‘Back on the air’ – Fulton Sheen beatification to be announced (The Pillar): “The Holy See is expected to announce in coming weeks a date for the beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, the Emmy-winning American prelate known for catechetical television programs in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Cardinal Roche Defends Traditionis Custodes at Extraordinary Consistory (Diane Montagna’s Substack): “A previously undisclosed text on the liturgy, prepared by Cardinal Arthur Roche and distributed to Cardinals at last week’s Extraordinary Consistory, has now come to light.”
Mamdani’s Commie Housing Official Is a Lunatic (National Review): “Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States.”
Cardinal Zen Denounces “Bergoglian Synodality” as “Ironclad Manipulation” at Extraordinary Consistory (The College of Cardinals Report): “In his intervention at the Extraordinary Consistory of Cardinals held at the Vatican on January 7–8, Cardinal Joseph Zen delivered a searing critique of the Synod on Synodality … “
The Qur’an Without Its World (The Abrahamic Metacritique – Substack): “My central proposition is this: the development of Islam can be fruitfully understood as a Marcionism that actually succeeded in severing itself from the Jewish and Christian world from which it sprang.”
A Father Helping to Form Families (Humanum): “The lessons born from the good formation of men in seminary can and should be able to provide fathers and mothers with lessons and aids in raising their children.”
What Binds Us: Papal Infallibility and the Authority of Papal Teaching in Canon Law (Humanum): ” In the past, a papal encyclical may have taken months or even years of study to comprehend its full moral weight. Today, off-the-cuff papal remarks caught on a hot microphone during an informal airplane press gathering can circle the globe in minutes.”
The Upside-Down Consistory (The Sayable – Substack): “There is an interesting parallel in the decision of the Consistory Cardinals to shelve the topic of liturgy, which occurred at the beginning of the Second Vatican Council – when the Council Fathers made the exact opposite choice.”
Ultra-Processed Foods and Industrial Agriculture: What’s a Catholic to Do? (Word on Fire): “My father, who was born almost a hundred years ago in 1926, grew up on a small, hardscrabble family farm in Maryland. He reminisced about naming and becoming fond of pigs that he knew would later become a series of family dinners.”
New Design Plans Revealed for White House Ballroom (Bloomberg):”The architecture firm designing President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom revealed formal details of the project for the first time on Thursday.”
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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Ultra-Processed Foods:”My father, who was born almost a hundred years ago in 1926, grew up on a small, hardscrabble family farm… He liked to get a rise out of us by talking about shooting swans in the ponds surrounding his Eastern Shore home and described those swans as “good eatin’.”
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One of my in-law’s has a brother married to a lady from a rural part of China. Her mother eventually was able to join them here in the States & was asked to house sit while her daughter & son in law went out of town. When they returned to their home in a bougie subdivision the neighbors shared that the Chinese mother in law had been skinning out nutria rats & hanging the skins on the fence. Ducks had been disappearing from the community pond as well.When the freezer was opened it was full of nutrias, muscovy ducks, & other wildlife.
People in rural China haven’t forgotten how to feed themselves.
mrscracker: truly a precious story!
Well, mrscracker, the Chinese grandma’s victuals do not appeal to my mental tastebuds, but maybe I could see them differently if I were starving.
My mother grew up in rural Pennsylvania. There, her family raised chickens, owned a cow, grew vegetables, and even distilled their own moonshine. During the Great Depression, neighbors (as well as hobos who traversed the rails running through the little coal-mining town, looking for jobs and hand-outs along the way) considered her family ‘rich’ because they had milk, eggs, root veggies even in winter, and an occasional broth with small shreds of chicken floating therein.
When I was a child, my mom tried her hand at raising chicks and ducks. Trouble was, she presented those creatures to us children as Easter gifts. Later in the year, we learned that those pets would serve us as dinner. I rebelled. My brothers, hunters all, enjoyed my squeamish disavowals, my feminine instinct so insulted. The taunting with drools, hearty appetites, and howls and bellows of how tasty was the meal drove me to my room.
To this day, I don’t like the idea of ‘pet-food’.
I hear you. My first pets were 2 baby ducks my daddy brought home in cardboard box.To this day I avoid duck on a menu. Excepting muscovy. We had a mean one that chased me one too many times & he ended up on the dinner table.
Wonderful and insightful story Ms. Cracker. Thank you for sharing.
You are welcome.
🙂
I never heard of nutra rats until “Duck Dynasty” had them on.
Damn things give me more murine nightmares than the movie Willard.
As a general rule, I hate rodents. Squirrels are nothing but rats with bushy tails and good PR.
I’ve heard that nutria can make good pets. They’ll come when you call them. There’s a video on YouTube of a lady who feeds local nutria rats carrots and she claims they cleaned out all the duckweed.
But they’re also an invasive species and are supposed to do real harm to our wetlands. You can buy nutria jerky and nutria dog treats. They’re all sorts of nutria recipes, nutria fur fashions, etc.but the nutria rats are still winning the conservation war.
We need more Chinese grandmas .
🙂
Its about time.
Not sure what you’re referring to, but if its the heroic witness of Cardinal Zen speaking to the Consistory, I say its the best news from Rome in thirteen years. Let’s pray rosaries in thanksgiving.
If Vatican II got things so right in prioritizing the Liturgy., why are we in such a mess now?
Good point.
Short answer to a complicated question: poor leadership and a failure (both intentional and accidental) to follow what SC actually stated about liturgy. While Pope Paul VI is often heralded for HV, it took him far too long to write and release it. And when it comes to the liturgy, he dropped the ball on a regular basis, and then failed to correct the many dubious (or worse) implementations (using that word loosely) following the Council. Put another way: Where in SC does it say to jettison Latin? Or Gregorian chant? Or ad orientem? And so forth. (Answers: no where at all; quite the contrary). Paul VI was undoubtedly a holy man, but his governance was quite poor, even lamentable. And far, far too many bishops either supported problematic changes or insane abuses, or simply went along.
Liberals in the Church cynically took advantage of a tragedy and cast John Paul I as one of them who would reverse HV, given their characteristic habit of calling freedom from guilt as “compassion.” The reality, from multiple sources, is that “the Pope of smiles” became furious as he gained a fuller understanding of heterodoxy spreading in the Church in his thirty days, disturbing him the point of causing his heart failure.
The unalterable permanence of sins of pride.
@ Cardinal Roche
In his memo to the consistory explaining his view on the Liturgy, Cardinal Roche concludes: “I do not see how it is possible to say that one recognizes the validity of the Council […] and at the same time not accept the liturgical reform born out of ‘Sacrosanctum Concilium [….]”
A great opportunity, here, for the Cardinal (and, yes, others) to engage in “synodal” listening!
Somewhere in the “reform” there remains the failure to successfully retain the sacramental transcendence while now expanding the (seemingly congregational?) immediacy of Christ–largely because of the multiple disruptions that proceeded unabated and simultaneous with liturgical reform (promiscuous experimentation), following the Council. If Sacrosanctum Concilium had not been exploited as license for clown masses, and if consistent adherence to the Magisterium had not been openly mocked and contradicted, the Cardinal’s insular attitude (“I do not see…”) would be more comprehensible. As in the Hollywood movie “Cool Hand Luke”…what we have here is a failure to communicate.
Perhaps Sacrosanctum Concilium, itself, should have used more precise and explicit wording than “the Liturgy is the source and summit”…maybe, “the Real Presence (CCC 1374) is the source, and the Liturgy is the summit…”
@ The Qur’an Without its World
Mansour writes: “My central proposition is this: the development of Islam can be fruitfully understood as a Marcionism that actually succeeded in severing itself from the Jewish and Christian world from which it sprang.”
But now this on the original “germ” of Islam: “There is not a child that he or she is born upon this ‘fitrah,’ this original state of the knowledge of God. And his parents make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian . . . and if they are Muslims, Muslim” (The Hadith, Bukhari). Various translations of fitrah are “natural disposition, constitution, temperament, e.g., what is in a man at his creation, a sound nature, natural religion (and) the germ of Islam.”
The historical problem, then, is that Islam as a natural religion is a mutilated intuition into the universal and inborn natural law (as differentiated from religion)—but with the embedded mystery of original sin denied. While the Qur’an reveres “the Law of Moses,” it omits explicit mention of the six prohibitive Commandments. Therefore, instead of “coherence” as in the transcendent and historical (both) Logos/Christ who “fulfills the Law,” Islam is an open door to contradictions and “abrogation.” And, therefore, has no foundation for excluding even jihadist terrorism with its psychiatric impulse to escape history, often by suicide. The Qur’an, itself, is such an escape and is regarded as “uncreated” and the very essence of God.
Shariah and poetry combine and are untouchable. So, beyond being revisionist history as with Marcionism, might we say that Islam obliterates ALL of history? Instead of teasing scripture out of history, Islam imposes its anti-historical self and its anti-historical scripture into history. At the end of his article, Monsoor unpacks, in greater detail, this understanding of Islam.
Muslims don’t call it Original Sin, but they do believe that every child born into this world–except Isa (Jesus) and Maryam (Mary)–have felt the “prick of Satan.”
Yes, that too, as I too do recall… Another contradiction?
The original orientation toward God—as from before time began (and as in the first four Commandments), pricked by (a Zoroastrian?) Satan, but not quite pricked from within as at the first moments of our human history (and as addressed in the prohibitive six Commandments)?
The Christian West positions the full and universal and inborn Natural Law as permanent—and prior to history or, say, prior to the Enlightenment or current process theology.
What I am trying to get at, however poorly, is that the personal intuition of individual Muslims is both truncated and then falsely conflated with heterogeneous Islam as a natural religion. Even today’s jihad is partly an historical accretion assimilated from the warrior code of the Seljuk and Ottoman Turk invasions in the late 11th and 13th centuries. Yes?
In Mecca and until the pivotal Medina period (A.D. 622-632), Muhammad himself had been only a monotheist (and monogamous!) street preacher. Troublesome to the thriving pagan trinket trade financed by pilgrims to the Ka’ba with its no less than 360 deities.
@ ‘Back on the air’ – Fulton Sheen beatification to be announced
Rochester became Sheen’s cross and crucifixion. Having spent his career as a public speaker, TV host, and retreat master he ran his own show free to make his own decisions. I won’t address the abuse issue except to say he was thoroughly honest. What he lacked was management skills.
He closed parish schools and gave away buildings belonging to parishes without first consulting the pastors. From then on it was mistake following mistake and the unforgivable ire of the clergy. Clergy that he genuinely loved but now suffered their unforgivable wrath.
It appears to have literally broken his heart. He developed a heart issue and soon after leaving Rochester he died of heart failure. Some Rochester clergy may have felt triumphant, although I believe he accomplished more for the salvation of souls by his suffering than had he been a successful administrator.
It is good news that the beautification of Bishop Sheen is going forward despite steps taken by the New York dioceses to delay or stop it. As has been discussed many times by church historians and biographers, he was the subject (and still is) of jealousy by church leaders and the diocesan bureaucrats for his years of success by the means of television, etc.