THE TAOS TATLER.

News item: Tattooed reverend gets hate online as Canterbury Cathedral defends her appointment to leadership role.

Since I’m at a loss for words, I’ll let someone else speak, Moses, in Leviticus 19:28:

Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the Lord. (KJV)

Tellingly, immediately following, in Leviticus 19:29, we read:

Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness.

Tempting as it is, I will not attempt creating a nexus between those two verses, rather, let them stand apart in silent snarkiness. It is worth noting however, before our cultural mores were tossed into the trash in the 1960s, tattoos generally were found only on tradesmen and enlisted men in the armed forces, and rarely on women. The last few decades however they have become familiar adornments, ubiquitous even, among professionals, priests included, though not on Catholic priests, yet; given the wretched state of the Anglican Church these days however, it’s only natural tats would find themselves on the arms and torsos of her priests.

Now, striking a blow for women’s equality, the madre in the news item has indulged herself in those lurid self effacements which, owing to my upbringing, decades later still cause me to cringe. In all honesty, your Tatler cannot look at heavily tattooed people and take them seriously. I know I am not alone in this.

In the case of heavily tatted C of E clergymen, though some have protested them, it hardly matters, as the average Sunday attendance in Anglican (and Episcopal churches, stateside) is likely less than the number of those horrid images on their bodies.

h/t to G & T.

Sin, absolution and penance? That’s soooo yesterday.

This video is a must-see for all observant Catholics. It is an explanation by Gavin Ashenden, an Anglican convert to Catholicism and the Associate Editor of the Catholic Herald. This hearty soul has taken the trouble to slog through the entire instrumentum laboris for Synodality (something this writer gave up about three-quarters through), recently released, which lays out what the synodists have in mind for the future of the Catholic Church. It is ghastly stuff.

In essence, the future Catholic Church, according to the synodists, will have little concern over an individual’s sinful behavior, past or present and will be far more concerned with engagement with him via “conversation” and “acceptance.” The Catholic Church of the future will become a “feel-good” institution, where the words of Jesus will be reinterpreted as progressive relativistic mush.

What is behind this dreadful morass, unsurprisingly, is the LGBTQ+ movement, as if there were among them a large percentage of Catholics, or Catholics to be, which is highly doubtful. Most observant Catholics who are gay likely know what the Catechism expects of them and live their lives accordingly and quietly. So in all, what the Synodality is, is a woke display of virtue signaling. As Mr Ashenden nicely puts it, it is

. . . colored and distorted by the endlessly repeated aphorisms of subjective relativism immersed in constant therapeutic truisms.

We should still beware, though. Should the synodists be successful in pushing this wretched stuff through, we well might see the beginnings of schism in the Catholic Church, as it is unlikely observant Catholics, of all kinds, who reverently practice their religion will want anything to do with the heterodox claptrap the synodists so eagerly promote.

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A footnote: by coincidence (or maybe not), here is the Gospel reading for yesterday’s TLM Mass, the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost. Our pastor in his sermon mentioned it was removed from the Novus Ordo lectionary. Hardly a surprise.

St. Matthew 7. 15-21:

At that time: Jesus said to His disciples, Beware of false prophets, who come to
you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, shall be cut
down, and shall be cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits you shall know them. Not every one that saith to Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom
of heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father who is in heaven, he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.

h/t William J. Tighe.

Alberto Giacometti, Chandelier for Peter Watson. Photo courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd. 2023.

From artnet.com:

The U.K. is fighting to keep a unique bronze chandelier by Alberto Giacometti within its borders, issuing a temporary export ban to give a local institution a chance to match the £2.4 million ($2.9 million) purchase price on the work.

It’s a pretty penny—especially considering the lighting fixture was worth just $700 when British painter John Craxton discovered it in a London antique shop in the 1960s. The artist was immediately aware of the significance of his find, as he recognized the work as having belonged to his late friend Peter Watson, an art collector and important midcentury patron of the arts in the U.K.

