"Oh Anglicans, come and walk with us!"

Pope Benedict did beseech.

A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each."

The eldest Anglican looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Anglican winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head--
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the liberal bed.

... and don't forget to bring your stuff.

Like your choirs.

And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more--
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.

He did?! Cool!

Maureen Dowd presents Exhibit A in her evidence against Pope Benedict:

"In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating 'feminine values' like 'listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.'"

Really?! Did he send one to Maureen with an invitation to go to confession?

Where can I get a copy of this?

I like Benedict more and more every day lately.

Update:
No, it turns out he didn't.

"[W]omen should be present in the world of work and in the organization of society, and that women should have access to positions of responsibility which allow them to inspire the policies of nations and to promote innovative solutions to economic and social problems."

[...]

"It is appropriate however to recall that the feminine values mentioned here are above all human values: the human condition of man and woman created in the image of God is one and indivisible."

Poop.

Never mind, I still like him.

Spooky

It's that time of year, so I thought some ruminations on the goings-on on the other side of the mirror of reality might not be amiss.

Other people are doing it:

Exorcist shares past experiences with demonic possession

I have often thought that there seems, at least in the way most people practice the faith, two kinds of Catholicism. What I have arbitrarily designated "The Rules" and "Spooky Catholicism".

Of course, a balanced Catholic lives his life according to The Rules because he knows that Spooky Catholicism is real. This is the correct way of looking at it. The supernatural really actually exists in the really real world and therefore things like the difference between good and evil is not merely the subject of dry academic debate but an urgent and immediate reality to be contended with daily.

The reality of the supernatural is something that seems quite difficult for modern people to understand. And this despite the vast and growing proliferation of the occult in popular culture, which seems odd.

As you know, I have just finished reading a series of very dumb teenager vampire romance novels. (Yes, I enjoyed them ... sort of...in a weird way.) One of the things that made them dumb was the fact that the authoress, Stephanie Meyer, did not seem to understand the difference between the natural and the supernatural. She regularly referred to her vampire and werewolf characters as being part of the supernatural world, but then said that tests had revealed that they had a different number of chromosomes in their cells from humans.

She indicated that the change from being a natural human to a supernatural vampire was merely a physiological change, the vampire "venom" (good grief!) would work its way though the body via the bloodstream re-writing the person's DNA to give them super-powers. (No, it really wasn't very well thought out, but that's not why all the teenyboppers are reading it.) And that was it, really, no more to it than that.

I suspect the banality, the flat-universe quality, of her books is a result of Stephanie Meyer's Mormonism, which does not even try to address the issue of "where does the universe come from". Mormonism also doesn't understand or acknowledge the difference between the supernatural world and the natural world. In Mormonism, the gods are more or less just humans with superpowers, and no one ever notices that the question "Who or what is the Prime Mover" is never asked.

At least with Buffy's vampires, there was a supernatural exchange of "souls" and the vampired person would become, essentially, possessed by an incorporeal demonic creature. (This system often broke down in Buffy, but that was the idea). In the Buffyverse, there are any number of "demons", "gods", "oracles" and assorted representatives of classical, pre-Christian and extra-Christian entities of varying degrees of supernaturalness (though perhaps significantly, never any angels. In all of Buffy, I think God only got a mention once or twice). And as the series progressed the rules about them seemed to shift according to the needs of the plot.

I note, however, that in Buffy, and even more later in Angel, the "demons" were again just a different kind of natural being. In Angel, there were actually different "species" of demons who were just modified humans and the damage they could do was not moral damage to a person's soul, but physical damage according to the potency of their super-powers. Plus, you could kill them with a gun or a sword. So ... you know.

It all gets a little fuzzy, really. It's not like I was really looking for theological consistency in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I believe that Harry Potter has solved the literary problem of the supernatural by more or less proposing that the wizards are a different species from the regular humans. A species that can naturally manipulate natural "forces" and that magic is essentially just another physical force like electricity. Again, this kind of breaks down in practice during the course of the books (which I haven't read), but that seems about the gist again. Once again, the modern occult writer does not seem to know what the supernatural really is.

I have noted several times that the universe accepted by the sci-fi writers is dualistic, that there is a distinct split between the physical and the incorporeal, the old mind-body split, but still no actual supernatural. Despite all the story lines of people exchanging bodies with each other and "ascending to a higher plane of existence" and whatnot, all of this is still strictly within the realm of the natural, the physical, the scientifically recordable. It's really just Cartesianism with special effects.

