Exodus 90 and other random thoughts

• St. Thomas Beckett, pray for us. 

Saint Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr - 29 December, from the Raccolta

• St Thomas of Canterbury, son of Gilbert Becket, was born in Southwark, England, in 1117. When a youth he was attached to the household of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, who sent him to Paris and Bologna to study law. He became Archdeacon of Canterbury, then Lord High Chancellor of England; and in 1160, when Archbishop Theobald died, the king insisted on the consecration of St. Thomas in his stead. St. Thomas refused, warning the king that from that hour their friendship would be broken. In the end he yielded, and was consecrated. The conflict at once broke out; St. Thomas resisted the royal customs, which violated the liberties of the Church and the laws of the realm. After six years of contention, partly spent in. exile, St. Thomas, with full foresight of martyrdom before him, returned as a good shepherd to his Church. On the 29th of December, 1170, just as vespers were beginning, four knights broke into the cathedral, crying: “Where is the archbishop? where is the traitor?” The monks fled, and St. Thomas might easily have escaped. But he advanced, saying: “Here I am—no traitor, but archbishop. What seek you?” “Your life,” they cried. “Gladly do I give it,” was the reply; and bowing his head, the invincible martyr was hacked and hewn till his soul went to God. Six months later Henry II. submitted to be publicly scourged at the Saint’s shrine, and restored to the Church her full rights.

  Reflection.—"Learn from St. Thomas,“ says Father Faber, “to fight the good fight even to the shedding of blood, or, to what men find harder, the shedding of their good name by pouring it out to waste on the earth.”

  
  
  
  
• Hey married guys. If you decide to do Exodus 90 remember that it is your spiritual mortification and not your family's. So no snarling at the kids for listening to music while you have a caffeine withdrawal headache and no glaring at your wife because she's having pie. If you are so grumpy that you make your wife and family miserable then what have you really done for yourself or the Church? 

• Do you remember how Cardinal Bernadin asked that the Gay Men's Chorus sing at his funeral? Many of the people who questioned what that meant were told to shut up. I imagine that when Cardinal Newman requested that the grave of  Fr. Ambrose St. John, whom he called his "earthly light" be opened up so that he could be buried in the same grave with him, some people were shocked and there may have been whispers. Those people were probably told to hush and not give any scandal in front of the Protestants. Cardinal Newman's request is still giving ammunition to the Church's snickering enemies. He never should have been canonized. 
  
  
  
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• Beware priests who have female fan clubs. Beware of priests who Tweet or blog endlessly about video games, movies, food, or anything and everything BUT the Faith.
  
  
  
  
  

Merry Christmas

 My husband is home from work. I've finally heard from my Tennessee relatives and now Rocky and I are happily eating bacon sandwiches and listening to the greatest Christmas album of all time, 

Pavarotti at Notre Dame, Montreal.

 

Merry Christmas

 

Hollywood was never our friend

 We watch old movies and TV shows almost exclusively. I've known that Hollywood kept pushing perversion for decades and were only kept in check by the Church but I'm seeing how Hollywood executives managed to subtly manipulate the public even in the so called Golden Age of entertainment. It was often done with such a delicate touch that it must have taken a huge amount of rewriting and meetings to pull it off. 

Rocky was watching a nearly 60 year old Western TV show a few weeks ago  and suddenly I saw something that I never would have noticed as a child. The heroine owns a saloon (No, it's not Gunsmoke), but to my adult eyes it seemed more like a brothel with scantily clad "girls" living upstairs. The hero is the local sheriff and he and lady saloon owner have a relationship that will not end in marriage,  because the heroine likes her freedom and the sheriff doesn't want to be tied down or leave a widow in case he gets killed trying to clean up his very rough town. 

A local farm girl leaves her dreary, puritanical father and finds work and happiness in the saloon. Her widower father is broken hearted and shows up at the saloon demanding that his daughter return home. He is shocked to see that a cowboy is apparently sleeping in his daughter's room and he angrily tells the woman owner of the saloon that she is a sinner who has debauched his child. He comes back late that night with his shot gun and is prevented from killing the cowboy by the sheriff.

 It turns out that the girl is not a prostitute and she and the cowboy are married. The saloon is really just a saloon, (probably for the sake of the censors), and the scantily clad girls who work there just serve food and drinks and flirt but really don't do anything upstairs but sleep alone. The father is made a fool of and everyone laughs at him while he stands there looking embarrassed but relieved. That show very cleverly made the church going father look bad.  That was a poison in the subconscious of the young viewers. 

