Just to lighten your day a little, I saw this at Anne Barnhardt’s Saturday meme roundup.

After several decades, and not of the Rosary in this context, along with other things I had loved to do and that I was good at and I that I had shelved because of seminary and priesthood, I’m getting back into chess.
I’m beating intermediate level “bots”. I’m losing to the higher ranked “bots”, unless they keep coming at me with the same openings or defenses.
Compared to how I played decades ago, my opening game sucks.
But, my middle game sucks.
On the other hand, my end game sucks.
But my end game is a little less sucky in suckingness, even though, paradoxically, fewer pieces on the board usually make for more complicated strategy. Maybe my end game sucks so bad that I don’t even know just how bad it really sucks.
This, however, both discouraged me and spurred me at the same time.
I can understand super famous match games. I can understand entirely crazy positions and bizarre developments or traumatic experiences.
Still… sheesh.
I’m not going to be Magnus or Maximus in chess.
At least I can be Maior … autem me.
In worldly endeavors, so too in the spiritual life. You can be better than you are now, with elbow grease and God’s grace.
When you love something, you engage your will so as to potentialize all your gifts. How crucial it is to know this in order to live our God-given vocations in the way God asks, so that we can fulfill the tiny part He ordained for us from before the creation of the cosmos, and chess. Love must first be given to God. Everything else follows. All else is less good.
Supply the grease and grace will come.
That video was a spur, as is the unbelievable explosion of young people following chess online in live videos.
Great Caesar’s Ghost, what is happening?
It is not an exaggeration to see tens of thousand of viewers live and hundreds of thousands of views of archived live chess play. No. Really. Tens of thousands of people watch chess games, on line, while one of the players comments… on his moves, on his favorite drink, on his moves, on whether hot dogs are better than hamburgers, on his moves, on whether some 25 yr old “pog” (not sure what that is), played against the Pirc. Sometimes, during their hours long podcasts they also are streaming their latest play list, which makes chess seem like the favorite game of Hell. Never mind the scrolling live comments on the side, recorded for perpetuity and the Final Judgment.
It’s enough to raise your hands to heaven and whisper … “Really?”
The video above, as I write, has 1,315,527 views in the 174 from Apr 30, 2021 till now.
7560 views per day.
Young skulls full of mush are competing, coached by masters, in online tournaments for SIX figures. And I do NOT mean the famous painting in the museum of my native place depicting Dante. I’ll give a shout to Robert Royal’s ongoing online courses on the Divine Comedy, presently in Paradiso. Magari. Utinam. HERE I’ve always wanted to teach Dante. Dante is complicated and alluring. What a kick it would be to teach Dante with Royal and Anthony Esolen, who made “the great translation”. (Part 1, Inferno US HERE – UK HERE). I digress.
Chess has its complicated, alluring complexities and its enticing engagement with the “other”.
How much more complex and enticing is Scripture, the orations of the Church, her history, mission and FOUNDER, who is wholly OTHER?
7560 views per day.
That’s more than my daily live-streamed Masses. (Those tens of you who followed, drop a line for developments.)
About my level in chess. Maior if not Magnus.
I invoke Piccarda, whose ascent to her level was swift (cf. Purgatorio, 24.10-15 and Paradiso 3.85).
I renew an invitation for CLERICS (bishops, priests, deacons) who play chess to drop me a line. Maybe we could have a private (very “clericalist”, set apart) chess group. HERE
BTW… if I have Fr. Z’s Kitchen, I might have to have Fr. Z’ Workshop.
I’m presently fixing up and old, dinged-up wooden folding chess box. Maybe this is self-reflective. I haven’t done any wood working since .. since… when I was still winning at chess and when Fischer played Spassky and when I read Tolkien, a huge divine force vector, for the first time.
I need more tools.

Holy Church is indefectible. That doesn’t mean that everything we do in it or all the people who guide it are doing God’s will.
From a reader in reaction to the dialogue between Francis and Jesuits in Bratislava. HERE
I had closed the combox on that post. My correspondent, a long-time… loooongitime reader and very knowledgeable about the state of the Church in these USA said, “Better to keep the combox closed” and added this…
See if it doesn’t strike a chord. Edited for anonymity.
