Anglicans in Groups

Pope Benedict has put together an offer for groups of Anglicans who wish to become Catholics and maintain an Anglican liturgy, spirituality and communal structure. The document is called Anglicanorum Coetibus, Groups of Anglicans. It's an interesting set-up and creates something like an Anglican Rite.

It maintains the strong position of Rome that sacramental priesthood was lost at the English Reformation and so will require that all clergy wishing to transfer into Catholicism be ordained again. Currently married Anglican priests will largely be accepted for ordination, but those who wish to ordained bishops must be celibate, as must, in general, future candidates for priesthood.

The basic structure for these Anglicans in Groups is called an ordinariate. In Catholicism, an ordinary is a person with juridical and pastoral authority over a diocesan or diocesan-like group.
Bishops are ordinaries if they are in charge of a diocese, but you can be a bishop without being an ordinary: an auxiliary bishop, or a bishop who works for the Roman curia. And you can be an ordinary without being a bishop: abbots and provincial superiors of religious orders have juridical and pastoral authority over certain groups, but are not ordained bishops.

To allow a former Anglican bishop to stay in his marriage AND to be the ordinary of a group of Anglicans, the document would allow him to be ordained as a priest but to wear episcopal insignia and participate in larger Bishops' Conferences with retired status. Abbots are examples of this: they are only priests, but are ordinaries and wear the mitre and carry the crosier.

As far as doctrine is concerned, unsurprisingly, there is no concession at all. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is the norm. And although there is talk of maintaining Anglican liturgical forms, what that would look like is not clear. JPII created a smaller version of this with his Pastoral Provision.

Significantly, other Catholics may not join these Anglican groups unless married to an Anglican who is making the move, and former Catholic priests who became Anglican cannot return to Rome and still exercise their ministry.

Rome, it seems, has made an offer but has stood very firm on principles. Seems to be Benedict's style. Kinda what you'd expect from a...pope.

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Berlin

My Guy is in Berlin and sent this shot of the Brandenberg Gate. Twenty years ago there would have been a wall there, that symbol of the split between the Communist World and the Free World, aka The West. It marked the divide between West Berlin and the world of the German Democratic Republic, where hundreds of thousands of informants helped the Secret Police, the Stasi, keep tabs, and worse, on fully one-third of the population. All in the name of the greater good.

No human arrangement is without flaw. My Irish grandmother put it this way, "All human things, given time, go badly." Hibernian optimism at its best! Certainly no political or economic system lacks problems. But some, for all their flaws, allow for kinds of human flourishing that others do not.

The West, restless child of Athens and Jerusalem, of Christendom and Enlightenment, has dominated the planet for the last five centuries. Much of the result has been extraordinary improvement in life for many. Have there been costs? Of course. But this is unavoidable on Planet Earth. We are not an episode of Star Trek.

One of the most unfortunate, lamentable and frankly evil developments within the West --one which is both utterly Western and implacably anti-Western-- is Marxism. I have opined elsewhere that Marxism is a far greater evil than Nazism, the convenient whipping boy of so many of our highminded betters. Marx and his children and nephews and nieces continue, despite the failure of the Communist project, to bedevil the West. His ghost is active and the backwash of the dismantled Second World still infects the air.

I have mentioned my idea of the Seven Pillars of "progressive" or "liberal" ideology: multiculturalism, feminism, redistributionism, environmentalism, pacifism, secularism and transnationalism. They all stink of the Gramscian mode of Marx's vile enterprise: for the sake of ideal human equality, to make all humans equally miserable in practice.

The obsession with equality, to the exclusion of almost every other value, marks the political and social landscape of the West two decades after that Wall in Berlin came down. Masquerading as a grand vision of hope and change, justice and peace, it is an ideology born of envy and hatred and leads eventually, as Communism always did and does, to Orwellian tyranny, poverty and soulessness.

