"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Thursday, October 17, 2002 On Beyond the Fringe in Northern Va.
Not headed for Arlington
He's St. Blog's favorite anti-Semitic geocentrist foil. And this weekend, Robert Sungenis of Catholic Apologetics International is scheduled to be one of the headliners at the Second International Catholic Conference on Creation, October 18-20 at St. Agnes Parish Center in Arlington, Va.
Other speakers decrying dinosaurs and Darwin at the conference are to include the host Kolbe Center's spiritual advisor, Rev. Robert Ruskamp, chaplain of Christendom College in Front Royal, Va., and Bishop Roman Danylak, who has testified to being present at a miracle in which the Host was changed to living flesh and blood.
Christendom College's theology chairman, William Marshner, also has been billed as a speaker in this invitation to the conference.
A flavor of the proceedings may be gained from this account of last year's conference, which featured presentations on the prevalence of "atheists, the sexually immoral, abortion supporters, social Darwinists, racists, and violators of each of the Commandments" among defenders of evolutionary theory, as well as on the significance of the "historical fact of Eve's creation from Adam's side."
Maybe it's something they put in the water down there, but Catholic creationist mecca Christendom College has come under attack from the Lyndon LaRouche movement for being a hotbed of Carlists, ultra-orthodox Spanish monarchists who supported General Franco.
Where's Fr. Sibley when you need him?
There's a reason diplomats consider the Washington D.C. area a tropical posting. An air remains there of the fever swamp.
Classicist was a Harvard man of the old school:Mason Hammond, a retired Harvard professor of Latin language and Roman history who died four months shy of his 100th birthday, attended morning chapel services for more than 70 years, and as an Army officer in the Second World War helped recover priceless art from the Nazis.
During World War II, Professor Hammond served as monument, fine arts and archives officer with Air Force Intelligence in Sicily, Italy, and Germany. Driving a small, decrepit car dubbed ''Hammond's Peril'' from battlefield to battlefield, he was among a cadre of art experts and intelligence agents credited with rescuing and cataloging vast amounts of Western classic art stolen and hidden by the Nazis.
At one point, he was in charge of the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti and other treasures of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. But he said he could not enjoy the company of these masterpieces because they were always crated.
On another of his missions, he advised General George Patton in his attempts to minimize damage to monuments from US bombs or artillery.
He received three honors for his work during the war, the Croix de la Legion d'Honneur from the French government in 1947, the Cabaliere Ufficiale dell'Ordine al Merito della Republica Italiana, from the Italian government in 1959, and the Bronze Star from the US government in 1945.
A Harvard Gazettearticle on a fellow worshiper notes a row of pews in Harvard's Appleton Chapel has been named for Prof. Hammond, who attended morning services there for more than 70 years.
Prof. Hammond also wrote the history of the Lowell House bells (see above).
Classicist, college house-master, gifted teacher, decorated war hero, man of faith: A noble epitaph, for a Harvard man, or anyone.
Patriotism and national service were once glorified on the Ivy League campus. Of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteers, the "Harvard Regiment," with which Oliver Wendell Holmes served with distinction in the Civil War, it was said: "The Twentieth has no poetry in a fight."
See also this tribute to Andover alumni lost in the Great War. A passage by George Eliot heads the Roll of Honor commemorating:
Those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence:
Live in pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self.
While anti-war academicians circulate a petition decrying US efforts to defend itself, hope springs anew in the ability of Generations X and Y to see through the tired Sixties radicalism of their teachers. Visit this page carrying a column of predictable left-wing cant by a Yale history professor and click on the comments section, in which the author is administered a deft Fisking the likes of which she'd never have received in the Faculty Club. Here's to Andrew Sullivan (third item) and the Internet!
Visit Tim Blair for updated news and commentary. The Australian Embassy offers links to media coverage and has established a condolence book at its Washington offices.
The fledgling United States' campaign against the Barbary Pirates, recalled in the Marine Hymn and in the legacy of the USS Constitution, offers a noteworthy historical backdrop to the modern-day struggle against the pirates' cutthroat heirs.
One wonders what today's peace-and-justice mavens would say were they transported to the early 19th century. Would they seek the root causes of the pirates' discontents? Would they suggest the looted ships had it coming? Would they counsel against fighting back, urging instead the payment of tribute?
Now consider the Barbary Pirates were with us today – and were able to strike far beyond the shores of Tripoli, not with scimitars but with weapons of mass death.
Would a restrained response be the order of the day? How about walking around for a bit inside the pirates' curly-toed slippers to understand why they hate us? Perhaps an apology for having affronted the pirates, or the odd bit of ransom? Or an appeal to an international law-of-the-sea tribunal?
The Appeasement Party at prayer: Andrew Roberts writes in The Telegraph of the 1930s echoes emanating from the C of E:
For all their doctorates and years in theology colleges contemplating the nature of sin, these bishops cannot see true evil when it stands up fully-mustachioed and combat-jacketed, as Saddam has night after night on their television screens, complete with rocket launcher hoisted on to his shoulder.
Once this war is over, the thanksgiving service for the victory should not be held in Westminster Abbey or St Paul's Cathedral, as on all previous occasions, but at the Cenotaph, without any bishops present. "Our Glorious Dead" would understand.
Meantime, at Catholic Light, Eric Johnson views Pax Christi in the light of Bali and finds its message not only wanting, but dangerous.
A clerihew compelled by the scoreboard in Foxboro.
The pride of the cheeseheads is Favrelous;
His way with a pigskin is mavrelous.
Raised lagers toast the Pack as first.
The Patriots? From brat to wurst.
