Move over Mr. Bush, here's Billy the Rambo Democrat!

"The Israelis know that if the Iraqi or the Iranian army came across the Jordan River, I would personally grab a rifle, get in a ditch, and fight and die."

-- Former US President Bill Clinton, July 31, 2002

[Hat tip, Christopher]

Hermeneutics of Fittingness: Hand-Holding during the Our Father

In the combox to the post, "Parish vs. Church?" (July 10, 2006), I let slip the remark "hand-holding during the Our Father, and such giddy nonsense", to which a notoriously liberal Irish priest responded with the predictable comment: "many find this practice deeply expressive of our togetherness before God as his children in Christ." I said then that I was thinking of a future post on this issue, because I think what he wrote expresses what is wrong with a lot of popular sentiment and sentimentalism in Catholic parishes today.

Checking back at that combox today, I noticed that many of our readers have already jumped the gun, beginning a thread on this very topic in that combox. As the interest seems to be there, let me open the topic up for more general comment with this post. Once again, the over-arching question (in this series on the "hermeneutics of fittingness") concerns the fittingness of hand-holding during the Our Father within the context of the Sacrifice of the Mass.

Karl Keating has commented on what he sees as the inappropriateness of hand-holding (more 'intimate' than a hand-shake) before the point in the Mass where the sign of peace comes (usually a nod of the head and/or shake of the hand with a "May the Peace of Christ be with you"). Keating asks, "What would you do if you were standing in line to buy a ticket at a movie theater and some stranger came up and wanted to hold your hand?" Coming from a background in Japan where I grew up, I know that any touching between strangers is exceedingly uncomfortable and avoided where possible. It was difficult, twenty or thirty years ago, for Japanese businessmen to begin learning how to shake hands rather than bow when greeting a foreign visitor from the West. In Japanese Catholic churches, the sign of peace is expressed with a bow toward one's neighbor, not a handshake. A fortiori, the prospect of reaching out one's hands to hold hands with complete strangers on either side of you in church during the Our Father is something any traditional Japanese person would find wrenchingly inappropriate and invasive. Likewise an Englishman. Likewise a Scandinavian. The practice -- which did not originate in the hispanic milieu, or Africa, where it might at least be intelligible -- becomes understandable in the West, if at all, perhaps only as a product of the cultural milieu of the 'Age of Aquarius' and paisley-clad, psychedelic-tripping, bell bottom-sporting, tie-dye-wearing, "Blowing-in-the-Wind"-singing background from which all these sorts of post-Vatican II developments, including the Charismatic Renewal, emerged.

I wouldn't for a moment deny that one could find this practice "expressive of our togetherness before God as his children in Christ." I've heard people, not all of them heterodox liberals, express such sentiments before. As far as I'm concerned, however, the question isn't whether such a gesture is expressive of such a sentiment (it can be), or whether such as sentiment is a good sentiment (it obviously is), or even whether it's good to cultivate it (it surely is). The question is whether this particular gesture, this act, this sentiment, and whatever else it involves (clammy palm-consciousness? thoughts about the person standing next to me? why are my hands being squeezed in this way?) belong in and are appropriate to the collective act which is the work of the people (Gk. leitourgia -- i.e., the 'liturgy') in the Mass. There are countless other things -- good in themselves -- that one could easily think of that would not be appropriate during Mass -- reading a novel, text messaging a friend, dancing a Tango, eating an ice cream sundae ... So what about hand-holding?

Here are what some readers have already been saying in the earlier combox, to prime the pump:

• I would like to know a) where and how this gesture originated in the context of the Mass, b) what it signifies in other communal-spiritual contexts, and c) whether its signification is truly fitting within the meaning of the Catholic liturgy. [Dave]
  
  
• Perhaps the Catholic Charismatic movement is the origin of the hand-holding? [Spirit of Vatican II]
  
  
• Perhaps the gesture of holding hands during the Lord's prayer COULD be a fitting expression of our collective self-sacrifice, assuming that we have a shared understanding of the essence of the liturgy as sacrifice in the first place. Yet what if that shared understanding is lacking? Worse, what if the "tradition" of hand-holding was introduced precisely to UNDERCUT that shared understanding? What if it was introduced to reinforce the errant theological opinion that our "togetherness in Christ" is the essential meaning of the Mass? [Dave]
  
