We met each other in 3rd grade in St. Catherine of Siena school in Oak Park IL in 1939, stayed in touch over the years, more recently via telephone, Chicago to his house in California.

His son called the other day, suggested I might talk to him. Not that he was talking any more but he was listening, which I verified with the help of the son’s  wife, who had put her phone next to his ear and later told me he was reacting to my voice.

Hearing is the last thing to go, she said, and I can testify three other death beds over the years, when mourners-to-be addressed the soon-to-die, one of whom, another from our youth, bed-ridden on a coma, pressed my hand, showing he’d heard.

As I told our #1 daughter, I talked to Bill a lot over the last several years, hearing what he had to say about lots of thinks, toward the end doing a lot of listening, let me tell you, but from now on doing all the talking, to him in the next life.

I love that part. Already have my sister Mary Clare Penney, who much appreciated Bill by the way, from conversations at our house and told her children about him. Bill told me he appreciated seeing siblings relate to each other, having had none himself.

Bill and I in days gone by played baseball on Sam’s Lot, as we called a vacant stretch on a corner near us. He considered himself a pitcher and made an art creation of it. Very serious about it.

On another of our locations, Columbus Park, on the Chicago side of Austin from the el and metro tracks station on the south to tennis courts on the north.  We played on the southern-end open space with diamonds on either end. Commuters would stop to watch on their way home from work.

One of our games had a score in the twenties, leading a religious-order priest assigned to St. Catherine’s, who played touch ball with us on after-school hours, observed it had been a pitcher’s duel.

Let’s leave it for now. Praying that Bill rests in peace, of course . . .

Rorate: Dew, Desert, and the Return of the Judge

Fourth Sunday of Advent: when God answers the Church’s long delay with a Quiet Coming that changes everything

Chris Jackson Dec 21, 2025

“Let the Just One descend, O heavens, like dew from above.”

That line lands differently when you have lived long enough to watch men replace thunder with press releases, altars with stages, doctrine with “journeys,” and apostolic gravity with a perpetual pastoral smile.

We are not the first Catholics to feel the sky has turned to brass. Advent itself presumes the experience of delay. It trains the soul to keep begging Heaven to open, even when the earth looks sealed.

Christian impatience, you know.

Today’s Mass does something bracing: it refuses to flatter our impatience. . . . gives us dew, not fireworks.

A voice in the desert, not a committee statement. A steward who fears the Lord’s judgment, not a “synodal” manager who fears headlines. It gives us the Church’s true hope, which is never “things will probably improve,” but rather: the Lord is coming, and He will set things right.

Oh yes. We are convinced of that.

The Introit is juridical and royal. “Rorate caeli desuper… Let the Just One descend.”

Neither therapist nor facilitator. The Just One. The One who does not negotiate with reality and cannot be bribed by modernity. The One whose justice is not cruelty, because it is married to truth.

The way things are. Relax, fellow. Buy into it, OK?

But notice the manner. Dew. Gentle rain. A quiet descent that still breaks the hardest ground.

That is already a correction to our age, which has trained Catholics to look for the kingdom in volume: the bigger event, the bigger platform, the bigger “moment.”

God enters history like dew. He does not need the Church’s marketing department to accomplish His Incarnation.

Again. Buy this. Make it your own. It’s you and God, yes. You can count on it. He knows all about you. Believe Him. Trust Him. Respect Him. Faith, Hope, Charity.

. . .

Very often people will ask, as I myself asked for years: “Why in the world would the Church’s leaders persecute some of the most faithful Catholics—those who form the TLM [Traditional Latin Mass] communities?”

They are penalized, to be sure, their venues taken away, promoters disciplined.

Why indeed?

The answer is not an agreeable one, but sometimes we must take bitter medicine in order to get well. Truth can be the bitterest of medicines. [Uh-oh. Look out.]

. . . of all the sicknesses in the Church, denial of reality is one of the most widespread and most unacknowledged. When this sickness is not diagnosed, the sufferer cannot take the steps he needs to take in regard to spiritual diet and exercise.

That last is a grabber. He’s means to prescribe or begin to uncover what’s needed for the pew-sitters of the world for them to stay (a) interested and (b) devout.

The Church’s leaders persecute the most faithful Catholics . . . a leadership . . .  at this time dominated by a network of active homosexuals and theological modernists.

Oh.

They are not always the same people, but they rely on, and receive, one another’s support.

We all know individual good bishops or cardinals, but such exceptions [!] are a controlled opposition, with very limited mobility.

Exceptions?

The more [these bishops and cardinals] act or speak out, the more ostracized they are, and sometimes they can even be canceled, as priests are canceled lower down.

In the ranks, where non-conformers pay for their sins.

What then of “the enormity of the evil represented by each of these forces”?

