In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I woke up this morning to see new signs -- unusual for a weekend -- that the CDC is losing control of the narrative. A big one is that people there are leaking. As of Thursday, an internal PowerPoint reached the Washington Post : It captures the struggle of the nation’s top public health agency to persuade the public to embrace vaccination and prevention measures, including mask-wearing, as cases surge across the United States and new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus. . . . The data and studies cited in the document played a key role in revamped recommendations that call for everyone — vaccinated or not — to wear masks indoors in public settings in certain circumstances, a federal health official said. That official told The Post that the data will be published in full on Friday. However, this didn't happen. Instead, The White House on Friday struggled to explain to reporters why it suddenly stopped holding coronavirus briefings after the Cente...

I've never stopped checking the daily Los Angeles County COVID statistics. The graph above is a screen shot from today's report. While other graphs show sharp increaes in positive tests and hospitalizations, there's been no eqwuivalent rise in deaths. The graph is based on seven-day averages to compensate for daily fluctuation. By early June, the averages reached a floor of about four deaths per day in the county of over 10 million. Since then, they've fluctuated between two and four, with no increase equivalent to those for positive teats and hospitalizations. Among other things, it's hard not to conclude that whatever the reason for an increase in hospitalizations, there are far fewer deaths resulting from them. So I went to find a graph of total COVID deaths in the US. Here it is at right (click on all the images for larger copies). A key takeaway is that, if in the past the public health authorities took cases as a leading indicator of deaths, so far, this do...

I couldn't help but notice a post yesterday at Fr Hunwicke's blog , which reads in its entirety: Like Vatican II, TC has now (after only twelve days!!) sprouted its own ghastly SPIRIT, which can even be directly contrary to the wording of TC, but still has to be as ruthlessly enforced. According to Fr Zed, an American cardinal called Gregory has forbidden an Authentic Form Mass in an American church which ... is NOT a "parish church". Simply a tyranny, isn't it, all this. You have to guess what Hitler or Stalin or that North Korean chappy really want, then you have to enforce it. If you know what's good for you. This is what tyrants and their lackeys always really expect. They don't really take seriously even their own wretched enactments. They just want you to grovel. Several things interest me here. It appears Fr Hunwicke thinks Cdl Gregory forbade a celebration of the Latin mass "directly contrary to the wording of TC". But Article 2 of ...

A visitor sent me the above screen shot from a Facebook thread on one of the ordinariate groups there. The backstory appears to be this, according to the Black Catholic Messenger blog: A planned council of the Knights of Peter Claver & Ladies Auxiliary at an Ordinariate parish in California has been quashed—and likely due to racism, according to the prospective council head. It would have made history both as the first KPC unit at an Ordinariate parish, and also as the first in Orange County (an affluent region in Southern California that is only ~2% Black). Last year, Gunnar Gundersen led the effort at Irvine's St John Henry Newman Catholic Church, a parish of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter. The plan was initially approved in December by the parish administrator, Fr Evan Simington, after the POCSP bishop Steven J. Lopes gave the green light in August. The visitor suiggests that Fr Simington's apparent turnaround came about because Mr Gunderse...

My wife and I normally record each night's TV schedule to watch the following night so we can fast-forward through the commercials, but if there's not enough history or animal or true crime stuff, I go looking for a film. The other night, I settled on Die Hard (1988), which neither of us had seen, and for which my expectations were low. After all, it's the dregs of summer season. It turned out not to be High Noon , but it was actually watchable, and remarkably insightful into modern culture very much like the Jason Bourne films that I've already discussed here . The Bourne films carried the strong subtext that the CIA of Allen Dulles, North by Northwest, and Topaz isn't the CIA we have. But I made the point that the Bourne trilogy appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Remarkably, Die Hard makes a similar point, that the FBI is no longer the FBI of G-men and J Edgar Hoover. And it s...

Naturally, in. the current controversy over Traditionis Custodes , it's important to understand our fellow Catholics on the other side of the issue. Yesterday's post by Fr Hunwicke , while it seems simple on the surface, carries two subtexts that lead to a deeper understanding of his, and traditionalists', mindset. It begins, I have always had a soft spot for S Anne, not least because she is the Patron of my wife's college at Oxford (we sent two of our children there) . . . In his thumbnail, he says he himself has been Senior Research Fellow at Pusey House in Oxford. But just so we're all on the same page, for those of us in the US at least, you need to substitute Yale, or possibly Princeton, for Oxford. Yalies in particular never let you forget they've been to Yale; two recent examples are Glenn Reynolds, whose actual intellectual mentors are Ayn Rand and Hugh Hefner, and Michael Medved, who lost his radio show when his NeverTrumpism became too boring e...

Yesterday's post at Fr Hunwicke's blog is another that invites further analysis. It begins: Dear Father Thank you for your email about whether you are bound in conscience to adhere to Traditionis Custodes. The answer is No; certainly Not; and No. My first reaction is that he's making a big deal in public about how priests apparently seek him out for advice on issues of conscience. In this, he's echoing Fr Z, who even now apostrophizes colleagues on his blog to the effect of "Fathers: Remain steadfast" blah blah blah. Fr Z's issue is that, by trying to pull a fast one on the local bishop, he lost his faculties and is unlikely to get new ones anywhere else. Why would any priest take Fr Z's advice on anything? If Fr Z had behaved with ordinary prudence, he likely would have been able to continue celebrating Latin masses in the Diocese of Madison, given the bishops' wide discretion under Traditionis Custodes. Now, he can't say it anyw...

When I was a lot younger, I had a friend who was an aspiring comic (he wound up working for American Greetings writing gag lines, so he had talent). I used to go to his routines on amateur night at the comedy clubs to support him, so I wound up learning a little about the business. One thing a comic has to do is put his best material up front and time it so the audience gets into the habit of laughing. Then he puts the not-so-funny stuff into the mix, and even if the joke is just "it rained last Tuesday", the audience still laughs. Fr Hunwicke, as far as I can tell, is thought in some quarters to be funny. His problem is he ran out of good material years ago, but he keeps posting the C-minus stuff, day in, day out. Let's look at a random recent post, the one he had up yesterday, Der Fuehrerbefehl . A Fuehrerbefehl is an order from the Fuehrer, viz, Hitler. I assume he's drawing some sort of parallel between that and a motu proprio . ROTFL, huh? But then he starts o...

Heavy-duty Catholic George Weigel thje other day described Traditionis Custodes as “theologically incoherent, pastorally divisive, unnecessary” and “cruel.” Msgr Charles Pope issued a cri de coeur, which seems subsqently to have been edited to "cry from the heart" : I must say that I am grieved and stunned by this document and the letter to the bishops that accompanied it. I think not so much of my own potential loss but of the many Catholics I have served who love the extraordinary form. For so long and in so many places they have often been treated harshly and have been marginalized for their love for the form of the liturgy that most of the saints knew. The Remnant editorialized : Francis is also obsessed with crushing the tiny remnant of believers left in a world of universal apostasy because he is a globalist tool. He has locked down Summorum Pontificum because like a crucifix to a vampire, the old Catholic liturgy threatens the diabolical New World Order t...

Most of the reaction to Traditionis Custodes I've seen in Catholic media has been negative, almost always tied to deep, and I would say knee-jerk, suspicion of Pope Francis. I don't think anyone can dispute that this is the case. This leads me to a basic question: how would I address any concerns I had about Francis in the confessional? Option 1: "Bless me, Father, I have sinned. I have attended a novus ordo mass, eleven times. I have received the sacrament standing, in the hand, eleven times. I was tempted to agree with Pope Francis in his statements on faith and morals, more times than I can count. I changed my mind on the death penalty after reflection based on remarks by our priests and his revision of the Catechism. I am sorry for these and all my sins." Option 2: "Bless me, Father, I have sinned. I have unconsciously adopted the idea that Catholics who don't attend the Latin mass aren't good Catholics. I have spread the opinion that the pope ...

