The Coming and Passing of Things

A Curious Headline

2011-07-15T00:34:00.000-05:00

According to the Daily Telegraph, one of Britain's leading newspapers:

Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will return to Hollywood despite a damaging sex scandal.

"Despite"?

Scotland

2011-07-12T19:57:00.011-05:00

On a visit last month to some old friends who are living now in London, my wife and I ventured up to Scotland and stayed for a couple of days on the far northwest coast, near the little fishing village of Lochinver. Suddenly all those poetic celebrations of the beauty of the Highlands, all the heartbreaking ballads, the romance of the clans, even the music of the bagpipes made sense. (Well, maybe not the bagpipes. They still give me the creeps, although I'm trying to like them.) The country has a way of sweeping you off your feet.

Scotland is so different from any other place I've ever seen that it's not even possible to say that it's the most beautiful place I've ever seen -- much as I want to say that -- because comparisons just don't make any sense. Unless you're a better photographer than I am, taking pictures doesn't make a whole lot of sense either, but that's about all you can do to preserve the memories. Here are a few that at least help me remember.

Given the British Isles' meteorological reputation, we were afraid our whole stay was going to look like this:

but as you'll see, the weather cooperated magnificently.

Arguing the subject of their countries' respective scenic attractions, the Englishman Samuel Johnson once said to a Scotsman: "Your country consists of two things -- stone and water. There is, indeed, a little earth above the stone in some places, but a very little; and the stone is always appearing. It is like a man in rags -- the naked skin is still peeping out." It's dangerous ever to contradict Dr. Johnson, but it's also possible to say that there are those who can look good even in rags.

Water is everywhere in Scotland -- a feature that really gets the attention of a Texan, especially this summer.

Next time I'll bring my fishing tackle.

And then there's the ocean. On our last day in the Highlands, the sun came out -- there was literally not a cloud in the sky at one point -- and the drive back along the coast offered the kinds of views that the Scottish Tourism Board only dreams about most of the year.

Here's the picture I'm using as my computer desktop at the moment. It's Ardvreck Tower, the 16th-century ancestral home of the MacLeod Clan, destroyed when Clan MacKenzie wiped out the MacLeods in 1672, took over that region of the Highlands, and built a larger, more elegant house nearby. (That MacKenzie residence, Calda House, burned mysteriously in 1737 and its stone remnants stand nearby. Say what you want about the lawless Scottish clans, they were good at making picturesque ruins.)

The area of the Highlands that we visited is called Assynt and it is famous for its weird terrain, with large isolated mountains rising up steeply off the moors. Lochinver, the village where we stayed, is dominated by one such mountain, Suilven. Its distinctive shape is hard to forget. Here's how it looked from the walking path above our hotel.

And here's a nice picture postcard shot (not by me).

Believe it or not, the summit of Suilven is reachable as a kind of walk-up, without any technical climbing, from an approach along the ridge. One of Scotland's best modern poets, Norman MacCaig, loved the Assynt region and wrote several poems about it, including a nice one about this mountain. It's an eloquent expression of how simply the feeling of being in nature changes man's perception of himself. I probably would never have paid any attention to this little poem if I had never seen Suilven, but now it's one of my favorites. An example, perhaps, of what Chesterton meant when he referred to travel (paradoxically, duh) as a "narrowing experience."

Climbing Suilven

I nod and nod to my own shadow and thrust
A mountain down and down.
Between my feet a loch shines in the brown,
Its silver paper crinkled and edged with rust.
My lungs say No;
But down and down this treadmill hill must go.

Parishes dwindle. But my parish is
This stone, that tuft, this stone
And the cramped quarters of my flesh and bone.
I claw that tall horizon down to this;
And suddenly
My shadow jumps huge miles away from me.

Even if you've never thought you wanted to go to Scotland, believe me, you do.

Vita Venturi Saeculi

2011-05-17T21:58:00.000-05:00

As you can see from the previous post, I'm making an effort at getting back to blogging, in response to thousands...well, hundreds...well, dozens...okay, two very earnest appeals that I do so. And then, just when I'm all set to make a new start, wouldn't you know it -- I find out that the end of the world is at hand.

I don't know whether to start writing as fast as my rudimentary typing skills and low-end laptop keyboard will permit -- something along the lines of "Lord, Lord," I guess -- or just wait until Sunday (si veniat) to find out whether there's any point in going on at all.

Harmon Killebrew (1936-2011)

2011-05-17T21:16:00.000-05:00

There is an evolution in the enthusiasms of a baseball fan as he grows up and then grows old. I now enjoy baseball as a more cerebral game than I did 40 years ago. I appreciate the good decisions (and excoriate the bad decisions) of managers in a way I never took the trouble to do in my youth, before I appreciated how central those judgments are to the outcome of a game. I never paid much attention to pitchers when I was young either, because just throwing the ball never seemed as interesting to me as hitting the ball. I've changed my mind about that too, now that I understand more about how the way the ball gets thrown affects the way the ball gets hit.

Above all, baseball gives us a chance to revel in the particular physical endowments we most lack ourselves. I now admire the speed and mobility of shortstops more than I ever did when I was young (and not quite so conscious of how fleeting speed and mobility are). And as a scrawny little 12- and 13- and 14- (etc., etc.,) year old, it was big brawny sluggers that I idolized more than anybody else in the game -- Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and above all during those years of the early 1960s, Harmon Killebrew. I checked the stats today, and he did not in fact hit a home run every time he came to the plate, but it sure seemed that way to me at the time. On August 3, 1962, he hit a home run over the left field roof of Tiger Stadium. Years later, recalling the feat in an interview, he said matter-of-factly, "I'd never seen anybody do that before." That's because nobody had ever done that before.

And that one statement of his shows just how thoroughly he combined the complementary virtues that nothing can foster better than sports: the opportunity to be supremely good at something and humble about it all at the same time. Harmon Killebrew was the consummate sportsman, even in an era when sportsmanship had not yet become the rare commodity it is today. It is not recorded that he ever feuded publicly with a manager, or spoke ill of a teammate, or yelled an obscenity at an umpire. He simply went out every day and played baseball; and he played it very, very well. This passage from The Ballplayers, an indispensable reference now incredibly lacking an update and out of print, shows how much of Harmon Killebrew's vision of the game is missing in this age of temperamental baseball divas.

Throughout his career, Killebrew changed positions frequently. He came up as a second baseman, was soon moved to third, then to left field for a few seasons, over to first base for a while, then back to third, back to first, and finally off the field altogether to DH. He would often shift between two positions in the same game. But he never groused, and his lack of a permanent defensive spot never seemed to affect his power.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. And let perpetual light shine upon him.

Blessed John Paul II

2011-05-01T17:26:00.000-05:00

Every Christian has certain inclinations, certain predispositions that can become an obstacle to the fullest possible realization of the Christian life. I'm not talking here about sin, which obviously is an obstacle for every Christian; but just about innocent differences in personality. There are Christians who regard religious faith as primarily something to be felt. They are very good at experiencing the grief of Good Friday, and the despair of Holy Saturday, and the joy of Easter Sunday. The mirror image of this first group of people, along the spectrum of Christian psychology, are those who take comfort in having all the proper intellectual convictions demanded by the Faith. They've read the whole Catechism. Maybe they've even read the Summa, or Ratzinger, or Rahner, or every 20th-century papal encyclical. They subscribe to First Things or America (or maybe, if they're real eggheads, both). And they may be slightly embarrassed by the effusive, emotional Catholicism of the first group, just as that first group is perplexed by the "cold, sterile" intellectualism of the second group.

There is a third group of Christians, the group to which all of us should belong, regardless of whichever of the first two groups may also claim us. It is the group of believers who regard Christianity primarily as something to be done, rather than as something just to be felt or understood. It is the group of people who have realized that our zeal for the Faith, rooted in our knowledge of Christ's teaching, compels us to live in an entirely new way as a response to what we feel and what we know.

The papacy of John Paul II was important in many ways, but it was especially important, I think, as a way of uniting these three groups of Christians. No one I can think of in the last 100 years was a more intellectually powerful scholar of Christianity than John Paul II (although his successor is giving him an impressive run for his money on that score). Nor was any Christian in my lifetime more obviously consumed with an elemental love of Christ and an almost childlike joy in Christ than John Paul II. So it's only natural that, combining as he did in his own person the full mind and the full heart of the Christian, he would be so eloquent in calling us all to join that third group -- those who turn their emotional commitment, or their intellectual commitment, or both, into a life of action in the service of Christ and His Kingdom.

Nowhere did John Paul II express this Christian synthesis more clearly than in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor -- maybe the greatest Catholic document of the 20th century.

It is urgent to rediscover and to set forth once more the authentic reality of the Christian faith, which is not simply a set of propositions to be accepted with intellectual assent. Rather, faith is a lived knowledge of Christ, a living remembrance of his commandments, and a truth to be lived out. A word, in any event, is not truly received until it passes into action, until it is put into practice. Faith is a decision involving one's whole existence. It is an encounter, a dialogue, a communion of love and of life between the believer and Jesus Christ, the Way, and the Truth, and the Life (cf. Jn 14:6). It entails an act of trusting abandonment to Christ, which enables us to live as he lived (cf. Gal 2:20), in profound love of God and of our brothers and sisters. [VS 88.4]

I'm old enough to have a clear recollection of the day John Paul II was elected Pope. I watched the live TV coverage, and saw a very unfamiliar figure, suddenly and inexplicably dressed in papal vestments, step out onto the balcony of St. Peter's, while all the commentators kept asking, "Who? Who did they say?" I knew just enough Italian to understand his first words as Pope, declaimed in a trained actor's voice, and I have remembered them a thousand times since:

"Sia lodato Gesu Cristo!"

Praised be Jesus Christ!

If we had only known it at the time, we might have understood that the new Pope was giving us, in those four words, a complete Catholic catechesis, one that he would expand on and enrich in the course of the next 26 years -- a vision of Christianity as something to feel, something to know, and something to do.

Praised be Jesus Christ. Now and forever.

Blessed John Paul II, pray for us.

The Rangers Win It!

2010-10-13T22:43:00.000-05:00

And now we get to play the Yankees for the pennant.

Does it get any better than this?

Dame Joan Sutherland, 1926-2010

2010-10-11T17:51:00.005-05:00

Any operatic soprano might consider it a dream come true to be known as the greatest singer of her time. But to pay that compliment to Joan Sutherland would be to do her an unforgivable injustice. She was not simply the best Lucia and Norma and Elvira and Amina and Maria Stuarda and Marguerite de Valois and Esclarmonde and Semiramide and Alcina of her day. On the basis of the recorded evidence, she was at least as good as anyone who sang those roles any time in the last hundred years. So it is by no means outrageous to suggest that Joan Sutherland did what she did better than anyone else ever has.

That's what makes those of us who got to hear her in person so grateful. She included all of us, just a bit, in the history she spent her career making. I posted a couple of Sutherland performances last year on her birthday. Here is another one--the final cabaletta from Bellini's La Sonnambula. The heroine Amina has just been cleared of suspicions that she is unfaithful to her fiance. (She walks in her sleep; make up the rest of the story yourself.) Here, assured of her happy ending, she gives voice to that mixture of joy and relief that any soprano experiences upon finding herself still alive at the end of the opera. She sings "Ah! non giunge uman pensiero al contento ond'io son piena." "Ah! human thought cannot comprehend the happiness that fills me." And listening to her, we feel pretty much the same way.

