MOMMENTARY |
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Friday, April 25, 2008 ( 11:35 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Go to Cacciaguida to read his observations on the Holy Father's visit to New York City Ignorant people like to complain about the grandeur of Catholic churches (in the past, that is) and claim that the money used to build and decorate them ought to have been used for the poor. What they don't realize is that the poor built the cathedrals themselves. I don't mean only that they were the laborers who erected the structures, although they were. I mean that churches and cathedrals like St. Patrick's were paid for by the voluntary contributions of cabbies, longshoremen, seamstresses, carpenters, trash collectors, millworkers, factory hands, janitors, plumbers, cooks, plasterers, streetcar drivers, firemen, nannies, grocers, printers, draymen, maids, junk dealers, waiters, roofers, tailors, and policemen. These were people who in many cases were bringing up large families on small wages, and hoping they would not be fired or get sick, which might have put their families on the street. Some of them were domestic servants who received room and board but were paid very, very little in hard cash. All of them cared enough about the Lord's house to wish to see it splendid and beautiful, and put an extra dime in the collection basket that they might otherwise have spent on a glass of beer with their dinner for a week, or a new bunch of ribbons, or have added to the little stock being saved for when they would marry. Of course there were larger individual contributions from well-to-do Catholics, but at the time I'm speaking of the poor Catholics outnumbered the middle-class and rich Catholics by several orders of magnitude, and it was the beer-money and the ribbon-money and the rainy-day money that accounted for far the greatest part of the cost of St. Patrick's. One can agree or not with their choice, but when the Catholic poor of Old New York could squeeze another nickel out of their little means, they chose to give it for the glory of God. # Friday, April 18, 2008 ( 3:27 PM ) Elinor Dashwood MAYDAY! MAYDAY! The secret's out! Noting that Benedict is choosing styles from the decades, even centuries, before Vatican II . . . some reformers express concern about what the Pontiff's clothing choices might indicate. (Washington Post, 17 April 2008) Boy, you've got to get up pret-ty ear-ly in the morning to fool those Posties. They've begun to suspect that His Holiness may have some secret plans to reverse certain changes made in the Church and in the Mass during the past forty years or so. And here we thought they'd never twig. It's a good idea to remind people occasionally that Vatican II is not, and ought not to be used as, a term of abuse. The Council was a council of the Church and is to be treated as such, with respect and a willingness to learn and accept. Where people like me get mad is at all the many and terrible abuses committed in the name of "the spirit of Vatican II". You may be sure that if the Call to Action types had found support for their bizarre policies and practices in the letter, the printed texts, of the Second Vatican Council, they would not have had to drape their obnoxious ideas in the veils of a "spirit" whose sybilline directives none but themselves seemed able to interpret. # Monday, April 14, 2008 ( 12:11 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I don't understand, and I think I never will understand, why people who look for twisty, cunning loopholes to avoid obedience to Church teaching on Papal authority are treated any differently to people who look for twisty, cunning loopholes to avoid obedience to Church teaching on marriage, or murder, or indeed anything else. Would it be proper for me to comb Church documents seeking a way out of my marriage? It might not be absolutely sinful, but it would show a very reprehensible spirit and give my husband good cause to fear that there was something seriously wrong with my attitude. Every time one meets a member of the SSUX, one is treated to an interminable discussion of what somebody said at some point about whether it's okay to attend a Mass at an SSUX chapel if there is a licit Extraordinary Form Mass available, or if there isn't and one thinks the Ordinary Form is really yucky, or if one thinks the Ordinary Form is okay in general, but the nearby parish is objectionable, or a half-dozen other excuses for disobedience. One person tried to argue to me that, since it fulfills the Sunday obligation to attend Mass at the local SSUX shack if one is stranded a hundred miles from the nearest genuine licit Catholic church, then it's all right really to belong to the shack and attend there all the time. No, it isn't. And please don't embarrass yourself by claiming that belonging to the SSUX group isn't adhering to schism. Face the facts, chum: if registering as a member, attending regularly, and contributing to the financial support of one of these fly-by-night outfits isn't adhering to schism, then nothing is. The term has lost its meaning altogether. # Sunday, April 13, 2008 ( 10:46 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Catherine of Catholic Stewardship (very nice blog) observes that she has