PS. Synchronicity? Just arrived home about an hour after posting and turned on the TV to find a story originating from...the Brandenburg Gate, about a Volkswagen called the Phaeton.

PPS. An email from Himself later in the day. Attending the celebration at the Gate, found himself moved by the place, symbolizing, as he sorta put it, the loss of possibility and the refinding of it. I like him.

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Aside

I don't post much about politics these days because it is so unremittingly depressing and my irritation is major. The feelings about B. Hussein Obama that I expressed during the campaign have remained intact, although I did not expect the serial outbreaks of rookie incompetence, thin-skinned pettiness and --with his responses or lack thereof to the Fort Hood massacre-- shockingly disconnected arrogance. I thought he would at least be able to make believe he gave a shit about the country's military. Like he does about gays.

So posting about that, or the biblically-sized unread healthcare bill on top of the apparently ineffectual hyper-massive bailouts that will make us a debtor nation for generations...what could I rant about that you could not read elsewhere and better expressed?

Hence, I think about sex.

Saw two guys on line recently who fit into my "impressive but not attractive" category. (Pic above is someone else. Both impressive AND attractive. Nice, no?) Some local guy called Rascally Randy, and a gay Italian model and actor named Alessandro. RR is a big, built, furry, handsome bearded Daddy with a killer smile. Very nice to look at. But unfortunately he thinks he's amusing, so he uploads humoresque videos to YouTube. Stick to silent stills, RR. Alessandro is a younger fella, darkly handsome, beautiful build and not, like RR, stuck on himself. But he is almost unreally beautiful and despite evidence of a lot of testosterone, muscle and fur, almost pretty.

Impressive guys, but not material I would fantasize over. I guess there is something about the unique, slightly flawed, lived-in guy that appeals to me. Good thing, because even though I have become handsome recently (!) Randy and Alessandro are way out of my league. Unique, slightly flawed and lived-in guys are not only appealing to me, but available to me.

Take The Boyo --I call him that because of his zest for life; he is a well-seasoned 55 years old.
You'd never find him on the cover of a magazine, and you could easily pass him on the street without turning your head. But if he walks into a store, or sits down at a table in a restaurant,
the clerk and the waiter are his new best friends...instantly. It is really amazing to watch. Something in the way he shouts --and he does shout-- "Hi", with a big grin, makes most people like him in a nanosecond. (Even my ex, who had a hard time getting used to him, told me that he was almost irresistibly likeable). They start smiling and talking and laughing before they know it. I love it. When he leaves, he turn to me with a grin and says, "My new best friend!"

This is an element in sexiness, a joy in life and a pleasure in experience, a magical power of opening other people up, an energetic playfulness centered on the other. Which he brings to almost everything he does. Wink wink. Part of sexiness is a gift for making the other person feel sexy. Damn, does he.

I'd take him over big handsome ain't-I-witty RRandy any day. And Alessandro..well, to be honest...ninety nine days out of a hundred. The Boyo's off in Europe still, so if Sandro were available this afternoon, I'd probably go for it. I'm pretty horny.

My ex and I were discussing our sexual histories recently and both agreed that the best sex we'd had in our lives was not with the best-looking and best-built men we'd slept with. Chemistry rules. Thank God.

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Half Century Men

I'm partial to men in their fifties. Stumbled on a 1975 film with Charles Bronson, Hard Times. He plays a bare-knuckle fighter during the Depression. The movie was made when Bronson was 54. Did his own fighting, no stunt man. He looked damn fine.

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Sigh 2

(see picture in preceding post)

KRON 4 News, typical of MSM, just ran a piece on TV about Nidal Hasan, who murdered and wounded fellow soldiers at Fort Hood yesterday. They showed video of him in a store, dressed head to toe in traditional robes and cap. They mentioned that he had been involved with radical websites and suicide bombers and had argued against the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not once did they mention the word "Muslim".


PS. A nicely done summary, HT to TakiMag.