May you all live long enough to hear that trill at 1:55 sung by someone else as spectacularly as Sutherland sings it here. But don't get your hopes up.

Rangers-Rays Series Tied at 2 Games Each

2010-10-10T19:29:00.000-05:00

Philosophy must take over at this point. On its face, it's a disappointment to Texas Rangers fans to see their team drop two games in a row and blow a chance to close out the series at home. But here are three considerations that might present themselves to the fan who thinks about it a little more deeply.

SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE:
Sweeping the Rays might have been a near occasion of the sin of pride. Narrowly winning a hard-fought nerve-racker will make it easier for us to "walk humbly with our God."

ALTRUISM:
Game 5 will give the Rays a second chance at the privilege and pleasure of seeing the great Cliff Lee in action.

RIGHTEOUS VENGEANCE:
A fifth game is necessary if we want to humiliate the Rays by winning the series from them on their home field.

Troublingly, it's the third consideration that appeals to me the most....

Babylonian Poetry, Anyone?

2010-10-04T22:46:00.001-05:00

This is fairly geeky, I admit. But I find these recitations of ancient Babylonian poetry fascinating, and especially the passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I read in high school and which I encouraged my middle daughter to read for extra credit last year when she was studying ancient history. (Have I mentioned that we're home schoolers? Is there any need to now?)

By far the most fascinating character in Gilgamesh is the hero's friend Enkidu, a kind of Rousseauian noble savage whose gradual introduction to civilization--partly at the hands of a prostitute--makes up the poem's most dramatic and compelling plot element. I've never been entirely sure how to pronounce his name, although I've always suspected that the pronunciation I learned in high school--something like "Inky-Doo"--was neither linguistically accurate nor dignified-sounding enough for so admirable a character.

Turns out, based on these recitations, that the correct pronunciation may be en-KEE-doo, which sounds much better to me; and that the title character's name, which I always pronounced with an accent on the first syllable, is actually gil-GAH-mesh.

Live and learn.

Barack Obama and the BVM

2010-10-03T21:20:00.000-05:00

What to make of this? On her recent visit to Spain, First Lady Michelle Obama mentioned that the President carries in his wallet a picture of Mary Help of Christians, one of the titles under which the Blessed Virgin is venerated by Catholics. She is the patroness of the Salesian Order.

Barack Obama is already under fire from religious right-wingers, some of whom have repeatedly questioned the President's credentials as a Christian and fostered suspicions that he might be a crypto-Muslim. If he turns out to be a crypto-Catholic instead, will Protestant fundamentalists consider that a step up or a step down?

The Feast of St. Francis of Assisi

2010-10-03T13:53:00.000-05:00

"Whatever the true religion might be (if there even is one)," I used to say to myself back in my days of spiritual wandering, "then following it--in this world, at least--will have to set you apart as a pretty strange person." And so I looked into some pretty strange religions. But I eventually found the strangest of all, and that's one way I knew it was also the true one.

The great genius of Francis of Assisi is that he continually reminds us how strange--how "other-worldly"--authentic Christianity must be. If our faith fits comfortably and conveniently into the life we have decided to make for ourselves, then there's something wrong with it.

One day in winter, as St Francis was going with Brother Leo from
   Perugia to St Mary of the Angels, and was suffering greatly from the
   cold, he called to Brother Leo, who was walking on before him, and said
   to him: "Brother Leo, if it were to please God that the Friars Minor
   should give, in all lands, a great example of holiness and edification,
   write down, and note carefully, that this would not be perfect joy." A
   little further on, St Francis called to him a second time: "O Brother
   Leo, if the Friars Minor were to make the lame to walk, if they should
   make straight the crooked, chase away demons, give sight to the blind,
   hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and, what is even a far
   greater work, if they should raise the dead after four days, write that
   this would not be perfect joy." Shortly after, he cried out again: "O
   Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor knew all languages; if they were
   versed in all science; if they could explain all Scripture; if they had
   the gift of prophecy, and could reveal, not only all future things, but
   likewise the secrets of all consciences and all souls, write that this
   would not be perfect joy." After proceeding a few steps farther, he
   cried out again with a loud voice: "O Brother Leo, thou little lamb of
   God! if the Friars Minor could speak with the tongues of angels; if
   they could explain the course of the stars; if they knew the virtues of
   all plants; if all the treasures of the earth were revealed to them; if
   they were acquainted with the various qualities of all birds, of all
   fish, of all animals, of men, of trees, of stones, of roots, and of
   waters - write that this would not be perfect joy." Shortly after, he
   cried out again: "O Brother Leo, if the Friars Minor had the gift of
   preaching so as to convert all infidels to the faith of Christ, write
   that this would not be perfect joy." Now when this manner of discourse
   had lasted for the space of two miles, Brother Leo wondered much within
   himself; and, questioning the saint, he said: "Father, I pray thee
   teach me wherein is perfect joy." St Francis answered: "If, when we
   shall arrive at St Mary of the Angels, all drenched with rain and
   trembling with cold, all covered with mud and exhausted from hunger;
   if, when we knock at the convent-gate, the porter should come angrily
   and ask us who we are; if, after we have told him, We are two of the
   brethren', he should answer angrily, What ye say is not the truth; ye
   are but two impostors going about to deceive the world, and take away
   the alms of the poor; begone I say'; if then he refuse to open to us,
   and leave us outside, exposed to the snow and rain, suffering from cold
   and hunger till nightfall - then, if we accept such injustice, such
   cruelty and such contempt with patience, without being ruffled and
   without murmuring, believing with humility and charity that the porter
   really knows us, and that it is God who maketh him to speak thus
   against us, write down, O Brother Leo, that this is perfect joy. And if
   we knock again, and the porter come out in anger to drive us away with
   oaths and blows, as if we were vile impostors, saying, Begone,
   miserable robbers! to the hospital, for here you shall neither eat nor
   sleep!' - and if we accept all this with patience, with joy, and with
   charity, O Brother Leo, write that this indeed is perfect joy. And if,
   urged by cold and hunger, we knock again, calling to the porter and
   entreating him with many tears to open to us and give us shelter, for
   the love of God, and if he come out more angry than before, exclaiming,
   These are but importunate rascals, I will deal with them as they
   deserve'; and taking a knotted stick, he seize us by the hood, throwing
   us on the ground, rolling us in the snow, and shall beat and wound us
   with the knots in the stick - if we bear all these injuries with
   patience and joy, thinking of the sufferings of our Blessed Lord, which
   we would share out of love for him, write, O Brother Leo, that here,
   finally, is perfect joy. And now, brother, listen to the conclusion.
   Above all the graces and all the gifts of the Holy Spirit which Christ
   grants to his friends, is the grace of overcoming oneself, and
   accepting willingly, out of love for Christ, all suffering, injury,
   discomfort and contempt; for in all other gifts of God we cannot glory,
   seeing they proceed not from ourselves but from God, according to the
   words of the Apostle, What hast thou that thou hast not received from
   God? and if thou hast received it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst
   not received it?' But in the cross of tribulation and affliction we may
   glory, because, as the Apostle says again, I will not glory save in the
   cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.' Amen."

The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi, Chapter 8

Tony Curtis R.I.P.

2010-10-03T12:48:00.001-05:00

I was never particularly a fan of his, but I do like several of his movies--or maybe I should say "movies in which he appears." His big roles--the roles he no doubt was proudest of--are not among my favorites. His portrayal of The Boston Strangler is among those "one-off" performances that movie stars sometimes turn in--a role that uniquely manages to make them look like real actors. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove. You know what I mean. And I may be the only person I know who doesn't think that Some Like It Hot is a really funny movie. (We all have our blind spots, I guess.)

But I would happily watch Spartacus any time--in spite of Dalton Trumbo's ham-handed and tendentious leftist-allegory screenplay. (Some stories are good enough to survive a bad telling.) And this weekend my 10-year-old sons and I will watch The Vikings--their favorite movie, and one of mine--in tribute to Mr. Curtis. Here's a great scene in which Curtis's character permits Ernest Borgnine's character an honorable Viking death (in a wolf pit). The scene is charged with dramatic irony because neither character knows that they are father and son.

And here is a very different sort of scene, from a movie I would know nothing about were my middle daughter not such a devoted Audrey Hepburn fan--Paris When It Sizzles. Hepburn plays a stenographer hired to help a screenwriter--William Holden--get a script done on time. She imagines each scene as Holden dictates it to her, adding her own suggestions as they go along. Tony Curtis agreed to make this cameo appearance in the movie because Holden--in real life--had had to check into the hospital following a drinking binge and George Axelrod, the producer, needed to keep the rest of the cast and the crew busy. Curtis does an expert job of skewering narcissistic "ac-TORS," himself included.

Stealing Home

2010-10-02T12:28:00.000-05:00

My daughter and I attended our last baseball game of the regular season last night. The Rangers did not win, but it was an exciting game nonetheless -- in part because Josh Hamilton was back in the outfield, diving for fly balls with the same abandon that put him on the DL for most of the month of September; and partly because of this thrilling bit of base running that tied the game for us in the bottom of the ninth.

It was the first time my daughter -- a new baseball fan this season -- had ever seen anyone steal home, and she was impressed. I'll have to show her that it can be even more impressive than that...regardless of what Yogi thought.

The End of Time

2010-09-29T22:56:00.000-05:00

All of a sudden, cosmology seems to be the sexy topic in the mainstream media's coverage of science. (Could Stephen Hawking have anything to do with that?)

Here is what seems to me a rather scatterbrained bit of speculation on the way in which the laws of physics and probability dictate that time will have to come to an end sometime within the next, oh, 3.7 billion years. (Nothing lends scientific credibility to a number like a decimal point, does it?)

I'd be more inclined to dismiss this bit of speculation as quickly as I do most cosmological ruminations if it weren't for a single line in the story that seems to ring true for some reason. The scientists involved "don't know what kind of catastrophe will cause the end of time, but they do say that we won't see it coming."

Hmmm. Do they mean it will be sort of like "a thief in the night"?

"Expert in Humanity"

2010-09-27T15:55:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Dayspring, a novel by Harry Sylvester. It's set in New Mexico (which is how it caught my attention--yes, I'm still on my New Mexico kick) and has as its central character an anthropologist who fakes (sort of) a conversion to Catholicism in order to gain access to the Penitentes, members of a secret brotherhood that imposes extreme forms of penance--chiefly flagellation--on its members and that has had a tense relationship with the Catholic hierarchy through most of its history.

After his pretended conversion, the anthropologist finds himself becoming more and more authentically Catholic in his outlook and sensibilities. In one passage, he marvels at all the ways in which the Church's teaching represents a very wise and commonsensical approach to matters of human behavior.

