My friend Jon Samsel does another great job on analyzing social media in light of the Rep. Weiner scandal: http://tinyurl.com/3awn6jh
From my POV, to read the Facebook convo he has where he reinforces a Jewish sexual stereotype ... boy. If I was Mrs. Weiner, I'd be livid. But here's why I love this scandal: It proves we still want our leaders to be men and women of virtue. Despite how we supposedly "turned a corner" and became "more enlightened" on this sort of thing in the wake of the Clinton scandal, it shows we still want our leaders to emulate the ideal, both in public and in private. Otherwise, who would give a rat's keester about someone's private, consensual life? In a strange, almost obscene way, it gives me hope for this quickly degenerating country of ours that we can turn things around. Because if we care about what our leaders do, it shows we still have standards, no matter how threadbare.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Some thoughts based on recent observation of the traditional Latin Mass
In the past four years, I've seen some things vis-a-vis the traditional Latin Mass that make me think folks who say its return as the Catholic Church's primary liturgy will magically improve things are possibly missing something.
I should start by noting my love for this form of the Divine Liturgy. In 1996, after my first time ever attending this form, my future mother-in-law (God rest her soul) asked me, "So: What did you think?" My response was, "Why did they get rid of so many beautiful prayers?"
When we lived in California for seven years, we lived in a diocese where the previous bishop had not done anything in the slightest to prevent the most egregious liturgical abuses from becoming "tradition." At best, our options for Mass were "not as bad" and "essentially tolerable" and "good, relatively speaking." However, if you wanted truly good liturgy, where the Mass was done as if everything associated with and in it truly mattered (because, given what it is, it does), you had one option: the traditional Latin Mass offered at a parish run by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, better known as the FSSP.
The Mass there was magnificent. Beautifully, reverently, and somlemnly celebrated, it also featured gorgeous, soaring, soul-lifting music, and meaty, thought provoking homilies. It was special. How I miss it.
Having experienced that parish, I truly understand those who say the TLM (i.e., traditional Latin Mass, pre-Vatican II Mass, pre-1969 Mass, Tridentine Mass, etc.) is the way to go. If it's done like that, you bet your bottom dollar it is.
However, having had the opportunity since then to assist at TLMs said by non-traditional order priests, my opinion is more tempered. When the TLM is in the hands of someone who's a) doing it simply out of the kindness of their own hearts, i.e., as a service/act of charity for those attached to the TLM or b) who's not capable or equipped to offer a High Mass or c) worst of all, begrudgingly (even angrily) doing it because they have to, it's underwhelming to say the least. One certainly gets no sense of the reverence and awe-inspiring power of the extraordinary form (i.e., TLM) to move souls.
But one could forgive this sort of thing coming from a diocesan priest. After all, he does not exclusively celebrate this manner of the Mass. It's sort of akin to Our Lord's admonition about serving two masters, isn't it?
What is hard to countenance, however, is when the TLM is done badly or in less than an exemplary fashion by a traditional order priest.
On my family's recent vacation, we did some genealogical gold digging in a remote part of a Midwestern state. It turns out the area had a TLM community run by a good traditional order in union with Rome, and so that Saturday morning, we assisted at Mass there.
In my experience, a Low Mass done on a weekday normally takes a good 40-45 minutes to celebrate, even without benefit of the readings being proclaimed in English and a sermon. This Mass, with no readings and no homily, took 23 minutes.
Now, granted, Father got in his car and left very quickly thereafter, so maybe he really had someplace to go, and thus hurried through Mass to attend to that. Maybe someone was dying and holding on for Extreme Unction. Who knows? In other words, I'm willing to cut this reportedly good priest some slack.
However, a friend of mine who runs a state's Catholic conference tells me when he was growing up in the late 1950s-early 1960s, he served at the altar for a priest who took great pride in his ability to say Mass in under 20 minutes on the days he had his tee time (i.e., days he had scheduled to play golf).