  
• Adoremus has already spoken on the issue of various shenanigans during the Our Father. Upshot is that, after the usual fumbling, stumbling, and misstating, nothing has been said officially, which to luminaries like Fr Joe means that anything goes. Here's a quote from their article, which you can get by typing adoremus orans posture into your browser:
  
  "At their November 2001 [USCCB] meeting, the bishops discussed "adaptations" to the new Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani (or GIRM) of the new Missal (reported in AB February 2002). The proposal to introduce the orans posture for the people was not included even as an option in the US' "adaptations" to the GIRM.
  
  Furthermore, the bishops did not forbid hand-holding, either, even though the BCL originally suggested this in 1995. The reason? A bishop said that hand-holding was a common practice in African-American groups and to forbid it would be considered insensitive.
  
  Thus, in the end, all reference to any posture of the hands during the Our Father was omitted in the US-adapted GIRM. The orans posture is not only not required by the new GIRM, it is not even mentioned."
  
  The orans posture is the bit of priest-aping whereby members of the congregation raise their hands palms up, imitating the priest, or Charlton Heston in "The Ten Commandments". Sometimes they sway gently, like palm trees in an ocean breeze, an affectation of ecstasy, an imitation of Alfred E Newman saying "what, me worry?", you be the judge. [ralph roiter-doister]
  
  
• On hand-holding during the Lord's Prayer at Mass, my former Archbishop confirmed your surmise that this comes from the charismatic movement. I found the practice particularly problematic as a catechist. We taught that the liturgical changes stripped away accretions and revived ancient practices, like the Sign of Peace. But pointing out that the new accretion of hand-holding overshadowed the revived Sign of Peace was to no avail. Hand-holding was claimed to be more in accord with .... the Spirit of Vatican II. [Terrence Berres]
  
  
• Terrence,
  Exactly how does the sign of peace conflict with holding hands? Why assume that the fig leaf, "revived ancient practices", grants a special cachet, especially since no one knows exactly what those practices consisted of? Maybe the disciples held hands too.
  
  In truth, both are distractions from the substance of the "Our Father". [ralph roiter-doister]
  
  
• I'm reporting the description of the conciliar liturgical reform from the course materials provided at my parish. We can all have opinions, but that doesn't create instructional materials to replace what we currently have to work with.
  
  By overshadowing I mean that shaking hands with someone doesn't seem as significant after you've just been holding hands with them.
  
  As to distraction, the hand-holding is during the Lord's Prayer, while the Sign of Peace is not. [Terrence Berres]
  
  
• What one is doing at the time of both the recitation of the "Our Father" and the sign of peace is prayerfully meditating on the sacrifice of the Son of God for our redemption. This will culminate in our reception of the body and blood, in which that sacrifice is embodied.
  
  Holding hands and waving to each other distracts us from that meditation.
  
  You could say it detracts from the idea of the mystical body, transforming it into a social gathering, with the "mystical" portion is eclipsed by the "social". [ralph roiter-doister]
  
  
• What, then, would be fitting gestures at the recitation of the Lord's prayer and the sign of peace? I would opt for hands folded reverently during the Lord's prayer.
  
  What if at the sign of peace we turned to our neighbor and blessed them with the sign of the cross? [Dave]
  
  
• Sorry Dave, but I don't think the neighbor should be in it at all at that point. It is between God and each member of the mystical body, not among individual members themselves.
  The time for individual members to recognize one another, I think, would be at the beginning of the Mass, around the time at which we meditate on our sins and pray for mercy. That, after all, is our common plight. [ralph roiter-doister]

Alright, go to it!

Bug fixed in comboxes

Many apologies. The comboxes were down for nearly two days; and after receiving a number of emails inquiring about what happened to them, I thought I should post a note. I couldn't figure out the problem and contacted the folks at Haloscan.com, who discovered a bug in the comboxes, and fixed it for us. So there were are again, up and running. Sorry for the inconvenience, folks; but we're back in operation again. Happy commenting!