Homosexuals reject the first principles of natural law.

Modernists reject the first principles of divine revelation.

Together, they reject the foundations not only of Christianity but of religion as such, and therefore of morality.

Hard words, hard to take. He warned us.

Their “religion,” if such it can be called, is one of self-actualization and self-regard—a secularized inversion of the Christian mission to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.

Condemnation, you have a target.

Theirs is the fashionable subjectivism and flexible relativism of the postmodern West, where “anything goes”—except, of course, traditional faith and morals, for this faith and these morals would eliminate them, possibly even in the old-fashioned method prescribed by pre-modern popes who did not think the death penalty “inadmissible.” [?!]

This false religion, combined with unlimited vanity and lust for power, explains why much of our senior leadership is hell-bent on erasing the TLM from the Church and uprooting the communities that grow around it.

Whom they see as their enemy.

Thus, when people exclaim—baffled by Traditionis Custodes and its ongoing implementation —“But look at how the TLM attracts young people! Look at the large families and numerous vocations!” they are . . . missing the point.

It’s precisely because of this fruitfulness, not in spite of it, that its enemies want to crush it. The more fruitful it is, the more furious they will be.

Whole thing is a mess. Modernists and same-sex-attracted join forces to shoot down opponents, run-of-mill purveyers of every-day Catholicism who know what side their butter’s on.

They see people every day dying for help and have bosses with eye out for non-conformity and ready to slap him down. Conformity, otherwise called unity, actually uniformity, is the never-ready explanation.

Wall St. Journal pays tribute to couple slain by the son they worked hard to bring around in a lifetime of addiction.

President Trump got caught up in the story, blaming the couple’s politics, as if to say they got what was coming to them.

Secondary story this, his ill-timed, misguided comment, a case I say, of giving way to a Satanic urge, by one who has dealt stoically with an amazing list of harsh commentary and attacks on his physical well-being.

Great day for Satan, Cardinal Newman would have said.

. . . to give ourselves only to this or that commandment, is to incline our minds in a wrong direction, and at length to pull them down to the earth, which is the aim of our adversary, the Devil.

Something else. Drug slavery is at the heart of this parental slaughter, and freedom from drug slavery is at the heart of President Trump’s closing down the border invasion and more recently hijacking delivery boats, indeed having them blown out of the water.

More than any other president, or public official for that matter, he has taken steps to shoot down the trade that kills thousands and/or leads addicts to kill their loved ones.

The president’s blaming the dead or seen as such for how they felt about him, bizarre as it was, oddly enough might be seen as referring in part at least to his crusade against killer drugs.

Either way, we have in this episode not only the horror of the son’s insane reaction to loving parents but also a case in point of the deadliness of the enemy that threatens the nation, what the president has recognized and seeks to thwart.

The last of writer’s introduction to his coming book . . .

We left off with this about the book as work in progress:

Part 5 of his coming book. . .

. . . traces the aftermath from Paul VI through the present pontificate, asking how the conciliar vocabulary ripened into the theology and pastoral practice of our own time.

It’s been at work, he says, in Council documents and encyclicals and explanations inspired by them, and official catechisms and codes that attempted to “domesticate” their language.

Getting us used to them, the better to have us take them for granted.

The book’s goal [will be] not to build a psychological portrait of “the spirit of the Council,” but to show, line by line, how certain sentences and choices of vocabulary made the present collapse possible and, in many cases, almost inevitable.

One long fait accompli.

He sees a grim picture, of “disoriented faithful — empty seminaries, closed parishes, profaned liturgies, catechisms that no longer catechize — the lived outcome of decisions made in aula and ratified in ink. In theology, words are deeds.”

Oh?

An adjective can shift the burden of a sentence. An adverb can hollow out a command. A cautious footnote can sabotage a dogmatic paragraph.

Catholics who kneel in half deserted churches, or who have had to seek refuge in marginal chapels and improvised altars, are living in the echo of those [phrases].

We don’t have to assume that “the true Church has perished or Christ has abandoned His promises.”

We do have to “face the possibility that . . . the official continuation of that Church has . . . become a counter witness to her own past, a counter church that survives by parasitism on the language and structures it inherited.”

Confusion.

And “recent claimants to the papal throne”? They either “lack authority” or “have abused it to the point of moral unusability.”

Yes, Virginia, there is such a word. Point being, morality be damned, full speed ahead to a new world out there, my friends, where the livin’ is easy . . .

“We must look honestly at what they have done with the Council they celebrate as their charter.”

Namely?

Calling a council in the first place “in an age that no longer believed in councils or in truth itself.”

The age itself being nothing to match up with., or accommodate. Lost cause, Newman would have said.

Look to the last years of Pius XII leading up to the John XXIII election, and “the strange confidence with which the Church opened her windows to a storm she could not control.”