My experience at the FSSP parish I mentioned toward the outset of this piece was, I would argue, an anomaly. I'm pretty willing to bet my underwhelming experience of TLMs celebrated by diocesan clergy or the type of priest my friend had as a boy or the traditional order priest we experienced that Saturday morning were the norm in the years leading up to the Council. Not in all places, certainly, but in many places. If not, why were so many so awfully eager to give up the Mass of Ages? If it had uniformly moved the faithful, they never would have countenanced the saccharine counterfeit offered them in the wake of Vatican II. Why was there a liturgical reform movement in the first place? (And, yes, I know this movement was largely driven by theologians, but were there no calls for such change by the laity? Given the impetus for reform at the Council, anticipated in some form by Pius XII's Mediator Dei, I can hardly thing this was the pet project of the ecclesial glitterati alone.) Therefore, what makes us think that returning to the TLM will be the wand that begins to magically cure all that ails Holy Mother Church?
OK, you can't make -- or make as many -- liturgical abuses in the extraordinary form. Granted. But isn't doing this Mass in a sloveny, uneven, or excessively hurried fashion an abuse?
What is needed in both the ordinary and extraordinarly forms are priests who know who they are, who know what being a priest fully means, who are unwaveringly committed to becoming that to the fullest extent possible, and for whom the Mass is the fullest expression and highest calling of being a priest. For goodness' sake, Father, you're bringing us Christ! Jesus' very Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity! Act like it! Show us by your reverence, your solemnity, your care, your solicitude, your every movement and expression, by your very bearing that this is the moment heaven and earth meld! We are starving for this in the novus ordo and TLM alike!
Sorry about all the exclamation points, but I'm sorely vexed by this. Bad liturgy is killing the Church just as much as bad catechesis and doctrine are. The only reason we will become the remnant, smaller body the Pope has envisioned many times is because people take the Church and all that makes her as old hat.
It doesn't have to be that way, and with the help of committed TLM and novus ordo priests and faithful alike, it won't be. The choice is ours. What road shall we take?
I don't know, what do you think?
I should start by noting my love for this form of the Divine Liturgy. In 1996, after my first time ever attending this form, my future mother-in-law (God rest her soul) asked me, "So: What did you think?" My response was, "Why did they get rid of so many beautiful prayers?"
When we lived in California for seven years, we lived in a diocese where the previous bishop had not done anything in the slightest to prevent the most egregious liturgical abuses from becoming "tradition." At best, our options for Mass were "not as bad" and "essentially tolerable" and "good, relatively speaking." However, if you wanted truly good liturgy, where the Mass was done as if everything associated with and in it truly mattered (because, given what it is, it does), you had one option: the traditional Latin Mass offered at a parish run by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, better known as the FSSP.
The Mass there was magnificent. Beautifully, reverently, and somlemnly celebrated, it also featured gorgeous, soaring, soul-lifting music, and meaty, thought provoking homilies. It was special. How I miss it.
Having experienced that parish, I truly understand those who say the TLM (i.e., traditional Latin Mass, pre-Vatican II Mass, pre-1969 Mass, Tridentine Mass, etc.) is the way to go. If it's done like that, you bet your bottom dollar it is.
However, having had the opportunity since then to assist at TLMs said by non-traditional order priests, my opinion is more tempered. When the TLM is in the hands of someone who's a) doing it simply out of the kindness of their own hearts, i.e., as a service/act of charity for those attached to the TLM or b) who's not capable or equipped to offer a High Mass or c) worst of all, begrudgingly (even angrily) doing it because they have to, it's underwhelming to say the least. One certainly gets no sense of the reverence and awe-inspiring power of the extraordinary form (i.e., TLM) to move souls.
But one could forgive this sort of thing coming from a diocesan priest. After all, he does not exclusively celebrate this manner of the Mass. It's sort of akin to Our Lord's admonition about serving two masters, isn't it?
What is hard to countenance, however, is when the TLM is done badly or in less than an exemplary fashion by a traditional order priest.
On my family's recent vacation, we did some genealogical gold digging in a remote part of a Midwestern state. It turns out the area had a TLM community run by a good traditional order in union with Rome, and so that Saturday morning, we assisted at Mass there.
