Around St Blog's: November 2003 Archives

here. I'll try to get my thank-you note up later today.

Vales first: looks like Vociferous Yawpings is bowing out. Bummer. I'd read it just for the title.

Aves: Speaking of Caritate Dei, Robert Diaz is inviting everyone to check out his group blog Eternal Rebels, which has a cool Chestertonian title and some new members.

T.S. O'Rama posts on economic systems and "bridling capitalism:"

One of the negatives of a global economy is that inefficiencies are squashed, and inefficiences can be humane. For example, companies in France and Germany are having to become leaner in order to remain competitive with the U.S. and Japan. Vacation time and benefits in European companies are higher, and they are paying the price for it. Instead of America tending toward the "more civilized" European model, the Europeans are tending towards our more cut-throat model.

It would be interesting if we could get a sustained conversation on distributism and Catholic social teaching going around St Blog's, maybe after the New Year.

The Curt Jester brings our attention to Steve's great post on the seven capital sins, Seven Means to Seven Sorrows:

It’s amazing really. From Bach to Eminem, every bit of music is a variation on eight simple notes. The same goes for literature – the Greeks identified roughly a half-dozen different plots, and that’s all anyone has ever used. Unhappiness is the same way. There are only a handful of ways to become unhappy....

Take that, Tolstoy! I hope Steve follows up with a discusssion of the seven cardinal virtues.

my smelling salts.... head...swelling.....

I want to thank Pansy Moss for her first-hand example of racial attitudes in America. To address Mr. De Nunzio's point further, there was no question in the comments on this Blog of ignoring or trivializing racial differences. Indeed, as Pansy says, they are deeply entrenched. The question is, why do these differences exist and to what extent are they exacerbated by centuries-long non-Catholic attitudes. This is exactly what Pansy alluded to. To bring us back to the original topic, Jeff and I voiced concern over racialist views being touted as “traditionalist” (in both the political and religious sense). I completely agree that the “anti-racist” crusade is generally so much leftist agitprop. I’m not concerned that Nazism is going to take over the U.S. But that doesn’t change that fact that in a small community like traditional Catholicism, which liberalism seeks to marginalize, that fringe views can make themselves more strongly felt, whether they are promoting false apparations, errroneous theology or political error. Jeff’s concern with the ideas of Jim Kalb (or mine with Sam Francis) is the idea that ethnicity should be a fundamental factor in formulating political ethics and Catholic social policy. Nor is this some vague paranoia. None of us would care in the least except that there are more explicit examples, like the “Legion of St. Louis,” which claims to promote Catholic Action yet sells works by anti-Semites, racists and extremists. The deeper danger is that the spiritual struggle is reduced to an ideological one in which “holiness” is equated with arcane or even dangerous political preferences. These groups do exist, and where their presence is felt, dissension and confusion follow.

First, I would like to give a shout out to Jeff because he is a fellow Trad that doesn't buy into any of this BS, and that is why I am one of his biggest fans.

One of the reasons why I love the Traditional Latin Mass is the culture that is held in esteem above others is Catholic, not Spanish, not Irish, not black or Italian but Catholic. This is hard to find in many Novus Ordo Masses around here. That is why this racist attitude that seems to permeating the Traditional movement is so heartbreaking. The Catholic Church is Universal and all men are created in the image and likeness of God. If a person wants to stick to the true traditions of the Church Christ established, then we need to look at a person as a human and not as simply someone of some race.

The notion that since liberals promote "diversity" and "tolerance" (which are also buzz words for racism) it is also OK to support some type of white supremecy such as The Caucasian Club or whatever is stupid, reactive and nothing more than an excuse to get Catholicism to fit someone's own racist agenda. And last I checked, when you try to change the Church to support what you believe rather than what the Church teaches, that is called Protestantism.

Someone told me once that the notion of "integration" is nothing more than black people wanting pity for their dark skin? What the? No, integration is what happens when people stop being afraid of each other simply on the basis of race.

Jeff Culbreath presents Mr. Matt Anger's commentary on leftism, racism, paleo-conservatism, slavery, throwing babies out with bathwater.... oh, just go read the essay, it's good:

Catholics don’t defend something on the basis of whether it is "old" or "new," but right or wrong. Mr. [Sam] Francis, however, believing that whatever the left hates must be good, defends all aspects of the Old South, including its "peculiar institution."
....I admit to feeling a bit impatient with those who howl at the least imposition of the IRS, and the "slavery" of the federal government, yet think nothing of consigning whole groups (like non-whites) to a second-class status... especially if they are members of the exempt class.

