Catholicae Testudines

Just so you know

Dominicans really know how to celebrate Holy Mass beautifully and reverently.

I would also like to say thank you to all other priests who have the humility to celebrate Mass according to the rubrics (rather than modify it as they please), and also to those who are open-minded about looking to the Church's tradition (rather than making up their own).

Tour

I got to go up in the bell tower at the Shrine today.  A (new) friend of mine is a regular altar server at the Shrine and he talked Fr. Fisher into giving us the VIP tour.  There is an observation deck up there from which we could see all the way to Alexandria.  The carillon can be played automatically (mostly for tedious things like extended tolling or chiming the hours) or manually by means of a big keyboard when they want music (they have a professional carillon player).  We also got to see the Cardinal's office.

(If Justin is reading this, I actually thought about calling you to see if you were in the area, but then I realized that I wouldn't be able to, and even if I did I wouldn't have been able to tell you what time to meet us there.)

For Sierra

You're off the hook. Isabel managed to locate a Super-articulated-Clone-Trooper-#41 at Target today.

Abortion vs. Genocide

I stumbled upon a little quote in an article about a Brazilian tribe facing extinction:

"Unless Brazil acts now to protect uncontacted tribes, they will disappear off the face of the earth forever. The annihilation of a tribe, however small, is genocide," said Fiona Watson, Campaigns Coordinator of Survival International in London.

The article itself reports on a particular tribe consisting of eight to ten people living in huts. Now, I hate illegal deforestation as much as the next guy. We all know that Sean Connery is bound to find a species of Amazonian ant that contains the cure for cancer if he just looks hard enough (it's the ants, Mr. Connery! It's the ants!), but my point is that this quote from Fiona Watson seems more concerned with preserving tribes than preserving people. Watson's definition of genocide (at least as CNN presents it in this quote) is not based on the scale of death or the depiction of tribesmen as being subhuman. She implicitly defines genocide as the annihilation of a way of life--not as the destruction of human life itself. By appearing so worried about an endangered culture, she appears to, ironically, dehumanize the tribesmen by reducing them only to a collection of their unique sociological traits.

Earlier in the year, I had the pleasure of meeting the rhetorically deft and charmingly witty Stephanie Gray while she lectured on Maryland's campus to promote the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP), an organization known for its shock-and-awe approach to comparing abortion to historic cases of genocide. While I remember being struck by the comparably deficient rhetorical skills of the UMD students who tried to debate her, it also occurred to me that "genocide" might not be the best term to describe abortion. People usually complain about GAP juxtaposing graphic images of aborted babies next to images of lynchings and the Holocaust, but my concern is more about the ideology that genocide apeals to.

When the layman hears "genocide," he thinks about the extermination of a group; genocide isn't merely the loss of life--it's the loss of a way of life.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there are people in this world who would be more upset about the loss of a culture than the loss of the people in that culture. Think of the old situation ethics question: You are looking at the Mona Lisa when the Louvre catches fire. You only have time to pick up the Mona Lisa or the 85-year-old woman standing next to you. Which do you take with you?
There are people who would take the Mona Lisa.
There are people who are more disturbed by attempts to stamp out Judaism than they are about the murder of Jews.
Culture and ethnicity make genocide different than mass murder. A homicidal maniac wants to kill people. A genocidal maniac wants to kill a way of looking at the world.
I think that it is hardest to compare genocide and abortion because the victims in abortion have no culture. There is no infant art or science or literature that can be declared endangered, and therefore it doesn't alarm those who would normally be concerned about abortion. In fact, it makes them indignant...though they would perhaps be less scandalized if they could see how abortion is choking our own culture to death.

Idiot America

I've never been so hip on contemporary music as I am now that I own a car. I'd never think of turning on the radio in my apartment, but the the Killers, Modest Mouse, and Keen are frequent travelling companions of mine. Anyway, I was playing FM 1 #6, which I programmed at some point as HFS, and my music education almost came to an abrupt end when I just barely resisted the urge to rip my radio from the dashboard. The scratchy voiced DJ was rambling on about how the narrow minded religious right-wing nutjobs were condemning the infirmed and disease to eternal languish by their refusal to allow embryonic stem-cell research. The DJ's brilliant metaphysical defense for using embryos was as follows (paraphrased, obviously): "We're not talking about unborn babies. We're talking about eight day old embryos that don't have any human characteristics." Human characteristics was definitely a term he used.
Most peculiar logic. It seems to me that an eight-day old embryo that didn't have all the human characteristics of someone who was only eight-days old would be something of a medical oddity. In fact, it's precisely the human characteristics of an eight day old embryo that make the embryo so desirable for embryonic stem cell research.