“Only by returning to that moment,” says our man, “can we see the scale of what followed.”

Nothing beats hindsight, of course. It’s why people write books.

In his book our man raises the curtain “on the last years of a world that still believed the Church could not change because God did not change.

“Pius XII reigned over a hierarchy that seemed unshakable.” he says. But “the soil beneath it was already loosening.”

As a Jesuit trainee in the mid-’50s in a three-year stint as a philosophy student, there were distinctions between new and old thinkers.

Our man about these days:

Theologians who once whispered their theories in seminaries had begun to speak them aloud. Bishops who had sworn to defend tradition learned to speak of adaptation.

Surrender was in the air.

John XXIII called for a council which was greeted by most “as a curiosity.”

Nothing to get excited about, a “tidying” of things Catholic, “not a revolution,” begun quietly, ‘in offices and corridors.”

It’s what this book is about.

— That’s all for now. Next comes the book . . .

https://open.substack.com/pub/dennisbyrne/p/dont-believe-democrats-who-say-violent?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

http://www.jimbowman.com

40th ward (my ward) lady describes ICE situation in Chicago — accurately I say, unfortunately for all concerned. But some questions remain neither raised nor apparently answered:

* Should law-breakers be allowed to go their way?

* Should cities or states declare themselves sanctuaries for law-breakers?

* Assuming inaccuracies

Friend X from away back is alarmed and looks for explanation and why not?

With the attack on the Minnesota Catholic church and school, I thought I would hear what our pastor had to say about it. Seemed like a good opportunity to address what I think was on the minds of millions of Catholics: How did God let this happen?

“How?” First, it’s one of millions (countless!) that He lets happen.

Quick answer, it’s that or abolish free will. God wants people, not robots, as objects of His you might say rapt attention and potential returners of their rapt attention.

Robots or people capable of heroisms or horrors? That was His option. Zombies or puppets? Dumb animals, supreme gardens, ocean, lakes, rivers? Stars, planets, meteors? Not enough for Him. Get it?

“God’s in His heaven, All’s right with the world!” was Pippa’s song as she passed the open window in the Browning poem.

Does God “intervene in human affairs”? you ask.

Or is he like the watchmaker? . . . . the flock is troubled and needs to hear from the shepherd. A touch of comfort?

Not this time. Rather, the preacher “stuck religiously to the prescribed Vatican II formula: Lecture us on the meaning of today’s gospel.”

He added:

True enough, the gospel does raise some needed thoughts, such as my fear of little me getting judged by the Almighty, Creator of the Universe. Standing (kneeling) in front of Him, He looking me in the eye; sends shivers down my spine.

Ah, He pays attention, takes it seriously.

“Anyway,” he says. “I’m interested in your thoughts about the priest deviating from the prescription prescribed by . . . men in Rome.”

Needn’t ignore it. Basing sermons on Scripture is least of our worries about what comes from Rome.

Finding in Scripture and running with a deep thought is good idea, deeper the better, allowing for receptivity of audience, getting them where they live without shocking them. Not usually, anyhow. At same time, not good to ignore horrid events headlined coast-to-coast.

As this one, horrible murders by an apparently deranged young man-turned-woman (!) of school kids and teachers in church.

My friend adds:

With all this in mind I read almost your [long, long] entire post yesterday, at least until I could safely think that I get it.

I also miss the Latin mass. I too am uncomfortable with the “show” with performers on the upfront stage.

(In college we often blasphemed by calling it the “magic show.” How right we were, it turns out.) I particularly liked the comment about the glitter of the vestments and the gaudy display of gold, etc.: Jesus didn’t wear the like.

Yes, keeping in mind our imitation of Jesus has naught to say about how he dressed.

Which . . . raised a question in my mind: If women can’t be priests because of a tradition that Jesus was a man and had male apostles, why does the tradition of modesty and tradition [not?] apply to priestly garments?

Apples and oranges if ever there was one, my friend. Tradition is of the church, 2,000 years, argued out and decided by institutional descendants of Apostles and popes, transferring what was believed from it’s beginning and applied and interpreted.

I know I heard (in reference to the beautiful churches and cathedrals) that God is deserving of the best we have. Not that I disagree with this Middle Ages explanation, and yet…. St. Francis comes to mind.

. . . who taught the church a thing or two about oft-forgotten practices and norms, as did saints throughout.

As for churches and cathedrals, reminders of God’s grandeur and saints and martyrs and all things supernatural, we might compare them to nuts-and-bolts newbie structures of our days, down-to-business buildings that imitate and tell us what? I ask you.

“Well that’s enough to chew on for this Sabbath,” says my friend. “Peace be to you.”

. . . and to you too, my friend. Come again . . .