Reading links

Jo Walton at Tor.com started with a post on Is There a Right Age to Read a Book? In a follow up, What's Reading For?, she noted that in the comments

…people started talking about prescribing childhood reading and talking about books as if they were vitamins that you should take because they’re good for you. There were comments about the immorality of re-reading because it causes you to miss new books, and comments about learning morality from reading. It all became surprisingly Victorian.

Leaving the good folk south of the Murray River aside for a minute, she followed with What's Reading For Part 2 : Books Do Furnish a Mind which also discusses re-reading.

Meanwhile Joe Queenan at the Wall Street Journal discusses My 6,128 Favorite Books – that's his, not mine.

Does the Pope have a pink bathroom?

(There was a splurge post on Pius xii in this place for a few hours this morning which will be edited and reposted later, in case you are wondering). As is now known all over the interwebs Pope Benedict xvi has written an op-ed [registration required] for the Financial Times which L'Osservatoro Romano helpfully reproduces.

At FT.com "the response of Jesus" in the first paragraph (quoting "render unto Caesar") is hyperlinked to Matthew 22 in the God's Word Translation but "the birth of Christ" at the beginning of the fifth paragraph is hyperlinked to Luke 2 in the New International Version. In both cases it is to the text hosted at BibleGateway.com. All three are Protestant institutions. This is not something to do with previous settings because those are the results when I used a browser with a cleared cache.

The following is at the bottom of the article:

The writer is the Bishop of Rome and author of ‘Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives’

Oh you mean that Pope Benedict xvi!

I imagine an Anglican subeditor having had some fun with all this, but I am sure that is just fantasy.

*The post title is a reference to the following sketch from Not the Nine O'Clock News, which I can't find on YouTube. The FT is printed on pink paper.

Reader 1 (Rowan Atkinson): I buy The Daily Telegraph, because it doesn't try to tell me what to think. It just reports the news. 

Reader 2 (Griff Rhys-Jones): I buy the Daily Express, because it informs me quickly, tells me what's going on, and let's me get on with my job. 

Reader 3 (Mel Smith): I read the Financial Times [beat] because I've got a pink bathroom.

Mankowsi: Why the Immaculate Conception?

The truth is often at right angles to the common perception. Fr Paul Mankowski sj asks "Why the Immaculate Conception?" in Women for Faith & Family, Vol v.1 (1990).

There is a strain of feminist Mariology which feels repugnance at the dogma of the Immaculate Conception because it views the notion as demeaning to women. Orthodox theologians were so scandalized by the particularly feminine dimension of sinfulness (according to this school) that they found it necessary to cook up the idea of an immaculate conception in order to sanitize the event of the incarnation. I hope I have shown that this way of thinking has got things exactly backwards. In articulating its belief that Mary was free of original sin, the Church is thrusting the Blessed Virgin into the heart of the problematic struggle of temptation and grace; it is the opposite of insulation. It is not some angelic perfection, but her humanity which is vindicated by Pius IX’s definition - her dependence on merits of Jesus Christ, her constant reenactment of the drama of Adam’s choice, a drama which is no less dramatic for its happy ending, a drama which ultimately includes us all, in the vision of the Woman clothed with the sun, crushing the serpent at the worlds’ end.

The introduction punctures a number of balloons:

Further, if we speak of the Virgin Mary as constitutionally incapable of sin, it is all the more difficult to discover in her the humanity which is by its very weakness transparent to God's power. Consequently, in an age like our own especially, she is all the more likely to be treated as precisely that sort of Ideal which cannot warm our affections or stir our courage.

One obvious, all-too-predictable solution, is to deny the Immaculate Conception and the sinlessness of Mary, under the fatuous pretense that by doing so, she will become more "human", and so more accessible to the rest of us sinners. Wrong on all counts, the most obvious being that a human who sins is less human after he succumbs that he was before. Still, there is a persistent, though imbecile, way of speaking in which some public figure who has an adulterous affair or a personal foible come to light thereby reveals a "human side" of himself. In fact, it is in keeping his commitments and displaying evidence of virtue that a man is most fully human; in giving in to temptations, even trivial or petty ones, he becomes that much more bestial.

