Because unsolicited and cringeworthy, ads started springing up on my free WordPress site, I bit the bullet and shelled out for an upgraded, ad-free site. Proprietor WordPress claims my new, paid-for site has various gimcracks and geegaws which will dazzle and enhance your blogging experience. Uh-huh.
Meanwhile, please make a note of the site’s new URL, posted above. This site will continue to exist, but I am not sure new postings will make it here, so in the future please go to the new address.
At the turn of this century a so-called “experimental poet,” Christian Bök, published a book of poetry in five chapters, which were not numbered but lettered, i. e., chapters A, B, C, D, E. Why, you ask? To indicate to the reader the sole vowel to be used in the poem of that chapter. Bök titled his book “Euonia,” which happens to be the shortest word in English containing all five vowels. Its meaning, ironically, is “beautiful thinking.”
Herewith, a sample of Bök’s beautiful thinking, from Chapter U.
Kultur spurns Ubu – thus Ubu pulls stunts. Ubu shuns Skulptur: Uruk urns (plus busts), Zulu jugs (plus tusks). Ubu sculpts junk für Kunst und Glück. Ubu busks. Ubu drums drums, plus Ubu strums cruths (such hubbub, such ruckus): thump, thump; thrum, thrum. Ubu puns puns. Ubu blurts untruth: much bunkum (plus bull), much humbug (plus bunk) – but trustful schmucks trust such untruthful stuff; thus Ubu (cult guru) must bluff dumbstruck numbskulls (such chumps). Ubu mulcts surplus funds (trust funds plus slush funds). Ubu usurps much usufruct. Ubu sums up lump sums. Ubu trumps dumb luck.
Moves one to the quick, doesn’t it?
Recently I received via a friend a story from Headline USA which brought to mind the poetry of Christian Bök. The story concerns (deep breath now) the first openly transgender bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, who is hopping mad over being fired from his position.
What brought to mind poet Bök and his singular use, in both senses of the word, of vowels was the Headline USA editor who, forced by company policy when reporting on trans matters to eschew the use of all personal pronouns, “translated,” as it were, the original wire-service story from conventional English into a tour de force of unintended comedy.
Excerpts:
In his lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Rohrer accuses the denomination of discriminating against Rohrer for being transgender and deliberately misgendering Rohrer and creating a “hostile work environment.”
Rohrer, who now works as a senior communications specialist with a black nondenominational church in San Francisco, said Thursday that Rohrer always felt the support of Lutherans in the pews, but not from the higher echelons of the national church. On Rohrer’s first day as bishop, during a video call, Rohrer said Rohrer was misgendered and ridiculed for featuring drag queens at Rohrer’s ordination.
Rohrer alleges in the lawsuit that Rohrer was scapegoated and “publicly shamed as a racist.”
What your Tatler would really like to see is a grafting of the two linguistic techniques above, with the story of the unfortunate trans bishop rewritten not only without the use of personal pronouns but employing only one vowel as well: a splendid hybridization that could well lead to a new 21st-Century literary genre!
CWN Editor’s Note: Bishop Paul Dempsey, who has led the Diocese of Achonry since 2020, warned the faithful of his diocese of the ‘need to let go of some of the familiar ways we have experienced parish life in the past.’
‘The crisis has become very real,’ he wrote in a Lenten pastoral letter.’The last ordination to the Priesthood in the Diocese was 2013. We currently have no student studying for the Priesthood.’
‘Up to 2022, we had a resident priest in every parish, however, this has now changed, and sadly we will no longer be able to provide a resident priest in each parish,’he continued. ‘At best, there will be 12 priests serving in the 23 parishes of our diocese in 10 years’ time. It is important that we are fully aware of this reality and its implications. We have never been here before.’
Meanwhile, with the Pope seemingly wishing to drive church attendance lower and lower, the Vatican issued the restrictive statement below, making it even more difficult for the Latin Mass to be celebrated by requiring all permission requests to be addressed to the Vatican alone, removing the right from all bishops and cardinals to grant them. It’s a no-brainer what the answers to most of those requests will be.
This is despite those churches where Usus Antiquior is celebrated enjoying far fuller pews, with worshippers far younger than the average Catholic. Holy Church’s downward spiral will continue, especially now that here in the US, the FBI and the radical leftist Southern Poverty Law Center have joined in the fun and piled on the efforts attacking the Latin Mass.
In the Vatican Curia they live in terror. “Il cretino gloriosamente regnante” [The gloriously reigning cretin], is an expression heard with some frequency within the sacred walls. But the most repeated word is terror. It is the regime that the Argentine pope has installed there. No one knows how long he will be in office and, even worse, no one knows who is spying on whom, for that is another one of Bergoglio’s methods: spying, to know what each of the priests and religious who walks around the Sacred Palaces are thinking and saying.
And:
I have been able to speak in recent weeks with priests from all walks of life. There is no need to pour out here the opinions of conservatives and traditionalists. Everyone knows them. What has astonished me is that the most progressive priests, who are generally also the oldest, have the same dislike for Bergoglio as that of their younger colleagues. It is no longer a doctrinal question in which traditionalists are pitted against progressives; it is something of a more basic level and has to do with the human and the institutional element.
Read the whole thing, it’s breathtaking. Is this dour situation common knowledge?
The Muslim name Muhammad is now the most popular birth name in one of Ireland’s most populous cities.