"On the basic things the Church was always right. By what extraordinary sifting of experience she had become so, he could not understand: it had always amazed him that this basic accuracy and rightness, achieved through some realistic process and over a long time, should be attributed by the Church to anything as ridiculous as what she called revelation. It was not that he and some of the others were ignorant of the Church's being right so often, as that they could not bring themselves to subdue their incredible pride long enough to do what someone else said they should do. Of course, if they believed in God, he thought, it would have been something else again."

What a brilliant miniature portrait of the "scientific" mind contemplating religious truth. And what a devastating analysis of the role played by pride in the origins of sin. The secular world necessarily dismisses any notion that there is such a thing as God's will, but is constantly amazed--and annoyed--that Christianity so often proves to be right about the practical consequences of living in defiance of God's will.

Catholic moral theology is grounded in Catholic anthropology, which means that the Church's calling is twofold: to show God to man, and to show man to himself. When Pope Paul VI, addressing the United Nations General Assembly in October 1965, scandalized representatives of the affluent Western democracies by explicitly condemning artificial birth control, he did so after having referred to the Catholic Church as an "expert in humanity." His claim was greeted with smug condescension. (I still have a vivid memory of CBS's Eric Sevareid being eloquently smug and condescending on the subject.) Forty-five years later it's still possible, perhaps more than ever, to find Catholic claims of "expertise in humanity" being greeted with smug condescension. But it's also possible to find--in every corner of the world--dramatic and tragic evidence that Pope Paul's warnings about "reducing the number of guests at the banquet of life" were right.

Of course, we mustn't attribute that to "anything as ridiculous as what the Church calls revelation."

Stephen Hawking, Theologian?

2010-09-27T13:16:00.000-05:00

The physicist Stephen Barr thinks that there is less to Stephen Hawking's latest speculations about God and cosmology than Hawking's publisher and the secular media would like there to be. As I read Prof. Barr's explanation of what Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow are arguing in The Grand Design, it occurred to me that their claims are not only not antagonistic to the claims of religion, but that they might actually be seen as pointing toward the validity of some of those claims.

But I was a little too lazy and way too scientifically ignorant to undertake an exploration of that subject. Now, fortunately, someone who is up to the task has done it, and his analysis, at Mike Flynn's Journal, is well worth reading.

My only regret in linking to the post is that now I'll never be able to pass off as my own this great Mary Midgley line:

"People who refuse to have anything to do with philosophy have become enslaved to outdated forms of it."

Two Cheers for Robin Le Poidevin

2010-09-27T11:08:00.000-05:00

It long ago ceased to be fun pointing out ways in which Richard Dawkins embarrasses himself when he pretends to be a philosopher. But Robin Le Poidevin, professor of metaphysics at the University of Leeds, still finds the temptation irresistible and, in succumbing to it, makes a point well worth making in a post at the OUPblog.

One of the pillars on which Dawkins's argument against the existence of God rests in his book The God Delusion is his contention that God would have to be almost infinitely complex to be the creator and sustainer of an almost infinitely complex universe. Simply knowing such a universe fully would make an omniscient God at least as complex as the knowledge itself. With this "straw god" firmly in place, Dawkins invokes Occam's Razor to argue that natural evolution is a simpler and therefore a logically preferable explanation for the existence of the world. (You can read this argument in full in Chapter 4 of The God Delusion.)

Dawkins seems unaware, at least within the context of the argument as he presents it, that the concept of a "complex God" flies in the face of orthodox Christian theology. Christians in the Thomistic tradition--which is to say Roman Catholics and a fair number of Protestants--hold to the concept of a "simple God." God acting in different ways at different times and in different places; God "responding to" the actions of human beings; God "working out" his will sequentially through history; God knowing a hundred bazillion separate facts, if you will; these are the perceptions of God as they occur necessarily to finite human beings, but they cannot be essentially true of the "uncaused cause" of the universe in whom Christians, Jews, Muslims, and a fair number of "virtuous pagans" have believed over the centuries. The basics of this philosophical position can be found in Part I, Question 3 of the Summa Theologiae.

Prof. Le Poidevin pinpoints Dawkins's mistake in his blog post:

"When the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz opined that God had created ‘the best of all possible worlds,’ his view was mercilessly lampooned in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide. ‘Best’ here, however, does not mean most agreeable, but rather where the greatest variety is produced by the simplest laws. And indeed it is a requirement on scientific explanation that it not involve needless complexity. Elegant simplicity is the ideal.

Perhaps God is like that: his understanding and capacities may be infinitely complex, but the underlying nature that gives rise to that complexity may be relatively simple. If so, then it isn’t a given that the probability of such a being is enormously improbable. And if God is not clearly improbable, then atheism is not the default position."

A nice encapsulation of the philosophical principle. Thomists, however, would correct Prof. Le Poidevin in one detail. God is not "relatively" simple; he is (as St. Thomas Aquinas termed it) omnino simplex--absolutely, altogether simple.

Prof. Le Poidevin moves on from this point to a philosophical defense of agnosticism and gets into a bit of trouble, I think--which is why I'm giving him only two cheers. I'll say something about agnosticism in another post.

Close Encounters of the Worst Kind

2010-09-26T21:38:00.000-05:00

So humanity's first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life is to be coordinated by the United Nations?

We're doomed.

The Rangers Clinch!

2010-09-25T21:56:00.000-05:00

No one with a shred of human compassion will begrudge Texas Rangers fans their moment of triumph today. This is beyond question the best Rangers team ever to make it into the absurdly expanded major league baseball post-season ( in which the world championship is now decided in a combined best-of-nineteen-game playoff).

The Woodwards will be attending the first home game of the division series, against either the Yankees or the Rays, and we're pretty keyed up about it. The last post-season game I attended in person was the legendary third game of the 1975 World Series. Surely I'm entitled to a little excitement once every 35 years....

Eddie Fisher R.I.P.

2010-09-24T21:43:00.000-05:00

He had better pipes than Frank Sinatra, better than Tony Bennett. The first time I ever noticed that a human voice can be beautiful, I was seven or eight, and I was listening to Eddie Fisher sing something or other on the radio.

One might wish that his musical taste had been as good as that voice. He got very rich singing some very bad songs. But here he is singing a great one.

One interesting sociological note. In 1959, Eddie Fisher was arguably the biggest recording star in the United States, and his hit TV show was making him a bigger star than ever. But in March of that year, amid the scandal of his having divorced his wife Debbie Reynolds in order to marry Elizabeth Taylor, NBC cancelled the show.

O tempora, O mores....

Yeah, But What About Monothelitism?

2010-09-22T22:11:00.000-05:00

Of all the protesters holding up signs as the Pope traveled through Great Britain last week, something tells me that this guy is the one His Holiness would most have enjoyed stopping to talk with.

The Faith of the Founders

2010-09-22T21:27:00.000-05:00

I can't think of any topic of civic discourse in the last 50 years that has been more pointless or that has provided the opportunity for the parading of more ignorance and ill will than the question of whether the United States is a "Christian nation." Particularly discouraging has been some right-wing demagogues' portrayal of the Founding Fathers as more or less a collection of Billy Grahams in powdered wigs.

Now, finally, someone with some knowledge of the subject and a dispassionate interest in judging the matter accurately has turned his attention to what Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton and all those other guys on various denominations of U. S. currency actually believed. The results are not particularly surprising to anyone who has studied American history, but they should still be an eye-opener to most Americans -- both left and right.

Bottom line: The Founding Fathers mostly believed in God (if only the God of the Enlightenment), which puts them at odds with most of the secular Left. But relatively few of the Founding Fathers believed that Jesus was the divinely begotten Son of that God, which puts them equally at odds with the Christian Right.

Read the fascinating details here.

(By the way, one curious omission from the First Things review (although I hope not from Prof. Holmes's book itself) is Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first great Catholic figure in the history of the new Republic. A wealthy Maryland farmer--and slave owner--he nonetheless advocated a gradual end to slavery, introducing abolitionist legislation in the Maryland senate and promoting the establishment of Liberia as a nation home for emancipated and "repatriated" slaves. That makes his beliefs with regard to "America's original sin" considerably more admirable than those of most of his fellow Founding Fathers, especially the slave-holding ones.)

One More Thought About Newman

2010-09-19T17:54:00.001-05:00

How many saints or beati of the Catholic Church rank with John Henry Newman -- not as examples of heroic virtue but as major literary figures? Here are the ones who come to mind:

St. Augustine
St. John of the Cross
St. Teresa of Avila

Anybody else?

UPDATE: Kind of embarrassing to forget St. Thomas More....

Blessed John Henry Newman

2010-09-19T17:41:00.001-05:00

A great day for the Church and for that multitude of us who revere Cardinal Newman as a thinker, a writer, and a model of holiness.

Nothing that happens in the Church nowadays can be absolutely free of partisan tensions. Newman, certainly, is too central and towering a figure in Catholic history to escape being laid claim to by a wide and contentious assortment of advocates for this or that "brand" of Catholicism. And so it is that we get Garry Wills (writing in that distinguished theological journal the New York Review of Books) calling Newman a "radical"--like Wills himself, get it?--and Pope Benedict "the best-dressed liar in the world." I'm old enough to have had at one time a tempered admiration for Garry Wills, back in his Bare Ruined Choirs days. Lately I find myself hoping that Wills will wake up in his right mind one of these days and instantly regret pretty much everything he's published over the last 25 years -- well, maybe with the exception of Lincoln at Gettysburg and his translation of Martial's Epigrams, two intelligent if wildly different studies in the power of language.

In one sense, Newman certainly was a "radical"; his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism is a perfect object lesson in Christian radicalism--a return to the roots of truth. But he was no "radical Catholic" in the way Garry Wills would like to think. Yes, Newman championed conscience in his famous toast--but conscience as the Catechism understands it, not as Hans Kung or Joan Chittister or Nancy Pelosi misrepresents it. And yes, Newman expressed reservations about the First Vatican Council's definition of the dogma of papal infallibility--but as a prudential matter, a question of timing and policy, not because he himself did not believe the dogma. (He did believe it, and wrote iron-clad defenses of it.) These are all matters of record for anyone willing to pay attention to the record--Newman's own writings, the standard biographies (Ker, Zeno, Martin), histories of the First Vatican Council. Yet the legend of "Newman the dissenter" is still resurrected from time to time by hero-starved Catholic dissenters, in much the same way that Protestants still talk about the Council of Nicaea as a Catholic hijacking of the New Testament Church, or anti-Catholic secularists still talk about Pius XII's collaboration with the Nazis. Some lies are simply too useful to abandon.

What Newman genuinely offers us today, above all, is not an endorsement of one side or another in the Catholic culture wars, but rather a call to action...oops, let me rephrase that...a warning and an encouragement about the real culture war in which Western civilization is now embroiled. It is the war against moral and epistemological relativism, and Newman gave his whole adult life in a struggle against it. Here is one of his most famous statements on the subject--the "Biglietto Address," the short speech he made in 1879 when he accepted the cardinal's biretta. (Newman's use of the term liberalism here is perhaps unfortunate--even though it was precisely the correct term at the time--because it suggests to modern ears that relativism is tied in some way to a political philosophy. It need not be.)