When we fall, we fall from a human dignity, not an angelic one; our skid may well end at a level of animal savagery, but we never "tumble down" into humanity. It was natural indeed that the Legion inside the Gerasene demoniac pleaded to be cast into swine -- not because pigs are of themselves wickeder then men, but because the elevator, so to speak, was already at that floor. There is no point, then, in exploring this avenue further. I think the way out is more direct. A friend of mine is fond of saying, "Whenever I hear the word 'dialogue', I reach for my dogma." Let us, in the same spirit, reach for our dogma and see if it has anything to say to us.

Makes Lord of the Rings look like Dora the Explorer

In 2010 I started reading George R. R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire. It's a calque (as T. A. Shippey would say) on the Wars of the Roses, extremely complicated and highly addictive. I read the whole published series and then re-read them again last year in preparation for volume 5. Like many others, the only reason I haven't finished it is because the author hasn't either.

For some people this is a problem. Others write a song about it.

Professor full stop

Professor J. Budziszewski   of the University of Texas at Austin writes an occasional column for the online Christian magazine (oh, all right, webzine) Boundless. He generally writes under the pseudonym Dr Theophilus. It was from his writings I learnt the definition "love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another". It might be from somebody else but I heard it first at the feet of Dr Theophilus.

The conceit of the Dr Theophilus' columns is that he is a professor pestered for advice – mostly moral – by his students. His writing is gentle but firm. No squishiness. His complete columns for Boundless appear to be all online (but there is no index, have to use the search vbar). They stretch back to 1998, including the one I nearly made the attention grabbing title of this post: I Got My Girlfriend Pregnant. What Now? Instead I made an undergraduate allusion to the general ignorance of Professor J. Budziszewski's Christian name. He became a Catholic in 2004.

Fr Cassian Folsom OSB : From One Eucharistic Prayer to Many

A striking omission from Archbishop Annibale Bugnini's memoir The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975 is any discussion of the reordering of churches. Striking because things like the demolition of the High Altar in St Patrick's Cathedral in New York, or the Rood Screen in St Chad's Cathedral in Birmingham, are precisely the sort of things that most Catholics noticed as the reform was underway, whether it gave them joy or pain.

Archbishop Bugnini does use building (and, sotto voce, demolition) as a metaphor.

While the intense work [of the liturgy Consilium appointed to carry out the decrees of Vatican II] of liturgical reform went on, we looked down from above, between the presbytery of St Peter's, the Camposanto Teutonico, and the stern palace of the Holy Office, on the great scaffolding for the splendid audience hall. This was the period when the old irregular buildings around the Chapel of St. Peter were being razed; pneumatic drills were thrusting sixty to seventy metres down for the mighty pillars of reinforced concrete that would support the prodigious vault of architect Nervi. Day after day for five years we watched the steel, at once slender and strong, rise into the air for this gigantic building. Here were two work-yards in close proximity: both intended for the people of God, both of them eloquent symbols and consoling realities. (Chapter 5, p. 53)

And again, discussing the Missal, he writes:

But how difficult it is to take an ancient building in hand and make it functional and habitable without changing the structure! Peripheral alterations are not enough; there has to be a radical restoration. All this applied to the Ordinary. Just as the introduction of the vernacular into some parts of the Mass brought home the need of extending it to the entire rite, so the changes made in 1965 only showed up more clearly certain inconsistencies in rites, signs, and ceremonies that had become anachronistic. (Chapter 10, p.115)

Fr Cassian Folsom OSB of St Meinrad Archabbey, published 'From One Eucharistic Prayer to Many: How it Happened and Why' in a series of issues of The Adoremus Bulletin in 1996. The whole essay is worth reading, but the following paragraph serves as a reply to Archbishop Bugnini's tidy-mindedness.

