Spot the quisling

 A lot of people who we thought were pro-life actually aren't or were just giving lip service to the cause. They enjoyed getting paid for speeches and essays but in their hearts they were perfectly fine with Roe and the money it brought them. I've been very surprised by the tepid response from a number of priests and bishops. One professional Catholic hates President Trump so much that he can't bring himself to be happy. He's the worst of the bunch but most of the professional Catholics have not responded with joy. I hope people are taking note. 

Dobbs

 I am a  GenX baby, the last generation to be born before Roe v. Wade and I have lived to see Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. God be praised. All glory and honor to God. 

random thoughts on a Thursday morning

• This piece on Old St. Mary's in DC is interesting but left me a bit unsettled. My godmother, was one of those little old ladies who attended the Monday novena and one of my earliest memories is going to St. Mary's with her and looking up at the Pieta statue with awe. The author of the essay says everything was gray and depressing. I thought that old church was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Old women like my godmother and the Chinese parishioners who kept the parish going deserved more respect than the essay gives. They weren't famous or rich but they had souls to save and they faithfully attended back when walking alone in Chinatown in the morning or night was dangerous. Cardinal Gregory, it's been whispered has turned a jaundiced eye towards the parish and in the end, it must might be those frumpy, uninteresting, old nobodies who save the parish again.
  
  
  
  
  
  

•  If you are a prepper it's time to go dark about it. If your family and friends haven't learned to plan for emergencies by now, they won't. 
  
  
  
  
  
• I have found that it's best to skip reading Fr. Z.  unless I want a pasta recipe because I just end up irritated and a little sad but I noticed on  Canon 212 that Fr. blasted Gloria TV for  reporting  a story about a confraternity that turned a  church in Rome into a dinning hall for a few hours in order to feed the needy. Father Z is in Rome eating and drinking and posting cute travel videos. Why he got upset with Gloria TV, which is not a minor Trad site , by the way, for noting while yes, we should and are commanded to care for the poor, reducing the house of God, which should be for His worship, to a feeding station is a mystery to me. My only guess is that Fr. feels this way  because the confraternity is affiliated with the FSSP and you're a bad Trad if you don't cheer for absolutely everything any FSSP priest does. I think that's baloney.  Also Rome apparently doesn't have any parish halls or civic centers the confraternity could have used to do this. Sure..... 
  I hope the Blessed Sacrament was removed for the event but neither Gloria TV nor Fr. Z. said so. 
  
  
  

Pentecost

 

Random thoughts on a Saturday afternoon

• Nigerian Christians are being terrorized and nobody seems to care. Priests and seminarians have been kidnapped and murdered. A church was attacked on Pentecost Sunday and the estimates are 50 or more people were slaughtered. Villages have been burnt, a young woman was lynched...Where is the Catholic media? 
  
  
  
• Is the new Obi Wan show so bad that Disney/Lucas Film is ginning up a faux controversy to fool people into watching it?
  
  
  
  
• Why are people so gleefully evil towards sedevaticantists? Is it the group-think need  to have someone on the outside to hate? I don't agree with them but they are Catholic and deserve civility. If you can plop yourself down to a seder at your parish or  say not a word of protest when your priest hands over your parish hall  to Muslims, while they build their mosque down the street then why NOT do the brotherhood of man song and dance in regards  to a Sede?
  
  Your archbishop has a woman's nick-name. There haven't been ten men ordained in one year for decades in your diocese.  You can't recall the last time you saw a real nun on the parish grounds, much less at Mass. The "Catholic" high school is celebrating sexual sin  and Confession is about 30 minutes once a week at your parish--if Fr. isn't busy Tweeting or doing his You Tube videogame review.  There's less that 50 people at Mass but you have two Eucharist Ministers.  The head of your RCIA program is loudly pro-abortion and not one thing will be done about it... Are things so wonderful that you can cheerfully damn a Sede on the Internet, whom you don't even know, to Hell for looking at all this and trying to find an answer? Would you ever even dream of treating  a Lutheran or Mormon the way I've seen Sedes talked to in Catholic social media?
  
  Are there annoying Sedes? Yes, but of course.  Some are downright obnoxious. Some have been driven mad and you just can't talk to them. There are also calm, erudite sedevaticantists who are able to make their argument with dignity and clarity. Again, I don't agree with them. If there hasn't been a pope since 1958, I don't see how we can ever have one again. The last cardinals made by Pius XII must be over 100 by now and may be in their dotage.  I can make that point without going, "Shut up you stupid, sub-human Sede and go to Hell." 
  
  
  
  
  
  St. Charles Lwanga, pray for us.

The insane walk among us.

In the late 60s and 70s the idea spread that with all the psychotropic medications available  even the seriously, dangerously mentally ill could live at home as long as they had a strong support system. In 1961, Professor Thomas Szasz published his thunderbolt of a book, The Myth of Mental Illness and founded the  American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization.  He testified before Congress and his theories caught on. He was also a proponent of suicide and did so in 2012. I've heard people mutter that, "Oh, Ronald Reagan closed the asylums in California and that's what started homelessness." No. The movement for closing mental institutions was a popular one that had been building long before that. Politicians responded to the people and the people had been told by movies, novels, the news, and academics that mental institutions were all bad. 

 What most of the well-meaning, nice people didn't realize was that eventually the strong 50 year old who can make his 20 year old son take his medicine, grows old and dies. The nice folks didn't take into account the number of people could not handle their sick relative and those who did not want to and felt that they'd been forced and shamed into the position of caretaker that they weren't equipped for. I can think of at least three examples of this:

• A old college  friend of mine had a cousin who was homeless. She explained, when noticing my surprise --the family was well off-- that when he was a freshman at college his mind broke,  either by nature or by drug use. His parents brought him home from school and took care of them until they died. They left money. They left a house. They left siblings who by that time were senior citizens and unable and unwilling to sacrifice their lives to take on a 30 year old who could get violent if his dosage schedule varied. So he's on the street. 

• One of my mother's neighbors took care of her mentally ill son  until her common-law husband died. She couldn't stay on the property as the husband never made any provisions for her legally. She decided to move a senior building but of course the building's management  would not allow her to bring her son with her so she left him. He lives in the alley nearby his old home and sometimes sleeps in the parking lot next door. His mother brings him food and laundry but he's on the street and sometimes he scares people rather badly when he's angry and  he gets arrested.  People who knew him when he was young look a bit shamefaced about it but  everyone, even the ones who are sympathetic to him are relieved when he's in jail. The last time I ran into him, I recoiled from his stench and then froze like a cornered rabbit until he passed me by. Living as he does, spending the Winters outdoors has turned his health. He's lost a good deal of weight and looks to be a shadow of himself. My mother is convinced that his body can't go like this and it's only a matter of time before he's found dead somewhere.
  
  
  

• I have a cousin who was hit in the head with a baseball when he was eight which some family members believe caused brain damage. If he's not medicated he has no impulse control, is quick to panic  and has gotten violent with females. He's been to jail and prison. Thankfully he has four brothers who keep him at home and  step up time and again to protect him and clean up any mess he gets into. That's  obviously not what most families  in this situation are doing or can do. 

It should be obvious by now, that public mental hospitals are needed and desperately so. There are poor, sick  in soul and body people wandering the streets who ought to be in a humane institution with food, drink, medical care  and shelter.  The insane walk among us. For their sakes and the sakes of innocents who may be harmed by them, it has to stop. 

St. Dymphna, pray for us. 

St. John and the boiling oil

 I love the look of mild annoyance on St. John's face.