In any case, Newman's words are startlingly prophetic. And, in their tone of calm Christian hope at the end, they are comforting:

For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth; and on this great occasion, when it is natural for one who is in my place to look out upon the world, and upon Holy Church as it is, and upon her future, it will not, I hope, be considered out of place, if I renew the protest against it which I have made so often.

Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith. Men may go to Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both and belong to neither. They may fraternise together in spiritual thoughts and feelings, without having any views at all of doctrine in common, or seeing the need of them. Since, then, religion is so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man. If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man's religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society.

Hitherto the civil Power has been Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as in my own, the dictum was in force, when I was young, that: "Christianity was the law of the land". Now, everywhere that goodly framework of society, which is the creation of Christianity, is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to which I have referred, with a hundred others which followed upon it, is gone, or is going everywhere; and, by the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten. Hitherto, it has been considered that religion alone, with its supernatural sanctions, was strong enough to secure submission of the masses of our population to law and order; now the Philosophers and Politicians are bent on satisfying this problem without the aid of Christianity. Instead of the Church's authority and teaching, they would substitute first of all a universal and a thoroughly secular education, calculated to bring home to every individual that to be orderly, industrious, and sober, is his personal interest. Then, for great working principles to take the place of religion, for the use of the masses thus carefully educated, it provides — the broad fundamental ethical truths, of justice, benevolence, veracity, and the like; proved experience; and those natural laws which exist and act spontaneously in society, and in social matters, whether physical or psychological; for instance, in government, trade, finance, sanitary experiments, and the intercourse of nations. As to Religion, it is a private luxury, which a man may have if he will; but which of course he must pay for, and which he must not obtrude upon others, or indulge in to their annoyance.

The general character of this great apostasia is one and the same everywhere; but in detail, and in character, it varies in different countries. For myself, I would rather speak of it in my own country, which I know. There, I think it threatens to have a formidable success; though it is not easy to see what will be its ultimate issue. At first sight it might be thought that Englishmen are too religious for a movement which, on the Continent, seems to be founded on infidelity; but the misfortune with us is, that, though it ends in infidelity as in other places, it does not necessarily arise out of infidelity. It must be recollected that the religious sects, which sprang up in England three centuries ago, and which are so powerful now, have ever been fiercely opposed to the Union of Church and State, and would advocate the un-Christianising of the monarchy and all that belongs to it, under the notion that such a catastrophe would make Christianity much more pure and much more powerful. Next the liberal principle is forced on us from the necessity of the case. Consider what follows from the very fact of these many sects. They constitute the religion, it is supposed, of half the population; and, recollect, our mode of government is popular. Every dozen men taken at random whom you meet in the streets has a share in political power — when you inquire into their forms of belief, perhaps they represent one or other of as many as seven religions; how can they possibly act together in municipal or in national matters, if each insists on the recognition of his own religious denomination? All action would be at a deadlock unless the subject of religion was ignored. We cannot help ourselves. And, thirdly, it must be borne in mind, that there is much in the liberalistic theory which is good and true; for example, not to say more, the precepts of justice, truthfulness, sobriety, self-command, benevolence, which, as I have already noted, are among its avowed principles, and the natural laws of society. It is not till we find that this array of principles is intended to supersede, to block out, religion, that we pronounce it to be evil. There never was a device of the Enemy so cleverly framed and with such promise of success.

And already it has answered to the expectations which have been formed of it. It is sweeping into its own ranks great numbers of able, earnest, virtuous men, elderly men of approved antecedents, young men with a career before them.

Such is the state of things in England, and it is well that it should be realised by all of us; but it must not be supposed for a moment that I am afraid of it.

I lament it deeply, because I foresee that it may be the ruin of many souls; but I have no fear at all that it really can do aught of serious harm to the Word of God, to Holy Church, to our Almighty King, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Faithful and True, or to His Vicar on earth. Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril, that we should fear for it any new trial now. So far is certain; on the other hand, what is uncertain, and in these great contests commonly is uncertain, and what is commonly a great surprise, when it is witnessed, is the particular mode by which, in the event, Providence rescues and saves His elect inheritance. Sometimes our enemy is turned into a friend; sometimes he is despoiled of that special virulence of evil which was so threatening; sometimes he falls to pieces of himself; sometimes he does just so much as is beneficial, and then is removed. Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God.

Mansueti hereditabunt terram,
Et delectabuntur in multitudine pacis.
["The meek will inherit the land,
And they will delight in the abundance of peace."]

Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us.

Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

2010-09-08T08:59:00.004-05:00

I've been away from blogging for several days, back in my home town of Louisville, Kentucky, tending to a family emergency. (Prayers for my father's recovery from a serious illness would be deeply appreciated.)

I do find myself with a little time today, though, to pause and wish the Mother of God a happy birthday.

OUR LADIE'S NATIVITYE

Joye in the risinge of our orient starr,
That shall bringe forth the Sunne that lent her light;
Joye in the peace that shall conclude our warre,
And soon rebate the edge of Satan's spight;
Load-starre of all engolfd in worldly waves,
The card and compasse that from shipwracke saves.

The patriark and prophettes were the floures
Which Tyme by course of ages did distill,
And culld into this little cloude the shoures
Whose gracious droppes the world with joy shall fill;
Whose moysture suppleth every soule with grace,
And bringeth life to Adam's dyinge race.

For God, on Earth, she is the royall throne,
The chosen cloth to make His mortall weede;
The quarry to cutt out our Corner-stone,
Soyle full of fruite, yet free from mortall seede;
For heavenly floure she is the Jesse rodd,
The childe of man, the parent of a God.

--Robert Southwell

Youth and Age and Tommy John Surgery

2010-08-29T19:24:00.000-05:00

I guess like most baseball fans, I find this story exceptionally heartbreaking. No major league baseball player's debut in recent years was hyped more than Stephen Strasburg's; and no rookie ever lived up to his hype more convincingly than Strasburg did. Now Strasburg finds himself, at age 22, a man on whom time has already taken its toll. The ironies need no annotation.

Strasburg is handling his misfortune gracefully and with an introspective courage that is rare among people born in 1988. Rare, frankly, among people of any age who must face disappointment on the scale he is facing it. Earlier this season, he realized an ambition that must have occupied him, more or less exclusively, for at least 75 percent of his life. And now the fulfillment of that ambition is in serious jeopardy.

I can't help thinking about the experience of seeing something you've worked 15 years for suddenly taken away from you -- at least temporarily, and perhaps forever. How much harder must the experience be when those 15 years represent pretty much your whole conscious existence. For a person my age, the frustration of "long-term" dreams is something that has probably happened at least a few times in one's life. Eventually we learn that things we once thought represented our one and only chance of happiness--getting this girl or that job--usually aren't as defining a goal as we thought. When we don't get the thing we were certain we had to have, we usually find some other way of being happy and fulfilled. And even more importantly, we find that there are other ways of being happy and fulfilled, knowledge that will be a source of repeated consolation to us as the years and the disappointments roll by.

Mentally and emotionally, Stephen Strasburg seems to be fine. Every baseball lover has to hope that sometime next year he will be fine physically as well. (And, frankly, I know a few hundred thousand people in north Texas who also hope that he ends up in a Rangers uniform someday.) But how hard a lesson it must be, at age 22, to learn that no merely human aspiration, regardless of how well supported it may be with talent and hard work and desire, can guarantee happiness. People my age often say--to the well-deserved scorn of their juniors--that youth is wasted on the young. But when I reflect back on the way in which disappointment and anxiety loomed unrealistically large for me when I was a young man--because of what I did not yet know--I sometimes think that the wisdom and perspective of age is wasted on the old.

A Cooking Tip (Don't Expect Many of These)

2010-08-29T15:01:00.001-05:00

There are ideas so self-evidently right that merely naming them proves their rightness. For example:

BACON PANCAKES.

I know -- it's the sort of revelation that makes you slap your forehead and mutter,"Why didn't I think of that?"

We had some for lunch today after church, preparing them pretty much as in the picture (although, being Texans, we chose Jimmy Dean thick-cut instead of Rath). We kept a small amount of the fat from frying the bacon strips to grease the griddle for the pancakes (which never hurts). And we ate them with pancake syrup.

They were indescribably good. In the words of the old hymn, "All glory, lard, and honor...."

H/T -- Four Pounds Flour

D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico

2010-08-26T22:30:00.000-05:00

That D. H. Lawrence line in my last post is from a 1928 essay of his, written after his two half-year stays near Taos (on a ranch he purchased in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers -- make of that what you will, real estate agents!). Maybe the most interesting passage from the essay, entitled "New Mexico," is this:

"Those that have spent morning after morning alone there pitched among the pines above the great proud world of desert will know, almost unbearably, how beautiful it is, how clear and unquestioned is the might of the day. Just day itself is tremendous there. It is so easy to understand that the Aztecs gave hearts of men to the sun. For the sun is not merely hot or scorching, not at all. It is of a brilliant and unchallengeable purity and haughty serenity which would make one sacrifice the heart to it. Ah, yes, in New Mexico the heart is sacrificed to the sun and the human being is left stark, heartless, but undauntedly religious.

And that was the second revelation out there. I had looked over all the world for something that would strike me as religious. The simple piety of some English people, the semi-pagan mystery of some Catholics in southern Italy, the intensity of some Bavarian peasants, the semi-ecstasy of Buddhists or Brahmins: all this had seemed religious all right, as far as the parties concerned were involved, but it didn't involve me. I looked on at the religiousness from the outside. For it is still harder to feel religion at will than to love at will."

Well, that is quite a goulash of romanticism, mysticism, cosmopolitanism, and paganism--which is not a bad four-word description of D. H. Lawrence's literary style. He was obviously a very confused man--more confused than ever on account of the broad experience of life that his 40-odd years of living had brought him. And yet there is something true in those paragraphs.

The quality in nature that leads one to religious insight is not the beauty of nature, or the orderliness of nature, or the goodness of nature. It is the wildness of nature, the bigness of nature, the feeling that nature produces in us of something immensely larger and more powerful than ourselves. Perhaps no one is better situated to be open to such insights than an Englishman, for whom his own local nature is essentially something domesticated and cozy. It is the transcendent feeling that English Romantic poets referred to as a sense of the "sublime." And, tellingly, they pretty much had to travel outside England and its human-scaled natural terrain in order to feel it. The Alps would do it for them. And, if they could have gotten as far as New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains would have done it for them as well.

I believe that I understand, more or less, what D. H. Lawrence felt and wrote about in his description of New Mexico. The immensity of nature that one confronts in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is, of course, not the only source of religious experience that a person can have. (And I certainly am not willing to let D. H. Lawrence define that religious experience for me. I am in touch with a defining religious authority that Lawrence would not, did not, acknowledge--the Roman Catholic Church. It's the authority that enables me to distinguish between what is metaphysically true--and what is not--in the religious impulse of the Aztec, and the Brahmin, and the Buddhist, and D. H. Lawrence.) But nature, as Lawrence clearly perceived, is a source of one particular religious truth that is hard to come by from any other earthly source. Nature affords us a kind of proof -- or at least a kind of reassurance -- that faith is not simply a form of wishful thinking, not something that we fashion in our minds to meet emotional needs of our own. Religion, experienced even at only the natural level, is an encounter with something beyond our ability to use, beyond our ability to fashion into something comforting, something that will reassure us that the world makes sense (on our own terms). Religion -- any religion worth man's attention--must be something overwhelming, something frightening, something beyond our ability to turn to our own purposes. That is what nature in its "sublimity" (to use the old-fashioned but expressive term) can still communicate to us. That, I think, is what D. H. Lawrence felt in New Mexico. It sure is what I feel when I go there.