Friday, October 11, 2002 A President Worthy of the Prize
Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong. No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.
Moreover, and above all, let us remember that words count only when they give expression to deeds, or are to be translated into them. The leaders of the Red Terror prattled of peace while they steeped their hands in the blood of the innocent; and many a tyrant has called it peace when he has scourged honest protest into silence. Our words must be judged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal we must use practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do actually make some progress in the right direction.
Pope John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council 40 years ago today, was a defender of Latin, a point not emphasized by many who invoke his spirit and that of the council he summoned.
[T]he Catholic Church has a dignity far surpassing that of every merely human society, for it was founded by Christ the Lord. It is altogether fitting, therefore, that the language it uses should be noble, majestic, and non-vernacular.
In addition, the Latin language "can be called truly catholic." It has been consecrated through constant use by the Apostolic See, the mother and teacher of all Churches, and must be esteemed "a treasure ... of incomparable worth." It is a general passport to the proper understanding of the Christian writers of antiquity and the documents of the Church's teaching. It is also a most effective bond, binding the Church of today with that of the past and of the future in wonderful continuity.
-- Pope John XXIII, Veterum Sapientia, On the Promotion of the Study of Latin, 1962
Had Good Pope John lived longer, what shape might liturgical reform have taken?
In The Spectator, a former follower of Opus Dei reflects on the mixed credentials for sainthood of its founder, the Marques de Peralta.
So there he is, then; up there with Christina the Astonishing, who flew out of her coffin and perched in the rafters of the church during her funeral, and Walstan of Bawburgh, princely pauper and patron of severed private parts: Monsignor Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, founder of the secretive and ultra-conservative movement Opus Dei, is a saint. No one claiming to be a Catholic can deny it: the Pope declared it publicly in St Peter’s Square last Sunday. But not all Catholics share the happiness of the 300,000 people who were present, or the delight of the movement’s 84,000 members worldwide. Some see Opus Dei as sinister, and consider it a cynically manipulative cult.
My own experience doesn’t lead me quite to that conclusion, but I have no plans to put a prayer card with Escriva’s picture on it in my missal. He’s not my kind of hero. There are too many stories about his bad temper and bullying to make me warm to him, and too many of his admirers are fanatics, albeit with the best intentions. It is claimed, for example, that he once completely lost it when told that a senior female member had broken the rules by putting uncensored letters in the post. ‘Draw up her skirts, tear down her panties and beat her on the bum!’ he is said to have shouted. ‘On the bum! Until she talks. Make her talk!’ The tribunal that weighed up his sanctity was not told that story because the woman who aroused his anger and several other prominent critics of Escriva weren’t invited to give evidence.More
In 1971 more than 50 of Britain's most distinguished scholars, writers, historians and artists, only a handful of them Catholic, directed an appeal to Pope Paul VI to protect the old Latin Mass from extinction. The story is told that Paul VI was unmoved by the list of British intellectuals who had signed the petition until he came to the name of his favorite mystery-writer: "Agatha Christie!" he exclaimed, and signed the dispensation allowing continued public celebration of the Old Mass in England and Wales. Hence the "Agatha Christie Indult."
The eloquent appeal and its signatories:
If some senseless decree were to order the total or partial destruction of basilicas or cathedrals, then obviously it would be the educated - whatever their personal beliefs - who would rise up in horror to oppose such a possibility. Now the fact is that basilicas and cathedrals were built so as to celebrate a rite which, until a few months ago, constituted a living tradition. We are referring to the Roman Catholic Mass. Yet, according to the latest information in Rome, there is a plan to obliterate that Mass by the end of the current year. One of the axioms of contemporary publicity, religious as well as secular, is that modern man in general, and intellectuals in particular, have become intolerant of all forms of tradition and are anxious to suppress them and put something else in their place. But, like many other affirmations of our publicity machines, this axiom is false. Today, as in times gone by, educated people are in the vanguard where recognition of the value of tradition is concerned, and are the first to raise the alarm when it is threatened. We are not at this moment considering the religious or spiritual experience of millions of individuals. The rite in question, in its magnificent Latin text, has also inspired a host of priceless achievements in the arts - not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians. In the materialistic and technocratic civilisation that is increasingly threatening the life of mind and spirit in its original creative expression - the word - it seems particularly inhuman to deprive man of word-forms in one of their most grandiose manifestations. The signatories of this appeal, which is entirely ecumenical and non-political, have been drawn from every branch of modern culture in Europe and elsewhere. They wish to call to the attention of the Holy See, the appalling responsibility it would incur in the history of the human spirit were it to refuse to allow the Traditional Mass to survive, even though this survival took place side by side with other liturgical reforms. Signed: Harold Acton, Vladimir Ashkenazy, John Bayley, Lennox Berkeley, Maurice Bowra, Agatha Christie, Kenneth Clark, Nevill Coghill, Cyril Connolly, Colin Davis, Hugh Delargy, +Robert Exeter, Miles Fitzalan-Howard, Constantine Fitzgibbon, William Glock, Magdalen Gofflin, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Ian Greenless, Joseph Grimond, Harman Grisewood, Colin Hardie, Rupert Hart-Davis, Barbara Hepworth, Auberon Herbert, John Jolliffe, David Jones, Osbert Lancaster, F.R. Leavis, Cecil Day Lewis, Compton Mackenzie, George Malcolm, Max Mallowan, Alfred Marnau, Yehudi Menuhin, Nancy Mitford, Raymond Mortimer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Iris Murdoch, John Murray, Sean O'Faolain, E.J. Oliver, Oxford and Asquith, William Plomer, Kathleen Raine, William Rees-Mogg, Ralph Richardson, +John Ripon, Charles Russell, Rivers Scott, Joan Sutherland, Philip Toynbee, Martin Turnell, Bernard Wall, Patrick Wall, E.I Watkin, R.C. Zaehner.