More to Think on...

This is more of a query than an actual observation, but sitting in the shrine today, I noticed an image of the Last Judgment in the West Transept. According to the official Shrine Website, it was designed by Mary Reardon. In the one cluster, all of the saints are looking towards the figure of Christ, except for my dear friend Thomas More. More is, instead, at the edge of the saints and conspicuously looking in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good look at what might have been in his line of site on the other side of the basilica. I thought perhaps he was looking towards the center of the nave where there is a set of windows in another dome, but I'm not sure what that would mean. The best conjecture I can come up with now is that the image of the witty prankster and saint is supposed to be somehow aware of his artificial nature and looking at something real beyond the art itself.

Extraordination

I just got back from the ordination of five new priests to the Archdiocese of Washington, including the ordination of the CSC's own Deacon-now-Father Woods. What a remarkable event. Seeing the Cathedral bursting at the buttresses with Catholics of every age and culture and the full regiment of priests lined up in the sanctuary would inspire even the most jaded Catholic.

Cardinal McCarrick delivered a homily about the newly ordained priests should take advantage of having an ordination on the vigil of Corpus Christi during this Eucharistic Year to dedicate themselves to the Eucharist--and, really, why else would you want to become a priest. Any lay person or religious brother can "help the community." The point of a priesthood is to live out the Mass.

He also spoke with great delicacy and intimacy to implore the priests to dedicate themselves to the Virgin Mary and seek her protection and guidance in their vocation.

This is what being a Catholic is all about. I'm pumped. I felt like I spent two hours snubbing the nose of Satan.

And to think I almost decided to sleep in this morning.

Revenge of the Shakespeareans Part II

Another thing just popped in my head regarding Revenge of the Sith. The Jedi and Senators also are analogous to the Senators from Julius Caesar. Mace Windu becomes Brutus (or more likely Cassius) attempting to assassinate Julius Caesar to prevent him from becoming Emperor. Of course, the Roman Senators assassinate Caesar from behind and without declaring him under arrest...but, then again, they weren't carrying lightsabers. So Palpatine is, in this sense, both Julius Caesar and Octavius Caesar rolled up in one. This also makes Anakin doubly Antony, since Anakin is the one who defends the fallen Palpatine, just as Antony is the one who defends the fallen Julius Caesar.

Maybe it's even worth mentioning that Antony performs the rite of Lupercalia in Julius Caesar. During Lupercalia, lucky young men got to run up and down the streets naked, striking women to make them fertile. This one is, granted, more of a stretch, but Anakin is certainly associated with fertility. Heck, not only does he get his wife pregnant, but pregnant with fraternal twins! (I realize that fraternal twins has more to do with the woman's biology than the man's, but the movies have always emphasized Vader's fatherhood more than Padme's motherhood). Anakin is also the only character in the six movies to become a father. In fact, Ewoks movies and holiday specials excepted, I can't think of a single character in the movies who is a father. Owen and Beru are apparently barren, as are Bail Organa and his wife. Jango Fett is only a father in the loosest sense of the word...and Anakin himself is without a father. There was supposed to be a scene where we met Padme's parents in AOTC, but it was cut. What could it mean? What could it mean?

Separation of Politics and State

It's just a matter of time before the liberal ideology of preventing conservative and religious ideologies from being promulgated in the classroom turnes against the liberals themselves. You can see the revolution already beginning in this
CNN article about high school posters that were banned for satirizing Bush

According to CNN, one of the reasons the principal gave for removing the posters was that they were "endorsing one ideology over another."

Can I tell you about what awesome friends I have?

Here's how awesome they are.  We might have been out late that one night in Ocean City and not gotten to bed until 2 AM or after, and some jerk might have kept us up with shouting and airhorn blasts, but they still got up when it was dark so we could get to daily Mass.