"Pope goes gaga for super bowl"

Why?

Emily Clarke sings "Papa Francis" ...

Here's a daisy that will warm the cockles of many a contemporary Catholic's heart, particularly if they have no acquaintance with roses.


What can one say? There's Rutherford Cabernet, and then there's Coca-cola; there's Roquefort, and then there's Velveeta; there's Shakespeare, and then there's Hallmark greeting cards; there's Michelangelo's Pieta, and then there's Precious Moments figurines; there's the Boston Catechism, and there's Youcat; there's the Council of Trent, and then there's World Youth Day; there's Solemn High Mass, and then there's Life Teen liturgy; there's the Chair of St. Peter, and there's the presider's chair; there's Palestrina, and then there's this. Or am I just being a mean-spirited old grump? (Notice the wardrobe and the props?)

Britney Spears "finds grace in the hook-up" while Jamie Lynn Spears thinks "love should take it slow"

Commenting on Spencer Kornhaber's article, "Britney Spears Finds Grace in the Hook-Up" (Atlantic, August 26, 2016), our underground correspondent, Guy Noir - Private Eye writes, in a cracker-jack display of journalistic finesse:

The Atlantic, the magazine for the 'good writing' crowd, yes, *The Atlantic* is publishing music reviews giving props to mall teen baby making pop. So goes the culture when two parent families are seen as a quaint commodity. I guess it's now 'all good' now matter how hormonally hyped if the message is 'chill' bohemian (Chris Brown, please leave the room), the producers trendy, and the production ingredients urban shiny. But the sophisticate's confession of faith in sex = salvation, tongue-in-cheekiness as it may be, paints poor Britney as a soon-to-be pop version of Snooki-crossed-with-Miranda Priestly. Oh wait, Madonna already has that part. Anyway...

And in a strangely-timed instance of You'd Never Know It's The Same Family, the Other Spears comes off [HERE] like an artful True Love Waits songstress. This is actually nice. Go figure.

Bravo.

Humor: Traddie hymn to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A Changing"

Once again, from the indomitable Amateur Brain Surgeon, we have another gem, this time a 'hymn' from the ABS Ministry Hymnal, "Tradition is reemerging" (see below). The hymn is preceded by the following introductory remarks:

During the turbulent years of 1962-1965 B.C.E. (Bestest Council Ever) when we all thought that everything with the One True Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church was jake, a sudden revolution fell upon us.

And now the revolutionaries appear to be in complete control but the lessons of history remind us that, often, it is just at that moment when the Empire seems indestructible that it is at its weakest.

And here, my friends, is the hymn, to be sung to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A Changing":

Tradition is reemerging

From ABE Ministry Hymnal.

Come gather ’round Catholics
Whose Capitol is Rome,
And admit insipidity
Around you has grown,
And fight it like Hell
Tooth, Nail, and Bone,
If your soul to you is worth savin’
You'd better keep fighting or you’ll sink like a stone
For Tradition is reemerging

Come libs and progressives
Who rhyme hen with pen,
And keep your ears open
Your chance won’t come again,
And don’t speak too soon
For Heterodoxy is sin,
The one's smiling now will soon lose that grin
For the loser now will be later to win,
For Tradition is reemerging

Come Cardinals and Bishops
Ignore the call,
Don't dress in your civvies
Shun Paul the sixth hall;
For he not arriving
Will someday be thriving,
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For Tradition is reemerging

Come priests and deacons
Throughout the land,
And don’t criticise
What you can’t understand,
The men of Tradition
Are beyond your command,
Papolatry is rapidly agin’
Pray Ad Orientem, Worship not man
For Tradition is reemerging

The line it is drawn
The future is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
Modernism has been submergin’
And the first one now will later be last
For Tradition is reemerging

Augustine of Hiphop

I kid you not:

I serve a king
who chose thorns over bling
that's why I can sing
"yo Death, where's thy sting?"

His gifts aint shoddy
true Blood, true Body

I aint no Arian
straight Trinitarian
three co-equal Persons
wit a love unvaryin

incarnate: what a scandal
He aint just an example
the Son be one wit us
wit the Father consubstantial

And much, much more ...

[Hat tip to A.B.]

The charity, the comedy, the fantasy

Our underground correspondent from an Atlantic seaboard city that knows how to keep its secrets, Guy Noir - Private Eye, recently called my attention to Stephen Glover's article, "Forgive me, but I find this hysteria a little over the top: STEPHEN GLOVER says the Second Coming would scarcely attract as much attention as Bowie's death" (Daily Mail, January 12, 2016), and commented:

What a terrific piece, even as it charitably identifies the Anglican grand poobah as "over-egging the pudding." Haha!

On reading that I thought, 'It's an unsolicited miracle, really, wrought just for me, that Francis has not waded into with eulogizing humdinger of his own!' So then I googled 'Francis & Bowie,' and laughed again, on discovering that the ever-fizzy KJL had managed to concoct a Francis/Bowie connection to fill any perceived vacuum.

Namely, this: Kathryn Jean Lopez, "Pope Francis and David Bowie: An Unexpected Duet: Great Fantasy is to start over, be born again. The fantasy is real...." (Aleteia, January 15, 2016). Noir muses:

It's all nice, and it's all comical. Which is in the end nice, I guess....

Metaphor for America

Via Amateur Brain Surgeon (January 12, 2016):

On being weird

"The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person." -- P.J. O'Rourke

[Hat tip to L.S.]

The Da Vinci Aqualung Code: Hilarious!

The connection between Pope Francis and the rock band Jethro Tull's 1971 album, Aqualung. This explains everything.


"The Aqualung Code" (St. Corbinian's Bear, December 19, 2015). Excerpt: 

The song "My God" featured prominently in Father Bergoglio's discussions, according to our sources. 

People what have you done?

Locked Him in his golden cage.

Made Him bend to your religion,

Him resurrected from the grave.

"We imprison the divine with doctrine!" Father Bergoglio would often say vehemently. "Yes, making Him bend to our religious rules instead of letting Him be free among the people! Where is the joy in this?"

Another part of the same song inspired a term he came up with one night while listening to "My God." Self-absorbed promethean neo-pelagians.

"I remember it like it was yesterday," our source recalled. "Father Bergoglio came to my room in an excited state and asked me to accompany him. We went to his room and he played some verses from a rock and roll song on a phonograph. As soon as they were finished, he would turn the record back and play them again. 'Listen!,' he said. His eyes were burning. 'This is telling me something. It's talking about... I don't know. About self-absorbed promethean neo-pelagianism!"

Our source continued. "At first I did not understand. Father Bergoglio turned off the record player and looked at me in silence for a moment. Then he repeated it slowly, almost as if he had had a revelation. Perhaps he had."

Here are the lyrics that so gripped the imagination of Father Bergoglio in 1971.

Confessing to the endless sins,
The endless whining sounds.
You'll be praying till next Thursday,
To all the gods that you can count.

To Father Bergoglio, these lyrics meant that people rely on their own religious efforts and correctness to save themselves. The lyrics also reminded him of excessive, repetitive, traditional prayers, which he began to call "rosary counting" after listening to the song repeatedly.

[Hat tip to L.S.]

What's wrong with free public colleges and $15/hr minimum wages? Nothing, if you can find a way to pay for them.

Neil Cavuto questions student who wants free college and has no idea how to pay for it



Such uncommon common nonsense!

Here's a bit of pushback from Bill Whittle against the myth about paying our way by soaking the rich, no matter how feasible that may seem after listening to our Activist-in-Chief, or, for that matter, some idiot like Michael Moore. Since it's from March of 2011, and I know that's gotta be "ancient history" to most "plugged-in" kids these days, let's call it a "lesson from history":

"Eat the Rich!"
One hardly needs to support the Republican establishment to see the folly Bill Whittle exposes here.

The one point on which I agree with the young lady interviewed by Neil Cavuto is that the "Corporate model" of education has become a problem. College presidents used to come from the ranks of the faculty and teach one or two courses in addition to their administrative responsibilities. Today they are drawn from a pool of elite executives and draw salaries rivalling those in the corporate world. That's only the tip of the iceberg.

The other part I'm concerned apart is that what most students are getting in exchange for the astronomical tuitions their parents are forking over is more often than not either the equivalent of a technical trade school education (computer science, mechanical engineering, business management, nursing, etc.), which they could get far more economically at a local community college, or something that passes for a "liberal arts" education but is really anything but that (queer studies, feminist studies, post-colonial Latin American studies, gender studies, literature of phallocentrism, etc.), usually taught by the most illiberal ideologues on campus.

What can be done? (1) If people want to keep the expectation that all their kids will "go to college," colleges may have to give up their "corporate model." Otherwise they will no longer be able to afford college for their kids.

(2) The alternative, which I personally believe makes the most sense, is to abandon the myth that everyone should get a "liberal arts education." First of all, most colleges and universities are not really "liberal arts" institutions anymore anyway. Second, the vast majority of students attending them aren't cut out to study the "liberal arts" as classically understood, even if the institutions retained a required core of traditional "liberal arts" studies. This would require going back to the old, traditional English and European models of education, where the vast majority of students out of high school would go to trade schools or finishing schools, and only a handful of those interested and able would go on for a traditional liberal arts educations at universities, for which they'd have to compete for limited scholarships.

So-called "college education" these days has pretty much collapsed into a fantasy. There are rare and valiant exceptions; but it seems to me that the writing has been on the wall for some time.

Funny thing: I doubt most "college grads" today could pass eighth grade-level exams like this from 1895.

[Hat tip to C.B.]

Pope's new rock video

Way cool! Now what used to be known as the religion of patriarchal male-chauvinist and homophobic repression will surely be embraced by Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber as the religion of cool.

Imagine no religion: John Lennon, the occult, and post-Christian culture

Carl Eric Scott, "Carl’s Rock Songbook, No. 106, John Lennon, 'Imagine No Religion'" (National Review, May 21, 2015), offers a read, as one correspondent suggests, that is "long, hard to read, and perhaps brilliant." Really. This is a pretty amazing tour-de-force for an online article. In it you learn about John Lennon's brief flirtation with Christianity, his re-immersion into the occult with Yoko Ono, and a whole lot more, all the while accompanied by the thoughtful musings of the author. Like this:

Such a thesis would still predict the more intellectual types abandoning religion as the world modernizes, but would also predict that the less educated masses remain “religious,” by serially entertaining diverse spiritual teachings, as in the days of the pre-Christian Roman Empire. This eclecticism could show up on surveys as a wide belief in “religion,” but this would be misleading if thought about in the old way. For the heretical religiosity of the many would join the secularism of the elite upon precisely one point: defensive opposition to the truth-claims of orthodox Biblical religion, and to the slightest hints of government, corporate, or associational respect being given them. Additionally, this adjusted thesis would regard it as perfectly predictable that the “Great Disruptions” of the 60s and their aftermath, and particularly in the area of sexual relations, would provoke a counter-reactive revival of traditional Judeo-Christian faith for a generation or so. However, the newer generations of those who lost connection with orthodox religion would find ways to live without it, and, to more practically live with the new personal freedom. The latter pattern would be in marked contrast to the wild experiments undertaken by the original revolutionary generation. So in the aggregate sense, the population would return to the overall modern trajectory of decreasing belief in Biblical religion after the 80s/90s plateau, or apparent reversal. It was also predictable that the new personal freedom would license and encourage a greater exploration of religions and religious practices that had never been collectively authoritative—either by law or by common opinion–in America and Europe. The champions of my posited adjusted secularization thesis would admit that the new personal freedom has lead to a lot of “bad religion” of the individualistic and crudely-thinking sort that Douthat describes, but would claim that much of this is pretty harmless and unserious.