Pro-life law students face double standard at Washington U. in St. Louis:The official Student Bar Association at Washington University in Saint Louis, acting for the University, has twice denied recognition to Law Students Pro-Life. It refused recognition because the students would not adopt the SBA’s view of what their political and moral views ought to be. Read more from FIRE.
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The national pastime belongs in the nation's capital
The Washington Post presents a slide gallery of photos from Senators baseball history, accompanying a report of a billionaire's bid to buy the Expos and move them to Washington.
The president throwing out the first ball of the baseball season at the Washington ballpark was once a staple of the national pastime, but the nation's capital has been without a team since the expansion Senators moved to Texas in 1972. The original Senators left town after 1960 to become the Minnesota Twins, and are now playing for the American League pennant.
I can say I attended the last Washington game ever played at Fenway Park, in 1971, and still have in a box somewhere a souvenir Senators pennant from the occasion. It is a travesty that the national game is not played in the nation's capital. Baseball should return to Washington – and if it's a National League club, the old "Nationals" nickname – "Nats," for short – would do fine.
Some Washington baseball links: Here is a group that wants to bring a team to DC. Senators fan sites are here and here. And here is a 1970 Senators scorecard featuring No. 1 fan Richard Nixon.
A Common Reader:Books of the hour and books of all time, books to be savored or read at whim: a selection of books for readers with imagination. Catalogues don't get much better than this. Disputations offers an endorsement in which I heartily concur.
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SCOTTISH Catholics have turned to a dead language to try to breathe new life into the church.
The traditionalists won another battle yesterday when Archbishop Mario Conti held a full Tridentine Latin Mass at a church in Glasgow, the first time in 18 years it has been used in a mainstream service. The move delighted conservatives within the faith who believe the Latin rite is more inspiring and mysterious than the English version and should be introduced in churches across the country.
But liberals were furious with Conti, claiming the use of Latin would alienate far more people from the church than it would attract. For centuries the Tridentine Latin rite was the only approved way of celebrating mass.
But since the mid-1960s, when the Second Vatican Council gave approval for other languages to be used, the Latin version has been frowned upon by the majority of Catholics.
Unlike the English mass in which a priest faces his congregation, the Latin mass sees the priest turn his back, leading them rather than joining them – a gesture that many find offensive.
Cardinal Winning refused to conduct masses in Latin and was a staunch supporter of English services. And in 1984, Scotland’s catholic bishops banned the Latin rite from being used in regular church services, although it could still be performed in monasteries.
The Pope later said individual bishops could still carry out the ceremony, but none had done so until yesterday.
The service at St Mungo’s Church, in Townhead, was the first time in 30 years that a senior member of the Scottish Catholic Church has used the Latin mass.
A spokesman for Conti denied the archbishop’s action was a deliberate attempt to court conservative Catholics.
“The occasional celebration of the mass in Latin simply provides for the spiritual nourishment of those who appreciate the beauty of the Latin language and Gregorian Chant,” he said.
“Catholics in Scotland already have access to a wide range of liturgies within the Roman Rite, from folk masses to English-language choral singing.”
Conti performed the mass at the request of Una Voce, an organisation that represents traditional Catholics...
Speaking before yesterday’s service, Father Paul Francis Spencer, the rector of St Mungo, said that although he understood Latin, he was more comfortable with English when saying mass. “We are delighted to be able to welcome Archbishop Conti to the parish, and interested in hearing the Latin rite mass,” he said.
“Mass means the same to me in English or Latin." But he admitted: “I have to confess to feeling about the English mass as sometimes people feel about opera which has been translated from Italian or German into English. When you hear the English version it feels as though something is missing somehow.”
No landmark status for Rochester cathedral: City planning board rejects proposal on Sacred Heart. Visit this site to view the cathedral's current Gothic interior, with high altar and baldacchino, and to see what the inside is to look like after renovation. No pennies in the wishing well, indeed.
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Angels in the Twin Cities: A $30-million renovation of Minnesota's St. Paul Cathedral was capped with the placement of a 500-pound aluminum cross atop the new copper domed roof. See a video here.
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Which is this? The sanctuary of a church re-ordered to reflect the liturgical requirements of Vatican II? Or the kitchen in Bishop Murphy's posh new digs?
Yes, the butcher-block center-island makes it tricky. But here's how to tell. If there's nothing where the tabernacle should be, it's a modern sanctuary. If there are a sub-zero freezer and wine-storage cabinet, it's the bishop's kitchen.
Protests &c: The New York Sun describes the true colors of many at the latest "peace" rally in Central Park.
Reliable reporting of this sort is becoming a lost art at the New York Times, the Weekly Standard's David Tell writes in a withering account of the Times' latest cooked poll on Iraq.
Meantime, this report from the Christian Science Monitor suggests patriotism and sacrifice are notions foreign to a remarkable percentage of the MTV Generation:
But just like their Vietnam-era counterparts, today's students are talking about the draft. One Harvard junior, who asked to remain anonymous, has already discussed it with his mom, who's a medical doctor. "If there's a draft, she's going to cut off my pinkie toe so I won't be eligible," he says resolutely. And he's not alone. A poll by Luntz Research found that 37 percent of college students would try to evade a draft – and another 19 percent would serve only if they were stationed inside the US.
A just war: Many of the country's leading ethicists oppose a strike on Iraq, but a look at the centuries-old theory of just war suggests military action may be in fact be morally necessary. Jean Bethke Elshtain writes in the Boston Globe.