Why I Haven't Been Blogging

2010-08-24T22:24:00.003-05:00

I was hiking in northern New Mexico.

To tell you the truth, I wish I still was.

"I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had."

-- D. H. Lawrence

The Sound of Chesterton, Belloc, and Lewis

2010-08-17T21:20:00.001-05:00

My blogger buddy Keith Rickert commented that Basil Rathbone sounds the way he wishes G. K. Chesterton or Hilaire Belloc or C. S. Lewis sounded. I had heard recordings of Chesterton before. Here he is, in rather dim sound, delivering a BBC lecture on architecture. And I had heard some of Lewis's war-time broadcasts that eventually became Mere Christianity. Here's one. (Scroll down almost all the way, to the "Beyond Personality" clip.)

But I had never heard the sound of Belloc's voice and wasn't really sure what I imagined it might sound like. Keith was kind enough to steer me towards some examples. Here is the great (and odd) man sounding great (and odd):

You can follow the text of the first song, if you like.

What we have here, I believe, are three good reasons why people think speaking with a British accent makes you sound more intelligent.

Bobby Thompson R.I.P.

2010-08-17T20:26:00.001-05:00

He died yesterday at the age of 86.

The 1951 Major League season ended with the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants tied in the pennant race, each with a 96-58 record. It was decided that the league championship would be settled in a three-game series. The Giants won the first game, the Dodgers won the second. In the third and deciding game, the Dodgers led 4-2 in the bottom of the ninth when Bobby Thompson, the Giants' third baseman, came to bat with two men on base. He took the first pitch, a fastball, for a strike. Then:

It's called "the shot heard 'round the world," lending immortality to a very un-immortal poem by that self-important hack Ralph Waldo Emerson; and of course to Bobby Thompson, who became the protagonist in what is quite possibly the most dramatic moment in baseball history; and to Russ Hodges, the voice of the Giants' radio broadcasts, whose famous quadruple announcement that the Giants did indeed "WIN THE PENNANT" reminds us all of baseball's power to turn a grown man into a little boy.

* * * * *

One final note -- and it's a cautionary note to any of my fellow Texas Rangers fans who may be reading this. In mid-August 1951, the Dodgers were leading the Giants by 13 games; by the end of September, that 13-game lead was gone, and the Dodgers ended up losing the pennant. The Rangers currently hold first place in the American League West division by eight games (although we're losing to Tampa Bay as I type these words). An eight-game lead is a nice thing to have. But in the long run -- and baseball is all about the long run -- it is no guarantee of earthly happiness.

Cesare Siepi

2010-08-15T17:57:00.004-05:00

He died on July 5, at the age of 87, and I'm a bit late in taking note of the sad fact. May he rest in peace.

I became an opera fan in the late 1960s, which means that all the singers who were then in their prime and played a big part in winning me over to the art form are now dying, or dead. It also means that I am slowly turning into one of those crotchety old fans who believe there aren't any great singers anymore and who respond to a younger fan's praise of any current star with a condescending "Yes, but you never heard _____________." The blank is to be filled in with the name of some long-retired diva whom I got to hear in person and the younger fan never will. It's a game that I imagine has been going on for centuries.

I knew Siepi from his many recordings, but I didn't get to hear him in person until the last decade of his active opera career. He was Philip in Don Carlo, the first performance I ever saw at the Met. It was a role he had also sung 21 seasons earlier, in his Met debut, and most fans thought he was better than ever. His voice combined the two qualities that usually are an either-or choice for an operatic basso--dark richness (so you know he's not really a baritone singing low) and agility (so you're tempted to think he might actually be a baritone singing low). There was never any question about what you were hearing when Cesare Siepi sang.

A couple of years later I heard him as the bass soloist in the Verdi Requiem at Carnegie Hall. My reaction that night was the reaction of most people to any Siepi performance: "That's exactly the way that music was meant to sound." In those days, I went backstage to get autographs. For some reason, Siepi didn't have the felt-tipped pen that singers usually have at the ready for such occasions, so in addition to handing him my program, I offered him the gold-filled Cross fountain pen that my parents had only recently given me as a college graduation present. He took the pen, looked at it admiringly, and gave me (in the attractively accented English that apparently drove women wild) a bit of advice that I have taken to heart ever since:

"Thees ees a very nice pen. You should not lend it to people. Someone might...you might lose eet."

Here he is, in the serenade from Don Giovanni. A simple-sounding tune that is surprisingly difficult to sing well.

And here, for something completely different, is Siepi in American operetta. It's a hokey staging of "One Alone" from Romberg's Desert Song, but it displays Siepi's voice (and that attractively accented English) wonderfully. He tosses off a world class high F (pretty much the highest note a bass ever has to sing) at the end.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

2010-08-15T16:07:00.000-05:00

Looking around for a painting of the Assumption to use as an illustration for this post, I was struck by how curiously pedestrian and uninspiring they all are. And yet somehow I find the unsatisfactoriness of all these visual representations strangely...satisfactory. Would it help us in any way to know what Mary's Assumption "looked like"? I have no very clear idea what the experience of being "assumed body and soul into the glory of heaven" even means. Obviously Titian didn't either. (That's his famous version to the left.) He can make a pretty picture out of the idea, but there's no sense in which he--or Veronese, or Andrea del Sarto, or Perugino, or Rubens, or El Greco, or anybody else--comes close to expressing either a theological or even an emotional truth about it. Perhaps by making it pretty the artist is saying as much as he is capable of saying.

The theological truth of the Assumption is important because it is directly connected to the truth of the Immaculate Conception, which is directly connected to the truth of the Incarnation, which is, of course, the central truth of human history. So I give the assent of faith to the Assumption because I recognize the theological superstructure of which it is a part (and because I do not wish to incur that bloodcurdling anathema at the end of Munificentissimus Deus, about which more in a moment). But incorporating the Church's dogma of the Assumption into my everyday life as a Catholic is a bit harder to do.

The teaching doesn't particularly make me love the Blessed Virgin Mary more. To be honest, I find the Annunciation--and the heroic example of humble trust in God that it provides--to be a vastly more moving incident in Mary's life. Nor does the Assumption really teach me anything new about the Last Things or our eternal destiny. The Church is wisely vague about whether Mary even "died" as we understand the word, or whether being bodily assumed simply marked the end of her earthly life as death marks the end of ours. We know (hope) that someday, after we die, we will once again be both spirit and glorified body with God as Mary is now, but we would know that even if we knew nothing of the Assumption.

"Give me something I can use" is my not infrequent reaction to the more rarefied and abstract elements of Christian theology. For a long time, though I acknowledged it as true, I couldn't find much useful in the truth of the Assumption. Then, fairly recently, one passage from Munificentissimus Deus, the apostolic constitution in which Pope Pius XII defined the dogma, jumped off the page at me. Maybe it was because, after 60 years, the Pope's words still seemed so timely:

We may hope that those who meditate upon the glorious example Mary offers us may be more and more convinced of the value of a human life entirely devoted to carrying out the heavenly Father's will and to bringing good to others. Thus, while the illusory teachings of materialism and the corruption of morals that follows from these teachings threaten to extinguish the light of virtue and to ruin the lives of men by exciting discord among them, in this magnificent way all may see clearly to what a lofty goal our bodies and souls are destined.

We are not just spirits longing to be freed from inconvenient and corruptible bodies so that we can get closer to God. Our eternal destiny is as much the destiny of our bodies as it is of our souls, because our bodies belong to God too and will be saved by and in him along with the rest of what makes us who we are. Reminding ourselves of that from time to time (say, every August 15?) should make living in the body a very different undertaking for the Christian than it is for anybody else. It should help us, as Pope Pius XII suggested, to withstand "the illusory teachings of materialism and the corruption of morals that follows from these teachings." In the Collect for the Feast of the Assumption in the extraordinary form, Catholics pray that by looking always to the things of heaven ("ad superna semper intenti") as Mary did, we might be worthy to share in the same glory ("ipsius gloriae mereamur esse consortes") that now is Mary's. What she was, we are. What she is, we can become.

* * * * *

Getting back to Munificentissimus Deus for a moment. It is well worth reading, among other things for Pius' thorough review of the history of the dogma, showing that it has been a tradition of the Church from ancient times--not one of those useful fictions that non-Catholics think the popes are always concocting to consolidate their own control over the rest of us. As formal dogmatic definitions have conventionally done, it concludes with an anathema, which somehow sounds especially forbidding in the original Latin:

Quamobrem, si quis, quod Deus avertat, id vel negare, vel in dubium vocare voluntarie ausus fuerit, quod a Nobis definitum est, noverit se a divina ac catholica fide prorsus defecisse.

("Therefore if anyone--God forbid--should dare of his own free will to deny or to call into question what We have defined, let him know that he has completely fallen away from the divine and catholic faith.")

I guess some people might say that that sounds pretty medieval (especially the kind of people who regard "medieval" as a derogatory term), and that we live now in an age of kinder, gentler papacies--"God's Rottweiler" notwithstanding. But to me there's something singularly healthy about a straightforward statement to the effect that "This is the Catholic faith, and the Catholic faith is serious business." To speak in that way is to treat people as adults, which is the best way of encouraging people to act as adults.

Soracte

2010-08-12T22:02:00.000-05:00

Writing to his brother Warnie in December 1939, C. S. Lewis includes this offhand report about his current reading habits:

"After years of estrangement I found myself this week going back to Horace, who has at least this advantage--that a single ode makes just the right length of reading for the odd five minutes before a pupil appears, or between the last pupil and dinner. I suppose the first lines would still wake in you as they do in me a flood of reminiscence--Solvitur acris hiems--O fons Bandusiae--Vides ut alta stet nive candidum...."

I'm not sure why Lewis--whose critical judgments I have always admired--would refer to the reading of Horace (the greatest poet who ever lived, as any of my well-coached children would be happy to tell you) as having "at least" a single advantage. Talk about damning with faint praise. Could Lewis have been reading Horace's rich, dense, and allusive Latin too quickly? (It certainly takes me longer than "five minutes" to get through one of the odes -- even one of the short ones.) Perhaps if Lewis had paid a little more attention....

Okay, I jest. I know that Lewis's Latin was a lot better than mine, and that de gustibus non est disputandum. What really caught my eye was that the last of those quoted opening lines in Lewis's letter ("Vides ut alta stet nive candidum") is from my favorite of all the Horatian odes. You can find it, and a parallel English translation, here. Horace looks out at the snow atop Mount Soracte north of Rome, realizes that winter is on its way, and uses that realization as the occasion to lecture his male servant (whom he fancifully calls Thaliarchus) about the necessity of enjoying life while one is young. Pretty much the quintessential Horatian sentiment--a philosophical commonplace turned, in Horace's magical hands, into poetic gold.

