I hate this “ordinary time” business, but Happy 25th Week anyhow, everyone.

Doesn’t mean we can’t swing to the rhythms of the oldie that is a sample of what the world owes to Holy Scripture, from Ecclesiastes 3:

There is an appointed time for everything,
and a time for every thing under the heavens.
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant.
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to tear down, and a time to build.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them;
a time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to be silent, and a time to speak.
A time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.

What advantage has the worker from his toil?
I have considered the task that God has appointed
for the sons of men to be busied about.
He has made everything appropriate to its time,
and has put the timeless into their hearts,
without man’s ever discovering,
from beginning to end, the work which God has done.

Life rarely a cabaret, but ever mysterious when you get down to it.

God has put “the timeless” into our hearts. We never do quite understand that.

via Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Rather than a flag for Courage, if there were one:

Surely by now, most everyone has heard of Courage International, a Roman Catholic Apostolate for people who experience same-sex attraction and who strive to uphold the virtue of chastity.

Surely by now, most everyone ought to know that those who have come home to the Church despite having same-sex attractions actually live the truth that the Church is not a place of hate or condemnation.

Surely by now, people have come to recognize that the Church loves all people, regardless of the journey they have taken thus far.

Not surely at all. How would most people know about this organization? Even when the late Chicago Cardinal Francis George invited or allowed Courage to meet at Mundelein seminary, except from me, there was almost no publicity about it.

It’s a touchy subject.

via Crisis Magazine

Doubles down.

Pope Francis, will you please say something?

From Times Literary Supplement review by Rozalind Dineen:

The artist-addict bromide is not what it once was. It’s easier to imagine a successful young artist in 2018 with a publicist than a habit.

And [writer David Foster] Wallace was, perhaps, the first artist-addict about whom one could not say “but I don’t really care” while still preserving literary credentials.

Caring is an intrinsic part of Wallace’s work and the effect he wished to have: he addresses a community – no longer the loner artist behaving as though he should be maintained through his otherness.

AA was a defining narrative for Wallace as it is for [writer Leslie] Jamison. In “This is Water” he extolled its precepts without naming them:

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and care about other people, and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, everyday”.

He acknowledged that the artist is held up in a net of understanding and revealed all the lines of equivalence between the addict who produces art and the one who does not.

via Story of thirst | Review: The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison

Holes in her argument.

via twitchy.com

List is growing.

17,388 have signed. Let’s get to 25,000!

And yet I do not sign, mainly because I consider it unrealistic, almost (but not quite!) in a class with praying for “an end to violence,” which is to say we pray for the Second Coming.

However, I do endorse the bill of particulars; and if I ever sign, it would be to advance that bill, which I consider accurate and eloquent.

It is:

We, the undersigned, in virtue of the Second Vatican Council’s empowering of the laity to respectfully voice their deeply held concerns to the shepherds in matters of the Church, respectfully beg His Eminence Blase Cardinal Cupich of Chicago to tender his resignation of his archdiocese, effective immediately.

In the aftermath of the “Summer of Shame” for the Church regarding the scandal of homosexual clerical predation and the promotion of sodomy at all levels of the Church, His Eminence has demonstrated a woeful lack of pastoral concern for both laity and his own clergy.

From his massively insensitive and unpastoral remarks to a Chicago TV station, where he said there is a “bigger agenda” than dealing with priestly sex abuse, to his doubling down on those comments less than a week later to a group of seminarians, which scandalized them, to his handling of the case of Fr. Paul Kalchik, a victim of homosexual rape whom he reportedly threatened to commit to psychiatric treatment, all of this demonstrates a pattern of extreme negligence in the fulfillment of his duties as shepherd, as well as increasing intolerance and lack of respect for faithful Catholics in his charge.

His reputation for this is now spreading far and wide throughout not just the Catholic world, bringing shame and scandal on the Church, but also in the secular world, where his comments are now the source of scandal for even non-Catholics.

In the face of all this just criticism, he demonstrated an embarrassing lack of humility as well as spiritual immaturity in blaming the TV station for “unfair editing” — a charge they disproved almost immediately.

Cardinal Cupich must publicly apologize for his insensitivity, intolerance, lack of transparency, lack of willingness to dialogue and resulting sadness, sorrow and scandal to the People of God that his willful actions have inflicted on them, and he must resign his post immediately.

The People of God can no longer endure the reign of a man whose very presence worries the faithful that each new day brings with it the increasing possibility of yet another national embarrassment for the Church. The faithful can no longer endure — nor should they endure — this appointment.

via Change.org

Closing of this brief 2017 description of St. Luke Institute, where Cardinal Cupich would have sent the long-ago abuse victim Fr. Paul Kalchik (by a neighbor at 11, by a priest at 19), closes with these reasonable questions:

Now, reflecting on all of the above, a few questions:

How much confidence do you have in the St. Luke Institute?

How many priests who were sent to the St. Luke Institute for counseling, and then returned to ministry, later became (further) involved in sexual abuse?

How much confidence have the American bishops shown in the Institute and its leaders? Has that changed in the past 15 years, as the above information has come to light? If not, why not?

How much confidence does Cardinal Cupich have in the institute? A lot, obviously.

via Catholic Culture