Does Dr Fauci seem a little tired, even distracted, in the photo above? I'm beginning to think so. He's now been fighting the public gain-of-function question for six months, when he'd spent almost all of 2020 trying to keep it from coming out at all. And notwithstanding his efforts, the word is out that An increasing number of senior administration officials engaged in a probe of the virus are now backing the theory that the virus could have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a CNN report. However, Dr Fauci is still on the side of the natural origin theory . No wonder, the obvious question, which nobody is quite putting in the terms it ought to be asked, is that a so-far unknown amount of money, almost certainly in the hundreds of millions, from the US government, incuding Defense, State, and the NIH, went to the Wuhan lab to fund gain-of-function research. The claim was that this was to prevent future epidemics. Instead, a lab leak fro...

As I predicted Sunday mornimg, there was no mention of Traditionis Custodes in that day's masses at our novus ordo parish, nor would there be any reason to mention it. Our pastor has sent no e-mails to reassure us of anything. We have a reverent OF celebration that includes professional vocalists with a small orchestra and a full organ. It's mostly all back from the lockdowns. Nobody is threatening it, and it appears that the archdiocese smiles on our rectory. A visitor sent me the image above, which is a social media message an ordinariate priest sent to his little group, as yet still a considerable distance from being a parish. Unlike our successful parish, clearly unthreatend by Traditionis Custodes , Francis's letter is clearly the one thing that's on their minds, notwithstanding they aren't a Latin mass parish and are no more threatened than ours. In fact, the priest goes on to say the Holy Father is "deeply, distressingly un pastoral". Just him, ...

On July 15, LA County imposed an indoor mask requirement, which took effect at midnight Saturday. Media reports like this one have been incoherent , describing on one hand the usual "sharp increase" in cases, while saying as well they're "a far cry from the winter peak that saw an average of more than 40,000 per day". Nevertheless, CNN reported that every patient now in the hospital for COVID is unvaccinated . An issue that so far nobody has raised is that, with compliance in LA County near 100% on masking and social distance in late 2020, it had no effect, even with partial new lockdowns, on controlling the pandemic, with case rates declining only after the introduction of vaccines. If the problem is actually the unvaccinated, any type of masking, or the reimposition of any other former controls, will have no better effect than they did last year. But reimposition of former controls is exactly what the county has in mind : [Health Officer Dr Muntu] Dav...

Yesterday I said that, although Anglicanorum coetibus so far doesn't seem to have been affected by Traditionis Custodes , maybe it should be. Although it was originally intended to appeal to disgruntled high-church Anglicans, very few of these came in (I think this reflected a profound misunderstanding of Anglicanism). Instead, such appeal as it's had has been largely among the same traditionalist faction of cradle Catholics that Pope Francis intends to bring to heel with Traditionis Custodes . I observed this movement for almost ten years in the old blog. Even before Anglicanorum coetibus , the most successful Anglican Use Pastoral Provision parish, Our Lady of the Atonement, wound up appealing largely to traditionialist Catholics as well, but its separatist posture resulted in financial as well as sexual abuses. Media commentators over the weekend across the board haven't mentioned the essentially separatist nature of both Latin mass and Divine Worship parish cul...

One thing I've come to like about Pope Francis is how easy it is to find photos of him with a wide range of facial expressions. Whatever else someone may say, he doesn't lack affect. I have a sense, in the absence of equivalent photos, that Leo XIII or Pius XI might have been like this, too. Francis is a good Italian. There was a general anticipation that something like Traditionis Custodes was in the works, and I've already said that I don't have a dog in the fight over the Latin mass. But scanning reactions yesterday, I was struck by their intellectual weakness -- even beyond that, their un-Catholic nature. The most bizarre was from Fr Hunwicke, who cited an Anglican authority against the pope : From a private letter to me from Prebendary Michael Moreton (7 November 2001); "I regard the Roman canon as part of the complex of traditions which characterised the life of the Church as it emerged from the centuries of persecution: a shared rule of faith in t...