GQ on Coulbert: "Totally smoking ..." Ha-ha!

Or, says our underground correspondent, Guy Noir - Private Eye, perhaps, with an eye to the pope on the cover of Vanity Fair and Colbert in GQ, the title of this post should read "AMERICAN CATHOLICISM 2015"

See Joel Lovell's GQ article: "The Late, Great Stephen Colbert" (GQ, August 27, 2015), and then this video:

Watch this video on The Scene.

And then there's Bishop-elect Robert Barron's "Stephen Colbert, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Henry Newman, and the Providence of God" (CWR, August 25, 2015), although I something tells me we won't be seeing Bishop Barron making the cover of either Vanity Fair or GQ, as much as he may covet the honor.

New textament (Bible in text-message language)

From New Oxford Review ...

Ed. Note: This year marks the tenth anniversary of The News You May Have Missed. In celebration of this milestone, we bring you the “top ten” entries, as determined by the editors, from the first ten years of this column.

10. New txtament (Dec. 2005)

The Bible Society in Australia has translated the Old and New Testaments into text-message language, the form of shorthand communication made popular on the Internet and cell phones. “In da Bginnin God cre8ed da heavens & da earth,” the SMS (short message service) version begins. “Da earth waz barren, wit no 4m of life; it waz unda a roaring ocean cuvred wit dRkness.” A spokesman for the society commented, “The old days when the Bible was available only in a sombre black cover with a cross on it are long gone” (emphasis added) (Telegraph, Oct. 7, 2005).

"Nightcrawler: my favorite Catholic super hero"

Charmaine Wagner, "The Amazing Catholic Nightcrawler!" (Skeeoh, August 25, 2013), writes: "Kurt Wagner A.K.A Nightcrawler is not only my favorite super heroes in general, he is also my favorite Catholic super hero. Here are some of his awesome quotes":

“We are alike, you and I — angry at the world. My pain drives me to seek God, yours drove you away. Our ability to understand God’s purposes is limited, but take comfort in the fact that His love is limitless.”- Nightcrawler to Wolverine

Read more >> ... and have a look at this revealing clip, if you're interested:

Church crisis illustrated by country music?

According to one amusing wag, HERE.

Epidemic pornography, the new crack cocaine of addictive disorders: Russell Brand, Psychologist Dr. Peter Kleponis, and Mark Houck of The King's Men

Shakespeare's classics in 3 seconds each

Peace, Good Tickle-Brain

[Hat tip to JM]

Pope Francis earning street cred in "Thug Life" rap

Signs of the times, eh? Listen to the end of the video. The rap number starts at about 25 seconds into the video.


I'm not quite sure how to take this video. As you can see for yourself, some of the comments claim that the video was intended a defence of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. I'm not sure.

There's a bit about the group HERE and a compilation of Thug Life music video's HERE.

Geneva Convention to ban Marty Haugen Music

"Marty Haugen Music To Be Outlawed Under New Geneva Convention Resolution" (October 24, 2013):

Geneva, Switzerland–New guidelines set down by the international community during the fifth Geneva Convention this week has extensively defined the basic, spiritual wartime rights of the Church Militant by outlawing all Marty Haugen music used in and around war-zones. What is officially being called The Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Parishioners in Times of Spiritual War has become the fifth convention establishing the standards on international law for the humanitarian treatment of spiritual war. “Our new resolution states that all Catholics who are in the process of spiritual warfare are to be treated humanely,” Said General of the Counsel Robert Durant at a press conference earlier this morning. “The following acts are to be henceforth prohibited: Violence to life and person, in particular, cruel treatment and torture by means of being made to listen to Gather Us In. Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment such as asking parishioners to sing along to We Remember. And finally, all acts requiring parishioners to listen to said music during the reception of communion.”

All this, of course, is entirely serious. I'm serious.

[Hat tip to C.N.]