I was thinking along these lines recently because I bought this 1833 engraving...

...of Mount Soracte, the subject of Horace's ode. And in reading around about the mountain itself, I discovered that there is almost never any snow on its summit.

Global warming?

Chesterton As Economist

2010-08-12T20:22:00.000-05:00

Over at Maclin Horton's blog Light on Dark Water, there's an interesting discussion going on concerning distributism -- the economic system that G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc thought could save the world from the moral toxins of both socialism and capitalism. The threads are here and here.

My position (currently under review as a result of reading Mac and his commenters) has always been that distributism, while picturesque and intellectually alluring to a certain kind of Catholic, would require an excessive amount of governmental intrusion into the affairs of everyday life in order to get established. One retort to my position is that capitalism -- at least as practiced in the industrialized world -- is itself a pretty artificial and governmentally propped up system.

There is undoubtedly something to that opposing view. As evidence, I offer this infuriating portrait of government-protected "free enterprise" in all its thuggish grandeur.

http://www.ij.org/videos/3458

Ometepe

2010-08-08T22:33:00.000-05:00

It's been a long time since I read about, or saw a picture of, a far-off place and found myself daydreaming about going there. (I guess Wanderlust is not the only kind of lust that fades with age....)

But after reading about the Nicaraguan island of Ometepe in the Washington Post -- and especially after seeing some pictures of the place:

...I find it unsettlingly easy to imagine myself sitting on a verandah, drinking some kind of rum-and-fruit-juice concoction with an exotic name, and just staring out at that landscape. The Post's Julian Smith puts it well:

"Nicaragua is a country drawn by a child: bordered by oceans, filled with jungles and volcanoes and a giant lake - and two volcanoes in the lake. Concepcion and Maderas, a pair of mountains joined by ancient lava flows, make up the hourglass-shaped island. Both peaks wear toupees of clouds."

Somehow I never bought into that Bali Hai business. Until now.

Christopher Hitchens Interview

2010-08-08T08:58:00.002-05:00

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/05/hitchens-on-cancer-diagnosis-why-not-me/

It's engaging and sometimes moving. Death turns out to be yet one more topic on which Hitchens has interesting things to say.

But his preemptive invalidation of any possible religious conversion he might yet undergo (around 7:30 of the video) reminds us that religion is the single topic on which Hitchens has nothing interesting to say, and now he's promising us that he never will. Can you imagine as lively and intellectually honest a thinker as Christopher Hitchens declaring that he will never change his mind, never acknowledge contradictory evidence or experience should it come his way, never credit superior opposing arguments -- on any possible question? When the question is the existence of God, unfortunately you can.

Fr. George Rutler once predicted to his face that Hitchens would die a Catholic (see the entry for May 1, New York City). Who knows? But that eventuality, or something like it, obviously seems plausible enough to Hitchens that he wants to inoculate himself against it with a declaration of very uncharacteristic closed-mindedness. At least he isn't bothered by people praying for him. I shall continue to do so.

The California Same-Sex Marriage Ruling

2010-08-04T23:02:00.002-05:00

I may or may not have additional comments on this. There really seems to be no good reason to say anything until the decision has wended its inevitable way on appeal up to the Supreme Court and been decided there on the basis of which other justice Anthony Kennedy talks to last before casting his vote.

But I do find one component of Judge Walker's findings extraordinary. No...make that outrageous. No...make that intellectually and morally shameful.

Judge Walker's decision hinges on 80 "findings of fact" -- facts that range from the peremptory and pedestrian -- "Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California" -- through the argumentative and questionable -- "Eliminating gender and race restrictions on marriage [notice the rhetorical trick?] has not deprived the institution of marriage of its vitality" -- to this remarkable assertion (Fact #77):

Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.

What is one to make of that statement as a philosophical assertion, or even as a simple declarative sentence? I suppose there are contexts in which the statement, understood conditionally rather than categorically, could in theory be true -- although the choice of interpreting it conditionally rather than categorically would be a demonstration of charity towards Judge Walker's command of the English language that I'm not sure he or it deserves. To demonstrate the point, let's take this analogical statement:

The belief that the Boston Red Sox are a superior baseball team harms New York Yankees fans.

If, after a Red Sox-Yankees game, a couple of fans were to get into a physical disagreement over the respective merits of their teams (something that I believe does in fact happen from time to time), and if the Red Sox fan were to succeed in his efforts to break the Yankees fan's nose, one could legitimately say that the Red Sox fan's "beliefs" about his team's superiority had in fact harmed a Yankees fan.

Is something along those lines what Judge Walker is talking about when he makes his "finding of fact"? Perhaps, but I doubt it. There admittedly are people who believe, on the authority of their religion, that homosexual relationships are sinful and who, compelled by that belief, beat up homosexuals. Such actions would be directly analogous to my baseball hypothetical. Those same actions would also be antithetical to the moral convictions of the vast majority of people who believe that homosexual relationships are sinful.

Are deplorable incidents of that kind the way in which Judge Walker is asserting that religious beliefs about the sinfulness of homosexual relationships "harm gays and lesbians"? Not on your life. Judge Walker believes -- rules, actually -- that a mere religious conviction about the sinfulness of "gay and lesbian relationships" -- apart from any overt action taken in response to that conviction -- harms homosexuals. The grounds for Judge Walker's private opinion on this point can be seen in the citations he makes to the transcript of oral argument in the case itself. He quotes testimony from several witnesses as to various Christian bodies' teachings on the immorality of homosexual activity. (He's fashionably "inclusive" in his scorn for Christian doctrine, Protestant and Catholic, on the point.) But he singles out the teachings of the Catholic Church as one example of religious beliefs that, in and of themselves, "harm gays and lesbians." One of the supporting footnotes to "Fact" #77 is this:

PX2545 (Young Nov 13, 2009 Dep Tr 55:15-55:20, 56:21-57:7: There is a religious component to the bigotry and prejudice against gay and lesbian individuals); see also id at 61:18-22, 62:13-17 (Catholic Church views homosexuality as “sinful.”)

There you have it. It is a finding of "fact" by a Federal district court judge that my religion is a "component" of the prejudice that is practiced against gay and lesbian individuals. My belief as a Catholic that homosexual acts are sinful constitutes an example of the bigotry that has deprived homosexuals who want to marry each other of their constitutional rights. One hears a lot of loose talk these days about a culture war. But can you blame Catholics for listening sympathetically to such talk when their government officially declares that the Catholic Church teaches "bigotry and prejudice"?

"Raccoon Terrorizes Family"

2010-08-04T18:20:00.000-05:00

Here's a horror story that could engulf anyone.

And yet one simple precaution can prevent a similar fate from befalling you. Do as the Woodwards do. Keep a blue tick coonhound on 24-hour guard.

That's right. Any excuse to put up a photograph of my pride and joy....

"Congregation Ordains Catholic Female Pastor"

2010-08-02T19:24:00.000-05:00

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/aug/01/congregation-ordains-catholic-female-pastor/

I'm going to let that headline go, no matter how much it begs to be fisked.

No, here's what caught my eye -- the explanation of how Ms. Corran, apparently a Presbyterian, came to discern her vocation to the Catholic priesthood.

"After returning to San Diego to care for her ailing father, she became 'certified and ready for call' to ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA). But intrigued by Mary Magdalene, she attended its first liturgy and noticed the shift in the locus of power."

Boy, that brings back the memories. I'll never forget the first time I went into a Catholic church, noticed the locus of power, and said, "Hey, this is for me."

Basil Rathbone

2010-08-01T22:44:00.000-05:00

If I could write English prose like anyone in the world, it would be Ronald Knox.

If I could paint like anyone in the world, it would be Raphael.

If I could play baseball like anyone in the world, it would be Joe DiMaggio.

If I could sing like anyone in the world, it would be Enrico Caruso.

And if I could talk like anyone in the world, it would be Basil Rathbone.

Maybe I was the only little boy in the world who ever thought that Rathbone should have won at least one of those swordfights with Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power or Leslie Howard just because he sounded so good.

I mean, really now. Isn't this the human voice and the English language at their very best?

Today Turner Classic Movies was having a Basil Rathbone day, and I missed most of it. But I have many of his films on DVD, including one of my favorite Rathbone performances, as an intriguingly sympathetic Pontius Pilate in the 1935 Last Days of Pompeii. TCM also showed a Basil Rathbone movie I've never seen--The Bishop Murder Case (1930), based on a Philo Vance mystery. I'm sorry I missed it.

The New Mass Translation

2010-08-01T12:26:00.001-05:00

My 17-year-old daughter, who works part-time at a Catholic bookstore, brought me home a copy of this booklet yesterday. I really hope that it, or something very much like it, will be widely used in parishes across the United States to prepare Catholics for the new--and much improved--missal translation next year.

The booklet, written by Fr. Paul Turner and prepared under the supervision of the Archdiocese of Chicago, does an excellent job of explaining the innumerable ways in which the new translation is more accurate and precise, both linguistically and theologically (theologically because linguistically, one might say). It also makes a case for the new translation as a more euphonious and collectively pray-able text. I'm not quite convinced yet on that point, but I'm willing to wait and hear what it sounds like once my fellow parishioners and I have it down pat.

As a sample of just how clear, commonsensical, and fair-minded the booklet is in its presentation, consider these comments on the use of the word consubstantial in the Nicene Creed--that "elitist and remote" word that Bishop Trautmann is so afraid will completely befuddle us all.

This word is a mouthful. In the entire revised translation of the Mass, this is probably the one word that will raise the most eyebrows. It replaces the expression "one in Being," and it describes the relationship between Jesus and the Father. In the current translation, "one in Being" was thought to be more comprehensible and closer to the original Greek of the Creed. However, the revised translation chooses a word that lies closer to the Latin equivalent, "consubstantialis." The question of how Jesus relates to the Father has immense importance. Heresies have divided Christians over this very issue. The early Church councils forged a vocabulary that carefully articulates orthodox faith, and they chose this word to express the dogma of Jesus' divinity. The Latin word means "having the same substance," which is even more fundamental than "one in Being." "Consubstantial" is a very unusual word. We don't use it for anything else. But it is describing a very unusual thing--the nature of Jesus Christ. He is not like anything or anyone else.

Understanding the Revised Mass Texts is full of helpful and winning explanations just like that. If the new missal translation can be presented to American Catholics in a way that is informative and respectful of their intelligence, I believe the coming transition--back to something more faithful to the prescribed Mass texts themselves--can be made without much disturbance.

The booklet can be ordered from Liturgy Training Publications for $1.25. Bulk discounts (may there be many!) available.

H. P. Lovecraft???!!!

2010-07-31T16:00:00.001-05:00

That's who I write like, according to this online test. They even gave me an "I WRITE LIKE H. P. LOVECRAFT" badge to insert in the blog in case I want to brag about it.

I don't.

Here's a sample of Lovecraft's imperishable prose, from his story "The Call of Cthulhu."

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

Now come on. I'm not that bad, am I?