-- Pertinaciously yours, Pertinacious Papist

Lectionary censorship

Who makes the decisions on what to censor in the lectionary? That's what carving up the lectionary up into a "Shorter Form" and "Longer Form" amounts to, when some passages presumably judged to be politically incorrect are omitted from the "Shorter Form," and sometimes even from the "Longer Form" altogether. What this means is that, all too frequently, Catholics are not only not hearing the Law of God expounded to them in their homilies; they're not even hearing it read in their churches. "Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ," said St. Jerome.

"Yes, but what's all this negative harping about Law and sin and judgment but so much guilt mongering! Isn't there enough negativism in the world? Why not accent God's grace, the open embrace of the Gospel, the warm, personal hot tub of Jesus' love?" The answer to that, my friends, is all around us. God's love and grace don't even mean anything in a context where they have been eviscerated of their proper content. "Love" in the New Testament always has a content. It's not a free floating sentiment. It's tied to specifics. Jesus said, "If you love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15). Gospel cannot be divorced from law. A Lutheran knows that much. Ask Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the author of The Cost of Discipleship, who railed against "cheap grace." By biblical accounts, the wisest man who ever lived knew a thing or two about wisdom. He was no sophist. He was a lover of wisdom in the profoundest sense; and he tied wisdom to -- of all things -- fear. The hot tub folks over with Barney and Friends aren't going to like this, but wisdom doesn't begin with Andrew Sullivan's editorials or Sr. Joan Chittister's diatribes against Vatican's patriarchal authoritarianism. Neither does wisdom begin with self-aggrandizing notions of self-empowerment, self-esteem, or self-assertion. No, the wisest man who ever lived says that the key -- oh, rue the day! -- is fear: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Prov. 1:7).

Now what in the world has happened to the FEAR of the Lord in the Catholic Church? If our Lectionary is any indication, someone has been making a concerted effort to keep us from finding anything to be fearful of, much less offended by, in the Bible. In his New Oxford Notes back in January of 2003 and November of 2004, Dale Vree offered a brief review of how the "Shorter Form" in the Lectionary omits some politically incorrect sayings of the New Testament (Mt. 22:1-14; Mt. 25:14-30; Ephesians 5:21-32) having to do with Hell and with wives being (woe! woe! woe!) subordinate to their husbands (although they do appear in the "Longer Form"). These are worth studying in their own right, and the findings are, I'm sad to say, disturbing. [By the way, Tony Esolen has a great article on the subject of headship, showing that when read correctly, it is the more sobering to men, who are called to lay down their lives. I think it's in Touchstone.]

But then, when it comes to the Gay "Spirit-of-Vatican-II" Lobby's favorite subject of homosexuality, Vree points out that there are passages in the Lectionary that are completely omitted (not to be found in any "Longer Form"). He writes in the Editorial of the June 2006 issue of New Oxford Review:

In the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, First Reading, Cycle C, in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18:20-32), the Lord says, "their sin is so grave," but we're not told what that grave sin is. The following chapter does make it explicit -- the sin of active homosexuality -- but the Lectionary omits it. In the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Abraham bargains with the Lord. Abraham says, "Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city...." The Lord replies, "If I find fifty innocent people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake." Abraham continues to bargain, and at the end, Abraham says, "What if there are at least ten there?" The Lord replies, "For the sake of those ten, I will not destroy it." The reading ends here on a happy note.

The Lord's raining down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah is not found in the Sunday Lectionary. Only in the Weekday Lectionary will you find it (Gen. 19:15-29), and only one percent (at a maximum) of Catholics attend weekday Masses. But again we're not told what the sin of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah is. It's made explicit in Genesis 19:4-7, the same chapter. It's the sin of active homosexuality, but the Lectionary editors chose to omit it.

With the biblical illiteracy of so many Catholics, how many will know it's the sin of active homosexuality?

You will not find Jude, verse 7, in either the Sunday Lectionary or the Weekday Lectionary: "Likewise, Sodom, Gomorrah, and the surrounding towns...in-dulged in sexual promiscuity and practiced unnatural vice, [and] serve as an example by undergoing punishment of eternal fire."

In the Weekday Lectionary, the Twenty-Eighth Tuesday in Ordinary Time, First Reading, Year I, you will find Romans 1:16-25. But verses 26-27, where the Lord condemns homosexual acts, are left out: "Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion."

