We need more of this.
Would that more prelates could screw up their courage and have at these wayward souls.
Even if they’re not Anglicans.
From the Daily Mail.
Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric has hit out at the ‘woke’ rewriting of Christmas carols.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols said preserving traditional songs was more important than ‘sensitivities which come and go’.
His comments came after a Church of England carol service sparked outrage by featuring an ‘inclusive’ version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.
Criminy, how can anyone take this forlorn institution seriously anymore? No wonder its churches are empty.
Clement XIV, pray for us.
More foolishness from the Jesuits.
From America, the organ of the Jesuits:
Pope Francis was finally asked the question we have always wanted to hear him answer—what would he say to a woman feeling the pain of a sincerely discerned and unfulfilled call to priesthood? Unfortunately, when asked that pastoral question by executive editor Kerry Weber, the pope did not give a pastoral answer. Instead, he gave a clumsy theological discourse on Marian and Petrine theories, which the average Catholic would be forgiven for not knowing by heart. . .
It’s a shame the authors of this piece didn’t put down a few words explaining exactly what “average” Catholics are capable of knowing, but they obviously place themselves above them. Bickerstaff, a convert, can report his catechesis included the study of Marian and Petrine “theories” (doctrines would be a better word and besides, Marian doctrine is dogma, hence immutable) and had little difficulty understanding them. Neither apparently did any other of his fellow catechumens.
Francis’ suggestion that “woman is more, she looks more like the church, which is mother and spouse” relies on a literal interpretation of the “spousal metaphor” that reduces the extravagance of one’s relationship with God and discipleship to plastic figurines on a wedding cake.
How so? Please explain. How else should the spousal metaphor be interpreted? Ah, yes, in a way accommodating your desire for the ordination of women. We’ll take the literal interpretation, if you please, rather than some sort of plastic one (to use a word from the essay), bending and twisting it so as to bring it into accord with fashionable twentieth-century opinions.
That this blog is no fan of our present pope should be obvious, but Francis does deserve credit for resisting the exhortations of feminist extremists in the Catholic Church. Even he knows were he to acquiesce to their demands, it would lead to chaos, schism, and worse in Holy Church. History supports this view. Read the superb piece in the New Oxford Review titled, “The St. Louis Congress after 45 years,” by William Tighe, which recounts in sad detail the all-but-demise of the once mighty Episcopal Church, brought on by her surrounding to demands precisely those America’‘s editorial staff and other liberals in the Catholic Church make of our Pope.
From a friend.
Reaching bottom?
Lower, lower, lower, he sinks.
Question: Will we ever reach the point where even Democrats concede this drooling idiot in the White House is unfit for office?
Answer: No.
From the New York Post:
A befuddled President Biden casually maligned the Irish while botching his wife’s family history during a gaffe-filled appearance in Delaware on Friday.
“I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid,” Biden inexplicably said as he greeted 102-year-old World War II veteran Ray Firmani during a town hall on veterans’ benefits in New Castle, Del.
“I married Dominic Giacoppa’s daughter,” Biden continued. “So, you know, I got a little Italian in me now, you know?”
The audience of military veterans and federal officials received the off-script comments in puzzled silence — but critics on Twitter took comic umbrage at the ethnic slur.
***
Biden’s mental acuity as the oldest-ever US president has been increasingly in question — particularly after he searched a crowd for the late Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) in September, six weeks after publicly mourning her death and calling her family to offer condolences.
What residents of the Empire State may look forward to in the coming year.
From here.
The late William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review, now only a faint semblance of its former self when the founder was still alive, once said, to great wailing and gnashing of the teeth from his targets: “Liberals don’t care what you do so long as it’s compulsory.”
That was long ago though, and since then a new generation of the left has moved on from that quasi-grant of freedom to a stance far more autocratic. These days they care deeply about what you do, unless of course it’s something truly offensive to the decent majority of this country, i.e., drag queen story hours or mastectomies and castrations of children barely into their teens.
A glance at the intelligence [sic] seen above nicely reveals the current attitude of the liberal-left, which is: you will do what we tell you to do or we will put you in jail. Given the aggressive comprehensiveness of this extreme agenda, one imagines the drooling glee of these bills’s sponsors when sitting down to discuss their latest assaults on our basic liberties.
Your Tatler spent most his adult life in New York, the City, no less. Five years ago, sensing the soon-to-be takeover by the lunatics in the asylum, he fled, ending up in Taos. While New Mexico is hardly a bastion of libertarianism, it is at least a fair distance behind the progressives’s slow but steady coup d’état of the United States of America. Deo violente, he won’t be around when they eventually “progress” their way here.
21st-century ecumenism?