I am starting to feel like Jonah, who complained that God took away the shade tree that grew over him. So now the Pope is going after EWTN– which, while solidly orthodox, is hardly the fringe right that some might like to portray it as being. What next? A condemnation of one of the four Gospels? I’m getting to the point where I can’t even stomach Catholic news any more much less secular news. I get the sense that the Pope is engaged in a nasty game of baiting the orthodox in an attempt to trap them into doing something stupid– and many will eagerly jump into the trap.
What a tightrope we walk these days. Perhaps the example of Jesus before Pilate is the best to follow for now for most of us.
Yes, “they win” to some extent, but we have to believe that Jesus has a plan– a grander plan than anything that Satan can concoct and certainly grander than anything you or I could develop.
[…]
I really feel bad for good orthodox priests these days. I’m not under nearly the pressure that many of you must be and I find myself muttering to myself all day and wondering how long before the stress does me in. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t work for a tiny company that mostly flies under the radar where I can escape the worst of the nonsense that is going on these days.
Try to hang in there. You and I may yet live long enough to see the beginnings of a reversal.
When I was young, I thought that GM would always be around, but that “old” GM stock is worthless today. The Soviet Union seemed as if it was indestructible, but today it is but a memory and Eastern Europe is free of Soviet domination.
There will be a day when people talk about the collapse of China and the liberation of those subjugated by China. God may yet have a miracle in store to prevent Islamic fundamentalists from overrunning the West, though I’m not sure that we deserve such a miracle.
There are any number of things and any amount of sufferings that seemed as if they would never end or go away, but only God can make the claim of being all-powerful and ever-living.
Others can but pretend for a while, like Ozymandias.
No matter how badly those who oppose a whole, integrated understanding of Tradition will drive and harass us, we have to strive not to hate them (as many of them do hate us) and pray for their conversion by whatever means God’s knows will work. We want as many people as possible to have the happiness of Heaven, even those who treat us badly. This earthly life is brief, and so whatever it is that they might need for their benefit would be short compared to the unending bliss of the Beatific Vision. The same applies to us.
We have to examine ourselves carefully and purify our loves.
O God, lover of and guardian of peace and charity: to all our enemies grant peace and true charity; and give to them the remission of all their sins, and mightily snatch us away from their plots.
I have just received a Kindle edition of the mystical Catholic writer Michael D. O’Brien’s new novel, The Sabbatical. US HERE – UK HERE
This is a sequel to The Father’s Tale.
I am excited to get to this soon.
The Father’s Tale – US HERE – UK HERE – was the story of a man who leaves his normal, comfortable life to go in search of his son who has fallen into a cult. It is a
“prodigal son” story with twists and tendrils into Eliot and Hopkins and Russian writers. That’s a massive reduction for such a massive work, over 1000 pages. While I have often thought that O’Brien could have listened to his editor a little more often, each page turn remains oddly compelling. Surely this is because O’Brien writes from depth and a rooting in a strong prayer life. Look at his artwork sometime. HERE
The Sabbatical is about one third the length of The Father’s Tale.
Sticking with O’Brien, some of you are in for a treat. You get to discover his books.
I recommend the following.
Read…
and then the series that hooks back into Father Elijah beginning with:
Outside that series is his extremely successful venture into SciFi:
I believe his most recently released work was, brief and charming.
I really liked that one.
In effect, you can choose where to dive in.
Perhaps this new will give rise to a new wave of spiritual Cristeros, namely, Custodes Traditionis. Please, everyone, I implore you to consider doing this, joining this informal confraternity.
With this news, let us now invoke also Bl, Miguel Pro and the holy martyrs of Mexico to soften the hearts of those in Mexico who will implement and then enforce the cruel Traditionis custodes.
In Guadalajara, Mexico, there has been a bad, and confusing, development. The Cardinal Archbishop of the place is slamming down on the Vetus Ordo in the wake of Traditionis Custodes, Francis’ Plessy v. Ferguson to Benedict’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Card. Robles Ortega issued a decree – you won’t find it on the dioceses’ truly cruddy website – for their implementation of TC.
NB: I was sent an English translation. I didn’t find the original or this translation on the truly cruddy website.
Low points and oddities.
The Cardinal body slammed the faithful there who are desirous of Tradition, and he put fetters on the FSSP, too. By the way – if the English is accurate – the document gets their name wrong, calling them the …
You know… I am not going to quote the translation on the weird variants in the text because I am not entirely sure that there are not canary traps either in the original (which we haven’t seen yet) or in the translation. Let’s just say that one variant for naming the FSSP might be an ironic Freudian slip of some kind or it could be an accidental conflation of their name with the parish where they serve.