never heard of anyone trying to dissuade his son from considering the priesthood. I don't suppose you'd meet many people among homeschoolers who would discourage a priestly vocation in their sons. I trust that this is because Catholic homeschoolers take the Faith seriously enough to know that it would be a great wrong to interfere with anyone's vocation, whether to the priesthood or religious life or to matrimony. I know that I have to suppress in myself a slight hankering after the place I'd occupy as a priest's mother. (In our old diocese, I once met the mother of a monsignor. She was exactly like a queen: supremely kind and gracious, but with a touch of greatness in her air.) For this reason I keep reminding myself that it would be quite as wrong to pressure a son into a priestly vocation he doesn't discern as it would be to discourage one he does. I was surprised, too, when our pastor told me he had been asked more than once to refrain from encouraging a young man's interest in the priesthood. Imagine anyone's having the cheek to ring me up and ask me to talk her daughter out of a wish to be a full-time mother! If Father had had my disposition he'd have given a pretty short answer to such impertinent requests. # Saturday, April 12, 2008 ( 12:56 PM ) Elinor Dashwood A commenter to a previous post asks, "I'm curious - why will your current parish be closing soon?" I'm sorry it took me so long to see this question. We're in a severe priest shortage here, and a majority of the diocesan priests are past retirement age or very near it. I don't complain, although I regret it: you can't keep a parish open without a priest. They're calling this maneuver "clustering", which I take it means having one already-overworked man dashing round to two or three locations to offer Mass every week. It seems silly to me. They'll end up paying upkeep on three buildings and getting much less income to support them. I daresay the closings proper will start in four or five years, and then the screaming will begin. There's always a huge outcry when parishes are closed. I assume that most of the screaming is done by regular parishioners, and one sympathizes with them. Some comes from people who live nowhere near the distressed parish, but who were baptized or married there, and seem to expect a financially-strapped diocese to maintain the buildings as a museum of their earlier life. For my part, I'll probably end up going most weeks to a nearby parish which is always well-staffed by an order of priests, and which administers the Extraordinary-Rite chapel to which Cacciaguida, Cacciadelia, and Jonathan Lee are partial. Since everybody will be playing the blame game when the closings start, I might as well begin. Part of the fault lies with CINOs who only come to Mass on holidays, and regard the church as essentially a suitable venue for weddings and funerals. A large measure of blame rests, however, with practicing Catholics who decided to take it easy on themselves and only have one or two children. Our pastor has heard it again and again: a man who has only one son doesn't want him to become a priest. Why it's so terribly important to Smiths and Browns to carry on the family name is a mystery to me. Our surname is as good as most and better than some, but if every one of my four sons felt a vocation to the priesthood, I'd be thrilled, and family names be bothered. Particularly culpable, in my opinion, is the worldliness that infects the minds of so many Catholics, even regular Mass-goers. One charming individual out of those who have asked Father to discourage their boys' interest in following the altar told him, "I don't want him to end up living like you." And what, exactly, is so objectionable about Father's way of life? He has enough to eat and a roof over his head and the means of dressing warmly and in keeping with his vocation. He has, Heaven knows, plenty to do, and the inexpressible gift of knowing himself to be really useful and to make an important difference in people's lives. I should think that the privelege of conferring the Sacraments would alone make up for every personal privation: if I could forgive sins, bless the dying, and confect the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord, you wouldn't hear any bellyaching out of me. # ( 11:59 AM ) Elinor Dashwood I've discovered Scrabulous. It's an okay game. In fact, it's a lot of fun. I find, however, that, being neither a cooperator nor a competitor, the Solitaire version available on the site suits me best. My luck, what? I became diabetic just at the start of a vast increase in the range of sugar-free items (I love you, Russell Stover!), and I began to be socially phobic just as the number of free single-player games exploded on the internet. I took up sudoku because there's a bit of Alzheimer's in my mother's family (although she is eighty-nine and doesn't have it), and it's well to fight back before it's needed. I find that Scrabulous, especially the single-player option, exercises a different segment of my mind, and I'm adding that to the arsenal for keeping dementia at bay. Besides that, it's about the only sphere I've found in which a huge vocabulary and a spelling-bee background are really helpful. I have played one game of Scrabulous against an opponent. An