Though we don’t yet know John McCain’s running mate, it’s clear, I think, that he is the best choice if we want to have any hope of adding strict constructionist judges to the Supreme Court, with the aim in mind of overturning Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, I feel that McCain is far from a safe pick on such an issue - that is, the appointment of justices - but even Bush (in some ways, more of a conservative than McCain), who did very well by us in the end (Roberts & Alito), nearly screwed the whole thing up with his initial nominee, Harriet Myers. Even if Obama were really the man to “make America strong again”, with him in office, there’s zero chance of getting the justices we need. This all is, I think, one reasonable, Catholic approach to the coming election: McCain isn’t the perfect conservative, but most anyone will be better than Obama.

But now here is another approach to voting in the fall, which comes to us from the St. John Mary Vianney Latin Mass community bulletin (an apostolate of the FSSP): Continue reading

Iacobus will be relieved to know that I finally tracked down the Latin hexameters with which P. G. Wodehouse was made a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, by the University of Oxford in June 1939. (If you’ve never read Wodehouse before, I’d encourage you to do so. I’d also recommend, if you’re so inclined, to begin by listening to one of his novels, rather than encountering him through the written word. Jonathan Cecil has recorded quite a few of the Jeeves novels; his interpretation of the characters and the voices he supplies them have often had me crying laughing.)

Anyway - the verses! I had been trying to get them the hard way, through inter-library loan. Surprisingly, my library did not have Frances Donaldson’s P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography. So I inter-library loaned that as well. When Donaldson’s book came, I was perusing it and found that she had included in an appendix the Latin address to Wodehouse on the occasion of his honorary doctorate. This led me to the further discovery that the verses were already available online: someone had copied them from Donaldson’s book. That this person had copied them from her book (and not from the Oxford Gazette) was clear because they had preserved a typo in lines 2 and 12. I guess that means that this person had done better than Donaldson! I’ve marked my corrections with a bold font.
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In case some of you didn’t see this - the Frenchies had a wonderful find in the Rhone:

They believe the life-sized representation, showing a balding man in his fifties, dates from about 46 B.C., two years before his assassination.

A spokesman for the French culture ministry said it was “the oldest representation yet known of Caesar” and “typical of a series of realistic portraits from the period of the (Roman) republic.”

Ever since Iacobus and I discovered St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori’s The History of Heresies & Their Refutation, I’ve done little more with this wonderful work than to make it my own - in that very weak sense of buying it and settling it permanently upon my bookshelf. Moved, however, by a chain of inspiration too random to recount here, I picked it up tonight and began to read the “Author’s Preface”. Though it is only the preface, Liguori gives a succinct defense of the claims of the Catholic Church in the space of a few paragraphs. In support of this task, he adduces several interesting quotations, especially intriguing because of their author.

We all know that protestants like to make much of Augustine - historically they did, and in my experience at Cornell, he remains a favorite among those in no way prepared to countenance the claims of the Church. But we know - if we’ve ever been to St. Peter’s basilica - that Augustine is among the four great doctors who are holding up the Chair of Peter. Despite the magnificent statuary in St. Peter’s, my feeling has often been: let’s hear it from Augustine himself! If he’s the great Catholic doctor, let’s hear him defending the claims of the Church.
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What is it with these exorcists?! I hope that you remember when Fr. Gabriel Amorth condemned the Harry Potter series as tending to enable the designs of the Evil One. Now, we have Fr. Jeremy Davies of the Archdiocese of Westminster doing everything he can to damn (perhaps I shouldn’t use that word in these circumstances) most anything and everything that’s dear to Lefties (and a whole lot of other people). Acupuncture? Satanic. Yoga? Satanic. Eastern religion? Satanic. Get this:

Fr. Davies also warns in his book against so-called New Age and occult practices, as well as trendy exercise and “spiritual healing” regimens derived from eastern religions.

