Dear Diary(!) – Man stops to let small white dog come up to Jim on bench, man is staked out, 7 a.m. of a Sunday, book at ready. Dog says nothing. Neither does Jim. Owner man says good morning, takes dog away. Good.

Moments later, “Good morning” from woman with another little white dog, also silent, she from a few yards away, not yet abreast of Jim. He looks up and nods with a half wave, looks back down again, she takes her dog away.

Two up, two down in the early-morning Grumpy Jim game. Third person moments later with little black dog. Jim looks up as they approach, sees smiling off-white face of short-haired friendly woman, smiles good morning. Her little black dog, a poodle with no personality, stops before Jim and stares.

“Phoebe, he doesn’t want to play,” woman says but does not pull Phoebe away. Instead, she tells Phoebe again that Jim does not want to play. Phoebe, unconvinced, stays there. A third time Phoebe has it explained to her and finally she gets it and goes her way. Inning over.

But no. Comes fourth batter, mahogany-skinned younger woman with pop eyes brings her little brown dog, who also finds Jim interesting. This woman says nothing, seems rather more anxious than the others, who seemed not anxious at all. Her little brown dog she too is reluctant to force away but dog is allowed, anxiously, to stand before Jim, curious and possibly seeking a touch on his little brown head accompanied by mild tickling of chin. But he or she too is taken away.

Down the path, there is a flurry and Jim looks up and sees little brown dog approached by little black one with much yip-yapping and then little white dog on leash and then other little white one off leash and now four little dogs in mish-mash of growls and yip-yaps.

Off-white woman, older, with short hair, is clearly gratified by this turn. Owner man of off-leash little white dog calls from other side of park and in due time the congress is dispersed and crickets are heard again, also aeroplane overhead. Also, homeless pair across the park are heard yip-yapping with occasional growl.

It was morning in America, Austin Gardens-Oak Park IL, 2013 A.D.

First of all, there are such married priests, as we many if not most know already. Not Roman Catholics but Eastern Rite, long-ago created in all-systems-go efforts at unification with once-schismatic Orthodox worshipers.

I stood chatting with one some time back a few blocks from where our two sons were living, upstairs from the art gallery they were running on California Ave., where the Ukrainian Catholic church was for which the priest was pastor.

As a one-time religion reporter and before that a Jesuit, I thought we might take a look inside. We did, but no more than a look. It was Easter Day, the pastor had been there since six o’clock, and he was closing shop. Had to join the wife and kids at home.

Yes. The man was a couple decades or so older than my sons. He had found his way in life that included two sacraments, Matrimony and Holy Orders. And I bless him to this day.

He and I and my son Pete had a pleasant half-hour chat and returned to the flat, joining his mother and others.

Another married-priest syndrome were the Anglicans who in the last several decades pulled a John Henry Newman on the Church of England and joined up with Roman Catholicism and now function as pastors throughout the U.S. and U.K.

These took Romanism on at the behest of our last pontiff but two, Benedict XIV, who in the year of Our Lord 2009 said come one, come all to Anglicans in search of old-time religion which they used to have in Merry England but had no more.

Alas, something went wrong with that invitation. It’s been withdrawn. By a pope named Francis, now gone for his reward, and not reinstated by his successor named Leo. No sir, no sirree.

One one single news day in the world of what this writer could find on his google, there a dozen links to the story about widespread former Anglicans become full-fletched Romans, lots of them, and one, 7-31-25, about Francis withdrawing same.

The Vatican has made a decisive move by ending a special provision that allowed Anglican priests to convert to Catholicism while retaining some of their traditions. This pathway, established under Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, was designed to welcome disillusioned Anglican clergy, particularly those opposed to the ordination of women and LGBTQ+ rights. [emphasis added]

Lot there, to be sure. The top man of Anglicans not happy with this doctrinal exposing as cause of hundreds of his people packing up for greener pastures in Rome. Come on, he says, you open your doors and we watch our people hustling through.

In hundreds, wives and families and all, as reported 11-21-25 as regards the United Kingdom, home of the worldwide English-speaking priests and bishops (!):

A new report reveals that significant numbers of Anglican clergy have converted to Catholicism in the United Kingdom since 1992.