old acquaintance very kindly started a game with me, and I didn't do too badly. The trouble was that the computer, with what in an organic person would have seemed malicious levity, kept sending me batches of letters that suggested words which it would have been tactless in the extreme to have played. So, I figure I'm not really cut out for social interaction anymore, and I'll stick to the solitaire games. # Thursday, March 27, 2008 ( 11:06 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Eli Stone: Get Stuffed About halfway through tonight's service . . . I mean, tonight's episode . . . I said that I would give this show one more week. If it continued to deliver left-wing sermons, I said, I would give it the push. I've changed my mind. I'm giving it the push now. Eli Stone started out as a quirky, unpredictable program with an excellent cast. The plots were offbeat and the characters were realistic, behaving in complicated and interesting ways. That was the first few weeks, anyway. Last week I was calling the plot twists five minutes before they happened. This week it was ten. On top of that, this week's homily was even more obnoxious than last week's. It's over. It needs to make a noise like a hoop and roll away. Of course, I deserve it, for allowing myself to engage with the popular culture in such a downmarket medium. Well, I've learned my lesson - again - television sucks. # Monday, March 17, 2008 ( 9:27 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Hurray! We had "All Glory, Laud, and Honor" for Palm Sunday, which is just as it should be. Our organist has a dreary taste in general, and cleaves to the line hewn out by Oregon Catholic Press, but she occasionally becomes aware of the suitability of a particular hymn to a particular feast. (It still hasn't struck her that "O God Almighty Father" would be especially apt on Trinity Sunday.) I daresay that, having given us a treat, she'll now revert to the usual rubbish for a long spell. It doesn't really matter: in all probability our parish will be closed in a year or two, and I'll have to find someplace else to go to Mass anyway. One extremely funny thing happened during Mass. The church (built in 1964) has one of those three-tiered baptismal fonts through which the water recirculates. As a rule, it trickles gently from one basin to another, and everybody seems to be used to the slight noise it makes. I suppose those sensitive to the sound of running water use the bathroom before Mass. (I'll say this for ugly modern churches: the bathrooms are good, and easy to find. In handsome Gothic churches the facilities are too often hidden away down twisting stairs and long dark corridors, and have a scary, forgotten look once you find them.) What I didn't know was that the flow is variable. Somebody who had a toddler of a roaming disposition was seated in the back row, and the child found the wall switch that controls the water speed. Suddenly there was a loud engine noise, and the font became a roaring waterfall. I just about keeled over from trying not to laugh. One of the ushers eventually figured out what the trouble was and turned the dial back down from Log Flume Ride to Serenity Garden, and not before time. It'll be the dickens to keep the boy away from the switch, though, now he knows what it does. # Sunday, January 20, 2008 ( 10:25 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Northanger Abbey is much, much better than I feared it would be. This new production sticks pretty closely to the book, and the main characters are perfectly charming. Felicity Jones is prettier than the book leads one to expect Catherine Morland to be, and has rather a look of the very young Kate Beckinsale. I hope she doesn't fade so soon, or acquire so many irritating acting tics. JJ Feild is about the most appealing funny-looking redhead presently inhabiting the planet, and quite captured my heart as Henry Tilney. Mrs. Allen is played by Sylvestra le Touzel (how's that for a name?), who played Fanny Price in Mansfield Park the last time public television did the whole Austen canon, back in the Eighties. She isn't portrayed as half the cipher here as she is in the novel, where she's virtually in a state of suspended animation most of the time. Neither is Isabella Thorpe quite as much the fluttering, flattering poseuse she is in print. (To do the character justice, there isn't the slightest suggestion in the book that she's seduced and rebuffed by Captain Tilney, as here; all that really happens is that she makes a strong bid for his affections, and that he first flirts with her and then disappoints her.) On the whole, I'm very much pleased and surprised by the quality and fidelity of this new Northanger Abbey. They made such a pig's breakfast of it last time around, in 1986, that I was uneasy about watching tonight, but I heartily congratulate those responsible. # Sunday, January 13, 2008 ( 10:33 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Conversazione chez Cacciaguida: Elinor, doing a crossword puzzle: Is it je-re-boam, or je-ro-boam? Cacciaguida: I'm not sure. Whichever it is, though, I'm sure the guy at the liquor store will know what you mean. Elinor: Oooh, I'll give you such a pinch. # Sunday, December 23, 2007 ( 10:09 