The Republican Party has a historic opportunity to revive the old Reagan coalition. The person standing in the way is the 45th president, writes the former attorney general.

He didn’t support his candidacy in 2016, doesn’t support it now, for reasons he gives having to do with crudity, rudeness, carelessness etc.

Then:

I also saw Trump’s strengths. I liked the clear and direct way he staked out a position and his willingness to state unpleasant truths that many were afraid to say. I appreciated that he was willing to confront head-on difficult issues—like unfair trade deals, or our allies’ paltry defense spending—that other politicians dodged. Above all, Trump had accurately diagnosed, and given voice to, the deep frustration of many middle-class and working-class Americans who were fed up with the excesses of progressive Democrats; the shameless partisanship of the mainstream media; and the smug condescension of elites who had mismanaged the country, sold them out, and appeared content to preside over the decline of America.

So he saved the country from four years of Mme. Clinton, but so what, Barr says. To which, no thanks.

Being moved by the Spirit

In 1840 the Benedictine monk Dom Prosper Gueranger published his Les Institutions liturgiques [“liturgical
institutions”] , described as “a wonderful demonstration of the antiquity and the beauties of the Roman liturgy,” by Didier Bonnetere his 1980 book, The Liturgical Movement: Gueranger to Beauduin to Bugnini, Roots, Radicals Results.

Neo-Gallican refers to newly revived separatist liturgies in northern Europe, especially in France. Neo because Pius VI had struck a mighty blow to the separatist movement Gallicanism (French-ism) with his condemnation of the Synod of Pistoia in 1794 at a time when “the whole of Europe . . . was floundering in an “anti-liturgical heresy.” (Bonneterre)

Gueranger was on the side of traditionalist angels, standing up for the wisdom of the ages, opposing changes meant to keep up with the times, etc.

Primarily, he wanted to bring the clergy back to the Roman rite. By the time of his death in 1875, all the French dioceses had abandoned their separatist ways. Their liturgy, wrote a fellow Benedicine in 1948, was replete with “confession, prayer and praise, rather than instruction.” He had “rediscovered the liturgy . . . discerned [its] essence” as worship that “sings to God its faith, its hope, and its charity.” . . .

Resr of it here.

From the archives:

The short-lived blog, Stuff White People Like (2008-2010), was fun while it lasted (if taken in small doses). I may be the last person to have found it. But, unlike white-”liberal”-yuppie persons, being au courant isn’t “where I’m at” (to use an expression that’s probably no longer au courant).

There are 136 entries. Here are my suggested additions:

• Foreign-language films — especially if incomprehensible, even with subtitles, about angst and suffering, and without an ending (the French way).

• Dressing casually — especially at fine restaurants. It’s a fetish — like wearing shorts regardless of the temperature.

• Public schools — for other people’s children.

• Public universities —très gauche, even if you attended one.

• Going “green” — as long as it’s expensive.

• Cheese — as in “I found this wonderful little cheese store.”

Plus many, many more, if yr interested . . .

“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]