According to Ireland’s Central Statistics Office, Muhammad was the most common birth name for boys in the city of Galway in 2022, marking a first in the once deeply Catholic nation’s history.
Irish Freedom Party president and faithful Catholic Hermann Kelly told Church Militant, “We see in Galway City that we are being demographically replaced by Muslims. Islamic culture is a political ideology of violent conquest and submission with a thin veneer of religion. We need thousands of poverty-stricken, violence-prone Muslims in Ireland like we need a hole in the head.”
Meanwhile, modern CatholicLites® and their allies in secular humanist circles blithely ignore or even welcome those whose religion teaches them not only to despise Catholics and Catholicism, but the whole of Irish and western culture. No melting pot for them.
Paradoxically, look what else CatholicLites® and their allies are up to.
Earlier this month, Ireland’s arts minister announced that the 2023 St. Patrick’s Day festival would showcase drag queens and other LGBT-themed performances, parades and events — effectively replacing the celebration of Ireland’s patron saint with sexual degeneracy.
Kelly quipped, “It’s ironic that Far Left anti-Christian radicals will be the first, as homosexual and LGBTIQ campaigners, to be thrown by Muslims off the high buildings in Galway.”
The Church Militant essay closes:
In addition to the loss of Irish religious culture, the fact that Mohammed is now the most common boys’ name in the main city in the west of Ireland is a clear indication of the replacement of the native Irish population.”
I would amend that slightly. There is certain to be a large number of the “native Irish population” present in Ireland when Islam becomes the law of the land. Most will be welcome to stay after their forced conversions to Islam. Those not welcome however will be Ireland’s homosexuals, who will quickly be rounded up to experience the wrath of Allah.
Read the whole essay.
With thanks to GWR via WJT.
Did Joe Biden fall down the stairs of Air Force One AGAIN when landing for his Ukraine visit?!
After much vacillation and consideration, I have decided to remain in the Catholic Church. Despite, or better put, because of the multitude of woes facing the Holy Church, from the pope down, it behooves me to stay, not flee and do what admittedly little I can do to counter them.
Woman in mufti distributes snacks at mass in the Ursuline School, while Father takes a well-deserved rest.
Note: As regular readers of this blog may know (and apologies for the fewer and fewer posts), I* have been wrestling with deciding whether to stay in the Holy Catholic Church or to leave her. The struggle may beover.
Meanwhile, the Pope is at it again, bashing his critics.
Francis, the world’s first Latin American pope, also took the opportunity to lash out at clerical conservatives who have been criticizing him over a variety of issues since the passing of Benedict XVI. ‘His death has been instrumentalized [sic] by people who want to bring water to their own mill,’ he said, using an Italian expression that means to profit at the expense of others. ‘The people who exploit such a good person, a Holy Father of God… These people have no ethics, they are party people, not Church people.’ (Italics added.)
Francis has been making it increasingly clear lately how deeply he despises those Catholics who prefer worshiping in the manner established in 1570 at the Council of Trent, and which has roots going back many centuries earlier. He and most of the brass currently occupying the Vatican want to, essentially, rasa the tabula by not only dumbing down the mass even further and banning again its celebration in Latin, thus forcing the use of inelegant translations into the vernacular, but also scrapping much of the accompanying dignified rituals that enhance worship.
In short, Pope Francis and his reformist colleagues’s missions seem to be transforming the Catholic Church into something resembling Episcopal Church-Lite with contemporary aesthetics like do-it-yourself liturgy and complete disdain for silly rules, such as those dictating by whom the host should be distributed (see photo above), their argument being along the lines: “those rules and others are oppressive to women, never mind they recreate biblical history.”
Alas, I cannot bear any longer watching Holy Church’s downward race to banality and blandness. Worship should be elaborate, beautiful, and awesome (in the proper sense of that last word, not California surfer-speak). A church of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, whose Divine Liturgies I have been attending lately, offers those things. And while I do not agree with certain Orthodox positions clashing with those of the Catholic Church, for now, we will simply have to agree to disagree. Not very satisfactory I know, but it’s the best I can manage at present. Please pray for this sinner.
***
*I have decided to drop use of the third-person. It’s just too cumbersome.
Archbishop Aquila of Denver responds to Cardinal McElroy's essay on the synod:
"I must admit that if I thought the way some of my brothers think, I would have left the Church long ago and joined another Christian community."https://t.co/8Z874r9n8k
The satanists believe abortion is a “religious” sacrament.
On Wednesday the Satanic Temple announced they will open a “religious medical services clinic” in New Mexico. The clinic will provide free religious medication abortion care to women in the state.
The Satanic Temple hopes to expand operations into other states, including those that do not allow clinicians to perform abortions. “TST is proud to expand reproductive options for our members. This is just the beginning,” said Erin Helian, Executive Director of Campaigns. “We will remain steadfast as we continue the fight to uphold reproductive justice in the United States.” The Satanic Temple has argued in its lawsuits against Texas that under the First Amendment, and federal and state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, its abortion ritual is exempt from restrictions and bans because the procedure is an essential part of religious practice.
Finally, truth in advertising: let us pray these devil worshippers display their name writ large and proud above the door so passers by may see precisely what sort believe killing the unborn is just ducky. Maybe, just maybe, it may persuade potential users of their facilities to seek the plentiful alternatives. Just maybe.
THE TAOS TATLER. 