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'Renovation' roundup
If a church is a sermon in stone, then Richard Vosko is the John Shelby Spong of liturgical design, the high priest of wreckovation.
On one of his projects, in Rochester, the good guys just won a round: The city Preservation Board unanimously recommended the exterior and -- in a rare move -- the interior structure of Sacred Heart Cathedral be designated as historic landmarks. Accidental Choir Director provides local perspective.
In San Antonio, however, the Vosko-inspired gutting of San Fernando Cathedral continues apace to approving spin. The affair is all the more dispiriting when you consider the cathedral's former glory. Here's what was left after an initial sack in the 1970s, and how it will look after the current vandals are through.
In St. Paul, the restoration of the magnificent cathedral was completed with the raising of a cross atop the signature dome. A local news video offers a bird's-eye view of the restored St. Paul Cathedral. View a photo gallery and web-cams.
Meantime, in Ottawa, a restoration completed in 1999 returned Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica to glory. The architectural firm of Edward J. Cuhaci & Associates maintains a site devoted to the project that features news coverage from the Ottawa Citizen. View a photo gallery
Thursday, October 03, 2002 From the NYT, more on Opus Dei:
Some lash themselves with bits of rope, as monks and saints often did in the past, although they usually do not like to talk about it.
"I can tell you that some kinds of that are less painful than an hour's workout in a gym," said Dr. Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the pope's spokesman, who has long been a numerary member of Opus Dei. "I can tell you that I've tried both."
The Rev. John Paul Wauck, an American in Rome who went from Opus Dei numerary to Opus Dei priest about three years ago, said he sometimes wore a spiked chain around his thigh and denied himself even lukewarm showers.
"It's not a main point of my life in Opus Dei," said Father Wauck, who is the brother-in-law of the accused spy Robert Hanssen, who was also a member, although not a numerary.
But, Father Wauck said, it reminds him of Jesus' suffering and moves him away from material self-indulgence.
"It's a penance," he said. "It's a way of saying no to myself."
Wednesday, October 02, 2002 "Blessed be pain. Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain. . .
Glorified be pain!" Josemaria Escriva, The Way
A Procession of Flagellants, Goya
Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriva, to be made a saint Oct. 6, is said to have been so fierce in beating himself with a cord-like whip called a "Discipline" that he routinely spattered the bathroom walls with blood.
The Opus Dei movement Escriva launched is today seen in the vanguard of the Catholic Church's New Evangelization, and is influential from Rome to K Street.
Yet certain devotional practices of the society remain positively medieval. These exercises in corporal mortification include wearing for two hours a day a spiked chain called a “Cilice” that breaks the skin around the upper thigh, and beating oneself 33 times once a week with the “Discipline.”
Opus Dei members interviewed by the Chicago archdiocesan newspaper said whipping is a form of suffering for God.
Martinez was put off by reading that Escriva whipped himself until he bled when she began looking into Opus Dei. “When I read that, I didn’t understand, because I always thought God gave me my body and he wants me to take care of it,” she said.
When she raised the issue with her Opus Dei spiritual director, he said that some people are called to emulate the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Others are not.
Suffering and sacrifice aren’t unusual in modern culture, said Hefferan, citing the grimaces she often sees on the faces of joggers in the morning. But most people do it for themselves, she said, while Opus Dei members do it for God.
“Sacrificing for God is the foreign idea,” she said.
Reporter Isambard Wilkinson of the Telegraph raised the issue of self-flagellation in this highly readable take on Opus Dei:
SHORTLY after I arrived in Madrid, long before other religious organisations knew of my existence, I received a telephone call from an Opus Dei official.
"You may not know who we are," he said in a consciously unthreatening voice. "But would you like to come and have an informal discussion about things?"
Sipping sherry in the organisation's press office in Madrid, I quickly appreciated what the message was. "You will hear all sorts of inaccurate theories about Opus Dei. We have no political influence at all. There is nothing strange about us," said Luis Gordon, Opus Dei's press officer.
Most Spaniards will tell you that Opus Dei is mysterious but offer very little information on what the organisation does. Most prefer merely to shudder at the mention of its name.
According to its critics, Opus Dei is a secretive and conservative religious order of well-placed people who form a near-Masonic shadowy influence behind Spain's political and financial elite.
Opus Dei's swiftly expanding influence at the heart of the Vatican makes it an obvious target for conspiracy theories. That is perhaps unsurprising as the group is known to favour practices with more than a whiff of the medieval - including the wearing of cilicios, pointed chains which dig into the thigh, or self-flagellation with a five-tailed whip while chanting the Salve Maria.
The Opus Dei man has a timeless take on the issue: "Do you like pretty women? So do I. Do you know what effort they make to get a nice figure, and increase their height with high heels - this is a very hard mortification, much more than a cicilio.
"Why does society accept this terrible mortification and then is scandalised when people do it for God?" asked Mr Gordon.
An entertaining feature in The Economist 10 years ago on old-boy networks from Skull and Bones to the Trilateral Commission looked at Opus Dei:
THE Jesuits have been around longer, but Opus Dei is rapidly supplanting the older, more intellectual order as a powerful elite at the heart of the Catholic Church. Although the organization is fairly secretive, it received unprecedented publicity earlier this year when 150,000 members descended on Rome for the beatification of the organisation's founder, Monsignor Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer.
Opus Dei (literally, the work of God) originated in Spain in 1928, but has now spread its network through 80 countries. Many of its members are recruited at school and university. Although only 2% of Opus Dei members are priests, the organisation's adherents dedicate themselves to prayer and self-discipline. The real masochists live in residencies run by the Opus Dei, where they practise self-flagellation and wear uncomfortable spikes on the inside of their trousers. But most members of the society live outwardly normal lives and keep their membership of Opus Dei a secret, even from close friends and relatives.
