“Where’s my cycle” is the rallying cry of a group of French women fighting for basic expectations of life: a pain-free existence, a medical system they can trust, and the ability to bear children.

On a bright October day in Paris, I attended an unusual event in a long reporting career: A rally, just a stone’s throw from Napoleon’s Tomb, at which women spoke about their periods.

Organized by a group called “Where’s my cycle,” the rally focused on intimate revelations: heavy bleeding, unprecedented pain, humiliation, and elemental physical changes. These symptoms began, not coincidentally, at the start of 2021, when women put out their arms and took, or were coerced by employers to take, covid-19 vaccinations.

The 300 women, and men, at this rally—and the 10,000 that Oú est mon cycle represents—are fighting for basic expectations of life: a pain-free existence, a medical system they can trust, and the ability to bear children.

This was not just about inconvenience or embarrassment. It was about fertility.

Among the testimonials: . . .

Read the rest here . . .

He put 1970s liturgical changes up the flagpole, had to take them down.

Pius X (1903-1914) is best known for promoting frequent communion, seen by some at the time as making a sacred thing unduly common and therefore less highly regarded.

This problem seems not to have risen until after Vatican 2, when communion became not only frequent but standard for mass-goers and everyone went — as I noted in a National Catholic Reporter essay in the 1970s, calling attention to an unsung achievement of the council, namely that it had abolished mortal sin.

In any case, this change of his and another, to teach catechism in the vernacular (!), are pretty tame stuff by today’s standards.

Let us, however, put a hold once more on this tenth Pius and his works, looking back a mere hundred or so years before him to the synod of Pistoia, a diocese in Tuscany, in 1786.

Liturgy was dying on the vine. Jansenists had made worship barely approachable with hard-nose demands on worshipers. Quietists had made it irrelevant with their insistence on a God-to-individual hot line as more than adequate.

Gallicanism (French-ism) was chopping away at the idea and practice of a universal liturgy, in fact universal lots of things, promoting church as federation of independent entities and the papacy as a first among equals, if that.

The issue or issues came to a head with this Pistoia synod, called by the local bishop at behest of the grand duke, Peter Leopold — later Emperor Leopold II — who pressed all 18 bishops in his duchy to do it, of whom three did. One was the Pistoia man, Scipio de’ Ricci, who was buying into some highly questionable ideas and causes whose time had come and gone. Bishop de’ Ricci was to regret this sorely.

. . . .  Read the rest here . . .

Opening shot, 11-17-18

I began this book in the role of a crabby old (very old) objector to the new mass, intending to issue primarily a cry from the heart, an extended complaynt at the plundering of liturgy as I knew it, which I sometimes considered akin to Henry VIII’s rape of the monasteries — Shakespeare’s “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” A despoliation, I feared — and to some extent still do.

You can imagine the shift involved, to go from complainer about the New Mass — Novus Ordo (new order of mass = new mass) — to looking for what I had to learn about it and charting a course for myself among Vatican 2 and other documents and assorted commentary and my own experiences and my own commentary including my complaynts.

So it’s an adventure, a journey of a soul, some might say, but not I. In fact, I shrink from grand statements. Don’t like them, because they glorify a common — not common enough — process of changing your mind or at least somewhat re-positioning yourself in a matter of wide discussion.

For the rest go here . . .

There for the man who owned his own darn weekly newsletter. Blithe Spirit explains itself in its inaugural issue, 3/6/96.

What’s This All About?

In the course of human events comes a time for declaring oneself. It’s not good for man to be alone with his thoughts. He must unburden himself, or explode. Suppression, says Freud, is bad for the soul — but he flourished in the steam age. What if he’d been a computer age baby? Would he have said garbage in, garbage out?

We’ll never know. Meanwhile, allow me to unburden myself — of thoughts large and small, largely about our community, Oak Park & River Forest, but not only that. Let chips fall.

It’s an exercise in self-declaration, you might say. Good for the soul, if nothing else. And full of short paragraphs.

Gentlemen, start your engines.  . . .

The rest of it is here . . .

Make it part of an offensive against recognition of the supernatural?

Our commentator puts the case of the Carmel in Philadelphia in a larger context of the crisis in the Church which started with the Second Vatican Council, and he issues a sort of battle cry, calling Catholics to resistance.

Down with the sacred, up with the world we know and can do something about!

How they do talk!

My wife and I had a favorite Thai restaurant when we lived in Austin, Texas. It wasn’t the best Thai restaurant in our experience. We’ve dined at much better ones in Washington, D.C., and Yorktown, Virginia. The best one was in Arlington, Virginia.

At any rate, our favorite Thai restaurant in Austin was very good and accordingly popular. And because Thai food is relatively inexpensive, it drew a lot of twenty- (and-thirty-) somethings.

Thus the air was filled (as usual) with “like”, “like”, “like”, “like”, and more “like”, ad nauseum. It made me want to stand up and shout “Shut up, I can’t take it any more.”

The rest of it is right here . . .

Abbott Calls Out the Guard [Updated]

Chapter One, The Man Goes to Church

Minister Friendly . . . The man dropped into church on Ash Wednesday for his annual reminder that he is dust and unto dust he will return only to be told by a feverishly smiling woman-with-ashes that God loves him, or something in that line. She did not tell him to have a nice day, he silently thanked her for that.

He believed God loves him and did not object to being reminded of it. But what about “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return”? He believed also in resurrection, but what about death? It comes first, doesn’t it? Medieval monks kept a skull on the desk before them. As just such a reminder, he presumed.

This wasn’t the man’s first happy-face reminder on Ashes Day. Funeral masses had not involved black vestments for ages, giving way to white ones, which emphasize resurrection. But even more so, he thought, in at least one small ritual, we can stand being reminded of death and putrefaction, “the seriousness of life,” as an old novice mate put it a few months before he died and became an expert on the subject.  . . .

more more more here . . .

He addressed guests at the Coalition for Cancelled Priests meeting in August in Naples, Florida.

He’s the priest who was excommunicated by his bishop in the wake of his fiery 47-minute sermon in 2018 to his small congregation in a Minneapolis suburb, later featured in a Remnant Magazine video VATICAN REVOLUTION: A Parish Priest Calls the Faithful Back to the Kingship of Jesus Christ.

His story is told here.

His August statement was a 7-minute message of encouragement, in which he quotes his father telling him as an eight-year-old never to ask the price he would pay when he sought the truth.

Part Two: Caught, Captured, and Summarily Dealt With . . .

From the pages of BLITHE SPIRIT, May 8, 1996, Two Cents and worth it.
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We left our heroes on the third-floor landing, balancing a garbage can
on Mr. McLaughlin’s railing. A dog started barking in the next yard. . . .
We froze again. Then Mel gestured, “Let’s go.” He tied twine to the
can, now balanced on the rail and made sure it was good and tight, giving it a
pull while I held the can steady. Then he threw the ball of twine over the
railing to the pavement below, where it landed with the slightest pop. Then
we started down the stairs, quickly as we could, quietly, one flight then an-
other.
We were already grinning with the sheer fun of it as we headed to the
first landing where the new people lived. Mel even jumped the last few
stairs, landing with a thump. Then the screen door flew open, and out jumped
the biggest guy I’d ever seen. . . .

For the rest, go here . . .