“The thin end of the wedge (soft drugs, yoga for relaxation, horoscopes just for fun and so on) is more dangerous than the thick end because it is more deceptive - an evil spirit tries to make his entry as unobtrusively as possible.”
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The Dallas Morning News has a story about how a Mexican man is posing as a bishop in order to “sell” the “sacraments” to unwitting Hispanics in the Dallas area. The local ecclesiastical authorities, having been alerted to this menace, have warned their flock to beware. When asked to comment for the Dallas Morning News, Sister Guadalupe Ramirez, director of the diocese’s Department of Catechetical Services, explained why Catholics can’t just settle for a layman in a collar:

“Sacraments aren’t like a Dairy Queen drive-thru. It is a life long experience.”

Right on, Sista!
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I saw this for the first time tonight. It delights me to no end to know that a “contest” like this would happen and that there are very clever men, like Jaroslav Pelikan, who would take the time to come up with an entry. From wikipedia:

While at Yale, Pelikan won a whimsical contest sponsored by Field & Stream magazine for Ed Zern’s column “Exit Laughing” to translate the motto of the Madison Avenue Rod, Gun, Bloody Mary & Labrador Retriever Benevolent Association (”Keep your powder, your trout flies and your martinis dry”) into Latin. Pelikan’s winning entry mentioned the martini first, but Pelikan explained that it seemed no less than fitting to have the apéritif come first. His winning entry:

Semper siccandae sunt: potio
Pulvis, et pelliculatio.

On my way out of the library the other day, my eye was caught by J. Bottum’s latest, provocatively titled article, “The Death of Protestant America”. Unlike in the case of his writing on the death penalty, I wasn’t left stupider after reading this article (D.A. can testify to this!), but it did prove considerably less exciting than the title. Basically, he reflects on the figures and studies which indicate that the old protestant mainline churches - the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans - are rapidly dwindling in membership. Then, he wonders what sort of civic life will be able to exist in this country once the protestant backbone of the nation, which provided a sort of common moral vision, has been completely broken. Okay, great. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly Catholic about his analysis or about what he thinks will (or, more importantly, ought) to fill the void. I hope that I’m wrong, but my impression is that the type of vision expressed here is wholly foreign to Bottum’s way of thinking.

Now, on the other hand, what I really like about the article (ha!) is when in his sort of objective, sort of dispassionate way, he slams the liberals of the mainline. His words about the Episcopalians I found especially enjoyable. He takes Katherine Jefferts Schori as his theme for meditation: Continue reading

What can we expect from Benedict XVI’s long anticipated “social” encyclical? Simon Nixon shares his worries here:

So far in his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI has delighted conservatives and annoyed the Catholic church’s trendy liberals in equal measure with his doctrinal orthodoxy and symbolic restoration of the old Tridentine Latin mass. But will the boot be on the other foot when the pope unveils a new encyclical (a letter sent by the pope to all bishops) on capitalism later this year? Will Benedict add his voice to the chorus of European criticism of capitalism at this moment of financial crisis? Will he proclaim anathema on hedge funds and private equity firms and denounce them as “locusts”?

I must say that the release of a social, so-called, encyclical is not the sort of event that thrills my heart. George Weigel was delighted when, in his assessment, John Paul II defended, basically, the free-market system in Centesimus annus. Not that this message - if it was the encyclical’s message, made it to a lot of Catholics who seem to favor the economics of Stalin (or the European Union). I wonder what we’ll get this time around.

As usual, a very interesting interview with Luc Perrin at Rorate Caeli. This portion, towards the end, seems especially well-said:

So we are left to face all the other thorny questions as listed by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais: religious liberty, ecumenism, Christian spirit of sacrifice, social kingship of Christ; curiously, the problems raised by inter-faith dialogue is not cited. But to be able to work with Roman theologians on these crucial issues, the SSPX would need some qualified experts and to be able to evaluate the achievements of the Church in the past decades with something more accurate than “John Paul II did nothing to rebuild the Faith” or, speaking of Ecclesia Dei communities, “These poor people (priests, religious, lay people) are liberals and pragmatics” (Bishop Tissier de Mallerais).