Apparently, for the editors of the Lectionary, homosexual acts are not serious sins, if they are indeed sins at all. Oh, but they are. The traditional "Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance" are: willful murder, sodomy, oppression of the poor, and dishonesty in wage payments to workers. Homosexual acts are mortal sins, which can send you to Hell for ever and ever.

Vree goes on to comment:

The homosexuals and their fellow-travelers are deeply imbedded in our Church, apparently able to censor out scriptural verses in the Sunday and Weekday Lectionaries. With the new ambiguous document on homosexuals in the seminaries, nothing will change with regard to admitting homosexuals into the seminaries (see our Editorial, Feb. 2006). And as long as homosexuals are in the priesthood and episcopate, our Church will continue to slide downhill.

Yes, we Catholics have faith that the Gates of Hell will never prevail against Christ's true Church, but they could prevail in the U.S. and Europe, just as they prevailed in North Africa.

Of course, the Gay "Spirit-of-Vatican-II" Lobby has its own pet hermeneutic for its alternate, sanitized way of reading all of these passages, which turns these offenses from "Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance" into mere venial offenses against hospitality and so forth. But this is patent sophistry and a vain howling into the wind.

But back to the central topic: Who has authority over the editing of the Lectionary? This whole politicizing of Scripture is unconscionable. Let Scripture be Scripture. Let God be God. Fear Him. FEAR Him. Find peace. Find joy. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Prov. 1:7).

Parish vs. Church?

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon. Among many good Protestant friends of mine -- especially members of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) with which my academic institution is affiliated -- I've noticed that there is an antipathy to the denomination as a whole that seems proportional to the affection for the local parish and its community and fellowship. On the other hand, I've noticed among a good many Catholic friends of mine the opposite phenomenon -- a frequent antipathy for their local parish that seems proportional to an affection they hold for the Church as a whole. The Protestant seems to be saying (though this is an obvious overstatement): "I love my parish: it's my church I can't stand," while the Catholic seems to be saying: "I love my Church: it's my parish I can't stand." I know there are exceptions and caveats. But the patterns seem to be there. Comments?

Why some scientists accept patent absurdity

Harvard population biologist, Richard Lewontin, an atheist who thinks that matter is all there is, writes in the New York Review of Books:

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our own a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, not matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door."

Again, the well-known philosopher, Thomas Nagel writes in his book, The Last Word that much of contemporary subjectivism may be due to "fear of religion," citing his own fear of religion as a case in point:

"I speak from experience being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that .... My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning and design as fundamental features of the world."

There's some disarming honesty about atheists not being honest with themselves! If Nagel is right, then those who say that theism is a crutch have got it backwards, at least for certain sectors of our intellectual culture. For these portions of contemporary intellectual culture, it's atheism that serves as a crutch!

[Richard Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons," New York Review of Books 44:1 (January 9, 1997): 28-32; The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 130-131; cf. J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know, pp.62-64.]

You gotta love those Nigerian Anglican Bishops

The Archibishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently proposed a two-tier system of church membership in the Anglican Communion -- the idea being that full and partial membership could save the Communion from schism. Anglican bishops in Nigeria responded this week. The Church of Nigeria is Africa's largest Anglican church, with an estimated 17.5 million members, according to the BBC:

In their statement, posted on two websites, the Nigerian bishops commend Dr Williams' idea as “brilliant as the heartbeat of a leader who wants to preserve the unity of the Church by accommodating every shred of opinion no matter how unbiblical.”

In that single sentence they've summed up the Gospel of Inclusivism pervading Anglicanism, the ECUSA, the Presbyterians, the ELCA, and proto-schismatic sectors of the Catholic Church championed by voices like those of Call to Action, Voice of the Faithful, Dignity, and all those despisers of Trent enamored of the "Spirit" of Vatican II.