A proud first generation American, born in Virginia, Nidal Hasan wanted nothing other than to serve his country. But the bigotry against Muslims that he encountered in the Army, plus the American occupation of Iraq, plus, finally, his anguish at being ordered to deploy to Iraq as part of the U.S. forces there, drove this deeply patriotic son of the Old Dominion to the point where he felt he had no choice but to launch a martydom operation against the U.S. Army and shoot down scores of his fellow soldiers.

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Sigh

A cranky old priest I once knew used to say that one of the unanswered mysteries was how there could be more horses' asses in the world than there are horses.

I was reading the SF Chronicle during breakfast this morning. Not my usual habit, but The Boyo is an avid and devoted Chronicle reader. When he is away, somehow it makes me feel as if I am doing something with him and for him to read it. Buying a copy helps the Chron stay in business, something that the print press has a hard time doing these days. He would miss it terribly were it to fold, so I do my little bit. Silly, huh?

Anyway, I find several letters to the editor. Unfortunately, I read them. The Chron specializes in pithy here. Both were responses to the decision by the voters of Maine to refuse marriage to same sex couples. One fella pronounced that this made America "a failed society." America. A failed society. And another writer stamped his adolescent literary feet and wondered why straight people got to vote on his relationship when he was not consulted about theirs. How dare the world exist before he was consulted...

This kind of childish, uber-narcissistic, catastrophizing histrionic foot-stamping...well, it provokes the question of the cranky old priest. So many horses' asses.

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Malesoul 33

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Feeling good about feeling bad

My favorite guy is away in Europe for three weeks. I miss him. But I am grateful that I have someone in my life to miss like that. And I am looking forward to the reunion. Those are always fun.

And then I know that I didn't make him up after all, that the terrific fella is real. And I am even more grateful. If still slightly incredulous.

Don't get me wrong; he's not perfect. Not at all. Just terrific.

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Day of the Dead

November 2 is the feast of All Souls, all the faithful departed. Here in Mexifornia, everyone calls it the Day of the Dead, El Dia de los Muertos.

I guess I am in nostalgic Catholic mode today. I am listening to a variety of performances of the old Requiem Mass sequence, Dies Irae, Day of Wrath. It is a medieval poem by the Franciscan Thomasso Celano and it is a no-holds-barred celebration of the apocalypse, the epic destruction of this world by a just and angry God, from the point of view of a single terrified sinner asking Christ for mercy and protection.

I can recall serving the funeral Mass as a ten-year-old altar boy: especially one day in winter, with a thunderstorm raging, sheets of rain pouring down the sides of the old German Gothic church of St. Boniface, whose larger-than-life ceiling mural showed him in full pontifical dress, huge ax by his side, standing with his foot on the felled oak of Odin; a small but densely decorated holy place populated by polychrome statues of saints, drenched with the smell of incense, the Latin muttering of the priests, the choreography of the rites, the flickering of many candles, and then the power of organ and voice descending on us from the choir loft, flooding the coffin and the mourners with the first eight notes.

It was not the hyper-restrained a capella chanting of chaste French Benedictines, but the local outburst of our forte and tremolo-loving organist with the solo blast of the frustrated opera-singer now consigned to belting out parish requiems. More faithful, I think, to the hymn's origins. A performance somewhere in the middle here:

Dies irae, dies illa
solvet saeclum in favilla,
teste David cum Sybilla.

O day of wrath, that day
dissolves the world into smoldering ashes,
as witness David and the Sybil.

Things only got worse!

When the liturgy was white-washed in the 1960's, this was removed from the funeral Mass, along with the black vestments and the weeping. The modern-world-loving priests who removed it "replaced (it) with texts urging Christian hope and arguably giving more effective expression to faith in the resurrection." At my Dad's recent funeral Mass, not only did the priest indulge in all kinds of unreal and verbose therapeutic sentimentality, but the music had devolved into a soap opera of effeminate pablum. I am not at all sure that that old rites should have been replaced.

You might not have liked Dies Irae's grim view, but you can't deny that it was dramatic, both in text and in melody, and it embodied an archetypal truth. Traditional Christianity's final cosmic explosion has now become the property of Gaia-worshipping eco-fanatics. Theologians became uncomfortable with the ancient hymn, but musicians have always loved it. Along with Mozart and Verdi, there's the contained histrionics of Jenkins, and on YouTube you can find contemporary rock, hiphop anime, and trance mixes of it.

Obviously something there in the Old Religion that the Enlightened Way of "effective presentation" lacks on this Day of the Dead, All Souls 2009.

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Impossible cases and hopeless causes

Catholicism is a pretty baroque religion. Not streamlined and simple. It's had 2000 years to percolate. Consequently, it is interesting, even fascinating. And it can be user-friendly to all kinds of people, since it has been shaped by all kinds of people. Just at present there are over a billion. Over the last two millennia...a lot of folks have had a hand in this.

One of Catholicism's pleasures is the patron saint, a specialized advocate in the system, so to speak. Lost something? Ask St. Anthony? Bad eyes? St. Lucy is your girl. Mental troubles? St. Dymphna. Need help in the kitchen? St. Lawrence. Are you an anesthesiologist? St. Rene Goupil. Going on a trip? St. Christopher. Sterile, got an STD or hemorrhoids? St. Fiacre is your guy.

Protestants --who are very strange, compulsive, minority, highly Western and johnnycomelately kind of Christian-- find this stuff hard to take. They have a tendency to mistake the "worship in spirit and in truth" of John's Gospel with worship in neatness and tidiness. Theologically, and humanly, it makes perfect sense to pray to saints. Christians, and Jesus himself, have always asked people to pray for them. According to the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, the organic unity of believers, just because someone is dead to earthly life is no reason to stop talking to them! That is, like, so bigoted and discriminatory against the dead.

The whys and wherefores of these patronage allocations are varied. Some result from official proclamation, but most come from immemorial tradition, often with the macabre and unsentimental logic ordinary humans understand but civilized modern Westerners find shocking. Why is St. Rene patron of anesthesiologists? The Jesuit was tortured gruesomely for two months by the Iroquois before finally being dispatched and relieved from his pain by a few tomahawk blows to the head. Why is St. Lawrence the patron of cooks? He was martyred by being roasted to death on a gridiron.

Anyway, one of patron saints is one of the Twelve Apostles, Judas Thaddeus, St. Jude. (The other Jude was Judas Iscariot.) He specializes in impossible cases and lost causes.

He is the traditional author of the New Testament epistle of Jude (which, by the way, for those of you Dummies who are fans of The Lost Books of the Bibles, quotes the Book of Enoch!). If his image looks a lot like Jesus, it's because they may have been cousins. His shrine in Kerala, India, boasts the biggest devotional oil lamp in the world. Dominican friars specialize in promoting devotion to him. Danny Thomas built a cancer hospital for children and named it after him. (See what I said about all kinds of people and fascinating, etc?) How he got saddled with the lost and impossible is not clear. Part of his traditional iconography is him carrying a club. Maybe someone who needs to get hit on the head with a club is a kind of hopeless case, and so...?

Anyway, part of the piety associated with him is that if you ask him for help, especially if you perform the nine-day prayer called a novena, and your prayer is answered favorably, you should publish your thanks for his help.

So that's what I am doing today. I may be a bad, ex-, nonpracticing or fallen-away Catholic, but Catholic I will always be.

Back in early August, I gave a St. Jude medal as a gift to someone who shall remain nameless. This person, another less-than-party-line Catholic, looked a bit hurt. "Do you really think I'm a hopeless case?" I let the medal speak for me. Next time we met, this lost cause of a person was wearing the medal, pinned to their clothing, right out in plain sight.

In the interim, what I thought was hopeless and impossible has turned out to be hopeful and possible.

Thank you, St. Jude. Really.

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