watch out. The food on your plate may contain water.

It’s next on the red-alert food-scare calendar.

First they came for the trans fat, and pretty much everyone agreed it should be banned, because it can clog arteries.

Then they came for monosodium glutamate. Even though food companies say it is harmless, they eventually pulled it from many products, because that’s what the customer demanded.

Now, one in 10 young adults want regulators to ban dihydrogen monoxide from food and beverages, according to a study by research firm InsightsNow.

Um, that would be H2O, also known as water.

The food industry is grappling with just how far to bend to consumer whims about chemicals—even when those whims seem clueless. And this is giving America’s food scientists indigestion.

Whatever. You can’t be too careful.

via Anyone for Diglycerides? Anyone? Food Scientists Are Getting Fed Up With Picky Eaters – WSJ

The Vatican Intelligence Service’s archbishop-hunter is a throwback

This fellow who heads the quest for the rogue Vatican diplomat Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano comes right out of his starring role in a soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture remake of the hit TV series of the ’60s and ’70s, “Hogan’s Heroes.”

Image
Domenico Giani

If Viganò is afraid for his life to the point where he has to destroy his cell phone and go into hiding overseas, it is not only out of fear of being tracked down by a staffer of the apostolic nunciatures and missions of the Holy See spread throughout the world — the “long arm” of the Secretariat of State that has ordered discovery of Viganò’s whereabouts — but also if not principally out of dread for the intelligence capabilities of the Vatican City State’s paramilitary Corps of Gendarmes of the Vatican City State currently led by Domenico Giani.

Francis to his top gendarme: Get him, Domenico. The regime is counting on you.

via Santa Alleanza: