Slavishly accurate liturgical translations & frank commentary on Catholic issues - by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf o{]:¬)
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Z-Cam and Radio Sabina: 
I had a guest tonight, to watch the convention coverage, and therefore made supper.
We started with a minestrone.
Here are some of the ingredients… fresh and Sabine.
And….
The setting:
The first course.
The second course…
Saltimbocca alla romana.
The beginning….
More later… perhaps.
Okay… duke it out over networks.
This thread is a bit unusual for me, but I think it can be done.
Rules:
If you are nasty, I won’t only delete your comment, I will permanently block your access to this blog.
If you attack people personally, I won’t only delete your comment, I will permanently block your access to this blog.
If you are profoundly obtuse….
I think most of you know me by now.
This can also apply to networks overseas, such as SKY or BBC, RAI or… fill in the blank.
Is there media bias?
Examples… be concrete.
Okay or not?
September 02, 2008Life imitates art again here!
Fans of the Sci-Fi show Battlestar Galactica have previously noted that John McCain looks like Colonel Saul Tigh — a temperamental war hawk and ex-fighter pilot , who also happens to be a former POW.
And, as Jonathan Last notes, Sarah Palin looks like a young President Laura Roslin — the former Secretary of Education who became president of the human race out of nowhere after the robotic Cylons killed almost all of them in a surprise nuclear strike.
In Season One, the remaining 40,000 or so human beings worry about her inexperience, her open religiosity and her choice to ban abortion in order to keep mankind alive.
For more information on the mock ticket, check out the campaign site that’s already been set up in their name.
UPDATE:
Jimmy Akin has a GREAT piece of political analysis over at his place. Check it out!
Here is a sample:
Many observers were impressed by Col. Saul Tigh’s selection of Laura Roslin as his running mate in the upcoming election.Others found Roslin to be a lightweight compared to Tigh’s 40 years of service to the Twelve Colonies and his record as a war hero and former POW.
Originally, Roslin held only a minor post in the Colonial government which—while it showcased her genuine love for children—nevertheless was a small backdrop before an unexpected and lightning rise to executive office, which she has held for only a short time.
On the other hand, her decision to ban abortion in order to keep mankind alive, her gung-ho Cylon-hunting, and her deep religious faith will surely fire up the base.
It is less clear what the effect will be of her statement that Admiral Adama’s deeply-unpopular and protracted conflict with the Cylons is a "task that is from the gods."
Some pundits viewed her selection cynically, saying that Tigh needed to choose someone like Roslin in order to shore up his standing in the party.
First things first.
As always, I want to thank those of you who have recently used the donation button on the left side-bar and on some entries. I periodically remember your names at Mass when I offer it for benefactors, as is only fitting. I am also grateful to you who sent me things from the amazon wish list, things useful for my work, life, and simply some joyful moments.
Here are some links to recent posts of interest. This is not exhaustive, so look around.
of the living
VOTE! Voting is still open for a little while longer for this award.
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After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto is alleged to have said:
"Gentlemen, we have just kicked a rabid dog."
Put another way, as popularized in the movies:
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant."
My deepest thanks to the mainstream liberal media.
When I speak to groups or congregations I will sometimes start with "hooks" people can hang ideas on as a hermeneutic, interpretive principle, for what follows.
Hook 1: Candidate Barak Obama, speaking without notes, referred to an unplanned baby as a punishment.
Hook 2: Candidate Sarah Palin last night explicitly spoke of special-needs children.
Hook 3: The liberal-left media is attacking Palin as a good candidate because she has five children.
Hook 4: Speaker Pelosi had five children and managed to be a Representative.
Hook 5: Candidate Biden was a senator and a single-parent.
Hook 6: Candidate McCain adopted a dying child from Bangladesh.
I turn now to a piece from the site of First Things with my emphases and comments:
A Vote for Sarah Palin
By Suann Therese Maier
Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 7:51 AM
Three memories [Her version of "hooks" for her interpretive principles of this event.] have shaped my approach to this year’s general election.
Here’s the first. In the late 1970s, during a two-year break from teaching to raise our second son, an adopted child, I found myself at a Los Angeles dinner party filled with DINKs, the “double income, no kids” crowd who were just emerging as a self-aware and upwardly mobile social group. I fell to talking—or more accurately, listening—to a chatty young female attorney who said she was putting in eighty hours a week as a junior associate on a variety of important cases.
After twenty minutes or so, she finally noticed my silence and asked me what I did with my own time. So I told her. I told her about the young couple that had asked my husband and me to adopt their baby if we covered their hospital expenses. I told her about waiting outside the delivery room for our son to be born. I told her about the bureaucratic maze that came with finalizing the adoption of a newborn. I told her about borrowing money from friends so we’d look more solvent than we actually were to Social Service inspectors who checked our accounts.
“That’s wonderful dear,” she said. “You’re so lucky not to have a real job.”
Here’s the second memory. I remember my fourth child, our son Dan, being born one winter evening, purple and struggling for breath. I remember my husband pouring water over his head as we baptized him in my arms. [A gesture of Christian hope in the midst of heart-rending, life-verifying challenge.] I remember the young Filipina doctor rushing Dan to intensive care. I remember the ten days of his fighting for life. And I remember Dan’s diagnosis, when it finally came in: Down syndrome.
Here’s the third memory. I remember my father, a successful young Chicago attorney, telling me why the Democratic party was the party of “our people,” and why so many Catholics were Democrats, and why the party stood for the little guy, the poor and the defenseless. I remember listening as a young girl in our kitchen as Saul Alinsky [!] organized my parents’ Catholic friends on racial and economic issues [sound familiar?] in our Chicago living room. And I remember the night in 1992 when Pennsylvania’s governor, Robert Casey, was denied a chance to talk against abortion at the Democratic national convention.
As I draw on those memories now, [her hermeneutical hooks] I reach certain conclusions. As a woman, mother, wife, and lifetime professional educator, I will vote, enthusiastically, for Sarah Palin as vice president this November. Even if the media pressure forces her from the ticket, I will vote against the Democratic party—partly because I respect John McCain and believe him to be the better candidate, but equally because I’m tired of the intransigence and condescension of the Democratic leadership on the abortion issue. [Good.]
I will vote for Sarah Palin because I don’t need the Democratic platform’s belated affirmation of motherhood. Thanks, but I already know that motherhood is good, several times over. Moreover, the party’s rediscovery of motherhood seems rather cynical in the current news cycle, while Democratic-friendly bloggers and media types bash Palin about her daughter’s pregnancy and her own busy schedule while bringing up children. [QUAERITUR:] How can a real sympathy for motherhood come from the same people who wrote a platform that hardens the party’s addiction to a phony right to kill the unborn?
I will vote for Sarah Palin because she has guts. We’ve never met, but I suspect I know something about her life, and so do a great many other women. I know what it means to have a son with Down syndrome. I know what it means to talk a good line about religious faith and then be asked to prove it. I know what it means to have a daughter pregnant and unmarried.
In fact, while we’re on the subject, I also know what it means to have two grandchildren born out of wedlock, a son struggling with alcohol, two grandchildren with serious disabilities, putting myself through graduate school while simultaneously caring for a husband and children and teaching full time—and a whole lot more. This is the stuff of real human love; [There it is.] this is the raw material of family life. And those who think that Palin’s beliefs and family struggles are funny or worth jeering at, simply reveal the venality of their own hearts.
I will vote for Sarah Palin because she is intelligent, tenacious and talented. Nobody made her rise easy, and no one is making it easy now. And—is it only moms who notice this?—unlike Senator Biden, she does seem to act consistently on her beliefs about the sanctity of life, at considerable personal cost.
I will vote for Sarah Palin because she doesn’t come from Washington or New York or Chicago or anywhere else the political and media aristoi like to hang out. In fact, I especially like the idea that the state she governs actually produces something—like some of the oil that powers the hair dryers and klieg lights at MSNBC.
I will vote for Sarah Palin because Roe v. Wade is bad law, and it needs to fall. I don’t doubt the intelligence and character of men like Doug Kmiec, the younger Bob Casey, and others who sympathize with the Obama campaign. But I do doubt their judgment. At the end of the day, the Democratic party in 2008 has conceded nothing to pro-life Democrats. The fact that Sen. Obama listens respectfully to pro-lifers without calling them reactionary dunces does not constitute progress. [Look instead at his record in Illinois.] Results and behavior are what matter. On both those counts, the party has again failed to show any real sensitivity to pro-life concerns. In that light, high profile Catholics who support Obama are simply rationalizing their surrender on Roe.
Finally, I will vote for Sarah Palin, not because I’ve left the Democratic party of my youth and young adulthood, but because that party has left me. In fact, it no longer exists. And no amount of elegant speaking, exciting choreography, and moral alibis will bring it back.