St. Ignatius Loyola

2010-07-30T19:46:00.000-05:00

One of the very greatest saints (who would not have liked being called that in his lifetime), founder of the Jesuits, he is honored with a feast day on July 31, the anniversary of his death in 1556.

I feel one point of connection with him. When he finally responded to his priestly vocation -- at the (then) advanced age of 33 -- he had to learn Latin as an adult, and he found it difficult. I learned Latin as an adult too. And it is difficult.

I've decided that, as an Ignatian "spiritual exercise" for August, I am going to try to live out this summary of the saint's attitude toward judging others (from History of the Life and Institute of St. Ignatius de Loyola, by Fr. Daniel Bartoli):

"To avoid condemning the actions of our neighbors, we must have recourse to their intentions, which are sometimes innocent, although their actions appear guilty; and if the action is so manifestly bad that there is no possibility of excusing it, we must search for extenuation of a violent temptation, and think that our weakness would probably have succumbed under the same, or perhaps under a lesser one."

Evidence of the greatness of the Jesuits' accomplishment can be found in the grudging respect they won from even as unrepentant an anti-Catholic as the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who said this about the Society of Jesus in his famous essay on Ranke's History of the Popes:

"That order possessed itself at once of all the strongholds which command the public mind, of the pulpit, of the press, of the confessional, of the academies. Wherever the Jesuit preached, the church was too small for the audience. The name of Jesuit on a title-page secured the circulation of a book. It was in the ears of the Jesuit that the powerful, the noble, and the beautiful, breathed the secret history of their lives. It was at the feet of the Jesuit that the youth of the higher and middle classes were brought up from childhood to manhood, from the first rudiments to the courses of rhetoric and philosophy. Literature and science, lately associated with infidelity or with heresy, now became the allies of orthodoxy. Dominant in the South of Europe, the great order soon went forth conquering and to conquer. In spite of oceans and deserts, of hunger and pestilence, of spies and penal laws, of dungeons and racks, of gibbets and quartering-blocks, Jesuits were to be found under every disguise, and in every country; scholars, physicians, merchants, serving-men; in the hostile Court of Sweden, in the old manor-houses of Cheshire, among the hovels of Connaught; arguing, instructing, consoling, stealing away the hearts of the young, animating the courage of the timid, holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the dying."

O God, in order to promote the greater glory of your name, you fortified your Church militant with a new army through the work of blessed Ignatius. May his help and example bring us through our battle on earth to be crowned with him in heaven. Amen.

"Come Unto Me...

2010-07-28T20:26:00.001-05:00

...all ye that have 25 quid."

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/07/28/catholics-pay-attend-big-events-england-popes-visit-september/

Looks like it's English Church officials who are responsible for this. I'm glad they're not afraid of playing into anti-Catholic stereotypes or anything....

What I Got for My Birthday

2010-07-28T20:05:00.000-05:00

For those of you who (like me) appreciate kitschy yet state-of-the-art Catholic sacramentals...

Behold:

the scratch-and-sniff holy card!

One comes free with every bottle of "The Pope's Cologne," an authentic recreation of Bl. Pius IX's personal fragrance. Talk about the odor of sanctity.

DISCLAIMER: I neither have a financial interest in nor am being compensated by the manufacturer of this product. I just love Pio Nono. (And the stuff really does smell pretty good.)

Reading Scripture -- With and Without the Church

2010-07-25T22:38:00.000-05:00

I recently finished An Introduction to New Testament Christology, by Fr. Raymond Brown. I don't read a lot of Bible scholarship (yeah, I know, it shows...ba-dump-bump), but I picked up the book for $5 used and decided that I should read something of Fr. Brown's all the way through. He was known to me, vaguely, as one of the "bad guys" among 20th-century scripture scholars, the most prominent example within the Catholic intellectual establishment of a demythologizer in the Bultmann mold.

There is plenty in An Introduction to New Testament Christology to reinforce those initial impressions of mine. Fr. Brown engages in speculation on the historical authenticity of various passages in the Gospels, and applies form-criticism techniques to the question whether a particular statement of Jesus' represents ipsissima verba or is an insertion back into the Gospel of a later Christian community's understanding of Jesus' words. It's all impressively well-informed and intelligent, and I didn't find any of it especially persuasive. And when, annotating Jesus' words in John 21:22, Fr. Brown suggests that "the Johannine author of chapter 21 employs casuistry to show that Jesus' promise [about the Beloved Disciple living until the Second Coming] was not absolute," I think he crosses a line that mustn't be crossed in questioning the veracity of the Gospel record.

But none of that gets at the strongest impression I carried away from reading the book. Fr. Brown is a conscientious practitioner of the historical-critical method of scriptural exegesis, looking at exactly what the Bible text says and drawing whatever conclusions seem valid on the basis of that evidence. He does not argue (as a member of the Jesus Seminar would, for example) that the Bible text itself is the only evidence there can be. On the contrary, Fr. Brown is remarkably and refreshingly humble in defining the limits of his discipline. Here, for example, are two passages that I found impressive in their clarity, their honesty, and their Catholic orthodoxy. The first is Fr. Brown's summary of his position on whether the Gospels clearly depict a Jesus who was (1) all-knowing in keeping with his divinity, and (2) conscious of his own relationship to God the Father:

The issue of Jesus' self-awareness is not the same as the issue of how much knowledge he possessed. Above I have signalled extreme caution about the claim that Jesus knew all things (secular, religious, the future, etc.) -- a claim that runs against much scriptural evidence and (I note for Roman Catholics) in support of which there is no clearly binding church teaching. In reference to Jesus' awareness of his own identity...the situation is different. There is not a word in the Gospels to indicate that at any stage of his life Jesus was not aware of a unique relationship to God; and although again there may not be a binding church definition that is absolutely clear, this issue is much closer to the heart of the Christian proclamation.

Fr. Brown's answers in this passage raised the further question of their compatibility with one particular Church pronouncement on Jesus' self-knowledge. Pope St. Pius X, in his condemnation of Modernism, identified as error the proposition that "Christ did not always possess the consciousness of his Messianic dignity." Fr. Brown points out that first-century Jews seem to have held widely variant understandings of what the Messiah was to be and that, for this reason, Jesus himself showed some ambivalence in proclaiming or acknowledging himself as the Messiah. To clear up this point -- and specifically to square his own reading of the Gospels with St. Pius X's definitive teaching on the subject -- Fr. Brown continues:

The present discussion of Jesus' attitude toward messianic terminology is perfectly consonant with faith in Jesus' divinity. If I had to phrase a common modern position with an eye on Pius X's statement, I would say that the Gospels always show Jesus conscious of his dignity (which involved a unique relationship to God); they are not clear as to whether he regarded "Messiah," in the sense understood by his contemporaries, adequate to express that dignity.

Here we have a prominent 20th-century Catholic exegete being true to his own understanding of the Gospel texts and simultaneously taking pains to demonstrate that that understanding is solidly within the bounds of (1) specific magisterial teaching and (2) the broader constant tradition of the Church ("the heart of the Christian proclamation," as Fr. Brown puts it). To my unschooled layman's mind, that's a very reassuring example of what Catholic scripture scholarship should be.

One other thought occurred to me after reading An Introduction to New Testament Christology. Fr. Brown (like all practitioners of the historical-critical method) insists on looking at the scriptural texts themselves, without recourse to patristic or medieval or modern applications of those texts to theological questions. But he does so without denying the usefulness of those other sources of biblical insight for a Catholic. The New Testament, as is often pointed out by Catholic apologists, is a Church document. It is the Church that gave us the Gospels, not the other way around. For the Catholic, as distinct from the scripture scholar, the Bible must be read with the Church -- as the Church reads it. Maybe that explains why modern approaches to scriptural study have undermined Christian orthodoxy among Protestants far more seriously than among Catholics. Without Tradition to illuminate and reinforce it, the Protestant Bible -- so famously sola -- stands exposed to every challenge of the demythologizers and the deconstructionists and the redactionists and the "historical-Jesus" hunters. The adherent to sola scriptura can make no corrective appeal to "the heart of the Christian proclamation," because for him it is the heart of the Christian proclamation that the scholars are challenging.

Coincidentally, the current issue of First Things contains a pithy expression of a very similar point. It's in an essay titled "A Richer Bible," by R. R. Reno (sorry -- subscription required to read the whole thing online). Here's the passage that says exactly what I've been trying to.

Historical study of the Bible certainly remains legitimate and perhaps necessary. But as a mode of interpretation it cannot serve as the final authority for Christian readers. Because the Church claims to teach apostolic doctrine, efforts by Christians to explain what the Bible fully and finally says require addressing Church teachings and explaining their truth in relation to the Bible. To do this, we cannot play an ad hoc game of match the doctrine to the verse. We need a biblically shaped metaphysical horizon for biblical interpretation, which is what the Nicene tradition provides.

Double Lives

2010-07-25T15:36:00.001-05:00

The Catholic Church apparently sees itself in the midst of a public relations crisis. From Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech, to the flood of priestly sex abuse scandals, to the release of new canonical norms pertaining to those scandals, to the news this week that some number of Catholic priests in Rome are leading double lives as active homosexuals, the Church seems intent on disproving that old saw about there being no such thing as bad publicity.

Since "public relations" is more or less the art of lying about oneself to large numbers of people, I've never been much troubled by assertions that the Church is not very good at it. An organization whose mission statement includes the certitude that "men will revile [it] and persecute [it] and utter all kinds of evil against [it]" should not waste too much time with media consultants cultivating a glossy corporate image. The real problem, I think, would be if the Church started trying to get really good at PR -- imitating celebrities and politicians and oil companies in a concerted effort to "spin" whatever bad news comes their way.

I fear something like that may be going on in Italy right now. The reaction of the Diocese of Rome to reports of "gay priests' wild nights" has been to issue a statement calling on any such priests to come forward publicly and renounce their priesthood. To those who long to see the Church adopt a get-tough policy (verbally, at least) against miscreant priests, the Rome Vicariate's statement probably looks like a welcome step in the right direction -- a strategic response, PR-wise.

I find it a little disturbing.

The pastoral care of sinners, and the discernment of what is and is not a genuine priestly vocation, are matters to be handled in chanceries and rectories and confessionals -- not in the headlines of Italian newspapers. Some of the priests involved in this story probably should never have entered the priesthood, and should leave it under the guidance of competent spiritual direction. But there may be others with real vocations who have gotten themselves caught up in a destructive, habitual, and seemingly hopeless pattern of sin. Does the Church have no pastoral obligation to priests in both of those categories? And is a face-saving blanket pronouncement that calls on all the priests involved to come out of the closet and get out of the priesthood an honorable way of meeting that pastoral obligation?

The message of Jesus Christ has always been:

"Hey, sinners! Stop it! I'll help you."

The Diocese of Rome has decided instead to shout:

"Hey, sinners! Go away and quit embarrassing us!"

The Beautiful Game

2010-07-24T19:46:00.002-05:00

No, not soccer. (Boy, do you have the wrong blog.) I'm talking about what Babe Ruth called "the only real game, I think, in the world." Baseball.