Nothing in, for example, Star Gate SG1's ideas about "ascended Ancients" was remotely supernatural. You just spent a few decades meditating and, pow! you got a pretty, glowy, kind of ghostly-looking body that could fly and control weather or whatever and live in some other "higher plane" that was, essentially, just another "dimension". This seemed to be as close as the sci-fi world could get to the idea of something "outside nature".

Whether we like it of not, we live in a culture that has, for 400 years or more, been rejecting the existence of the supernatural. And now that we're looking for it again, we don't know it when we see it and think we see it when we really don't.

I think that our modern obsession with the occult is not in fact a result of an innate human fascination with the supernatural. Or perhaps the purveyors of the occult pop-culture are so unimaginative that what they are peddling is merely naturalism dressed up in sparkly CGI costumes.

As a result, we Catholics seem to have a hard time understanding what the actual supernatural is. We have popular Catholic literature that talks about things like birth, and sunsets and butterflies as "miraculous". Well, it might be a poetic way of speaking about how great nature is, but it is misleading too. Natural things are not, by definition, miraculous. The supernatural is not just the natural with super-powers.

We really have a hard time with the idea of something that is real, has a will and an intellect and the ability to do things in the natural world, but no body at all. A spirit, in the strictest sense.

We have a heck of a time understanding the thing about God being outside, above and preceding time and space.

Now that the Church has more or less given up talking about the supernatural and continues to justify its existence based on its record of social work projects in the third world, we Catholics have fallen into the habit of thinking naturalistically. So much so, I think, that things like the "Catholic charismatic movement" have sprung up in reaction.

People who are interested in religion are really interested in the Spooky parts. They want to know about the grand movements of Heaven and Hell, of angels and demons and the Great War between them. They want to know that their own moral struggles are about something greater, taller and more grand than global warming or the dangers of smoking. Something better, that is, than what the secular world offers.

It's the real reason movies and books like the Da Vinci Code are so wildly popular. Why Hollywood always dresses its pretend nuns to look more like real nuns than the real nuns have looked in 40 years. And why the Godfather movies all have depictions of the brocade and velvet, pointed arches, gold-curliqued and marble-columned Catholicism of the pre-Vatican II era. No one who is looking for the real, Spooky, Supernatural version of religion wants a priest to dress in a polyester poncho and sing folk songs.

There's The Rules, yes, and we give intellectual assent to the doctrines of the Faith, (which is what "The Rules" is shorthand for.) But what are The Rules guiding if not the supernatural life of the soul?

What is it all for if there's no Spooky?

They had a plan

which, frankly, they botched spectacularly.

But never mind. At least there's more BSG.


More! Woo hoo!

Ok, so let's see if I've got this straight,

Everyone who holds "conservative," that is, traditionally Christian, beliefs about sex and all that, is a "bigot".

My Church is not a safe haven for bigots ...I was hoping that the Church’s antipathy to female and openly gay priests would, in time, weaken and dissolve. Now instead, it seems, a whole lot of bigoted reinforcements are arriving to galvanise those more unpalatable aspects of Roman Catholic doctrine. Should I stay in a club that would welcome these people as members?

Am I getting it right?

Ummm...

isn't that,

well,

kind of

bigoted?

Diogenes grins evilly:

there's no question but that it's got the right people pouting. Across the board, among Catholics, Anglicans, and neutral spectators, hostility varies inversely with orthodoxy.

A fave returns

I really liked this video someone made of the escape from New Caprica put to the Hendrix version of All Along the Watchtower. I guess it violated six ways of copyright laws, so it was taken down and I had to replace it on my BSG playlist with another, less cool version. But it's back. For now.

It always makes me think the same thing. Why on earth didn't they keep Pegasus and let the Cylons smithereen Galactica, which, at the beginning of the attack on Caprica, was ready to be mothballed as a museum, and by the end of the series was literally falling apart at the seams? Pegasus was beautiful and shiny and new and sparkly and I bet way bigger and faster and with meaner guns and rockets and stuff, and probably even nukes. Adama was down to, what? eight by the time they get to the Temple of Five planet?

I realise Pegasus was cursed and evil and everything, and the ship herself had to plunge to a firey self-sacrificial death to atone for the evilness of its previous commander, but,

at least she ran. And didn't have to be held together with Cylon superglue.

Oh well. I suppose they just couldn't change the name of the show in the middle.

...and yes, I realise that I like this show waaay too much.

Too weird? Not in Toronto!