In any event, if it’s in the decree this is sloppy for something that will affect a lot of people lives in a seriously upsetting way.
The decree says that Masses at that quasi-parish, St. Peter in Chains, can continue but with readings only in the vernacular.
They can’t add Masses and, once COVID winds down, the number of Masses will be reviewed.
That’s little ironic, since officialdom wants the pandemic to last until entropy cools the planet or the Lord returns.
For the other places, daily Masses can continue at Our Lady of the Pillar, on weekdays only one Mass in the Chapel of Christ the King and on Sundays and Tuesdays at the parish of St. Francis Xavier of the Hills. I don’t know the geography of that area. One wonders how far O.L. Pillar and St. Francis Xavier might be from each other.
As Job cried, “Blessed be the name of the Lord! That’s “¡Viva Cristo Rey!”, I guess.
As for inside the House of Formation of those in the FSSP, present in the Archdiocese of Guadalajara, Masses will be regulated, here it comes…. by the Congregation for Religious in Rome. These are the same pastoral ambassadors of love who tenderly regulated the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, and who are sure to be putting forth soon an Instruction for the formation of all the new entrants into traditional communities now under their umbrella, rather than under the CDF’s.
That was one of the scariest results of TC, by the way. That, and that regulation of liturgical issues will be under the Congregation for Divine Worship.
The decree further stipulates that people can’t go to the chapel of the Fraternity’s house.
Next, the quasi-parish of St. Peter in Chains is canonically suppressed.
¡Viva Cristo Rey!
Priests of the archdiocese must now be authorized on a case by case basis…. back to TC now from TJC. Both older and newer priests must formally declare that, I will summarize these rather than quote because of possible canary traps in the text. That’s how bad things are now, I think.
So… summarized, the priests who want to use the Vetus Ordo must formally declared that
a – they don’t deny the validity of the Novus Ordo and the Council and the Magisterium of the Supreme Pontiffs,
b- they recognize that the “only” expression of the Roman Rite is in the books promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II (which seems false, because clearly the Vetus Ordo is the Roman Rite and always will be… it can’t be anything else, but I digress),
c – they are obliged to use the Novus Ordo and, if they don’t have explicit permission, they can’t use anything other than the 1962 Missale Romanum for anything, because – as the decree claims – all other provisions of Summorum were abrogated. Not sure about that.
This loyalty oath business is deeply insulting and also – I suspect – indicative of a potential double standard of treatment of priests.
Will priests who are so poorly trained that they don’t know how to celebrate Mass with the 1962MR, who can say only the Novus Ordo, be required to take a loyalty oath about the Magisterium and that they will hereafter always stick to the rubrics of the Novus Ordo as they are written?
I’m thinking about the probability that in Mexico all the Novus Ordo Only priests are, even now, following the Novus Ordo rubrics precisely and not changing any texts.
Later, under the business section, in the part where he gives his little peroration he says – again I don’t want to quote exactly because of the possibility of canary traps – that it is his, the Cardinal’s, duty to ask everyone commit to celebrating the liturgy with fidelity to the books. He says that there is a healthy liturgical tradition there now and it is like a beautiful garden to be tended and not treated with laziness which degenerates into abuses.
Again, will all the Novus Ordo Only priests have to take a loyalty oath?
Will they be disciplined if they stray from the rubrics and official text of the Novus Ordo Only books? (And there’s the problem of the language “only” expression of the Roman Rite, because we don’t have a Latin document of TC so we can figure out the ambiguity between the possible meanings of the vernacular versions – German, Spanish, English, Italian.)
It might be understandable to imagine that this Cardinal might drop the weight of the world on a priest who continues without his extra-special motu-inappropriate super-double-top-secret permission to say what is not unjustly called “the Mass of ages”.
How bad will the double-standard be?
¡Viva Cristo Rey!
Here’s a helpful suggestion.
Perhaps the faithful of Guadalajara might start documenting with their phone cameras how the Novus Ordo is being celebrated in the diocese, and share those video and audio proofs on social media, so that we can all be edified and motivated to do our very best.
¡Hagan lío!
Mind you, I am working with a translation that was provided. The official version will eventually be extruded into public view and we will have to double check this. I don’t have a strong reason to think that the translation was off base. However, little items in it seem just a tad bit … off.
UPDATE:
The Spanish.


