In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

It's starting to look like vaccines, no matter how indifferently distributed, are the magic bullet that will solve COVID. But so far, governments to one degree or another are becoming disappointed that this is the case. I saw reports of a mass demonstration in London last Saturday : Videos posted to social media showed streets jammed with mostly maskless protestors. One marcher carried a sign reading “They did not isolate a virus. They isolated you.” Others said “No to vaccine passports” and “Lockdowns kill”. Some reports put the crowd size at 10,000. Lockdown measures have already started to lift in the UK with restaurants and pubs given the greenlight for outdoor eating and drinking on April 12. Gyms and hair salons were also permitted to open and further restrictions are set to be lifted May 17 at the earliest. Curious, I went to see the UK's COVID chart. To my surprise, it looks a great deal like California's, which is the best in the US. But California contin...

Anglicanorum coetibus and the complementary norms themselves aren't specific about how the groups that enter the Catholic Church as bodies of former Anglicans are organized, but explanations at the time of the constitution's promulgation generally assumed they were existing Anglican parishes that wouid enter with their Anglican clergy. This is at least implied in the constitution itself: §4 The Ordinariate is composed of lay faithful, clerics and members of Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, originally belonging to the Anglican Communion and now in full communion with the Catholic Church, or those who receive the Sacraments of Initiation within the jurisdiction of the Ordinariate. Early publicity focused on parishes that would enter, not only as continuing corporate entities, but with property and endowments as well as their clergy and people. Very few did this, and the attempt of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood parish, which did h...

Jeffrey Steenson, who was Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande from 2005 to 2007 , was the third US Episcopal bishop to resign while in office in order to convert to Roman Catholicism. The first was Levi Silliman Ives, who was Episcopal Bishop of North Carolina from 1841 to 1852. The second was Frederick Joseph Kinsman, who was Episcopal Bishop of Delaware from 1908 to 1919 . The differences between Steenson and his predecessors are remarkable, in part perhaps reflecting Steenson's character, but also showing how times have changed. Both Ives's and Kinsman's resignations and conversions were moderately important public events, and in consequence, both Ives and Kinsman published detailed apologias, Ives in The Trials of a Mind in its Progress to Catholicism and Kinsman in Salve Mater . (Kinsman is highly underrated as a writer, and since the book is on line, it's worth the read.) Both of those bishops addressed a general audience with an understanding of broad ...

I keep thinking back to Fr Lengenecker's 2018 Lenten mission at our parish, where he gave very insightful remarks on Anglicanism that were actually just a brief digression in a much more extensive talk. One point that he made was that, given the wide spectrum of Anglican belief, after his years of experience in the denomination, if he listened to an Anglican for some minutes, he could discern roughly where the speaker stood in relation to the diagram above, but this would still be with only about 90% certainty. The odd thing for me is that, in my 30 years as an Episcopalian, nobody gave me anything like the explanation in the diagram above. In my confirmation class, there wasn't even mention of a high church-low church polarity -- it was just the XXXIX Articles were established so everyone could compromise, but they never even reviewed the Articles themselves, which are very Protestant. It didn't matter, because everyone compromised. It was only after I became Catholic ...

In thinking over the past few months about why Anglicanorum coetibus failed, it occurs to me that nobody at the start of the project gave much thought to Anglicanism. This is puzzling, because there's been effective opinion within the Church all along that could have provided insight, most specifically by the former Episcopal Bishop of Delaware Frederick Kinsman. but other Catholic writers like Hilaire Belloc have offered similar opinions. Even the former Church of England priest Fr Dwight Longenecker, now a Catholic pastor in South Carolina, noted in a 2018 Lenten mission at our California parish that Anglicanism "looks like" Catholicism, but it isn't. Figures like Bernard Law, Joseph Ratzinger, Jeffrey Steenson, and others who drafted Anglicanorum coetibus at the start seem to have been lulled by appearances. It's a little like the warning about the coral snake: red touch yellow, kill a fellow. The Complementary Norms for Anglicanorum coetibus simpl...

A visitor to my old blog sent me a cri de coeur on the situation at the cathedral of the North American Catholic ordinariate for former Anglicans, which I've published with comments at the old blog . It's been very good for me to become more detached from the ordinariate, of which I was never a member in any case, as I've steadily become more assimilated into the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church via a well-run parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Two things strike me. One is that my own experience of being Catholic has educated me in the meaning of this passage from the Vatican II constitution Lumen Gentium Often the Church has also been called the building of God. The Lord Himself compared Himself to the stone which the builders rejected, but which was made into the cornerstone. On this foundation the Church is built by the apostles, and from it the Church receives durability and consolidation. This edifice has many names to describe it: the house of ...

When I posted Sunday on rhw headmaster's resignation at the uber-elite Dalton School, I thought it would be an easy short post on a day when I'd be preoccupied with installing my new desktop. But then yesterday I heard that Megyn Kelly, of all people, had gone public with scolding the headmaster, and a few people had noticed, so I wondered what else was up. Let's keep in mind that Kelly is still presumably rich following her settlements with Fox and NBC, and at least arguably still famous, though she's past her sell-by date. But she destroyed her career doing as the lizard people told her to do in 2016, trying to ambush Trump, so I'm not sure why she's hanging around. The elites don't like her, and she doesn't like them -- unless they continue to fawn over her, which they aren't doing. It turns out that Kelly has had a running Twitter feud with New York elite schools and New York itself since last year. She pulled her kids out of the equally tony ...