Pass me not, Oh Gentle Savior

Fr. Cutie

I once saw Fr. Cutie in person. It was after the Papal Mass in DC. Rocky and I were still in the stadium and walked right past him. I think he was doing a commentary on the Mass for a Spanish language channel. He is a good looking man---- movie star pretty and has JFKesquse charisma. His followers (that's a problem right there-- a priest shouldn't have followers) were mostly women, since it's chicks who babble on about love and marriage. Guys don't.
Surely someone in the diocese should've had enough sense to see that a mess could happen. If he had time to carry on a dalliance then he obviously had no oversight and had too much unaccounted for time surrounded by dreamy women with heaving bosoms and slobbery emotions.

Anyway, he and his woman have abandoned the Church for Episcopalianism, a religion that was started becuase Henry VIII was a heartless swine and Anne Boleyn was an ambitious woman. I wouldn't want to be the future Mrs. Cutie. There's a mark on her back. Every woman who's every looked too long at Fr. Cutie before thinks that she has a shot at him now. All is fair in love and war and sisterhood is crap, especially when a man is on the line. Afterall, if he could not be faithful to his vows to God and the Church why should anyone expect him to be faithful to one woman?

It's all too bad and too sad.

Christopher West

I read that Christohper West has suggested that married couples bless their genitals before doing the deed. Some fans of his on other blogs defended this and said they do just that. I began snickering then outright laughing because the genital blessing ritual reminded me of the this adults only, NSFW scene from of the most oddly revolting and stupid movies ever made by a great director, Eyes Wide Shut.

why do catholics so often bayonet their own troops?

Dawn Eden echoed this question which was originally posed by Mark Shea. My first impulse when I read it was to ask, "What do you mean our troops?" If a professional Catholic who presumes to speak for the Church spouts garbage, blasphemy, or acts a fool in public what's so bad about calling him or her on it?

Ascension Sunday

The Ascension Chapel at Our Lady of Walsingham. My all tme favorie Ascension imge.

Mass was beautiful. The feast of St. Rita was earlier this week so the church was filled with red roses for St. Rita and pink and white roses for Mary. A joyful and glowing Fr. Gollum preached a remarkable homily. I wish I'd been taking notes because this was worth keeping and savoring.

After Mass a nice old couple renewed their wedding vows. They'd been married for 40 years.

After they were done I went to work. The crown of carnations on our Mary statue was crooked and that bugged me all during Mass so as soon as I could I straightened it. Fr. Theoden saw me and smiled sympathetically. 'Oh look, he must have thought, 'There's Dymphna being OCD again.'
Rocky, later pointed out to me that he'd watched my crown straightening attempt with nervousness. "You could've fallen. You barely reach Mary's head."

He's right, of course. The statue was too tall for me and I had to do a certain amount of climbing and stretching but I can't stand half assedness. I had to straighten out that crown.

My thorn crowned Captain

Woe, to me if I should prove to be a half hearted soldier in the service of my thorn crowned captain. ----St Fidelis.

Please pray for a poor messed up kid

Tony, (that's not his name) is 17. He was born out of wedlock. Instead of putting him up for adoption his mother decided to keep him and like a great many single mom's in this country, she did a lousy job. He's depressed, bi-polar and isn't good about taking his medicine. He doesn't like school and has managed to skip most of this year. Soon he'll be 18 with little chance of passing the GED test, no chance of going to college or to trade school and the world is not going to baby him like his mom did. He'll be legally a man with nothing going for him. I have no idea what's going to become of this poor kid.

Does the pro-life movement need a reboot?

Before anyone gets mad let me tell a little story.

Once upon a time when America was a very different place a black girl got tired of having to sit in the back of the bus and got tired of having to give her seat in the back to any white person who wanted it. One day she refused to give up her seat and was arrested. I am not talking about Rosa Parks. This young woman who took her stand before Rosa is largely unknown today because the civil rights movement leaders looked into her background and saw that she had a child out of wedlock and was pregnant again. She had guts but her home life was a mess and she wouldn't look good on TV and interviews were out of the question. A few months later Rosa Parks, a quiet, dignified and yes, articulate married woman decided to refuse to put up with the unjust bus situation. Rosa was an excellent spokesman for the movement. Middle class America saw her on TV wearing her Sunday hat and gloves and many felt shame. For the first time ordinary Americans began saying that hey, making black people move around on the bus at the whim of any white person was cruel and unAmerican.