In my experience, a Low Mass done on a weekday normally takes a good 40-45 minutes to celebrate, even without benefit of the readings being proclaimed in English and a sermon. This Mass, with no readings and no homily, took 23 minutes.
Now, granted, Father got in his car and left very quickly thereafter, so maybe he really had someplace to go, and thus hurried through Mass to attend to that. Maybe someone was dying and holding on for Extreme Unction. Who knows? In other words, I'm willing to cut this reportedly good priest some slack.
However, a friend of mine who runs a state's Catholic conference tells me when he was growing up in the late 1950s-early 1960s, he served at the altar for a priest who took great pride in his ability to say Mass in under 20 minutes on the days he had his tee time (i.e., days he had scheduled to play golf).
My experience at the FSSP parish I mentioned toward the outset of this piece was, I would argue, an anomaly. I'm pretty willing to bet my underwhelming experience of TLMs celebrated by diocesan clergy or the type of priest my friend had as a boy or the traditional order priest we experienced that Saturday morning were the norm in the years leading up to the Council. Not in all places, certainly, but in many places. If not, why were so many so awfully eager to give up the Mass of Ages? If it had uniformly moved the faithful, they never would have countenanced the saccharine counterfeit offered them in the wake of Vatican II. Why was there a liturgical reform movement in the first place? (And, yes, I know this movement was largely driven by theologians, but were there no calls for such change by the laity? Given the impetus for reform at the Council, anticipated in some form by Pius XII's Mediator Dei, I can hardly thing this was the pet project of the ecclesial glitterati alone.) Therefore, what makes us think that returning to the TLM will be the wand that begins to magically cure all that ails Holy Mother Church?
OK, you can't make -- or make as many -- liturgical abuses in the extraordinary form. Granted. But isn't doing this Mass in a sloveny, uneven, or excessively hurried fashion an abuse?
What is needed in both the ordinary and extraordinarly forms are priests who know who they are, who know what being a priest fully means, who are unwaveringly committed to becoming that to the fullest extent possible, and for whom the Mass is the fullest expression and highest calling of being a priest. For goodness' sake, Father, you're bringing us Christ! Jesus' very Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity! Act like it! Show us by your reverence, your solemnity, your care, your solicitude, your every movement and expression, by your very bearing that this is the moment heaven and earth meld! We are starving for this in the novus ordo and TLM alike!
Sorry about all the exclamation points, but I'm sorely vexed by this. Bad liturgy is killing the Church just as much as bad catechesis and doctrine are. The only reason we will become the remnant, smaller body the Pope has envisioned many times is because people take the Church and all that makes her as old hat.
It doesn't have to be that way, and with the help of committed TLM and novus ordo priests and faithful alike, it won't be. The choice is ours. What road shall we take?
I don't know, what do you think?
Friday, June 3, 2011
What they really think
When I was a boy, I lived in the Middle East, Amara and then Basra, Iraq, to be exact, followed by some months in a ghetto for foreign workers at Dharan, Saudi Arabia.
In Saudi, we never saw Arabs because we were, again, in a ghetto, purposefully segregated by the government, I guess so we evil, infidel foreigners would not contaminate the local Islamic population? I don't know. We could drive to the beach or to the Aramco ghetto, but there wasn't much to see outside the ghetto, anyway. Then again, inside the ghetto, there was absolutely nothing. No kids. No parks. No stores. All I remember are blocks of single family homes with small yards and little vegetation and a boring existence. I think we lasted six weeks, although I can't say. It was early 1976 that we arrived, and all I know is that I was attending a parochial school in Canton, Ohio, before the end of the '75-'76 school year.
Iraq, however, is an entirely different story. It was an exciting, wonderful place. I loved it. Of course, I was a seven, eight year old little boy, and everything was magical, new, and different, the sights, the smells, the people, especially the people.