$700 seems pricey enough for this light fixture, which to my unpracticed eye appears to be an assemblage of metal parts made into a chandelier after a bit of rummaging around a metal shop. Does the mere fact the artist Giacometti did the rummaging really make it worth a cool three-million? How so?

Can anyone explain what’s so special about a rather dull collection of nuts and bolts, albeit their being made of bronze, without lapsing into artspeak. No? I didn’t think so.

Not long ago at St Francis of Assisi Church in Midtown Manhattan, parishioners hosted an event titled “United in Love Pre-Pride Festive Mass and rooftop BBQ.”

Here are some photos of the event for your delection.

Sheer speculation and hypothetical to say the least, can you imagine this God-awful stuff taking place were the Tridentine Rite being celebrated? Novus Ordo, with its painful informality, invites this sort of junk that the old mass wouldn’t permit.

In the description of this event on the church’s website, is the following.

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Catholics have recently been particularly singled out for vitriolic, uncharitable, and frankly, unchristian, attacks by some members of the Church. In one photo you will see a small protest which took place outside of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi before and during our Mass which underscores this point. This attitude is completely against the teaching of the Church and does not bear witness to Christ who said “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another just as I have loved you.

Here is the referenced photo.

Four “protestors,” observed by a single bystander wordlessly holding a banner urging the participants inside to consider expending their energies humbly devoting themselves to the Heart of Jesus, who suffered for us all, rather than to their own personal “pride.” This is, apparently, an example of “vitriolic, uncharitable, and frankly, unchristian, attacks by some members of the Church.”

The participants in this silliness ought to be reminded, even though a mass was celebrated by a priest sympathetic to heretical behavior, Church teachings are immutable and inviolable on same-sex matters, no matter how many “pride” flags are waved during the eucharist. Indeed, if those particular teachings were changed (along with any other Church teachings) it would mark the end of the Holy Catholic Church.

h/t JJU.

More profound wisdom from a Princess of the Church and something else.

Our Vatican correspondent has unearthed a vitally important document from Her Eminence, Cardinalette Harris. Surprisingly, Her Eminence also moonlights as Vice President of the United States, though few people are aware of it. This newly discovered document concerns how she handles the often crushing responsibilities of her other job

Editor’s note: Princess of the Church and VP Harris has elected to forgo paragraph breaks in order to conserve natural resources. Take a deep breath and plunge into this masterpiece of erudition and edification.