[Hat tip to Christopher]

Can human nature change? A caveat on Fr. Reardon's Ponderings

Fr. Patrick Reardon, the former Catholic priest who is now a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church and editor of Touchstone Magazine, offers an email subscription to his exegetical reflections, which are subsequently (I think) posted to his website at OrthodoxyToday.org under the heading of "Father Pat's Pastoral Ponderings." His email ponderings are forwarded to me occasionally by a friend, and the most rescent of these was for the week of July 16, 2006, and began thus:

In biblical history the Lord gives us, not only the definitive revelation of Himself but also the conclusive revelation of man. That is to say, divine revelation addresses not only the question, "Who is God?" but also the question, "What is man?" I suggest it is useful for Christians to reflect on the unique character of the Bible's answer to this question, because we take our biblical anthropology so much for granted that we fail to count it among those things that many prophets and kings have desired to see but have not seen them.

Without divine revelation there are all sorts of theories about man, and in fact the Christian Gospel was obliged to contend with certain of those theories.

One such theory, for instance, claimed (and still does) that "human nature does not change." This theory is understandably attractive, because it provides a sense of universality among human beings and a sense of continuity throughout history. Indeed, as applied to a specified, narrow range of human experiences, we can even call it true.

Yet, if we adhere to the full anthropology of divine revelation, it is strictly speaking not true that "human nature does not change." Indeed, it is the very business of divine revelation to cause human nature to change.

Fr. Reardon goes on to make a case for the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of 'theosis' (deification), which is not quite what it may sound like it is. It is the thoroughly Christian and Catholic doctrine, really, of human nature becoming transformed in Christ by being incorportated into Christ and conformed to His divinity. The notion is attested in 2 Peter 1:4, where St. Peter speaks of our becoming "partakers of the divine nature." This is what Fr. Reardon intends by his argument above, and with this we have no quarrel.

However, I propose a caveat to Fr. Reardon's notion here of an 'unfixed' human nature above, because it think it is open to serious, if unintended, misunderstandings and distortions. With all due respect to the vitally imperative point that Fr. Reardon is making here about the Athanasian thesis that God became man in order to make men 'divine,' one can easily see even in stating the matter thus how easily it can fall prey to misunderstanding. God did become man in Jesus. But when men are elevated in theosis to become "partakers of the divine nature" (as St. Peter says in his epistle), they do not cease being creatures or cease belonging to the species, homo sapiens. Reardon's point that human nature has a supernatural telos or end is important, but it must be supplemented by the addendum that this telos is always proper to the human nature or esse (he doesn't like that word, but there's neither anything objectionable about it, nor is the concept it entails avoidable). As human nature has natural ends (physical and social wellbeing, marriage, children, etc.), so it has supernatural ends (sanctity, glorification, and eternal fellowship with the Holy Trinity). But while these supernatural ends are proper to a nature that is altered by the remediating sanctifcation of God's grace, they are also ends that are proper to a human nature. They are not ends proper to, say, the nature of a stone, a tree, a cloud, or a tadpole. Thus, while I would second Fr. Reardon's notion of theosis as involving human nature in an openness to change, I would not want anyone to mistakenly suppose this notion of 'change' to mean that human beings have no stable nature -- a currently quite popular view among those who presume, among other things, that same-sex 'marriage' may substitute for the heterosexual archetype among men and women with 'changed' natures.

Fr. Reardon is a friend of mine. We have sat on the same panels at conferences. I know him and like him, and we find ourselves on the same side of many arguments, even if we disagree on the 'little' matter of the Papacy and Church authority. I consider him a great ally in the culture wars that beset us, just as I number among some of my fellow Catholics those who would regard me as their enemy.

Sheldon Vanauken & the 'Severe Mercy' of unwanted pregnancy

Some of you will know the name of Sheldon Vanauken, the Virginia historian and former Oxford grad who was converted through the influence of his wife and, among others, C.S. Lewis at Oxford. Those of you who have read his autobiographical love story, A Severe Mercy, will know what I mean when I call it one of the most poignant and hear-rending Christian love stories of the twentieth-century. Containing as it does, many previously unpublished letters of C.S. Lewis in the correspondence between Vanauken and Lewis, it makes for a story that is not only deeply personal but deeply theological.

Not everyone who has read the more popular love story, however, has read the less-known sequel, Under the Mercy, written after Vanauken's subsequent conversion to the Catholic Faith. His account of his Catholic conversion is briefly but powerfully sketched in Ch. IX, entitled "The English Channel," a chapter that is reprinted in an anthology of conversion stories edited by Dan O'Neill, called The New Catholics: Contemporary Converts Tell Their Stories, of which I have written a brief review article ("Contemporary Converts Tell Their Stories").

