Category: Blithe Spirit

The good and the bad, emphasis on Trib and Sun-Times

Jobs Report: Trump Delivers For Workers … After Years Of Empty Obama Promises | Investor’s Business Daily

And yet the lefties want more govt. control (socialism). It’s the nag they are riding on.

Labor Market: The latest expectation-shattering jobs report isn’t a fluke. It’s another sign that President Trump’s economic policies are improving the lives of middle class families.

The 304,000 gain in jobs reported by the Labor Department was nearly twice the consensus estimate. And it comes after December’s expectation-busting gains.

There’s more. The jobs picture is so strong right now that it’s pulling people in who’ve been sitting on the sidelines.

How they complain about every little thing. They are the blind who would lead the blind.

New Dark Money Front Targets Pro-Life HHS Appointees – Capital Research Center

What’s with this poverty law center? they mean abortion-promotion center?

So, what is “HHS Watch,” Equity Forward’s first campaign project, watching? HHS Watch publishes opposition research on the Trump administration’s appointees, focusing on work they have done for social conservative groups, especially those smeared by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The campaign further attacks the administration appointees’ efforts to overturn provisions in Obamacare which compel religious dissenters to pay for birth control and abortifacient drugs.

Remember, you good guys: The enemy never sleeps.

Sundance buying spree, with a twist – Variety

The makers soften the blows a bit.

“The festival seems to be broadening its aperture a little bit this year,” said Van Toffler, co-founder of Gunpowder & Sky. “The movies are less intense than they have been in the past where sometimes a movie would end and you’d sort of want to blow your brains out.”

My life partner and I recently skipped two episodes of one festival of intensity, to see the last one and know how the mess ended, find ourselves increasingly in the market for interesting but not overly demanding.

Kelsey: I don’t like giving kiss of peace. Fr. Rutler: Not to worry.

Solving a small problem

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

Kelsey J from Grand Rapids, MI:

It seems to me like a needless distraction. I can glad-hand Mrs Smith any time I want. On Sundays, I’m there to see Jesus. Is this uncharitable or disobedient?

Fr. R., :

The Sign of Peace is a distraction where it is presently situated in the Liturgy, especially if effervescent personalities wave and chat.

A patrician friend of mine, when I said Mass as he was dying, asked me to omit the Peace because it made his butler uncomfortable. I have used that as a sufficient excuse ever since, regardless of domestic arrangements.

God save the butler!

If done at all, it should be liturgical: greeting just the person next to you with a formal gesture. Influenza has a salutary effect because in flu season the Peace is often suspended.

Shame if it takes that.

The real fault with it is that it is…

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1959, An Evangelical bemoaned “decline of worship” and . . .

Catholics not only ones . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

. . . “the rise of externalism.”

He was Warren C. Young, in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, in which he asked “Whither Evangelicalism?” citing an earlier complaint, “The Failure of Evangelicalism,” in Eternity magazine, in which that author raised two “timely” criticisms.

Evangelicals have lost the true sense of worship, and the Christian life is measured far more often by external criteria rather than by a biblical and spiritual emphasis.

Young, a teacher at West Side of Chicago-based Northern Baptist Seminary, warned:

If, because of irreverence and externalism [attention to externals,esp. to an excessivedegree], Evangelicalism should be written off as an exhausted and empty thing, there may yet come a day when we shall find ourselves in the midst of a revival which some of us will not recognize as such, because it did not come out of our mold, and does not…

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What Cardinal Avery Dulles said about capital punishment

From a Fr. George Rutler essay:

One essay, “Hanging Concentrates the Mind”, particularly caught my attention. Fr Rutler is not of the view that capital punishment is always wrong. Indeed, he quotes Cardinal Avery Dulles: “If the pope were to deny that the death penalty could be an exercise of retributive justice, he would be overthrowing the tradition of two millennia of Catholic thought, denying the teaching of several previous popes, and contradicting the teaching of Scripture.”

As reviewed by Francis Phillips in the Catholic Herald.

Well, Francis has never been a fan of tradition, whether he knows it or not . . . Nor has he shown himself overly familiar with papal teaching. As for Scripture, he has a way of quoting it to his purpose.

I’d say he’s ready for a Pauline conversion. Lots of us are, for that matter. Woe.

Facing the people in 1955, Paul Claudel’s lament continued . . .

Paul Claudel’s final statement.

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

The new, experimental mass in France drew fevered objections from the poet, dramatist, and diplomat Paul Claudel in a Figaro article a month before he died . . .

“It is true that in the traditional liturgy,” priest with back to worshipers, “the most moving part of the Holy Sacrifice is hidden from the faithful. But it is not hidden from their hearts and their faith.”

At Solemn High Masses of old, this sense of wonderment was such that the sub-deacon, one of the regulation three celebrants, at the foot of the altar remained standing during the Offertory, hiding his face with his left hand in reverence.

“We too are invited to pray,” he said, “to withdraw into ourselves, not in a spirit of curiosity but of recollection.

[Emphasis added throughout]

He took note of the (Catholic) Eastern-rite practice of in effect hiding the altar behind the iconostasis, a…

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