Outsiders hoping to identify members of Opus Dei must look for tell-tale signs. Somewhere in the house of most members will be a small model of a donkey, representing the ass that Christ used to enter Jerusalem. A whiff of Atkinson's cologne, the favourite of Escriva, is also a giveaway.
The canonization ceremonies Oct. 6 no doubt will see Rome awash in asses and Atkinson's.
The Flagellants, photogravure after the painting by Carl Marr
Tuesday, October 01, 2002 Thirty-five years ago today
Red Sox fans mob pitcher Jim Lonborg, Oct. 1, 1967
On Oct. 1, 1967, the final day of the season, the 100-to-1 long-shot "Impossible Dream" Red Sox rally from a 2-0 deficit to defeat the Minnesota Twins, earning a tie for the American League pennant. Later in the day, after the Angels defeat the Tigers, the Red Sox clinch their first pennant in 21 years. See snaps from the game. Read a list of the 100 greatest moments in Red Sox history as compiled by the Herald's Steve Buckley. And here's your chance to order the Boston fan's Holy Trinity of sports highlight records.
Madrid protesters wearing mock suicide bombs and little else capture the deadly frivolousness of the "anti-war" left. Little Green Footballs disapproves, while offering more candid snaps from the pacifists' favorite Religion of Peace.
Meantime, Democratic congressmen travel to Baghdad to denounce US policy. The loyal opposition? Hardly. I think what we're seeing now is the hard-core base of the Democratic Party showing its true colors, and those colors, having flirted with irrelevance and then insouciance are now perilously close to treason, writes Andrew Sullivan.
George Will writes: Hitler found "Lord Haw Haw" -- William Joyce, who broadcast German propaganda to Britain during the Second World War -- in the dregs of British extremism. But Saddam Hussein finds American collaborators among senior congressional Democrats.
Not since Jane Fonda posed for photographers at a Hanoi antiaircraft gun has there been anything like Rep. Jim McDermott, speaking to ABC's "This Week" from Baghdad, saying Americans should take Saddam Hussein at his word but should not take President Bush at his. McDermott, in his seventh term representing Seattle, said Iraqi officials promised him and his traveling companion, Rep. David E. Bonior, a 13-term Michigan Democrat, that weapons inspectors would be "allowed to look anywhere."
…McDermott and Bonior are two specimens of what Lenin, referring to Westerners who denied the existence of Lenin's police-state terror, called "useful idiots."
St. Michael Overcoming Satan, Gasson Rotunda, Boston College
Saint Michael, Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Pope Leo XIII
Friday, September 27, 2002 Kneeling at Holy Communion
Joos van Wassenhove, The Institution of the Eucharist, c.1474
Catholic Light reports an allegation of a politician denied the Sacrament at the Arlington, Va., cathedral because he kneeled for Communion. Rev. James Tucker, a priest of the Arlington diocese, registers dismay.
The kneeling-at-Communion question has been getting an airing at HMS Blog, where Emily Stimpson writes: "[W]hile I believe we must remain obedient to our bishops, I can't help but feel frustrated by the continual efforts of some to strip away the simple acts of reverence and piety, which hurt no one and help many to grasp the mystery of the faith."
The tradition in the Catholic Church is to take Communion kneeling. That's why altar rails were also called communion rails. (Note these magnificent images from the old St. Albertus Polish Catholic Church in Detroit, here and here.)
Go to an Episcopal parish and you'll see worshipers still taking Communion that way. It has been only in the past 30 years that Catholic liturgical engineers decided standing for Communion was somehow preferable. There was no great demand from the pews for standing for the Sacrament. Indeed, kneeling has stubbornly hung-on following the Sanctus, and in many parishes, the Agnus Dei, despite the efforts of the liturgists to discourage it.
Kneeling at a rail for Communion doesn't harm the faith but enhances it. When standing is the general rule, one can see where a great show of kneeling while others are trying to proceed to the altar could be disruptive, but a quick genuflection before the Sacrament wouldn't hurt anyone.
Remember, when you genuflect or kneel before the Sacrament, you are appealing to longstanding Church tradition, much more so than the modern-day Roundheads who hide tabernacles, remove kneelers and gut sanctuaries.
Martin Luther King wrote: "I would agree with St. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all." When clerical Cromwells actively seek to undermine age-old devotions that do no harm but instead great good, civil disobedience may be in order.
For a number of years the most popular caller on Boston sports radio was a fellow known as "Butch from the Cape." He cultivated a raffish air of mystery as to his background and whereabouts: The suggestion was he had ties to the wise guys. He was tremendously funny, calling in to the talk shows daily to deliver, in a Bronx sneer, brilliant comic riffs on the sports news of the day. He became a fixture on the airwaves, a familiar personality to millions of loyal listeners. When he died last year after a publicized battle with cancer, the news was greeted with an outpouring of grief.
But then, after his death, a story in the Hartford Courant (see below) revealed Butch from the Cape, in real life, had been a scam-artist and confidence man who had bilked scores of gamblers in sports-betting schemes. His last and most far-reaching con had been to invent himself anew for millions of radio listeners.
He had created an entire persona for himself, and become like a member of the family to sportswriters and radio listeners who sang his praises and considered him a friend – but who, in few if any cases, really knew anything about him at all.
The point is, you may think you know personalities on the airwaves – or in cyberspace – but all you really know is what's presented to you. You may think you know someone based on the persona he or she presents on the Internet. But how well do you really know a virtual friend?