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Blogiversary! Yesterday marked five years of Mommentary. Here's the post that started it all. The Santa question. If you've read Cacciaguida recently, you've seen that we never did the Santa business with our children. That is, we read them "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and told them about the saintly bishop's character for doing charity by stealth, but we made it clear that the miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer were a charming fairy story and not to be believed as fact. Here's what I want to know about parents who tell their children about Santa as if it were true, to add wonder and specialness to Christmas: have they thought this through? At Christmas we celebrate the beginning of our Redemption, when God's own Son came into a cold and exhausted world to work our salvation. If you want wonder and specialness, try this: go somewhere alone - in church, perhaps, or anywhere quiet - and try to understand what was done for you, and at what cost; how the history of all Heaven and the fate of all Earth were changed, so that God might not lose you to the fire. I'm inclined to think that if that isn't enough wonder for you, a guy in a red suit jumping down the chimney won't be a satisfactory substitute. A merry Christmas, a blessed Nativity to you. # Tuesday, December 18, 2007 ( 2:19 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Cacciaguida's dad died very early this morning. We're all extremely sad. # Tuesday, December 04, 2007 ( 12:34 PM ) Elinor Dashwood It was touch-and-go there for a while, but I think I will probably not die of this cold. It started with that premonitory tickle in the throat, and I immediately set about bombing it with Zicam, a perfectly wonderful substance that usually cuts off my colds before they really get going. It didn't stop the cold altogether this time, but has worked so well so often in the past that I'm inclined to think that this strain of rhinovirus must be a real humdinger. What the Zicam appears to be doing is what I've observed Cold-Eeze (another favorite) do sometimes. The cold seems to have been put into hyperdrive, and is rushing through the usual stages at great speed, rather like the initiation scenes in The Court Jester. I hope to be better in a day or two. But all this is nothing. Cacciaguida's father will have surgery tomorrow morning to correct a contusion on the brain. The doctors say that, as brain surgery goes, this is comparatively quick and simple, but there's always a risk, especially as he's seventy-six and has not been in good health for some time. Any prayers for his well-doing will be greatly appreciated. # Friday, November 16, 2007 ( 1:12 PM ) Elinor Dashwood The Tall Kid has turned into a dynamo. He's a fairly typical middle child in that he's very reliable and doesn't make havoc in the family. Until now, his usual MO has been to do his job and his schoolwork with an efficiency that leaves him a remarkable amount of unstressed free time. Lately, however, he has taken up political organizing in a way that simply staggers me. He found out where to get petitions to collect signatures to get his candidate on the ballot, and the exact conditions and instructions for making that notoriously challengeable operation valid. He has spent several days at work, on campus, and in other public places, in rain and shine, filling several petitions, and found a notary (a free one, even) to get them attested to and submitted. He does all these things that I wouldn't have known how to do at his age, and wouldn't have the energy to do at mine. What is more, and for which I'm sincerely grateful, he doesn't make home a perfect Gehenna of nagging argument, in spite of the fact that Cacciaguida and I aren't altogether in sympathy with his candidate's views. All in all, I'm amazed. I wonder if he'll ever run for office himself? If he keeps being active, sooner or later somebody is bound to urge him to run. He's intelligent, articulate, industrious, and - very important in electoral politics - handsome and tall. Also he has great hair, which shouldn't matter but does, and the only remotely embarrassing thing he's ever done in his entire life has been to dye it black once, largely to make people jump. (It worked on me.) Now I come to think of it, he's obviously a natural. # Sunday, November 11, 2007 ( 10:02 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Oh, b-rother . . . John at the Inn At the End of the World blogs a message from his pastor: On another note, I have already spoken to our Bishop, and we have good news: Bishop Brown, with all his love/charity and care, is going to allow us to have the Tridentine Mass here, starting with the First Sunday of Advent (December 02, 2007). Now, as I understand our excellent Pope Benedict XVI's liturgical depth charge, it isn't necessary to get the bishop's permission to celebrate the Tridentine Mass. I suppose Bp. Brown knows this and is giving parishes leave to do it so that they don't point out to him that his opinion in the matter is surplus to requirements. This sort of statement is generally accompanied by the kind of unmirthful smile which in my youth was described by a rather indelicate hyphenated adjective. # |
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