This seven-plus-minute film is a fable about what goes wrong when society goes wild. It’s a 1937 E.B. White story illustrated a la Popeye etc. (H/T Instapundit)
They were trying to help
Jesus saves
Forgiveness double-header today. From Hebrews 4:
For we do not have a high priest
who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,
but one who has similarly been tested in every way,
yet without sin.
So let us confidently approach the throne of grace
to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.
And Mark 2:
Some scribes who were Pharisees saw that Jesus was eating with sinners
and tax collectors and said to his disciples,
“Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus heard this and said to them,
“Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.
I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (Italics added)
Tax collectors bought the position, then took tax revenue to cover their cost and make a profit. So there you were, dealing with a middle man reporting to no one. To sit with these people was to be one of them. Jesus had something else in mind. Good for him and good for us.
Two colors of tyranny
Reference to Yves Simon by Eugene Kennedy led me to this:
Communism and national socialism have come to resemble each other in so many respects that their historical diversity and their lasting opposition arouse wonder. In spite of common features that are profound and increasingly obvious, they prove altogether repugnant to effecting any kind of merger.
The task of fighting them would be greatly eased if followers, actual and potential, were led to believe that one system, i.e., the one which appeals to them, is substantially identical with the other, i.e., the one which they hate; but such identification never was very successful as a polemical instrument.
Conservatives in the 1930’s were given a fair chance to understand that naziism was but brown bolshevism;{1} yet many of them helped the Nazis. Today it seems that it should be easy for all concerned to recognize in communism the very features that they hated most in naziism; but not all do.
It’s from Simon’s Philosophy Of Democratic Government (Amazon). You can read it online here.
The Kennedy reference is to his and his wife Sara Charles’s 1997 book, Authority: The Most Misunderstood Idea in America, which I have even now waiting for me at the OP library.
As for the two-colors business, I wrote about liberalism as fascism for the Wed. Journal of OP&RF late in the ’08 campaign. This horrified leftist Oak Parkers, fascism being a word the left reserves for its enemies.
I argued that excessive governmental power (authority) was common to fascism and, for that matter, socialism. Will have to stay with Y. Simon et al. to see to what extent they back me up. As Bob McClory says in his comment below, with “perhaps even enlightenment” for me.
Presidential
Catch Sarah Palin on the Tucson murders, the aftermath, and us.
Here:
How keen is your crozier? (Modified)
Eugene Kennedy does the Chicago cardinal up brown.
Questioning whether Francis George’s is “the keenest crozier at the conclave,” he recalls the great man’s initial meeting with psychiatrist Sara Charles, Kennedy’s wife.
“I’ve looked into your book” — Authority: The Most Misunderstood Idea in America — “and I’ll tell you where you’re wrong.”
“It’s too Jungian,” George began, but my wife cut him off: “There is nothing Jungian in it. It’s based on the work of the Catholic philosopher, Yves Simon.”
“It is?” the startled George replied but did not wait for an answer.
[It’s a 1997 book, co-authored by Kennedy, by the way. We take Kennedy’s word for the implications here; he does not say when it happened or in what circumstances. Not a receiving line, we must presume, for instance.]
Interviewing George as “the U.S. bishops’ thinker-in-chief,” NC Reporter’s John Allen “suggests that many Catholics would like to see Cardinal Law-like resignations from bishops who covered up or reassigned sex abusing priests.
To which George:
Law — who, as his great patron put him in line to become archbishop of Chicago as soon as he heard that Cardinal Bernardin had a fatal illness — “went into exile.”
I guess so, but remaining on six powerful Roman congregations, being in charge of a prestigious basilica and living in splendid apartments does not sound like Elba to most people.
[Yes. Law blew it in Boston, got transferred (in style) to the home office. George can’t or won’t get this.]
Asked if he was surprised that New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan was elected president of the U.S. bishops’ conference over then-vice president Tucson Bishop Gerald Kicanas,
thereby breaking the conference’s tradition of selecting its outgoing vice-president as its new president, George cuts right to the chase: “Yes and no.”
Oh my. Painful to watch.
[As Gene K. presents it. But the rest of what George said is important here, which I failed to check. Sloppily. After the easily criticized “yes and no,” George:
I expected [the election] to be very close, but . . . had assumed the custom would be followed. . . . The discussion [about the election] was going on [among the bishops], and we [he and Kicanas] knew it. It was fed by many factors, which have been analyzed and discussed. Some interpreted it ideologically, but I don’t know there’s that much ideological difference. Some saw it in terms of different eras – new bishops and old bishops. Obviously, Bishop Kicanas has the capacity and the personality to be president of our conference, and so does Archbishop Dolan. Maybe some bishops simply thought, since both are worthy candidates, why should we be bound by a rule we didn’t make?
[This last sentence makes no sense that I can see, but at least he didn’t let it go at “yes and no.” He also defended Kicanas as working “extraordinarily” hard at coordinating bishops’ committees, which is fair enough. All in all, his remarks on this matter were forthcoming enough, if not persuasive.
[As for his wanting to study and read more in retirement, it was a relaxed interview and he was candid in a personal matter. Retirement? That’s the biggest issue raised in the whole article. Does he mean to do so at 75, in a year?]