Still fewer are acquainted with the poitnant story of the daughter his wife Jean Davis ('Davy') had out of wedlock before they were married, and gave up for adoption, and who later found Sheldon Vanauken after the tragically premature death of Davy. The story was initially published by Vanauken in a 1990 article entitled "Discovery: Finding that Long-Lost Someone," published by the New Oxford Review where he served as a contributing editor. It was subsequently republished in The Little Lost Marion and Other Mercies (1996).

On January 21st of this year, The Charlotte Observer ran a column by the Charlotte Catholic Lawyer, Thomas J. Ashcraft entitled "'Wholeness of Vision' on Abortion." The story picks up the thread of this latter story from Vanauken's article about meeting his long-lost step-daughter. Here's what Ashcraft wrote:

It will take more than windbag senators and coy judicial nominees to determine what the settled law on abortion should be. A just answer will only be found by listening to people who have passed through this life and learned how to deal wisely with pregnancy when it arrives as unwelcome news.

Sheldon Vanauken (1914-1996) taught history and literature for years at Lynchburg College in Virginia. He is best known for his book "A Severe Mercy," first published in 1977 and still in print.

It tells the story of Vanauken's love for his wife Jean Davis, known as Davy, their experience together at Oxford University where they became friends of C.S. Lewis, their conversion to Christianity, and Davy's early death from a mysterious liver ailment in 1955. A lyrical and deeply touching book, it is impossible to read with dry eyes.

Although full of details about the couple and their life together, "A Severe Mercy" omitted a major event from Davy's youth. Vanauken related it in a 1990 article entitled "Discovery: Finding that Long-Lost Someone," published by the New Oxford Review where he served as a contributing editor (www.newoxfordreview.org).

Two years after the death of her minister father when she was 14 years old, Davy, as Vanauken tells it, "running a bit wild . . . found herself pregnant. There was nothing to do but tell her mother, who, along with her older sister, stood by her. All this, of course, is an old, old tale among womankind."

Davy had the baby, whom she called "Marion" and always remembered as blue-eyed and beautiful, and gave her up for adoption. Davy was then "sent to a good prep school for girls." During her marriage to Vanauken, "Davy continued to remember her daughter with love, her daughter growing up -- somewhere."

After Davy's death and the publication of "A Severe Mercy," Vanauken wondered about "little lost Marion" and how much she would learn about her mother by reading the book. He began to search for her but encountered the usual hurdles in the adoption world.

In 1988, however, the adoption agency finally consented to tell "Marion" (her adoptive parents had given her a different name) of Vanauken and his book about Davy. While Vanauken was trying to decide how to contact Marion, Marion dialed him up on the phone "wild with excitement."

"Found at last," Marion later wrote. "Incredible, choking joy! Thanksgiving. Yet sadness also -- sadness that I could not touch her, hold her, and be held."

On "A Severe Mercy," Marion wrote to Vanauken: "At once thrilling and scary! My heart pounding. Almost breathless with discovery, unable to sleep till I'd read every word. Excited beyond belief, sobbing, my pillow wet with tears. Seeing my mother as a young woman loving the things I loved -- beauty, dogs, sails in the wind, music. I had been starving for this -- and now the book. I loved her love for you and your sharing and the incredibly wise things you did to protect your love. And the piercing beauty of Christ coming into your lives."

After high school Marion had become a nurse. She later met and married a physician. They had three children and lived in the San Francisco area. One daughter had Davy's smile.

Having experienced the loss of his wife and discovering much later his wife's grown daughter and her own family, Vanauken acquired a unique understanding of what is meant by those asserting the "right to choose."

"To see abortion right-side-up I must see," he wrote, "not only the frightened 14-year-old Davy with a likely candidate for abortion in her belly but also the warmly alive Marion and her family. This has been shown to me. Having seen, how could I now say: 'What a pity she couldn't have an abortion in those benighted days!'

"To kill Marion now would be unthinkable, but it was Marion -- no one else -- when Davy was 14 and scared. I can sympathetically feel for Davy then, but I know Marion and her children, too. Surely both must be known or imagined for wholeness of vision."