Whether speaking of structure or of theology, the main argument seems to be that the Roman canon is untidy. In the course of its development it spread out from the original core text, the way an old country house develops from the original building: a wing is added on here, an extra story is built there, a door is cut in the wall where a window used to be, other windows are walled up and new stairwells are necessary because of certain additions, while others are rendered useless. Decorative trim is added “just because”. Fine woodwork and stonework appear in the most hidden and out-of-the-way places. Each part of an old building has its own history, and old rambling houses like this are truly wonderful: but they are not neat. Furthermore, they were not originally equipped with modern conveniences like indoor plumbing and electricity, and so we moderns sometimes find such houses inconvenient.

Mankowski: Silk Purses & Sow's Ears

(I am sure the apostrophe in the title is misplaced)

Arguing with inclusive language loonies, the best I could come up with is that they never seem to worry about the gender of Satan, all his works and all his empty promises. For a better essay see "Silk Purses & Sows' Ears: 'Inclusive Language' Comes to Mass" from Women for Faith and Family viii.4 & ix.1, by Fr Paul Mankowski sj.

This is one of those essays when you want to keep cutting and pasting (funny that, considering the first paragraph). But here is a line of argument that had not already occurred to me:

Consider this sentence: "The men and officers of the second battalion will return to winter quarters on Monday." Here the word "man" is being used exclusively (i.e., non-generically), but it means, of course, not "non-females" but "non-officers." The word "man" is not only unmarked for gender but unmarked for military rank. Accordingly, in different sentences it can serve the broader or the narrower function, usually without ambiguity. There are, of course, certain linguistic situations in which it may be difficult to tell which use is intended. For example, in a pub you overhear a stranger say, "Jack's a man in my regiment." Does he mean man/non-officer or generic man? A speaker of even modest skill can ordinarily indicate his meaning clearly.

Now suppose for a moment you're serving as a military chaplain somewhere and have just conducted a Mass in which you recited the Nicene Creed according to the conventional translation. How would you deal with a red-eyed infantry colonel who buttonholes you in the sacristy and complains in a trembling voice that he feels the words, "For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven", exclude officers from the ambit of divine salvific activity? If you have bought into the standard inclusive-language mindset you're in a tough bind, for according to the mindset it is the listener's subjective impressions that take precedence over standard usage and over the intentions of the speaker. So if you refuse to change the Creed to read, "for us men and officers he came down from heaven," you're at a complete loss to explain your previous concessions to feminist critics. And if you do make the requested change you're incapable of refusing with rational consistency the next madman who feels himself excluded by your language.

Mankowski: What Went Wrong?

Robert Conquest says somewhere that the “behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies". Of couse, he means enemies of the organization: the idea of a bureaucracy being taken over by its enemies fills me with a mixture of hilarity and dread.

That reminds me of Fr Paul Mankowski SJ's paper from July 2003 (I blog slow but exceeding fine): What Went Wrong?

In thousands and thousands of pages of records one scarcely, if ever, is edified by a pleasant surprise, by discovering that a bishop’s or superior’s concern for the victim or for the Faith was greater than that known to the public, that the engines of justice were geared up and running at full throttle, but in a manner invisible to those outside the circle of discretion. Didn’t happen.

It is not surprising that something by an American priest in 2003 should smell of cynicism of all Ecclesiastical bureaucracies:

When the scandal is sexual or financial, it seems the Holy See can move quickly to remove the offender. When the scandal is in the arena of heresy or administrative irregularity or liturgical abuse, there is almost never enough secular interest generated to force the Holy See’s hand. Bishops Milingo and Ziemann and Roddy Wright have many brethren; Bishop Gaillot has few.

These differences between the Vatican's policy towards immoral Bishops and that towards dissenting Bishops may be due to the differences between the applicable canon law. That became clear when it took the Pope five years to remove Bishop Morris of Toowoomba.