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. # |
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