Vanauken concluded: "John Donne, hearing the tolling of the passing bell, recognized that the bell tolled for him, for the death of any man diminished him. Davy had only the poignant memory of the little lost Marion, yet she would have been diminished if abortion had deprived her of that memory. . . . It seems to me that just this one abortion would have left a hole in Creation."

And what of 33 years of Roe v. Wade?

[Acknowledgements: A tip of the hat to Tom Ashcraft, who did me the courtesy of emailing me his article. Write him at TAshcraft@bellsouth.net.]

Related reading:

"Sheldon Vanauken, R.I.P.", by Jack Taylor (Catholic Answers)

"Vatican Council II: A Non-Neutral History"

Rome, July 3, 2006 (www.chiesa) - "Upon release of the latest volume, an international pool of scholars directed by Giuseppe Alberigo brings the History of Vatican Council II to a close," writes Sandro Magister. Alberigo's main inspiration, he says, is found in Giuseppe Dossetti, with whom he has been a close collaborator for decades in Bologna. This History of Vatican II, he writes, "is, in no way, neutral":

"This History's principle thesis is that the Council's prime elements are not the very texts it produced and promulgated. Priority, in fact, is given to the event itself. The true Council is found in her 'spirit'. It is not reducible to, but rather, vastly superior to the 'letter' of the Council's texts."

Why, we know commentators on this blog who would just LOVE Dossetti's perspective. Magister continues:

"What's more, the Council's 'spirit' is identified with John XXIII's vision of a 'new Pentecost' for the Church and the world. Meanwhile, the 'letter' probably meant the harnessing of the assizes carried out by Paul VI, the pope who in effect promulgated each and every Council document. The differences between popes John and Paul are given as immeasurable. Almost as if the Montinian 'letter' had suffocated and betrayed the Roncallian 'spirit' of the Council."

There's more to the review. Read the rest here.

"Synod on the Eucharist: The Pope Has the Last Word"

Rome, July 3, 2006 (www.chiesa) - "Benedict XVI is writing the concluding document, which will be published this summer. Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith gives this preview: 'A correction is necessary. The liturgy must be won back, in the spirit of the Council.'" Thus reports Sandro Magister.

The concluding document for a synod, Magister says, usually takes the form of an apostolic exhortation, and is written by the pope. But it is the synod itself -- through the elaborative work of a council of 15 bishops and cardinals -- that writes the outline and presents this to the supreme pontiff. And the council of 15 met in Rome recently (in June) for the last time, urged by the Holy Father to move more quickly.

According to Magister, no surprises are expected from the outline presented by the council. Rather, if there are any surprises, they are more likely to come from Benedict XVI himself, whose definite ideas on the liturgy are a matter of public record. Magister suggests that some indications of the directions of the pope's thought may be found in an interview given by the secretary for the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship, archbishop Albert Malcolm Ranjith Patabendige Don, on June 25 to the French Catholic newspaper La Croix. In this interview, he criticizes the "many tendencies that have banished from view the authentic meaning of the liturgy"; and contrast to these tendencies "a necessary correction, a reform of the reform. We must return to the liturgy in the spirit of the Council."

The interview, conducted by Isabelle de Gaulmyn, touches on the use of Latin, direction of liturgical prayer, and the missal of Pius V. Here is but one excerpt, in English translation, touching on the question of post-conciliar liturgical reforms. Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith replies:

"I have noticed how much the young priests here love to celebrate the Tridentine rite. It must be clarified that this ritual, following the missal of Pius V, has not been 'outlawed.' Should its use be encouraged even more? That's for the pope to decide. But it is certain that a new generation is seeking a greater orientation toward mystery. This is not a question of form, but of substance. In order to speak of the liturgy, what is necessary is not a scientific or historical-theological spirit alone, but above all an attitude of meditation, prayer, and silence.

Once again, it is not a question of being progressive or conservative, but simply of permitting man to pray, to listen to the voice of the Lord. What happens in the celebration of the Lord's glory is not a merely human reality. If one forgets this mystical aspect, everything gets mixed up and confused. If the liturgy loses its mystical and heavenly dimension, then who is left to help man free himself from his egoism and self-enslavement? The liturgy must be above all a road to freedom, in opening man to the infinite."