Another movie that I watched was even more overt. In this one a local woman is an adulteress who sees a murder as she returns from her off screen assignation with her lover. An innocent man is accused and is going to hang. He has one witness, a girl from the saloon who says she saw him going about his own business at the time of the murder and he had nothing to do with it. The innocent man's lawyer, who is the hero of the movie somehow finds out about the local wife and questions her in court. Desperate to save her marriage and not be humiliated in public, she perjures herself. The prosecutor jumps up and demands that the court can't possibly take the word of a harlot over that of  a respectable married woman. The innocent man's lawyer gets the married woman to confess and the innocent man is saved from the gallows. This movie was made in the late 40s or early 50s but it deliberately made the prostitute the truly good woman and denigrates the married lady. Hollywood was never our friend. 

We certainly do live in interesting times.

 As horrible as 2020 is and has been, there may come a day when we all look back on it as the calm before the storm and may even call it the good ole days. St. Januarius's blood did not liquefy today. The last three times it did not liquefy were in 1939, 1944, 1973, and 1980. Sooooo, yeah. Things can always get worse.

 

Life amongst the ruins and other random thoughts.

• If you still have a job, stock up now.  I'm not saying run around like your backside's on fire and  get 100 pounds of rice but there is no excuse for your children to go hungry because you didn't get an extra case of water or can of ravioli every time you go to the store now. Three million people claimed that they went hungry during the UK lockdowns. That's incredible. Come on folks, get some Spam. Get some Vienna sausages. Get a box of  macaroni or spaghetti and stick it in a big ole glass jar. Pick up a couple of packs of the cheapest ground beef and stick it in the freezer. Get some powdered milk. I know it's nasty but fresh milk won't last so unless you can find shelf stable milk, one can or box of powered milk  could really come in handy. You should be able to get through a month at least. 
  
  
  
  
• Child sex abuse and rape reports have doubled in Ireland since the lockdowns. Ireland, what the Hell is wrong with you? One study has shown that head trauma abuse of children in the UK has gone up by 1493%. Brits, what the Hell is wrong with you? I can't even fathom that number. It's also been reported that the number one cause of death of men there, age 50 and younger is suicide.  I haven't seen a study for this horror in the USA but police departments around the country say that child and woman beating and suicide among teens and young adults is up. We are being sorely pressed but violence and self destruction as answers to the crisis are not the right ones.  
  
  
  
  
• The governor of my state, during his press conference made a hostile remark to Christians who want to go to Church and he was not shouted down. To my knowledge  bishops of Virginia said nothing in response. 

• If you have someone in a nursing home read this. 

• Could somebody please go to Rome and knock over that foul Vatican nativity set?
  
  
  
  
• Every time I meet a young Latin American priest I find myself wondering what seminary he came from and if he was one of the seminarians who were brought in the USA via the McCarrick pipeline to be um....entertainment for Uncle Ted and his  brothers. 

random thoughts on a Saturday afternoon

• Please stop naming and posting photos of your parish or chapel with chirpy remarks that the Mass is conducted normally. You are just making it easy for busybodies to go there and make a complaint to law enforcement if they see someone without a mask. Protect your priest.
  
  
  
  
•  Rocky and I went to Richmond yesterday. It was incredibly depressing. Monument Avenue is hideously deformed with graffiti. The residents almost all have BLM signs in their windows in an attempt to protect themselves. The streets downtown are quiet. We could not enter our favorite Richmond restaurant but had to place our order over the phone and wait for them to bring it out to us. We ate at Belle Island park and watched college kids and birds.
  
  Later we went to Shockhoe Slip and that was just stunningly sad. Normally that area of Richmond is bustling with people but in the time of the Great Sickness we only saw a handful of folks walking with purpose and more homeless people than I've ever seen in Richmond before. On top of that, these homeless didn't have that drug addict look, nor did they look like con artists. They all looked seriously mentally ill. We only saw two men who were actively begging. The rest of the homeless were just sitting or walking seemingly unaware of the world around them. 
  
   At the end of the trip we went  through the drive through at Lees Chicken for dinner and it was such a relief to see lots of happy almost normal people in their cars. I thought about going to the FSSP church in Richmond but the last time we visited the people weren't friendly at all and since most folks are extra jittery right now I decided not to. 
  
  
  
  
• In order to comply with Virginia's rules my parish is requiring people to RSVP for Christmas Mass. I imagine that there will be some angry people who end up being turned away because the church won't be allowed to take walk-ins. Pray for everyone who will be involved. 
  
  
• This product is going to get somebody killed.  People are so freaked out and  many have lost their minds. One example of this  happened  last week when Rocky and I were going to get on an elevator but the woman who was on it panicked and backed up against the wall and yelled at us. 
  
  
  
• While you're donating to some lay apologist or instead of  doing that, why not help traditional nuns, monks and priests? Fr. Maximilian Mary of Jesus Crucified is a hermit in Pennsylvania. You can read his booklets and donate to him here.  
  
  
  
  
  
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• I listened to this podcast twice.