Lots more of what the cardinal said — and decide for yourself — at “Picking the brain of the U.S. bishops’ thinker-in-chief.“
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Not easy to be Catholic
Here’s a hot one. This Catholic college can’t claim to be Catholic:
In In re Manhattan College, (NLRB, Jan. 10, 2010), a National Labor Relations Board regional director held that the judicially and administratively developed exemption from NLRB coverage for colleges whose purpose is the propagation of a religious faith does not apply to New York’s Manhattan College.
Its adjunct faculty wanted to unionize, the college claimed not be required to brook it.
The decision concludes that the evidence shows the purpose of the college is secular. It finds that there is little risk that exercising NLRB jurisdiction will lead to unconstitutional entanglement of government and religion because the “school’s stated purpose does not involve the propagation of a religious faith, teachers are not required to adhere to or promote religious tenets, a religious order does not exercise control over hiring, firing, or day-to-day operations, and teachers are given academic freedom…” [italics added]
The union had argued that the college “does not meet the test of a religious institution,” the NLRB bought the argument, in the face of this from the college president:
[T]he fact that we are a welcoming, pluralistic community is being presented as proof that we cannot be an authentic Catholic college. Questions about the number of brothers in various roles imply that the work of lay faculty, staff, and administrators is negligible in forwarding our mission, and betrays a complete incomprehension of a full generation’s hard and faithful work in passing forward the charism of religious orders to lay colleagues. [italics added]
Oh my, this “charism” business, which is trundled out whenever people notice that priests or brothers or sisters are distinctly minority figures on campus, as if years of training and lifetime commitment can be transfused to the unordained, the non-vowed, the non-religious-disciplined on demand.
The word should be banned in religious circles.
He falls, he bleeds
Up today at Chicago Catholic News, Fr. Pfleger in Bob McClory’s new book:
(POSTED: 1/12/11) “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”
— Percy B. Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
“We lepers.”
— Fr. Damien to his flock on Molokai
The Rev. Michael Pfleger is no Shelley, but he has a Romantic’s intensity of personal experience and self-absorption. He’s also a paradigm of latter-day Roman Catholic activism who has found in Robert McClory his perfect delineator.
Indeed, it could be argued that Pfleger has answered the call to action more perfectly than any other, making him and McClory a match made in Detroit, home of the Call to Action movement with which McClory is closely identified.
Neither is big on a Divine Providence approach to being Catholic. Instead they put their chips on a firm belief in the power of human beings to change the course of history. . . . .
more more more . . . .
The ABC’s of getting it right
Some nice explanation here from various experts about what’s been wrong with the RC liturgy and how it will change come next December, the first Sunday of Advent, 2011:
The original translation of the Roman Missal into English was carried out under 1969 Vatican rules that stressed simplicity, modernity and other factors that would make the language of the liturgy more comprehensible and participatory.
I believe it.
[T]here was concern “that the language has been too laid back” and failed to convey the rich liturgical heritage of the Roman rite.
Yep.
The new translation [in December] shows an effort “to heighten the language a bit” and capture “the transcendence as well as the imminence of God,” he says.
Yes, give us a taste of something special here, alert us to the mystery.
“. . . To radically simplify the language is often to dilute the concept.”
Not to make light of the problem that led to simplifying things, but you do lose something. I like the challenge the translators are recognizing. Let’s hope they meet it.
Catch me later about this
Man in the U.K. Catholic Herald, William Oddie, contrasts the going version of Scripture read at mass in the U.K. (Jerusalem Bible) and it’s “ghastly, tone-deaf, flat-footed mediocrity” with the 400-year-old King James and yet older, later revised, Douay-Rheims versions.
As in last Sunday’s “This is my beloved son” passage, where Jesus asks John the Baptist to baptize him, John hesitates, and Jesus says go ahead, do it:
[T]he sentence rendered by King James [Douai-Rheims] as But John forbad [stayed] him, saying: I ought to be baptised by thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering, said to him: Suffer it to be so now, appears in the Jerusalem Bible as John tried to dissuade him. It is I who need baptism from you, he said, and yet you come to me! But Jesus replied, Leave it like this for the time being.
I am not making this up: Leave it like this for the time being is how this wretched travesty renders what ought to be memorable words, as though our Lord were a car salesman with a special offer, or a politician suggesting some murky compromise.
He’d like to see leeway granted by bishops over there as to what version one may use, and I’d like to see it over here, where our New American Bible put the sentence thus: Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness,” which also limps.
Leftward, ho, even with Daley around
This may be a bit of comfort food for the angry, radical left soul of Michelle Obama, who advised students to shun the world of business. We know about Chicago’s Bill Daley . . .
Meanwhile, flying under the radar, is the appointment of Tina Tchen, another Chicagoan, as Michelle Obama’s chief-of-staff. Tchen is a hard leftist.
An acquaintance of hers told me (with a bit of exaggeration, I assume) that Tchen makes Dennis Kucinich look like a right-wing extremist.
According to sources, when Tchen practiced law as a partner at a big Chicago firm [Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom], she was the scourge of more than one associate unfortunate enough to have made his or her conservative views known.
Remember, says Bill of PowerLine Blog, “hard leftists” still “prowl” the White House, even if Bill Daley does not fit the description.