That’s the real tragedy of this election.
Suann Therese Maier, the mother of four and former director of non-profit support organizations for pregnant women and children with disabilities, is a teacher in Colorado.
Some of the reasons she gives, quite personal, such as "she’s tough" or "she’s been there", are good, but not in my book as compelling as some of the other reasons she gives.
However, another important dimension of this article is that many people out there on both sides or no side of the lines of political parties have the very same set of memorable hooks.
Our friends at Rorate are still on top of interesting things.
We are now informed that Pope Benedict, ... well… read on:
In the Mass he will celebrate in Paris, the Holy Father will don vestments which belong to the Abbey of Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux, the most famous Traditional Catholic abbey in France.
Keep in mind that the Abbey at Le Barroux famously returned to unity Rome at the time of the 1988 act of "separation" by Archbp. Lefebvre. They live a Benedictine life, and with rigor. As a result, the monastery is stuffed with vocations. Years back they published a fine Latin/French hand missal for the old Mass… with a preface by Joseph Card. Ratzinger.
The Holy Father has been chosing vestments to make a statement. His use of historical cuts of vestments, especially the marvelous taglio filipino, is a concrete lesson in continuity.
Some thought to brush the vestment lessons aside.
They are dead wrong.
His Eminence Francis Card. George, Archbishop of Chicago, has made a strong statement in a letter posted on the website of the Archdiocese.
My emphases and comments.
Office of the CardinalSeptember 2, 2008
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
In the midst of a lengthy political campaign, matters of public policy that are also moral issues [pretty much all public policy issues are moral issues, but this one trumps all others] sometimes are misrepresented or are presented in a partial or manipulative fashion. [In other words, in a deceptive manner.] While everyone could be expected to know the Church’s position on the immorality of abortion and the role of law in protecting unborn children, it seems some profess not to know it and others, even in the Church, dispute it. Since this teaching has recently been falsely presented, [by Speaker Pelosi on Meet The Press, to a huge audience] the following clarification may be helpful.
The Catholic Church, from its first days, condemned the aborting of unborn children as gravely sinful. Not only Scripture’s teaching about God’s protection of life in the womb (consider the prophets and the psalms and the Gospel stories about John the Baptist and Jesus himself in Mary’s womb) but also the first century catechism (the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles) said: “You shall not slay the child by abortions. You shall not kill what is generated.” The teaching of the Church was clear in a Roman Empire that permitted abortion. [A good reminder.] This same teaching has been constantly reiterated in every place and time up to Vatican II, which condemned abortion as a “heinous crime.” [Gaudium et spes 51: "Vita igitur inde a conceptione, maxima cura tuenda est; abortus necnon infanticidium nefanda sunt crimina".] This is true today and will be so tomorrow. [This teaching will not change.] Any other comments, by politicians, professors, pundits or the occasional priest, are erroneous and cannot be proposed in good faith. [Contradict the Church’s clear teaching, you are not in good faith.]
This teaching has consequences for those charged with caring for the common good, those who hold public office. [Read: pro-abortion Catholic politicians] The unborn child, who is alive and is a member of the human family, cannot defend himself or herself. Good law defends the defenseless. Our present laws permit unborn children to be privately killed. Laws that place unborn children outside the protection of law destroy both the children killed and the common good, which is the controlling principle of Catholic social teaching. One cannot favor the legal status quo on abortion and also be working for the common good. [Pro-abortion Catholic politicians are working against the common good.]
This explains why the abortion issue will not disappear and why it is central to the Church’s teaching on a just social order. The Church does not endorse candidates for office, but she does teach the principles according to which Catholics should form their social consciences. The teaching, which covers intrinsic evils such as abortion and many other issues that are matters of prudential judgment, could not be clearer; [and if you (or Speaker Pelosi) says the Church’s teaching is not clear, you (or Speaker Pelosi) are a liar undermining the common good] the practice often falls short because we are all sinners. There is no room for self-righteousness in Catholic moral teaching.
The Conference of Bishops in this country and the Bishops of Illinois have issued statements about Catholic social teaching and political life. They are available in our parishes. All of us should keep our country and all the candidates for office in the next election in our prayers. God bless you and your families.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.
Archbishop of Chicago
The Cardinal does not say explicitly that pro-abortion Catholic politicians should not receive Communion, but that is the logical conclusion. He doesn’t not say that pastors of souls should deny Communion, but that is the reasonable conclusion.
WDTPRS kudos to Cardinal George.