The people were magnificent. They were wonderful, gregarious, generous, open, hospitable, giving, and every good adjective you can find to describe other humans. Yes, there were the cretins who would pinch my mom's rear while she walked down the street, but those weren't the people with whom we had our normal interactions. There was our driver in Amara, an imposing man in his 50s with a wide girth, a wider grin, and a still wider heart. There was our driver in Basra, Abdul Wahed, a good, patient man who endured a lot from us obnoxious American kids (he drove all the American families, not just mine, and all of us, I'm sure we drove him insane, but he was such a good egg).
One day, I will return to Iraq, not just to see the sights, but also to see if I can find any of those wonderful people. It was this influence on me that in part led me to eagerly befriend a Palestinian gentleman named Mohammed when I was in college working the front desk at a nearby Marriott. He was also good and gracious, as well as highly intelligent, and we broke bread together many times.
The point of this trip down memory lane is that I well know not all Muslims are jihadists intent on enslaving you and me as dhimmi. However, from the studying I've done, I'm convinced those that aren't are a) not well catechized in their faith or b) aren't good Muslims. Because to be a good Muslim, you have to follow the Qu'ran and the hadith. And they have little to say about loving one's enemies and much to say about doing violence into those who stand in the way of Islam's total domination.
The problem is, however, that the number of "good" Muslims doesn't seem to be decreasing. Rather, just the opposite. And, as a result, this sort of litany is possible.
We must wake up. We must stop pretending there is some peaceful strain of Islam that will prevail. It will not. The religion is satanic in origin, bent on hellish destruction, and thus will only metastisize in its more perverse expressions as time goes on. This isn't to say we enact lynch mobs or segregate them as we did with the Japanese in WWII or the German American population in WWI. We do not defeat barbarity with more barbarism.
However, how do we defeat them? The strategy employed in the latter part of the Cold War by Reagan, Thatcher, and Bl. John Paul II was a great one, but it's not easily transferrable to this situation.
The only way to do this is through evangelization. Help these people to see that it is not that the "crusaders" are bent on keeping them down -- and that is why they've wallowed in backwater, impoverished conditions for centuries while the West and certain other parts of the world have advanced apace -- but that the very religion to which they cling so dearly is what is keeping them back, as we see here and here.
What are your thoughts? What should we do?
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
In Saudi, we never saw Arabs because we were, again, in a ghetto, purposefully segregated by the government, I guess so we evil, infidel foreigners would not contaminate the local Islamic population? I don't know. We could drive to the beach or to the Aramco ghetto, but there wasn't much to see outside the ghetto, anyway. Then again, inside the ghetto, there was absolutely nothing. No kids. No parks. No stores. All I remember are blocks of single family homes with small yards and little vegetation and a boring existence. I think we lasted six weeks, although I can't say. It was early 1976 that we arrived, and all I know is that I was attending a parochial school in Canton, Ohio, before the end of the '75-'76 school year.
Iraq, however, is an entirely different story. It was an exciting, wonderful place. I loved it. Of course, I was a seven, eight year old little boy, and everything was magical, new, and different, the sights, the smells, the people, especially the people.
The people were magnificent. They were wonderful, gregarious, generous, open, hospitable, giving, and every good adjective you can find to describe other humans. Yes, there were the cretins who would pinch my mom's rear while she walked down the street, but those weren't the people with whom we had our normal interactions. There was our driver in Amara, an imposing man in his 50s with a wide girth, a wider grin, and a still wider heart. There was our driver in Basra, Abdul Wahed, a good, patient man who endured a lot from us obnoxious American kids (he drove all the American families, not just mine, and all of us, I'm sure we drove him insane, but he was such a good egg).
One day, I will return to Iraq, not just to see the sights, but also to see if I can find any of those wonderful people. It was this influence on me that in part led me to eagerly befriend a Palestinian gentleman named Mohammed when I was in college working the front desk at a nearby Marriott. He was also good and gracious, as well as highly intelligent, and we broke bread together many times.
The point of this trip down memory lane is that I well know not all Muslims are jihadists intent on enslaving you and me as dhimmi. However, from the studying I've done, I'm convinced those that aren't are a) not well catechized in their faith or b) aren't good Muslims. Because to be a good Muslim, you have to follow the Qu'ran and the hadith. And they have little to say about loving one's enemies and much to say about doing violence into those who stand in the way of Islam's total domination.
