The Hound Of Ulster

The USCCB is meeting right now, and Amy has great COVERAGE. As usual. It’s a bit more personal than her stuff usually is, though. I feel like I can see a bit of the “real Amy” peaking through, which is rare on her blog.

This is a perfect example, and very interesting in its own right.

However, he [Bishop Trautman] preceded those discussions by talking about the refusal of the Holy See to expand the indult re/purification of Communion vessels by lay ministers. He went to great pains to emphasize that this by no means, in any way means that Communion under both species shouldn’t still be a model - he never said “the best” - but he quoted from the various liturgical documents expressing the symbolism and so on.

One bishop - and I think I caught who it was, but I’m not sure, so I’m not going to post it. Someone who knows can let me know who it was - honed in on this and asked if Trautman was absolutely, positively sure that this refusal to extend the indult had really and truly come from the Pope. Well, yes, said Trautman, we met with Arinze, there were two Cardinals who met with him, and we can be very certain the Pope is on board with this. The bishop didn’t give up. Really? No revisiting? Is that the feeling of this body that we shouldn’t revisit it? Can we take it directly to Pope Benedict? Bishop Trautman said, literally, “I do not believe it would be advisable.”

(Update: Thanks to Fr. Guy for helping out - it was Bishop Brom of San Diego. I knew it was either Brom or Brown, but could never quite make out exactly what Bishop Skylstad was saying when he addressed him.)

Heh. It sort of amazes me that there would be a bishop who is so unfamiliar with Benedict’s writing on liturgy that he would think that with just a little more begging, Benedict would be on board with this.

There was also a lot of Courage talk, which is somewhere between fascinating and frustrating. Or maybe it’s just both. (AMY and DOM comment on this one, and Amy also WRITES a bit about the “presser.” Dom doesn’t seem to be too excited about things, though. I can sympathize. Watching the USCCB can be a bit like watching C-SPAN2. On a slow day.)

Something Bishop Vigneron said jumped out at me, though. And AMY, as well.

They just voted on the Music Directory issue (approved w/88% yes) but before that considered an amendment from Bishop Vigneron of Oakland. He proposed a process similar to the conformity guidelines for catechetical textbooks. His point was “what we sing at the liturgy is a liturgical text.” He said the bishops should take a serious approach to these texts, and proposed a central conformity review process. If something like that didn’t happen, he said, he feared that the music directory idea, as proposed, would be inadequate to meet the call of Liturgiam Authenticam.

The “what we sing is a liturgical text” line is very insightful. I have fairly vivid memories of suddenly realizing that a some of the songs sung at my parents’ parish were not only vapid and melodically worthless - but actually theologically unsound, even heretical. If everyone could recognize Bishop Vigneron’s point, that sort of thing would be stopped. Instead, people tend to fall into “it’s just a song, so why make such a big deal out of it?” camp. The response is that what we do in Mass is never “just” anything. And recognizing that the songs themselves are a part of the liturgy is vitally important.

I think I’m going to put this post “Brave Bishops.” Not all the bishops mentioned deserve it, of course. But I am seeing a lot of familiar names: Burke, Vasa, Morlino, Finn, Vigneron and the like.

I think I’m getting over my post-election blues, courtesy of the American Catholic Bishops. Who could have predicted that? OK, OK. So it’s actually courtesy of “a fairy specific group of the American Catholic Bishops,” but still. They seem to be doing a lot of the talking.

Very, very good.

Captain Ed JOINS the Pence-Shadegg crowd.

John Boehner and Roy Blunt have been loyal Republican Congressmen. However, as the Club for Growth has noted, both men have been part of the efforts that have separated the GOP majority from its 1994 reformist roots. When Jeff Flake offered a score of anti-pork amendments in this session, both men voted to defeat all of them. Both men voted to approve the pork-laden Highway and Energy bills. Boehner has a better track record than Blunt; he opposed the BCRA in 2002, for instance. However, he has appeared ready to shift positions away from conservative principles for political expediency (on 527s, as CFG points out), not exactly the stalwart defenders of party policy that one expects from leadership.

And he has this chilling (and accurate, I think) note at the bottom:

How important is replacing current leadership with fresh faces and reform-minded Republicans? Think Harriet Miers squared. Make no mistake about this — the GOP had better be prepared to make changes, or they will retreat farther into irrelevancy in 2008.