Later, if you're in the mood for illiterate mumblings on a related topic, I blogged a few months ago on Patrick Buchanan's book Death of the West.

Welcome, Catholic and Enjoying It! readers!

Elinor Dashwood has a delightful thread going on on Literary Loves: What fictional character or characters have you ever fallen in love with?

Now this is how much of a plunker I am: Elinor first floated this idea in an email to me. Not only have I not come up with any literary loves, I haven't replied to the email yet. My apologies, Elinor; I'll try to write back today. I am pleading absence -- the Maryland Mosses went away for the weekend, and I am trying to restore order to the household.

As for the literary loves question, I'm thinking about it. I'm probably thinking wayyyyyy too hard about it and I'm too embarrassed to ask something as geeky as "define falling in love, please." Perhaps part of it is that I'm not prone to crushes in real life (exactly three over the course of my entire life: one in high school; one in college, complete with the requisite heartbreak; one on the gentleman I eventually married.)

I need to go sort laundry.

Steven is drawing attention to (and inviting intelligent comments on) a post by Steve Bogner on inclusive language.

"Intelligent comments" -- that would exclude me; I'm not good at discussing these things anyway, and I'm especially short on time and neurotransmitters today. So I'm just going to come out and say it (with apologies in advance for the rant):

My personal perspective as a woman, a reader, a mother, and a Christian, is that I hate inclusive language.

I hate it because I feel patronized when it's in use. I hate it because I feel like its promoters, well-intentioned though they may be, are saying to me, "O woman, you are not smart enough to know when the words 'men' and "man" refer to the whole human race and when they refer to males. All those times you thought you were being "included"? Nope, you were being fooled. And your feelings are not strong enough to handle being excluded, even if you didn't know you were being excluded until we told you. You can never focus on the universal, on what you have in common with men and women; you must always be focused on the particular, on yourself, your femaleness. Your feelings are too delicate to withstand the knowledge that there are males on this earth, and that they did things. The very fact that Jesus was a male is a stumbling block to you, and we must smooth it over. The very fact that He told us to call God Father -- 'Abba', 'Daddy' -- was an error; the only-begotten reproduced Son Offspring of God, who comes to make all things new, was a prisoner of His own time. (Jesus was not as enlightened as we moderns, of course.)"

I hate inclusive language because it insists that all the places I thought included me were actually excluding me. It seeks to drive a wedge between me and pretty much everything written before 1970. Inclusive language has robbed our language of the little honors paid to the feminine in the tradition of using the feminine pronoun for ships, countries, and abstractions. Inclusive language is the Mrs Elton in the garden of literature, the tacky boor who wrenches every spotlight towards herself.

I read pretty widely as a child and a teen, and I can remember one time and one time only when I misread the context of the word "man": it was in a satirical essay by H.L. Mencken, when he abruptly shifted from "man" as "mankind" to "man" as "all males."

In real life, we can't have relationships with Its. I can have a relationship with my mother, my friends, my husband, my little boy: they are Shes and Hes. My little boy doesn't have Parents or Father-Mothers; he has a Mommy and Daddy. The Coneheads have "parental units" because they're aliens; humans have mothers and fathers. Words such as He, Him, Father invite us to see God as a real Person who seeks a real relationship with us. If we have poor relationships with others, including with our earthly fathers, our Heavenly Father can help us relearn Whom those earthly relationships are supposed to model. We need this intimate, personal vision more than ever in this impersonal age of bureaucracy and broken families.

We should not worry about "placing limits on God." We should be thanking Him for, in a sense, placing limits on Himself, for the scandal of particularity. God, Who is so beyond us in every way, came to live our grubby daily lives with us, reveals Himself in images drawn from our grubby daily lives, ones that even little children can understand: Seeds. Drinking water. Daddy.

kill as few patients as possible

Second, Martin is someone who, like so many of us, grew up with conflicted identity, a foot in both the colonial Spanish world and the world of the black servants and slaves. His identity in Christ both enabled him to transcend his beginnings and to extend the deep love of Christ to all - even some animals, like rats which are widely considered vermin.

Martin de Porres is special to me because of this reason. I am not sure what challenges being biracial in Peru at that time posed, but like many saints their experiences are timeless personal accounts for those of us who need a helping hand in different walks of life.

Smockmomma, how will I evertop this?

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