The problem is, however, that the number of "good" Muslims doesn't seem to be decreasing. Rather, just the opposite. And, as a result, this sort of litany is possible.
We must wake up. We must stop pretending there is some peaceful strain of Islam that will prevail. It will not. The religion is satanic in origin, bent on hellish destruction, and thus will only metastisize in its more perverse expressions as time goes on. This isn't to say we enact lynch mobs or segregate them as we did with the Japanese in WWII or the German American population in WWI. We do not defeat barbarity with more barbarism.
However, how do we defeat them? The strategy employed in the latter part of the Cold War by Reagan, Thatcher, and Bl. John Paul II was a great one, but it's not easily transferrable to this situation.
The only way to do this is through evangelization. Help these people to see that it is not that the "crusaders" are bent on keeping them down -- and that is why they've wallowed in backwater, impoverished conditions for centuries while the West and certain other parts of the world have advanced apace -- but that the very religion to which they cling so dearly is what is keeping them back, as we see here and here.
What are your thoughts? What should we do?
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
Beatification and sainthood causes news over the last month
On April 27, the positio for Salesian Br. Stefano Sándor, who was martyred in Hungary in hatred for the faith on June 8, 1953. It's an amazing story that really is worth taking the time to read.
At a May 7 Mass in Naples, Angelo Cardinal Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints beatified Fr. Justino Russolillo (1891-1955), founder of the Vocationist fathers and sisters.
The diocesan phase of the beatification cause for Mother Rosario Pidal Arroyo, great grandaunt of Filipino First Gentleman Mike Arroyo, has finished and been forwarded to Rome by the Filipino bishops’ conference. Mother Rosario was the foundress of the Dominican Sisters of the Most Holy Rosary.
On May 13, a group of recovering alcoholic women started the beatification cause for Sr. Ignatia Gavin, who is known as the “Angel of Alcoholics Anonymous.” According to the cause’s Facebook fan page, “As patients left St. Thomas Hospital [for alcoholics] in Akron, Ohio, USA, Sr. Ignatia would present them with a Sacred Heart of Jesus badge and ask for a promise. Before picking up another drink, they were to return the badge to Sr. Ignatia personally. The badge was a sacred pledge and symbol of the treasure of sobriety. Patients respected the trust Sr. Ignatia had in them and valued the gift as a commitment to stay sober.”
On May 15, Fr. Georg Häfner (1900-42), a Carmelite parish priest who perished of malnutrition at Dachau, became Bl. Georg Häfner at the cathedral in Wuerzburg, Germany. According to CatholicCulture.org, “Fr. Häfner refused to make the Hitler salute and continued to teach religion classes in defiance of Nazi authorities. The Vatican has declared his death to be a martyrdom.”
Sr. Dulce Lopes Pontes (1914-92), a nun who served the poorest of the poor, was beatified Sunday, May 22, at a Mass attended by some 70,000 Brazilians, including President Dilma Rousseff.
One bit of news about which I’m particularly happy is this Sunday’s (June 5) beatification of Juan de Palafox, the late bishop and governor of New Spain, better known as Mexico. The Holy See called it “one of the most complex [sainthood] causes in the history of the Church.” To show just how long canonization causes can take, Bl. Palafox’s cause was opened by Benedict XIII in 1726. He was a great man, and if I could afford to fly to Spain for the event, I would be there. Read his story, and you'll see why I say this.
This Sunday, June 5, in Quincy, IL, at 3pm Central, there will be a memorial Mass at St. Peter Catholic Church to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Servant of God Francis Tolton’s ordination. Tolton was the one of the first black priests in the US, and Francis Cardinal George recently launched his beatification cause.
Rabbi Eric A. Silver, a retired rabbi in Connecticut, has taken up the effort to have Pope Ven. Pius XII declared a “righteous Gentile.” He says the records prove this, and he is going around talking with whoever he can to make the case that Pius was a great friend of the Jews.