Frederick Douglas was a cultured, elegant man who spoke better English than most of his listeners. Jackie Robinson's courageous and calm manner did more to desegregate this country than anybody else before MLK. Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige were both great baseball players but neither one would've been able to handle the abuse Jackie had to put up with. Gibson's mental problems would've made him crumble and Paige's temper would've made him beat somebody senseless.

I think that maybe the leaders of the pro-life movement need to think about presentation. First, everyone who speaks for the movement, every figure head must have a personal life that is above reproach. I mean your taxes must be paid, your teenagers must be well behaved in public and in private. You'd better not be having an affair or have been divorced and remarried and even the most rigourous investigator should'nt be able to find out anything bad about you that can be exploited. You also have to be able to speak well. If you can not present the pro-life case in an articulate fashion please don't get in front of a camera.

A Soldier's Prayer...for all those who will not be slient

My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).

I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart)

Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek)

I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.
(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy agony of Bloody Sweat?)

My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).

Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.

So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift.
Amen.

Joyce Kilmer

Fr. Weslin

HT to Curt Jester

Pray for us, Oh Sorrowful Mother.

Star Trek

Go. See. It.



My only quibble was that the girl who played Uhura was not up to the job. Oh and whatever you do, don't make the Vulcan mad.

Thank God that's over

The Pope is back from his trip to the Holy Land. It was a grueling schedule for an 82 year man. I found it very distasteful how everyone seemed to want to use the Holy Father's presence to advance their own religious and political quarrels.

I hope he takes a long break after this.

The sex sermonist and poor old Brother Ray

Christopher West reminds me of Brother Ray, an old teacher of mine from high school. Brother Ray meant well. He was earnest, he tried to relate to us kids and he tried to be hip. I thought him to be ridiculous. Every time he tried to "rap" with us, I think, "Oh man, Brother Ray's talkin' about sex again. Gag me with a spoon why don'tcha?"

Poor Christopher West says that the editors of Nightline used dicey editing to make him look bad with his Hugh Hefner and JPII as his muses quote. But West bungled into it by bringing Hefner up in the first place. Every time Christians try to look sophisticated and clever and make friends with the world they make themsleves look stupid. It's like Christian pop music. It's dumb, second rate and embarrassing at best.

Hugh Hefner is no liberator who went wrong. He didn't want to save Americans from prudery, the dude wanted and still wants to degrade women. Period. And that's what he's done.

Prudence has been given a bad name. It was a societal protection for the young. Once upon a time in the prudish past if a man looked too long at a 15 year old girl his decent friends would reprove him. Others, not his friends would just think that boy aint right. I better not hang with him or he'll get me into a mess of trouble. Now everybody laughs and a few may remind him jokingly that 15 will get ya 20, but most just laugh. They'd kill him if he were to mess with their 15 year old but otherwise it's okay. Is that an improvement?

Once a young man knew that he had to treat the girl next door with respect or society would make him pay for it. Hugh Hefner has successfully taught that the girl next door is a just whore at heart-- no different that the creatures walking the street in the red light district and that she really wants to be used and discarded. When Jay-Z sang about not trusting or needing women for anything more than sex he was reflecting the zeitgeist that Hefner wrought.

And folks we are not bound to study TOB anymore than we're bound to study the rythm of our fertility stages. It's not a sacrament. It's not a law of the Church. It was a hobby of JPII. When the pope is talking about the deposit of the Faith I'm there. But when he's talking about cooking, fishing or sacred sex I can go work on my stamp collection with a clear concience. As much as I love John Paul II, if you ask me if I know what he really said about sex I will cheerfully respond, (depending on how old you are or what your state in life is) that yes, I do but I really don't give a rat's ass.

In your charity, please pray for Fr. Cutie, he got lost somewhere

You must never forget that priests are, and that they remain, men.
God does not perform a miracle to wrest them from the human state.
The priesthood does not of itself give a person the power to do everything or to excel in everything. It is important to remember this lest you fall into a very old error . . . that of dehumanizing the priesthood and consequently of setting the priest outside of ordinary life.
That does great harm for by thus isolating him, as unbelievers do, to the exclusive realm of ceremonies . . . he is deprived in good part of his reason for being. If men refuse to pass through him, he no longer can be, at least fully, their mediator. Cardinal Suhard --> -->

gay marriage, welcome to the vomitorium

At first glance the whole subject seems too ridiculous to entertain. I don't think any of the gay men I know really want to be married. They want a gaudy spectacle of a wedding. They want attention but I doubt that they have any concept of what marriage is supposed to be. I say supposed to be because normal people have damaged the institution of marriage and damaged it severely. It's like taking a piece of fine linen and tearing it to shreds and then objecting when your kid puts his dirty hands on it.