Looking back over the 50 or so years that I have been a fan, I guess I thought that baseball had already afforded me just about every kind of pleasure and excitement the game offers. But this season, baseball has given me a new reason to love it. My kids have finally become fans -- baseball fans in general and Texas Rangers fans specifically. (It doesn't hurt that the Rangers are playing very, very well.)

And they're not just the "go-to-a-game-and-buy-a-cap" kind of fan. I'm talking about the "memorize-batting-averages-and check-the-box-scores-daily" kind of fan. In fact, it's even better than that: My daughters are now the "score-the-game" kind of fan. They will sit, score sheet and pencil in hand, diligently recording 6-4-3s and F7s and HBPs -- maybe even an occasional CI or IFR. (Okay, I had to look up the notation for those last two myself.) The point is that scoring makes you pay attention to the game, and paying attention to the game is what will make you love the game. Very seldom do my girls have to record a play with Phil Rizzuto's famous WW (wasn't watching).

Maybe baseball isn't "the only real game in the world" (I say maybe because I'm a little nervous disagreeing with the Babe). But, more than any other, it's still the game that fathers play with their kids. It is supremely the game that ties American generations together. (Watch Field of Dreams if you don't know what I mean.) And this season, to my delight, it's tying two Woodward generations even closer together.

Now if only I could get my 10-year-old son to quit rooting for Tampa Bay....

"La Caballeria de Cristo"

2010-07-22T23:59:00.000-05:00

During a recent visit to San Antonio, I took some time (on the recommendation of my parish priest) to visit the retreat center and Lourdes shrine operated there by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. The Oblates are a heroic missionary order, with priests and brothers in every corner of the world -- especially the remote and dangerous corners. (Pope Pius XI once referred to the Oblates as "specialists in difficult missions.") Their work in Spanish-speaking countries in the nineteenth century won them the nickname "Christ's Cavalry," and a large bronze relief sculpture on the grounds of the center commemorates that particular aspect of their apostolate. It offers an image of the priesthood that is, to say the least, arresting...

...and, in these difficult times, a much-needed reminder that the vast majority of Catholic priests are still what Catholic priests have always been -- good men (often heroically good) with a deep commitment to bringing the Gospel to a suffering world. Seeing them depicted as the cavalry "riding to the rescue" adds a nice touch of romance.

By the way, the sculpture is obviously based on this photograph of a group of Oblates somewhere in south Texas in the early decades of the last century.

See -- they really were cowboys.

The Pope William F. Buckley Wanted

2010-07-21T21:41:00.002-05:00

Here's an interesting little snapshot from the past -- an essay that William F. Buckley wrote for The New Republic in the late summer of 1978, as the world waited for the Catholic Church to choose a successor to Pope Paul VI. Buckley's wish list for the qualities the new pope should possess is fascinating both for the ways in which it accurately diagnosed what was wrong with the Church in those turbulent years, and also for the ways in which Buckley could not have foreseen or even hoped for the kind of pope the Church ultimately got in John Paul II.

What did Buckley get right about the Church's most pressing needs that September? First of all, he realized that the Church needed more than anything else a pastoral pope, rather than a pope around whom one ideological brand of Catholicism or another could rally for the advancement of its own worldly agenda.

"The Pope must stand out as the principal symbol of the transfiguring dimension of life...The Pope’s capacity persuasively to superordinate the spiritual over the material is the highest skill his community can demand from him."

John Paul II was nothing if not a "symbol of the transfiguring dimension of life." He successfully placed himself above the political squabbles that had already broken out in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and, simply by the force of his own personality and intellect, made it impossible not to acknowledge him as the Pastor of the Universal Church in a way that Paul VI never managed to do. He was, supremely, a spiritual leader of a kind the church had not elevated to the Chair of Peter in 20 years.

Buckley also saw accurately the damage done to the liturgical life of the Church by the "spirit of Vatican II," although he was rather too willing to blame Vatican II itself, rather than a false implementation of the Council's decrees, for that damage:

"The showplace of the church is the liturgy, and here the [Council's] reforms proved disastrous: a disfiguration of what was venerable and beautiful, into a vulgar collegiality that is artificial, distracting and appropriately celebrated by the worst abuses against the English language in the history of syntax."

Well, maybe. Most of what Buckley is lamenting here can be catalogued under the heading of what was permitted in the name of the Council rather than what the Council mandated. And surely Buckley -- a man to whom language itself had a sacramental dimension -- would be pleased to see the reformed translation of the Mass that will be introduced next year, a translation that will correct many of the "worst abuses against the English language in the history of syntax."

In other respects, Buckley can sound surprisingly -- and perhaps to some people disillusioningly -- like a typical '70s "progessive" Catholic. He thinks that dispensing with the rule of celibacy would not harm the standing of the priesthood as a "distinctive spiritual caste." More tendentiously, he seems to hope for a general dilution of the Church's teaching on human sexuality and marriage.

"The new Pope is likely to look again at these arguments [condoning contraceptive practices within marriage], and it is likely that, in a fresh allocution, he will modify Humanae vitae at least to the point of making it paradigmatic as distinct from binding. To say that the supreme point of sexual union is the continuation of life is to say that and not necessarily more than that. A retreat from a strict constructionist reading of Humanae vitae probably would be welcome in the long run without being held up as evidence of theological demagogy."

Well, we're none of us perfect, and it's almost reassuring in a way to discover that even as subtle a mind as William F. Buckley's could occasionally lapse into relativist incoherence, as he does here. With John Paul II he did not get his wished-for "retreat" from Humanae vitae. Instead he and we got a brilliant and forceful vindication of that historic and courageous papal document. (If you're Catholic and have not read Love and Responsibility, you should. Tomorrow.)

Perhaps the ecclesiastical portent that Buckley most obviously missed as he gazed into his 1978 crystal ball was the central importance of generational transition in the Church. It's a portent that the coming pope, John Paul II, did not (thank God) fail to recognize. Buckley's generation of Catholics -- the Vatican II generation, if you will -- was already giving way to the next generation (mine, as a matter of fact) when John Paul II was elected. And my generation in turn would prove much less influential in shaping the Church of the New Millennium than the generation that followed it. It was this younger generation that John Paul II targeted so successfully, and molded into the generation of young priests -- priests in their 30s and 40s today -- that will fulfill the promise of the Second Vatican Council and correct the misdirections committed in the Council's name. Ultimately, the inspiring of that generation may prove to be John Paul II's greatest gift to the Church.

As things turned out, the Church in October 1978 did not quite get the pope William F. Buckley wanted. Instead, it got a better pope than Buckley -- or any of us -- could ever have imagined.

"Is Any Among You Sick?"

2010-07-21T18:49:00.001-05:00

You would think, from scanning the blogosphere, that Christians were embroiled just at present in a heated debate about the appropriateness of praying for Christopher Hitchens's recovery from his recently diagnosed illness. And yet I can't find a single Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox blogger -- or indeed any self-identified Christian or Jewish commentator in the mainstream press -- who has questioned the rightness of doing so. How, and by whom, did this question first get raised?

Forgive my paranoia, but I can't help suspecting that the question initially occurred (or appealed) to secularists eager to demonstrate one -- or if possible both -- of two things: that Christians are (1) officious and sanctimonious busybodies lacking the simple decency to respect someone's privacy in a time of personal crisis; or (2) vengeful hypocrites unwilling to pray for the well-being of anyone they perceive as an enemy.

As for implied allegation (1), I fail to understand how wishing the good of another human being, particularly if it is done (as Jesus encourages us to do) in private, constitutes any infringement of that other human being's privacy or dignity. Hitchens himself has been the soul of graciousness on this point -- and in doing so has shown himself to be a much bigger man than those on his side of the "God question" who want to protect him from the scourge of intercessory prayer.

As for allegation (2), I think the outpouring of Christian solicitude on Hitchens's behalf is the best possible refutation of it. Oh, I suppose there are some professed Christians somewhere who refuse to pray for people they don't like. (They're the ones I constantly hear in my own church responding to the Prayers of the Faithful with "Lord, partially hear our prayer.") But such an attitude, if it really does exist anywhere other than in the darkest and slimiest corners of various comboxes, is obviously, demonstrably, and self-evidently not what Christianity is about.

In that regard, we Christians should all be just a bit ashamed if the insinuation that we're not praying for Christopher Hitchens -- or for any human being in any kind of trouble -- is able to gain traction with the public at large. If we're not famous as the people who "love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us," then we're not fully living out the Gospel we profess.

The Coming and Passing of Things

2010-07-20T19:54:00.003-05:00

I wanted a blog title that would cover just about any topic I might choose to pontificate on, and the phrase from St. Augustine's commentary on Genesis ought to serve nicely.

But beyond that, I've always loved the insight St. Augustine brings, in the passage quoted in my banner, to one particular riddle of creation: If the world God created is "good" (as God Himself declared it to be), then why doesn't it last forever? Why does anything good have to come to an end? To get right to the real point, why does my own earthly life, why do the earthly lives of people I love, have to come to an end? Why would God bestow existence on good things and then withdraw the gift?

I think St. Augustine offers a workable answer to this hard question. Some good things do last forever -- the things that are closest to God Himself, and we human beings are among those things. To the extent to which we draw close to God in this life, we will "abide in the most exalted holiness next to God" forever. But temporal things, as we can see all around us, abide only "according to the determinations of their time." This evening's beautiful sunset, the flowers in the garden, my dog Nellie, Chartres Cathedral, the Rocky Mountains -- all exist only for a determined time, and God allows them to do so (if I understand St. Augustine correctly) in order that we will have some understanding of what eternity is. The ageless beauty of God Himself, that beauty "ever ancient, ever new" that so transformed Augustine's own life, would not be even remotely comprehensible to us unless we had, as an object lesson before our eyes daily, the unfolding of a lesser beauty -- "the beauty of the ages."

For the most part, we see that beauty unfolding only up close and partially, in the events of our own everyday lives. And, frankly, it doesn't always look all that beautiful. The beauty of the ages is more like a crazy quilt of big events and small, some obviously meaningful, most seemingly meaningless, and we seldom have the time or perspective to sort out whatever meaning there may be in them. The Brueghel painting I chose as the emblem for this blog makes the point beautifully. It's called The Census at Bethlehem, and unless you know the title, you could stare at it for a long time, perhaps even admiringly, without knowing exactly what it depicts. The canvas pulls together several whirlwinds of activity: some children are having a snowball fight, merchants load their carts, women carry firewood, a man butchers a pig, travellers crowd toward an inn. You have to look closely amid all the confusion, knowing what you're looking for, to notice the man carrying a saw and leading a donkey upon which sits a woman in a blue cloak. They pass anonymously through the crowd.

Isn't that exactly what life is like? Men, women, children scurrying here and there like ants, each singlemindedly about his own business. What does it all mean? To the Christian, it will often look as confused -- and confusing -- as it does to anyone else. But the Christian also knows that amid the crowding events of daily life, if he watches attentively and knows what he is looking for, he will see Jesus.

So that's what I'm going to do with this blog. I'm going to watch the coming and passing of things, using some of those things as pegs to hang my convictions and prejudices on, but trying not to miss St. Augustine's beauty of the ages as it unfolds, and looking always for that figure from Bethlehem in the crowd.