According to AsiaNews.it, “Despite the ban imposed by authorities, thousands of Catholics took part in the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Sheshan on May 11 to mark the Day of Prayer for the Church in China, established by Benedict XVI and hampered by the government.... On that occasion, the bishop had wanted to announce to the faithful that the Holy See accepted the cause of beatification of the first convert of Shanghai, Paul Xu Guangqi (at the time of Matteo Ricci), but was forbidden by the Patriotic Association.”
Peoria’s Bishop Daniel Jenky and Fr. Andrew Apostoli presented the “positio” – that is, the document outlining the beatification cause – for Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. Once the Congregation for the Causes of Saints approves the positio, they will start investigating whether the healing attributed to Abp. Sheen’s intercession was truly miraculous. The positio would be accompanied by a cover letter by Australian Catholic Bishops Conference president Archbishop Philip Wilson of Adelaide and Archbishop Barry Hickey, ACBC vice president, along with Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart and Darwin Bishop D Eugene Hurley. Echoing his countrymen’s praises of Sheen was George Cardinal Pell of Sydney, Australia, and it was later revealed that Pope Benedict actually knew the archbishop.
We have a new Peruvian candidate for beatification. The cause for Francisco Tito Yupanqui, who sculpted the famous statue of the Virgin of Copacabana, was opened on May 21 at the Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Our Lady of Copacabana. According to the Fides News Agency, “Local Catholic tradition holds that Tito Yupanqui had a night vision of a woman with a baby in her arms. Then he reproduced the shape of her face with native features and the image of the Virgin is in copper color. For this reason it is also called the “dark-skinned Virgin” (La Virgen Morena). The image has been preserved since 1583, while the shrine at Copacabana is one of the oldest in the Americas.”
An American is trying to promote the beatification of the late Queen of England, Katharine of Aragon (1485-1536), the first wife of the much-married English king, Henry VIII. The Catholic bishop of East Anglia and the Catholic Primate of England have both said emphasized that there must first be clear evidence of that people venerate Katharine’s memory and consider her saintly. Interestingly, it’s the Anglicans who are providing this, because, evidently, the biggest reason people visit Peterborough Cathedral – in Anglican hands and where she is buried – is to pray at Katharine’s tomb. Indeed, the author Joseph Pearce recently recounted how to the extent possible, he prays at her tomb whenever he is in England.
The Congregation for the Causes of Saints is now probing if a healing attributed to the intercession of teenage Visayan (i.e., Filipino) martyr Bl. Pedro Calungsod is “supernatural.” It concerns a Filipino woman who in 2003 revived from a Glasgow Coma 3 or a deep coma where a person is almost dead.
The beatification cause of the Servant of God Constantino Vendrame, a missioner who worked among the Khasi tribal people in northeastern India, has moved to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. When he came to the Khasi, there were just 400 Catholic Christians there. Five years later, that number had tripped to 1,449. One way he did this was to show film strips about the life of Jesus.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Something interesting is happening in China
I love everything about China, its history, its culture, its beauty, its people, its government .... Uhm, no. Scratch that last part. Hate its government. Hate, hate, hate its government. Words can't express how vile, filthy, and repugnant I find its government, its repressive, anachronistic, shriveled, fearful, paper tiger, abortion causing, contraception forcing, baby killing government. The good news is that it can't last. No government that is so afraid of the good that it does everything -- every evil -- in its power to thwart the good can long endure, no matter how economically powerful. I actually take solace in every tale of persecution coming out of that storied nation because it means that is one more tear in the tapestry of totalitarianism woven by the successors of the Mandarins and the eunuchs of the Forbidden City. China's government is a house of cards, and as the following article indicates, the toppling may come sooner than later.
We need another John Paul II or at least someone to bring the Chinese this compelling message in an idiom they can understand. Would simply translating George Weigel's masterful biographty of Bl. John Paul Witness to Hope do the trick? It certainly inspired me.
What do you think?