Trust but verify, Ronald Reagan once said about the Soviets. It's good advice, too, in Blogistan.
THE HARTFORD COURANT
October 18, 2001 Thursday, 7 SPORTS FINAL
SECTION: MAIN; Pg. A1
LENGTH: 1463 words
HEADLINE: TRUTH IS, HE NEVER MET A LIE HE DIDN'T LIKE;
SPEERS THE CON MAN KEPT 'EM GUESSING TILL THE END
BYLINE: By EDMUND H. MAHONY; Courant Staff Writer
BODY:
Tommy Speers, ace con man, had moves so slick the police never really figured out whom he worked for. That goes some distance toward portraying Speers' skills as a swindler, because for 20 years or so, he was supposed to be working for the cops.
He was a gambler who called what he did "ripping" people. His theory of the sports bet was simple: Bet often. Collect when you win. Never pay when you lose. That, of course, was easier said than done.
But it worked for Speers until the bitter end Wednesday when he died at 58. He beat the mob, he almost always beat the police and he beat a sad line of suckers from Poughkeepsie to Cape Cod. And for the last decade, he beat thousands of sports radio fans in eastern Massachusetts.
Thomas W. Speers lost the one that counts at 4:10 a.m. Wednesday, in bed with his family beside him in his newest home on Cape Cod. It was a hard, nearly two-year fight with renal cancer.
But as always with Speers, you never got what you thought you were getting. He left his last scam intact. At the end of a life-long rip, the sports airwaves in Boston were filled with accolades for the man radio callers knew only as the mysterious "Butch from the Cape." Boston sportswriters were writing tributes to the most brilliant, perceptive, caustic, hilarious sports commentator ever.
If they knew the real Butch -- the one who terrorized bookmakers and police officers in Connecticut for decades -- they never wrote about him.
Speers lived his final decade or so at the elbow of Cape Cod in a condominium paid for by his victims. He arrived there on parole from a Connecticut gambling charge. It wasn't long before he did what he had done so successfully over a career of hooking marks: He fashioned a brand new persona. It was swallowed with equal enthusiasm by wiseguys on the Cape and the sporting crowd in Boston.
According to his new story, Speers was a New York Yankee fan and would-be writer from some unspecified upstate New York town, forced by bad breaks into life as a saloon owner. It was a slippery step from the saloon to the bookies, Speers told his new friends in Massachusetts. He told them he got caught gambling, did a short stretch in a New York jail. But there were never any details. For Boston sportswriters, Speers' last name was "none of your business." Speers was a man trying to hide a mysterious past, something he knew would only add to his allure to those in sports radio land.
"Not many people can lay claim to be being the best at anything," a writer with the Boston Herald wrote last week as Speers' life neared its end. "Butch, 58, is the best talk-show caller there is, probably the best there ever was. In many ways, he defined the art, combining a caustic sense of humor with an iconoclastic sense of mischief."
An Associated Press sportswriter reported Wednesday that when Butch from the Cape spoke into the radio, Nomar Garciaparra became "No Arm," Rick Pitino was "Coach Pinocchio," and Drew Bledsoe was either "Drew Bozo" or "Nancy Drew," depending on his mood.
When the news broke in sports radio land that Speers was suffering from a probably fatal disease, he told an interviewer: "Maybe I've got Red Sox cancer, the kind everybody beats."
Speers certainly was good on the radio; program hosts fought over him to promote their shows. He was good at a lot of things. His old handlers in the Connecticut State Police used to call him brilliant, until he started setting fire to their careers. But they remember him a little differently in Waterbury where he grew up.
In Waterbury they will tell you that the closest Speers ever came to owning a bar in upstate New York was nearly getting buried under the parking lot of a joint outside of Poughkeepsie. The bar owner was a connected wiseguy who caught Speers trying to run off on a losing bet.
For a guy who worked the wrong side of the law, Speers was uncharacteristically smart, funny, engaging and captivating. A generation of state troopers still talks about his stories about his life in crime. About a decade ago, just before he left Connecticut for good, he was handicapping football games for the guards at the Brooklyn Correctional Center. Speers was serving a short gambling sentence -- his last.
Speers has claimed that it was his first bet -- or more accurately, the fact that he won -- that put him on the wrong side of the law. He laid down $13 to win $10 on the San Francisco Giants in 1961. But it is far more likely that associates will place the beginning of Speers' notoriety at his brief dalliance with the newspaper business.
During a number of interviews in the 1980s, Speers said he was hired by the newspaper in Waterbury to collate sports scores delivered to the newsroom by wire services. He was fired when the editors discovered he was doctoring the scores to cover bets he made with local bookies.
Tossed out of the news business, Speers embarked on a career that terrorized bookmakers and sports bettors in Connecticut for more than two decades. This is how he said it worked: He would assume a false identity. A favorite was "Terry Conlon," a banker new to the state. Then he set out to ingratiate himself with a bartender or bookmaker or anyone else who looked willing to take a bet.
He bet small to begin with, paying when he lost and collecting when he won. But as his credit increased with whoever was taking the bets, Speers raised the limit. Eventually, the bet was $5,000 or $10,000, a big sum in the 1960s and '70s. If Speers won, he collected. If he lost, he disappeared. It wasn't long before a lot of people in a lot of saloons were looking for Terry Conlon, a bespectacled banker in a conservative suit.
Sports betting wasn't Speers' only game. While still living in Wolcott, he once passed himself off as a liquor store owner from the Cape. He told his mark in Naugatuck that his liquor business was such a bust that he set it on fire in a successful insurance fraud.