Marriage was mocked and shredded long ago. And you know who did it? Your parents and their parents. When Elizabeth Taylor was going from man to man people still flocked to her movies. When Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner humiliated his wife in public, people idolized Frank and couldn't get enough of Ava. And don't forget your part: you love reading People and US magazine to see what Brad and Angie are up to, don't you?

We will never know for sure if Cardinal Cushing knew the extent of JFKs adultery but we do know years later when Jackie was about to marry the divorced Aristotle Onassis when people asked Cushing what he thought he stated that people should practice charity and leave Jackie alone. Later when Jackie died she was given a Catholic funeral, anyone who mentioned that at the time of her death she had been living with a married man was branded a gauche hater.
Decades earlier, Archbishop Sheen told Joe DiMaggio to his face that his "marriage" to Marilyn Monroe was wrong, but he was only the only churchman who did. It may not seem like much now but millions of Catholics and non Catholics were watching and listening and making conclusions.

Once, a divorce or open adultery was the end of a Protestant minister's career. No more. In the 1950s, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell dumped his wife to marry his lover. Most people in the church were shocked but didn't stop attending Abyssinian Baptist Church. Joel Osteen's father was a divorced man but that didn't faze his congregants. He married again and built up a powerful ministry that spawned the career of Joel. Richard Roberts, son of Oral, divorced his wife and most people in the church didn't even flinch, at least not in public where it counted. Some people excuse the ministers by saying that it's hard being a preacher's wife (it is) or that the wife wasn't fit to be a preacher's wife and that the divorce was her fault. Other's use the King David excuse.

In the American Catholic church annulments are handed out like cookies at a girl scout meeting. People who've been married for decades with teen aged or adult children have gotten annulments. Are you telling me that ALL of these annulled marriages REALLY were invalid? Now, yes, of course, there are pitiful cases where an annulment is the only right thing to do : A woman who finds that she's married to a secretly gay man was lied to from the beginning. Her marriage was not valid. She did not have all the facts before the wedding. A man who finds that his wife has no intention of having children and didn't tell him was duped into a false marriage. I know of one woman who married a man who suffered from severe depression. His family was relieved when he married. Did anyone tell the wife about his condition? I don't know but if no-one did she has a right to an annulment one day. Those are sad cases but they aren't common. They aren't enough to fuel the annulment machine we seem to have today. And let's not forget the divorced and remarried Catholics who haven't gone the annulment route have been known to present themselves for Communion.

To a gay man, who is the victim of parents who probably didn't have the marriage they should've had or who fell prey to a horrible situation early in his development it must seem like rank hypocrisy that we who have played marriage so fast and loose should turn our noses up at him for trying to play house. I could argue with him pointing out that he's not right in the head (and he is not) but he could argue back that the society that produced him is sicker. I expect gay marriage to be the law of the land within five years. Of course, if it's true that as some economists are predicting, that the entire US economy is going to collapse, gay marriage will collapse with it. A rich fat man can afford to be decadent. He can afford to ignore gay marriage.As long as his wife's gay friends don't insinuate themselves into his children's lives, he'll shrug his shoulders about the whole thing. A man who's rioting in the streets for food or who hasn't worked in over a year will not look kindly on the frivolous or the ridiculous. After the binge comes the hangover. After the bacchanal somebody is left cleaning up the vomitorium.

2009 Cannonball Award Nominee.........

Psst. Y'know this Swine Flu "pandemic" is just the media being a bunch of crazy Joe Bidens, right?

Don't fear the piggy wiggy.

On a more serious note, thousands of Americans die of the regular, non hyped flu every year. That's why your grandma really ought to get her flu shot and why you need to see a doctor if it goes on for more than five days. I think the media is just trying to distract us from what's really going on. Statistically speaking swine flu has killed a handful of people. A tragedy for their families of course, but hardly a cause for widespread panic. Folks, when Mr. Pestilence gets on his horse to ride, he doesn't send a press release. People just start dying en masse.

who was that veiled woman?

A Catholic woman at work was mocking women who wear veils at Mass. I just changed the subject. Bless her heart, if she ever runs into me at Mass the shock might be too much. Hopefully I'll be wearing one with sequins or the hot pink one and she'll be so horrified that she'll look away and never recognize me.