With its 40 Biblical reading groups, choir, catechism, its faithful (typically members of the new bourgeoisie – professors, doctors, lawyers, students, and even Party members), Shouwang gains dozens of new converts each month. For the regime, it is the strongest symbol of the wave of religious conversion that has swept over the country of late. Urban, educated, disgusted by the “red” discourse served by the media, and fed up even with the cult of consumerism, the new, Christ-conscious Chinese upper class is on a moral collision course with a government that it perceives as soulless. (emphasis added)What the Catholic Church needs to give the Chinese people (and, frankly, I don't know that Benedict, for all his awesome strengths, is up for this; I just don't see it's his bag, although his mastery of Augustine could serve well) is to remind them of their God-given dignity, of the potential of the human person, of their potential, which can only be recognized if they possess the freedom to choose the good. John Paul II did this with the Poles and the Czechs, and this bled into other Eastern European countries. But most importantly, it caused the Poles to finally lift their eyes from their shoes to behold the dawning sun on the horizon. They could imagine a different future, and once they could imagine it, they dared to achieve it and succeeded. Both as a Polish bishop then archbishop and later as Pope, John Paul II helped keep alive the clandestine Church in Czechoslovakia, and this clandestine Church later played a key role in the subsequent Velvet Revolution.
We need another John Paul II or at least someone to bring the Chinese this compelling message in an idiom they can understand. Would simply translating George Weigel's masterful biographty of Bl. John Paul Witness to Hope do the trick? It certainly inspired me.
What do you think?
On biology versus environment (or nature vs. nurture)
By all lights, I should absolutely LOVE beets. My mother and father love them. My sister loves them. My grandparents, as far as I know, love/loved them. I should be genetically predisposed to loving beets with a passion that might frighten some into wondering whether I needed psychological counseling (undoubtedly I do, but that is a different matter for a different post).
The truth is, however, that I don't. Quite the opposite. Nothing turns my stomach more than the very thought of those deep purple, sweaty, gelatinous slices or cubes approaching my mouth. The repulsive visions this produces in my psyche are worthy of the greatest nightmare, such is my revulsion to the very notion of beets.
So am I a genetic anomaly in my family? Well, perhaps, but here's the thing: In my baby book, my mother writes that as a toddler, "[He] loves beets." Evidently, I ate them up with gusto whenever they were placed on my high chair tray. The question is begged, therefore, why do I hate them now?
I don't know. I can't say. All I do know is that I can never remember a time when I didn't hate beets. If I didn't see it in writing, and I didn't know that writing was set down contemporaneous to the events in questions, I would think my mother had made up the above statement in an effort to guilt young-child-me into going along with the rest of the family at dinner time. "Be like us! See?! You used to LOVE beets." The evidence before my eyes, however, shows me this is not true.
Today, there are lots of people who say that XYZ condition must be genetic within them because they can never remember a time when they didn't feel drawn to and/or afflicted by said condition. Memory when we're very young, though, is such a very vague thing, isn't it. How can they say for sure what did or didn't happen to make them behave or feel that way?
What do you think?
The truth is, however, that I don't. Quite the opposite. Nothing turns my stomach more than the very thought of those deep purple, sweaty, gelatinous slices or cubes approaching my mouth. The repulsive visions this produces in my psyche are worthy of the greatest nightmare, such is my revulsion to the very notion of beets.
So am I a genetic anomaly in my family? Well, perhaps, but here's the thing: In my baby book, my mother writes that as a toddler, "[He] loves beets." Evidently, I ate them up with gusto whenever they were placed on my high chair tray. The question is begged, therefore, why do I hate them now?
I don't know. I can't say. All I do know is that I can never remember a time when I didn't hate beets. If I didn't see it in writing, and I didn't know that writing was set down contemporaneous to the events in questions, I would think my mother had made up the above statement in an effort to guilt young-child-me into going along with the rest of the family at dinner time. "Be like us! See?! You used to LOVE beets." The evidence before my eyes, however, shows me this is not true.
Today, there are lots of people who say that XYZ condition must be genetic within them because they can never remember a time when they didn't feel drawn to and/or afflicted by said condition. Memory when we're very young, though, is such a very vague thing, isn't it. How can they say for sure what did or didn't happen to make them behave or feel that way?
What do you think?
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