After enjoying a hearty laugh over the ludicrous blasphemy seen on the flyer above, (outrage isn’t worth the bother), your Tatler, chewing on the matter a bit, realized the last sentence overleaf: “Yes, we are awesome,” serves nicely as a credo for the increasing number of secular religions springing up over the years, filling the void as people abandon God. That is especially true and ironic when considering the correct meaning of the much–abused word awesome: inspiring reverential fear, which in this case, appropriately, is in themselves.
Still, one must give a tip o’ the hat to those pot dealers attempting to meld their oh-so-contemporary enterprises with our Holy Mother and her Church, via audacious dialectic synthesis (sort of). Bravo, dudes.
.
Heartwarming Christmas cheer from a freezing Hungarian church.
One of your Tatler’s favorite composers, Ralph (pronounced rāfe–God bless those Brits) Vaughan Williams’s lovely Fantasia on Christmas Carols, here receives a fine reading in an unspecified Catholic church, wanting both heat and paint, in Szolnok, Hungary. The extreme circumstances seem not to have bothered in the least the forces involved, nor the audience. Uplifting and inspiring, this is.
Possibly good news: declining college enrollments.
College enrollments are sharply decreasing according to Axios, 10% during the Covid pandemic and continuing still.
From the report:
The big picture: Higher education in the U.S. is in the midst of a sea change, forcing schools to adapt with the times.
- “It suggests that there’s a broader question about the value of college and particularly concerns about student debt and paying for college and potential labor market returns,” Doug Shapiro, the executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, said earlier this year, per the New York Times.
What’s happening: College enrollment had been trending downward, and the pandemic accelerated the trend.
Why is this possibly good news? Colleges and universities are by far the most responsible for the leftist indoctrination of young people. While most of the secondary schools in this country, both public and private, certainly do their part, it is in the cloistered environment of higher education where young charges are subjected to a four-year, non-stop barrage of Marxist-Leninist propaganda. Often these days it takes the insidious form of explicating 20th and 21st-century popular cultural references and events, e.g., the Nasir Jones Hip Hop fellowship at Harvard. Whatever makes it easier for inchoate minds to absorb, just get the job done.
After four years of the above, a good percentage of these college kids (though certainly not all) will have transmogrified from empty-headed freshman into seniors, clutching diplomas, with heads stuffed to overflowing with hatred of all things pertaining to western civilization.
My argument why this may be good news is simple (some will say simplistic): the fewer young people going to college, the fewer commies ipso facto poisoning and destroying our society. Young people rejecting higher education, going to work, and earning a paycheck (and possibly noting how much is diverted from that check to support institutions college leftists adore), are less likely, it strikes this writer, to fall into the tentacles of modern progressivism. That is good news.
Invisibilium.
This past Sunday your Tatler, for the first time in some time, attended missa antquior, the Latin mass, at a small mission church on a Tewa pueblo, joining the schola cantorum doing the chants. There were a decent number, 50 to 60, in the pews and plenty of children squealing and squawking, music to the ears of a former Episcopalian.
In the church’s bulletin however, one only sees mass times for Novus Ordo, the modern mass in bad English, even though the Latin mass is celebrated at that church weekly or more. An oversight? Hardly. His tarnished Grace, Archbishop of Santa Fe John C. Wester, a devotee of Pope Francis, has slavishly followed papal orders making it difficult, if not impossible, to celebrate the old Latin mass in his diocese though it is entirely valid.
The pope, clamping down on the old rite, antithetically insists his diktats will somehow bring “unity” to Holy Church by making outcasts of Latin rite adherents. Archbishop Wester concurs, and prosecutes the pontiff’s orders.
Other prelates however have disagreed with the pope, notably Cardinal Dolan of New York, not at all a Latin mass enthusiast, but who nonetheless ignores the anti-Latin rules from Rome, even going so far as to praise one Latin mass church in his diocese for bringing many Catholics back into the fold. In other words, ahem, bringing unity.
Not here in the Archdiocese of New Mexico, though. Here, we who love the old mass are invisible. Our mass is invisible. Our celebrant is invisible. Our servers are invisible. Our worshippers are invisible. We were kicked out of our first church to a much more out of the way mission.. In Archbishop Webster’s diocese, we are personae non gratae, but still come to mass and donate substantial fungible dollars. Only those are visible to the Archbishop, who never stops clamoring for more of them to pay the legal bills and awards for the sinful behavior of clerics under his watch.
On a grimly optimistic note, our archbishop, as well as the pope, are well into antiquity, which brings to mind your Tatler’s oft-expressed aphorism: there is nothing wrong with the Holy Catholic Church that cannot be remedied by a good flu epidemic.
THE TAOS TATLER. 