Speers offered the greedy mark the surviving inventory at a discount -- if the mark could provide the up-front money to cover "expenses." When the day of delivery arrived, Speers appeared without the goods. He carried with him a newspaper clipping reporting that the state police had impounded a shipment of bootleg liquor on I-84 the night before.
Using his newspaper experience, Speers had impersonated a state trooper and called a rural news bureau with a news release about an illegal liquor shipment. The fake story about the liquor bust was published.
Speers came to the attention of the Connecticut State Police in the early 1970s, about the time the agency was creating a new organized crime squad. He became the first informant, Number 01. But it wasn't long before confusion developed over whom Speers was really working for.
In a series of interviews before his death, Speers said that he would report to his handlers that he had stumbled upon a bookmaker who was taking action. Usually, he said, the state police instructed him to place bets to build a case for a bookmaking arrest. In the meantime, Speers said he kept whatever money he won. When he had enough evidence -- usually after losing a big bet -- Speers handed the bookie over.
But in many cases, Speers said, he didn't find the bookmakers himself. Rather, mobsters would direct Speers to bookmakers who weren't paying the Mafia for permission to operate.
The beginning of the end of Speers' relationship with the state police occurred in 1973. A meeting to settle a dispute between Speers and a gambler in Danbury got out of hand. When it was over, one of the gambler's two enforcers was dead. The state police covered the meeting to protect Speers and became involved in a shootout. A medical examiner's report later concluded that the enforcer shot himself in the head. There were many in law enforcement at the time who did not believe an enforcer would shoot himself to avoid arrest.
Former Chief State's Attorney Austin McGuigan began arguing that Speers should be cut loose as an informer. The state police resisted, perhaps because as many as 60 percent of their gambling arrests were based on information provided by Speers. McGuigan eventually lost his job as a result of continuing disagreements with the state police.
By the late 1980s, Speers had become too notorious to ignore and police in Waterbury arrested him on gambling charges. Speers was eventually convicted and served a brief sentence at the correctional center in Brooklyn. But before the case was over, Speers' lawyer was charged with trying to improperly influence the judge.
At the time, Speers said he was enraged by the arrest.
"I'm not content to just walk away from this," he said. "What with all the exposure and mental anguish I've had to live with."
Tuesday, September 24, 2002 What's the difference between a Mason and a modern liturgist?
Must be the handshake. Because the tastes in ritual-space design are remarkably similar.
Carrie Tomko, in a comment on the post below, notes the similarity between the modern Catholic liturgists' un-sanctuary and the Masonic altar here.
Note the altar placement in these rooms of the Philadelphia Masonic Temple – quite a remarkable building, really, in an over-the-top rococo-faux-Babylonian sort of way.
St. Albert the Great Catholic Church, which befitting its Austin, Texas, location, is fronted by a mock oil derrick. (Meantime, the mall-like baptismal pool looks well-suited to the pitching of good-luck pennies, though the purpose of the attached Tiki Hut volcano is unclear.)
Completing the Masonic parallel, though not designed by Habiger & Associates, as far as I know, two Italian chapels of the Neocatechumenal Way (which may or may not feature secret handshakes): In Catania, Sicily, and in Florence.
Monday, September 23, 2002 Replacing the missal with a Little Red Book: The forced collectivism of the liturgical commissariat
Free Republic notes the web site of a Catholic chapel in State College, Pa., that is a model of get-your-mind-right Liturgist-Speak.
The re-education in new-think proceeds apace, from the rationale for the full-immersion baptismal jacuzzi to those given for the lack of decoration or of a defined sanctuary.
Altar area: Eucharist is a celebration of the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. This area is the focal point of the space without being removed or isolated from the rest of the space. It is given just enough prominence to allow visibility by all present but without putting distance between this space and the rest of the room. Christians gather around the table of the Lord; they are not spectators at the Lord's table. The area is uncluttered by extraneous appointments; there is simply the Lord's table (the altar), the lectern or ambo, and the presider's chair. These are the focus of the liturgy.
Altar shape: The square design best expresses the theology that all are gathered around the table. There is no front or back, no head or foot of the table. All places are of equal importance. (A round altar can also express the concept.)
Presider's chair: While certainly not a throne, the chair's central position serves to remind us that the community does gather around someone who presides at the celebration.
Seating area: One of the challenges in designing a space in keeping with a contemporary understanding of liturgical celebrations is seating people so that they do not see themselves as spectators but as active participants in the liturgy. They are as much a part of the action of the liturgy as the presider or the reader or the choir. They are to interact with each other as well as with the presider and the reader. Their role in the liturgy is of equal importance with the roles of anyone else taking part in the action of the liturgy. We are not in a theater to watch. We are with each other and at the table of the Lord, and our seating arrangement is designed to help establish this feeling.
An important general feature of the worship space is that everything in it is portable or moveable except for the baptismal font. This allows us to gather in this room in a variety of ways, and, on occasion, to use the space for other liturgical functions as well as concerts, plays, etc. The options to rearrange the room can help to facilitate special liturgies. It might be one way to mark the change in various liturgical seasons. Furthermore, we are a pilgrim people. A pilgrim people is a people that is on the move, not fixed and permanently settled. We should not forget that.
Here we have the liturgist as modern-art critic, explaining the symbolism behind the latest innovation in worship as performance art. An argument for Mass in the vernacular was that it made the rite more accessible for the average worshiper. But if a standing class of liturgist-critics is required to intepret all the new "symbols" they are constantly inventing, from "pilgrim" folding chairs to the filling of holy-water fonts with sand, has the Mass been made truly more accessible to the average person in the pew (or "pilgrim" chair)?