I saw a guy on the train the other day doing a cube. He struck me as someone I wouldn't really want to meet. Had an odd, pastey look about him. Like he spent too much time in basements examining wriggly things under dim lights.

But it wasn't the strangest thing seen recently on Rome transit.

I have it on good authority that someone, who looked mentally competent, was seen on a bus reading L'Osservatore Romano.

Bad Vestments

Just discovered a new website after our own hearts.

Bad Vestments

Got bad vestment pics?

Send em in.

And he has done a bit on one of NewChurch's most popular features:

Creepy Giant Puppets.

They're big, they're bad, they frighten small children and they're coming to a NovusOrdinary parish near you.

Update:
It's amazing how many hits you get putting "creepy giant puppets" into Google.

Try it.


...


Wait, what was I supposed to be working on?

But, guys, it's the Tablet.

Surely rather than using their editorial to promote Tony Blair, who remains one of the world's leading anti-life/anti-family politicians, The Tablet should be briefing its readers to oppose the Brown government's anti-life legislative push expected in November - promoting access to abortion for schoolchildren without parental knowledge and consent?

John Smeaton's post about a Tablet editorial comparing Tony Blair with Newman, reminds me of something funny. I read that a nice young English priest admitted that in his spare time, he amuses himself by shredding, one page at a time, all the issues of The Pill he can get his hands on.

"It's tedious, but it's God's work," he is reported to have said.

"Impartial, eh?"

Interesting.

At the beginning of this debate, the moderator said that Stephanie would be representing the "pro-life" side and that Dr. Kluge was representing the "pro-abortion" side. There was a brief (and quite good natured) roar and some ribbing over the "slip".

He was supposed to use the accepted euphemism, you see. Please! it's "pro-choice".

Now, here's something interesting.

Some time ago, the editor of the Vatican's derivative leftist rag daily newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Gian Maria Vian, said, with apparently a perfectly straight face, that President Obama, because of his comments at Notre Dame University had revealed to his (Vian's) satisfaction that he (Obama) was "not pro-abortion, but really was merely pro-choice".

Hhhokay,

let me explain something to you, Mr. Editor of the Vatican's newspaper.

Let's say, to take things out of the emotion-riven issue of abortion for a moment, that we are talking about being pro-bank-robbery. Let us imagine, for a moment, that there is a significant political movement to legalise bank robbery on the grounds that to criminalize it makes it unsafe for all concerned, bank robbers and security guards, staff and bank customers. Part of the political work of this movement has been to change the "tone" of the debate, and to re-frame it. Instead of talking about the victims of bank robbery, (who, after all are mostly just already insanely wealthy bank shareholders and insurance companies) they believe that the debate should focus instead on the rights of bank robbers.

They have created the expression "pro-choice" to describe the position that they hope will become accepted in the debate. To be "pro-choice" on bank robbery is to say that while one would oneself not necessarily wish to rob a bank (having, strangely, some vestigial Judeo-Christian moral qualms about private property), they do not feel it is right to impose their personal beliefs on others who might want to make the "choice" to supplement their income in this way.

So, being "pro-choice" is not the same thing as actually supporting bank robbery. You can be against bank robbery and still pro-choice. It's a brilliant political ploy, giving people a nice-sounding reasong to support people's "rights" and to be generally fair-minded and calm, and yet, still be seen as moral people who would never directly support something bad.

The public eats it up, because it is really just totally complimentary and wonderfully self-congratulatory and there is nothing the public of our time likes better than getting something for nothing.

But, let us examine the idea of being pro-choice on bank robbery a little more closely, shall we?

If you say that you are in favour of someone being allowed to "choose" to do something, are you making a comment on the moral admissibility of that thing? Are you saying that bank robbery should be legal because it is itself morally innocuous? If you say that people should be allowed to choose to rob a bank you are saying that your own moral qualms about it are not absolute. A pro-choice person will never be able to say that robbing a bank, a thing that violates the rights of the person to protect his property, is inherently immoral: wrong. He can only ever say that he personally does not like bank robbery, as he does not like brussels sprouts.

Indeed, to say that someone ought to have the "right" to rob a bank, is to say that there is such a right and that a person may exercise it at will. One has said at least, that there is no real moral objection to bank robbery. It is fine. It's just not my personal thing.

A person who is pro-choice on bank robbery thinks there is no moral objection to it and that it is a right that should be protected under the law.

He is pro-bank-robbery.

Get it?

So, when the moderator said at the beginning of Miss. Gray's debate, that her opponent would be taking the "pro-abortion" side, he was speaking factually.

But in our times, the facts, reality, are biased.