The report, “Convert Clergy in the Catholic Church in Britain,” released 11-20-25, shows that approximately 700 clergy and religious of the Church of England, Church in Wales, and Scottish Episcopal Church have been received into the Catholic Church since 1992. The number includes 16 former Anglican bishops.

This equates to approximately a third of all Catholic priests ordained in England and Wales during this period.

And then there is the US and Canada situation.

1-1-12,

Benedict XVI announced creation of an ordinariate – similar to a diocese, but national in scope – for Anglican groups and clergy across the United States who wish to become Catholic. The ordinariate will be based in Houston.

Yes indeed, the Spirit moved Benedict to make it international. Anglicans shocked and disturbed by their religion and wanting out were given it.

The pope also named Father Jeffrey Steenson, a Catholic priest serving in Houston since 2009, to lead the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.

Married and the father of three children, Father Steenson was an Episcopal bishop before becoming Catholic in 2007.

He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe in 2009, the same year he came to Houston to teach patristics (the study of the Church fathers) at St. Mary’s Seminary.

Two years later, Benedict opened the gates.

Pope Benedict XVI promulgated the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, permitting erection of personal ordinariates equivalent to dioceses, on November 4, 2009.

By 2017, there were 43 ordinariate parishes and missions in the in U.S. and Canada, headed by priests named by the equivalent of monsignor but not bishops, who had to be unmarried.

So 43 married priests and parishes, what do you know about that? Adding to the Eastern Catholic pastors like him who took time for a half-hour chat in mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday but had to get back to his wife and kids.

It can be done. Holy Mother Church is pastored almost but not entirely by celibates including the same-sex-attractive who currently number as high as eight out of every ten, some of whom live up to their state of life but others who don’t.

For these same-sex attracted one might (I did) go to what’s said prolifically by a priest of long experience who makes this proposal: Mix up your (presumed) 80% of them with ministerial colleagues who have wife and kids and you have, shall we say, a calming effect on the church of today.

— more to come on this unusual proposal —

From Peter A. Kwasniewski’s How the Liturgical Reform and the Contemporary Ars Celebrandi Are Remote Contributors to the Crisis on Marriage and Family© 2015:

It might be assumed that once the compilers of the new lectionary of readings decided on a three-year Sunday cycle and a two-year weekday cycle, they would not fail to include in their new lectionary all of the readings from the traditional Roman liturgy, and that, in their march through various books of the Bible, they would not omit any key passages.

You would think so.

Instead, they made a programmatic decision to avoid what they judged to be “difficult” biblical texts [in part because] such texts would be more difficult for the faithful to understand.

Huh. Spare the people conundrums.

Be that as it may, these verses from 1 Corinthians 11 did not make it past the cutting board, never appear in the new mass readings:

“. . . whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink of the chalice of the Lord unworthily,
shall be guilty of the Body and of the Blood of the Lord.

“But let a man prove himself; and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice.

“For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the Body of the Lord.” (verses 27-29)

Never appear? Never.

So the allowing of all and sundry to communion, a major issue in new-church politics, can’t readily be shot down by this presumably confusing passage at any new mass during the mere decades-old choice by some  apparatchiks of the 1960s?

Right.

Now what kind of organization would ignore, in this case erase, a basic statement that cuts at the heart of its existence?

Paul, with Peter one of the earthly very founders of the church as we know it, said it. The fixers paid no attention to it and made sure pew-sitters would not be reminded of it.

We are to ignore — misrepresent — something as crucial as who is worthy to take the Eucharist? Because it’s too hard a sell? So we have a liturgy cleansed of the hard-to-take?

Good luck with that, people. This be a counterfeit version meant to leave members undisturbed, relaxed, happy with themselves and they better be, or they be telling us goodbye?

It would seem so, in that for “almost half a century, St. Paul’s warning against receiving the Body and Blood of the Lord unworthily, unto one’s damnation, has not been read at any Ordinary Form Mass.

A warning that “in the traditional Latin Mass,” whose readings were called “too restricted,” these verses are heard “at least three times every year, once on Holy Thursday, and twice on Corpus Christi, in the Epistle and the Communion antiphon.”

Hmm.

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 . . .