Remember the scene in Dr. Zhivago when his Red commissar brother criticizes his poetry as personal and "self-indulgent"? The scriptwriter might have been borrowed for this passage on the corrupting influence of "private" devotions:
The absence of kneelers is another notable feature, related to the fact that this space is meant for public worship, not private, personal devotion. According to the rules of the liturgy of Vatican II, standing or sitting are the two preferred postures, rather than kneeling, although kneeling is not outlawed. Kneeling is a posture suited to private, personal prayer; kneeling tends to close out people around us. This should never occur in liturgy.
For similar reasons, our worship space also has no statues, no votive lights, and no stations. This space gives prominence and focus only to those elements involved in the public celebration of the church's liturgy and draws all of our attention to the sacramental life of the church. It invites us insistently to develop a liturgical spirituality. A liturgical spirituality is one which gives primary emphasis to the sacramental life of the church. Even private devotion takes its inspiration from and leads back to the celebration of the liturgy.
This is not Catholicism. This is liturgical bolshevism.
And while this is an extreme case, the trend toward forced collectivism, with the shifting of focus toward the assembly, and an emphasis on Mass as shared meal rather than sacrifice, is why many blanche at the seemingly innocuous imposed handshake with "Christ in your neighbor" that Fr. Johansen mentions.
The Project Canterbury site is a gem, and well worth a cross-Tiber visit.
A tip of the biretta to Fr. Jim Tucker for calling attention to the site and, in particular, to this vintage travelogue posted therein, Ceremonial Curiosities and Queer Sights in Foreign Churches: Ecclesiological and other notes from the travel diaries of Edward J. G. Forse, M.A., F.R.G.S. The frontispiece portrait is priceless.
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When the B in BVM stands for Bisuteki
A Free Republic thread on the proposed new church at Fatima draws a comparison to the George Foreman grill. I'm thinking there are Hibachi elements, with a touch of early Stephen Foster banjo.
Globe scribe, defending NPR ramparts, attacks Harvard president on anti-Semitism warning. But the 'intellectual fraud' in this case isn't Larry Summers.
Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara paints Harvard President Larry Summers as an "intellectual fraud" for warning of anti-Semitism in the campus Israel-divestiture movement.
Ascribing bigotry to those with whom you disagree is the last refuge of cowards. It is especially offensive from a university president, McNamara writes.
During his address at morning prayers in Memorial Church last week, Summers tried to have it both ways. Insisting that he values vigorous debate and academic freedom, he nonetheless upbraided certain Harvard students and professors for ''advocating actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent.''
Summers cited a petition urging the university to divest in Israel because of its policies toward the Palestinians, a call that the president said serves unfairly ''to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested.''
The merits of divestment as a means of exerting political pressure on the government of Ariel Sharon is a worthy topic of debate, even of heated argument, but for Summers to suggest that proponents of that strategy are racists is to marginalize, in the ugliest possible way, the views of people no less principled than he.
"No less principled than he?" "Marginalize?" The guiding light of the MIT-Harvard divest-from-Israel campaign is Noam Chomsky. Gallons of ink have been spent debunking the so-called Peter Pan of the anti-American Left. (Here are two fine savagings, courtesy of Alan Dershowitz and City Journal's Stefan Kanfer.) But a passing familiarity with the Chomskyite faction behind the divestiture campaign – in Dershowitz' description "a motley assortment of knee-jerk anti-Zionists, rabid Anti-Americans, radical leftists (the Spartacist League), [and] people with little knowledge of the history of the Arab-Israeli dispute – would be enough for most sentient beings to dismiss the effort.
And singling out one bad actor on the international stage for retribution is hardly unique to these petitioners. Witness the Bush administration's focus on Iraq, to the exclusion of Iran and other unstable nations that also harbor terrorists.
Yeah. Even if these Ivy League protesters are wrong, what about that simpleton Bush? How much more enlightened US foreign policy would be, were it only guided by the Globe editorial department, or by the Unitarian peace activists from Somerville who must surely serve as a barometer of public opinion, given their overwhelming prevalence in the newspaper's Letters to the Editor section.
That his business and political experience did not entirely prepare Summers for the freewheeling atmosphere of university life has been clear since his arrival at Harvard.
That would be a reference to the Cornel West brouhaha. It might come as a revelation to Eileen McNamara that rapmaster West's departure for Princeton has not universally been viewed as a loss to the Crimson.
It was evident again when he cited as an example of encroaching anti-Semitism a rally against global capitalism in which chanting students could be heard equating Sharon and Adolf Hitler. Well, a German justice minister last week reportedly compared President Bush's tactics toward Iraq to Hitler's toward Europe before World War II. Is she anti-American or merely hyperbolic?
Both?
To lump, as Summers did, the intemperate chants of students with such genuine signs of the rise in worldwide anti-Semitism as the burning of synagogues and the popularity of neo-Nazi political candidates across Europe, is to mistake unpopular speech for race hatred.
To not lump them together is to miss that rises in overt anti-Semitism and synagogue-burnings have accompanied the tide of anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric on the Left during the Mideast crisis.
Has Eileen McNamara simply not been paying attention? Has she missed reports out of San Francisco or Berkeley or Canada on anti-Semitism amid the campus Left? Has she not heard of Cynthia McKinney, or read the MEMRI transcripts of what passes for Arab news coverage?
Did she simply crank out a high-dudgeon column without bothering to examine the issues or her own comfortably-held prejudices? Or can it be that accepting Larry Summers' warning would mean acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: that the socially-conscious NPR-listeners who constitute Eileen McNamara's readership have been siding with the Brownshirts, have been siding with the Klan?
Who, in this case, is really the intellectual fraud?
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