So THIS is not a good sign, I guess.

Jonathan Martin has a bit on both SHADEGG and CANTOR. Not sure what to think, really. This whole post-election election business is odd. And I’m not a fan of the Killer B’s.

And then there’s Thomas Sowel, who’s in the non-optimist CROWD in a big way.

People have said that before — and have been proved wrong before. Before the election of 1860, abolitionists said it would make no difference whether Lincoln or a Democrat was elected. But millions of people were freed because that prediction was wrong.

In Germany, the Weimar Republic was nobody’s idea of an ideal government and, in the desperate days of the Great Depression, no doubt many German voters thought that nothing could be worse. But they discovered during the dozen years of Nazi rule just how much worse things could be.

Congressional Republicans don’t have enough votes to stop any legislation or confirm any judges, especially since the Democrats stick together, unlike Republicans. Moreover, with a Republican president saying that he wants both a bipartisan immigration bill and a bipartisan minimum-wage bill, there is not even a hope of a veto.

But the fact that you cannot stop something does not mean that you have to become an accomplice. There is no reason why a majority of Republican senators should ever again vote to confirm another extreme activist judge like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Nor is there any reason why congressional Republicans should again outrage their supporters by voting for another illegal-immigration amnesty bill. Not unless they want to be chumps again in 2008.

Even aside from moral issues, betrayal has had a bad political track record under both the elder President Bush (“No new taxes”) and the younger President Bush (“comprehensive immigration reform”). Congressional Republicans will have to face the voters again in 2008, even if President Bush does not.

Cardinal Arinze TALKS about the importance of saying Mass in Latin. The Novus Ordo Mass, that is. (I’m sure he’d bevery supportive of the idea of saying any Mass in Latin, actually. But he’s particularly talking about the New Mass here, I think.)

“Is it a small matter,” he asked, for priests or bishops from around the world to be able to speak to each other in universal language of the church? Or for “a million students” who gather for World Youth Day every few years “to be able to say parts of the Mass in Latin?”

In an hourlong, often humorous, address that received several standing ovations, Arinze suggested that, in order to give Catholics options, large parishes offer the Mass in Latin at least once a week, and in smaller, rural parishes, at least once a month. (Homilies, he said, should always be in the faithful’s native language.) Latin “suits a church that is universal. It has a stability modern languages don’t have,” he said.

This is also interesting. Except for the word “coy.” That I could definitely have done without.

The cardinal was coy about the timing of the indult, which some Vatican watchers believe could come this month. “The pope has not said anything about it,” he said. “When the pope does say something, we will all hear it. “

(HT: DAPPLED THINGS)

Jon Weisman WONDERS why everyone hates J.D. Drew.

I think the biggest problem I’m having is that so many people disliked Drew in the first place, and have been going out of their way to trash Drew’s career, independent of what happened this week. And Drew did play well. Even with the time he missed due to his injuries, he found himself among the best. He helped lift the Dodgers to a playoff spot.

But even though Drew never got into trouble and never complained, even though he did so many things right, multitudes will consider him a lifelong enemy to the Dodgers. Drew is the new Paul DePodesta, a man whose approach to baseball is so anti-cinematic as to earn widespread loathing. I don’t know why I’m sympathetic to characters like these when I love the movies so much, except that maybe I realize baseball isn’t quite like the movies.

In the end, I can’t expect everyone to like Drew, much less politely applaud when he returns in an opposing uniform. He’ll not be a favorite son. All I would ask is that people acknowledge what he did do for the Dodgers. It’s not all black and white, and Drew did a lot that was good.

I think there’s a lot to that. But I also think that there’s more here than the “anti-cinematic.” I think both Drew and DePodesta made massive contributions in ways that most traditional baseball fans do not yet notice. And that means that his ability go largely unnoticed, as well. The fact is that LA was a better team with Drew than they were without him - sometimes significantly better. But it is also a fact that not a lot of people could see that.

Hard to imagine such “quiet excellence” being true of THIS guy, though.

Best Buys is STARTING the “No Christ in Mas” a bit early this year, aren’t they? (HT: PRO ECCLESIA)

And THIS made me laugh. Quite a bit, actually. Once again, I am reminded of just how important an editor can actually be in the creative process. Of course, an editor with a 120:1 shooting ratio could probably make a film mean anything. Still, those trailers are great fun.