The original title of the interview, roughly "The reform of Vatican II never got off the ground," is "La reforme Vatican Il n'a jamais decolle" (I'm sorry, but I don't know how to enter diacritical marks on my 'Blogger' program without getting gibberish for output, unless someone can instruct me how.)

Karl Keating: "I've Changed My Mind: I'm Now Pro-Choice"

The following, from Karl Keating's E-Letter of June 13, 2006, is too good to pass up:

Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:

It hasn't been easy. I don't change opinions willy-nilly, especially if I've held them for a long time and if they're about key issues. But I've been doing a lot of soul-searching lately and feel that the only responsible thing to do is to go public and admit that I'm now pro-choice.

Here is my new thinking:

1. The government shouldn't be able to tell me whether to paint my house yellow or green. It's my house, and the choice should be mine. I'm pro-choice.

2. No one should pressure me to buy a foreign rather than a domestic car--or the other way around. It's no one else's business whether I drive a Toyota or a Chevy. The choice should be mine. I'm pro-choice.

3. On election day, I should be able to vote against any scoundrel I wish. I don't want to be nagged into voting against this guy or that. I can choose my own scoundrels. It's my ballot and my decision. I'm pro-choice.

4. In these E-Letters, I should be able to express any opinion I want. If a reader doesn't like what I say (or doesn't understand irony or parody), tough. It's my E-Letter and my writing. I'm pro-choice.

Precisely because I am so consistently pro-choice when it comes to my own choices, I acknowledge the right of others to make choices of their own.

Just one example:

I think every child should have a choice about whether he will come into this world. If he chooses not to, we should respect that choice. Of course, his choice will have to be manifested in a sufficiently clear way.

When the rest of us make choices--to hire a house painter, to buy a car, even to vote--we sign a contract or somehow make our choices known on paper. The same should apply here, for consistency's sake.

Thus, if an unborn child signs a waiver or agreement or contract (or whatever the document would be) indicating that he doesn't want to come into this world, his choice should be respected. Absent such a signed document, we have to presume that his choice is to come into this world. After all, everyone I know who ended up being born preferred it to the alternative.

Whatever the unborn child decides, we should respect his choice--and we should not allow it to be overruled by someone else's choice. That's my opinion, and that's why I'm pro-choice.

Reading and Gratitude

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Karen Heller writes:

Reading is a solitary pleasure. It forces people to do two increasingly rare activities simultaneously: shutting their mouths while opening their minds.

Best selling author and journalist Melody Beattie contributes the following reflection:

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.

Not many lectures or sermons pack that much punch in such lucid brevity.

'Sodomy' book author exposes Santa Rosa bishop, priest

Randy Engel's soon-to-be released, 1318-page book The Rite of Sodomy: Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church promises to be one of the most controversial books in some time. The author provides Matt C. Abbott with some advance material from the book, which offers incriminating material on Santa Rosa Bishop Daniel F. Walsh and Father Xavier Ochoa:

Santa Rosa Bishop Daniel F. Walsh's complicity in the escape to Mexico of Father Xavier Ochoa, accused of the sexual molestation of a 12-year-old altar boy in Sonoma County, should come as no surprise to Catholics who have followed Walsh's early clerical career as vicar general and auxiliary bishop under Archbishop John R. Quinn of San Francisco.

Read the rest of the story here.

Rush nails it

From Fumare.blogspot.com, which features rotating images of smokers such as McArthur, Tolkien, etc., this quote from Rush Limbaugh:

"But despite all this, folks, there is one place in this country which, if you're there, you are at far greater risk than any American soldier anywhere in the world today, including Iraq, and that is the womb of an American woman. Uniformed soldiers in Iraq are much safer than a baby in an American woman's womb, particularly if that American woman happens to be in a Planned Parenthood office. If you wear the uniform of the United States military in Iraq, you have a fairly good chance of walking out alive. That's not so if you are in a Planned Parenthood clinic in the womb of an American woman who happens to be inside the clinic. Facts are facts, and you don't hear the Democrats concerned about that at all. You don't hear the American left concerned about that at all."

[Hat tip to Christopher]