Being Vice President of the United States, I am just one heart beat or brain wave from the Presidency. It is a wonderful but demanding burden because it involves some heavy lifting not physically but with the mind, and the mind we all know is a terrible thing to lose which is why we must use it in order not to lose it because once lost it is just hard to find even if finders are keepers. I often think of my favorite hymn by a slave trader who gave up slavery even though he was not a slave himself: “I once was lost but now am found.” With these wonderful words he is not speaking of losing his mind because he goes on to say that he once was blind but now he sees. Whenever I hear that, I thank the good Lord for modern contact lenses. Of course I mean that I thank the good Lord/Lady. Or better yet, Good Person. In just a couple of days I have had to share my expertise on the two (2) subjects of (1) Transportation and (2) Artificial Intelligence which, as you know, and I really think this is the case, are not related to each other unless in some way they get connected which is an interesting phenomenon, to use a big word, a really big word, because even if they are not connected themselves, transportation is all about connections which is to say connecting one place with another which statistics show is the primary reason why people regardless of race or color travel. I think Joe our president is doing a job which is phenomenal, to use that big word again, to help people connect regardless of their race or color or religion or dietary preferences. That in a profound sense is what travel is all about and if Artificial Intelligence, which is two words, can help people travel, I say there is nothing to fear even though some of the latest intelligence information seems to indicate that we may be soon invaded by extraterrestrial forms of life which can be identified on film by the way they travel in unidentified flying objects, and in a profound sense if they travel in UFOs, in a vital sense you might say that they are UFOs themselves. If they are of higher intelligence then humans on Earth, there would be no need for affirmative action in their college applications but I suppose they would not want to go to college anyway because they are more interested in practical trades such as flying between planets, and we do not know if they have colleges on their own planets anyway. This is something the Supreme Court did not consider in its recent terrible decision about affirmative action based on race regardless of race as I see it. Perhaps Artificial Intelligence can help straighten this out because even if it is artificial it still is intelligent as we can tell by the wonderful way it is two words. By being artificial, we know it is not real in the sense of reality and so there is no reason to feel threatened by it although I deeply feel that it would be unfair to prefer a robot over a person of color, regardless of pronouns. Which gets us back to the subject of travel and I know that my good friend the Secretary of Transportation has unfairly the blamed for all the airplanes and trains recently crashing and blowing up when he really had nothing to do with it and I know this for a fact because he was not personally involved in the crashes and explosions because he never travels himself unless he has to go from one place to another which, as I have previously said, is the definition of transportation and I hope that our new government budget will include significant amounts of funding for trans people who are porters, because that in fact is the central meaning of transportation. In other words, when you use your mind as I began by saying, trans people have a vested interest in transportation and without it they will go nowhere. All this proves that robots have a right to their own pronouns and if they are denied that, they will rust if they are made of metal just like other metal victims of climate change, When I was a young child because of my early age, my mother asked me what I wanted and I said “Fweedom” and thus I already knew even before the older age I am now chronologically with the passing of the passage of time, that fweedom means nothing unless we can avoid unhealthy fwied food and share fresh vegetables with our fwiends and speak fwankly with them about transportation in its most elemental and radical sense of moving to and fwo from one place to another, even in the case of Martians whether or not they exist although we know the planet Mars exists. Thank you and remember that every woman has a right to choose to keep or terminate who own mind.

D’you suppose that’s still the case? Note the word “tragically” in the Twitter post. There are many definitions of “tragic,” but this one in Dictionary.com seems to represent the general consensus of the word’s meaning.

characteristic or suggestive of tragedy:
tragic solemnity.

extremely mournful, melancholy, or pathetic:
a tragic plight.

The actions of the two idiots in this video hardly fit those two definitions. No, they seem downright chipper about their stunt, which may result in their going hand-less the rest of their lives, all for the fraudulent cause of “climate change.”

I’d say the best definition of those protesters’s actions might include such words as “stupidity,” “brainless,” “moronic,” and a host of others. No thinking person, even among liberals (I think), would say gluing your hands to concrete is a rational or sane act.

“Dumb as a fence post” is a good way to close.

h/t For What it’s Worth.

The latest on the Synod on Synodality.

By Her Eminence, Kamala Cardinal Harris, Fomenter of Coprophagia.

Note: this account, reported exclusively by your Tatler, was received from a well-placed Vatican source and has been edited slightly for the sake of opacity.

Fellow Synodalists:

I shall accompany you as we walk together in a pentecostalization of the discernment process until we reach a point in time when we affirm the conclusions previously drafted by the protosynodalists in a process of consultation and mutual enrichment which is the point of the significance of the passage of time in time itself in a Church that is not other, but different. Spoiler alert: Journeying is the journey ! Our questions have been answered even before they were asked, not because they were answerable but because the Synod on Synodality makes them askable (suscettibile di essere interrogato). It will happen in the morning. Joy. It is all about joy. The new Magisterium is exciting like seeing craters on the moon close up even though they are so far away because of distance. The synodal delegates will be like astronauts all suited up and they will walk with us spiritually because they are strapped in their seats, and they will discern by a communal Spirit what is discernable because all of them love yellow buses. I do. I really do. And then we shall find out who hid the cocaine in the Vatican which is a small country because of its size next to Italy which is bigger because of its own size.

The Synod is moving along smartly now to its exciting conclusion.