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.
Special counsel Robert Mueller was born and bred to torment Donald Trump.
If you hope (and think) Trump will get a fair shake from special prosecutor Robert Mueller, you might hope harder and think again when you read a leftist writer making this claim:
[T]here’s one more thing about Mueller that’s going to make it impossible for Trump to show him any respect: The former FBI director is practically blood brothers with James Comey.
Great.
Laer: Same article, writer adds:
Odds are good, in fact, that Trump will use Mueller’s closeness with Comey to accuse him of bias and question the legitimacy of his inquiry.
Really. Now why would anyone do that?
As I say, it’s fun to eavesdrop on someone’s echo chamber.
Today’s Catholic liturgy “is sick,” said cardinal in charge in 2017 — a look at the Mass and related matters that remains current . . .
He is Robert Sarah, onetime prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, appointed in 2014 by Pope Francis. His book is
From which I quote:
[C]elebrations [of the mass] become tiring because they unfold in noisy chattering. The liturgy is sick. The most striking symptom . . . is perhaps the omnipresence of the microphone. It has become so indispensable that one wonders how priests were able to celebrate before it was invented. . . . I sometimes have the impression that celebrants fear the free, personal interior prayer of the faithful so much that they talk from one end of the ceremony to the other so as not to lose control of them.
They certainly are loathe to let the air go dead. It’s as if they were on radio, rather than TV, though for that matter, TV announcers do jabber away. But you don’t need the sound while watching he World Series in a bar.
Do not presume that the cardinal is breaking new ground for himself (or others, such as James Hitchcock in his Recovery of the Sacred). He has set liberal hearts pulsing with alarm in numerous public statements to this effect. But this new book of his has some choice descriptions, as in this about participating in the liturgy as urged by Vatican II:
Truly, it is about becoming participants in a sacred mystery that infinitely surpasses us: the mystery of the death of Jesus out of love for the Father and for us. Christians have the . . . obligation to be open to an act that is so mysterious that they will never be able to perform it by themselves: the sacrifice of Christ. In the thought of the [Vatican II] Council Fathers, the liturgy is a divine action, an actio Christi. In the presence of it, we are overcome with a silence of admiration and reverence. [Struck dumb, as it were.] The quality of our silence is the measure of the quality of our . . . participation. [Huge departure here from current practice]
All in all, in this passage as throughout the book, he strikes a spiritual note. He is, I have concluded, of the spiritual wing of the church, as opposed to the social action wing led by (whom else?) Pope Francis, with whom he is on a collision course, to judge by several well publicized incidents and several major controverted issues.
He quotes then-Cardinal Ratzinger in a 1985 book, “[Some have lost] sight of what is distinctive to the liturgy, which does not come from what we do but from the fact that something is taking place here that all of us together cannot ‘make’.”
Idea is, we go to church (mass) not to do something but to witness it. It’s a happening, and a quite mysterious one at that.
The late Robert McClory, in his Radical Disciple: Father Pfleger, St. Sabina Church, and the Fight for Social Justice, cites a St. Sabina parishioner on Chicago’s South Side who supported what its famous activist pastor, Fr. Michael Pfleger, does but stopped attending mass there, going to another parish. McClory couldn’t get much more out of the man, who apparently wanted something more rewarding in a personal-spiritual sense.
So I concluded, anyhow, having participated in one of Fr. Pfleger’s three-hour liturgies and found it fascinating but hardly something that would keep me going on an apostolic venture — or on the humdrum daily fulfilling of the duties of my state of life.
More later from the book on silence by the cardinal who speaks up when he thinks it’s important.
Unemployment lowest in 16 years
CNN has it, and others too of course. But notice the three-line 2nd ‘graph in its email alert:
The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 4.3% last month, the lowest in 16 years, the Labor Department said Friday.
Employers added 138,000 jobs, weaker than economists expected, and unemployment declined in part because fewer people were looking for work. Job gains for March and April were revised lower.
Still, the 4.3% unemployment rate is the lowest since May 2001. It marked the 21st consecutive month that unemployment has been at or below 5%.
I’ll bet they used to add those caveats when they reported such results in the eight years ending last January.
And guess what? I’ll bet I would lose that bet.
Trifecta for the man in the White House
President Trump’s first foreign trip was path-breaking. Remarkably, he created buy-in from Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders for a unified front against an “evil” that threatens every religion, radical Islamic terrorism.
Reminds you of whom?
The moment was akin to Ronald Reagan’s 1983 identification of Soviet Communism as “evil,” delegitimized it and setting in motion his “roll-back” doctrine.
Calling the shots.
Anatomy of a Deep State – WSJ
The EPA’s ‘Science Integrity Official’ is plotting to undermine Trump’s agenda.
On May 8 a woman few Americans have heard of, working in a federal post that even fewer know exists, summoned a select group of 45 people to a June meeting in Washington. They were almost exclusively representatives of liberal activist groups. The invitation explained they were invited to develop “future plans for scientific integrity” at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Meet the deep state. That’s what conservatives call it now, though it goes by other names. The administrative state. The entrenched governing elite. Lois Lerner. The federal bureaucracy. Whatever the description, what’s pertinent to today’s Washington is that this cadre of federal employees, accountable to no one, is actively working from within to thwart Donald Trump’s agenda.
The reliable Kimberley A. Strassel on the case. The woman who called the meeting holds a position that’s
a legacy of Barack Obama, who at his 2009 inaugural promised to “restore science to its rightful place”—his way of warning Republicans that there’d be no more debate on climate change or other liberal environmental priorities.
It’s a plot, pure and simple, hatched by the craftiest leftist ever to live in the White House.
More more here: Anatomy of a Deep State – WSJ (for Wall St. Jnl subscribers).
A Brief History of Politicians Body-Slamming Journalists: From Gianforte to John Adams
Now and then a video captures history, providing perspective in the process!
Source: A Brief History of Politicians Body-Slamming Journalists: From Gianforte to John Adams
Trump has ‘made up his mind to withdraw US from Paris climate deal’ despite saying publicly he will decide next week
He sees past that hurrah business.
Settled science, you know, stop discussing it!
And all that madness of crowds.
The pope and the president, a Canossa moment?
See how the president sits facing the pope’s desk.
Shades of Henry IV and Gregory VII, 1077.
A fanciful allusion which a certain kind of person can’t quite resist.
Advice to the Sun-Times: Get a right-wing Mark Brown . . .
. . . to offset the real one, whose competence is top-rate, as are his left-wing creds.
Have a look at this list of his recent columns.
He’s good, no doubt. But what if there were a counter point to, ah, spark debate?
Sun-Times is heading for new ownership with the promise (right?) of independence. The new owners would be fools not to respect that, of course. So why not a bit of seasoning to the daily mix that has provided the place to go for local reporting, namely a non-Mark Brown who lays as heavily as he but into issues dear to the right?
Chi Trib’s editorial page has long provided that for its readers, not to mention the Royko successor John Kass, appearing regularly on its Page Two, its sole columnist to provide the ah-so experience for those on the right.
There could be one of those in S-T, yes. The conservative and libertarian woods are full of them. Somebody Chicago, of course, with not a Coastal bone in his or her body. Like Mark Brown, except different. The right man or woman for the right-wing job, yes.
