In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

One thing that strikes me about the traditionalist movement is the essentially Protestant subtext of so much that comes out of it -- the ich kann nicht anders insistence on speaking out over some perceived, often liturgical, abuse in the Catholic Church. For an example, I had only to return to Fr Hunwicke's blog and today's post. Oddly, he quotes an Anglo-Catholic priest's bombastic remarks from 1921: Let us remind ourselves that the grand possession of Western Christendom, this great prayer, the Canon of the Mass, this noble Consecration prayer, for at least 1300 years, intact and immutable, formed the basis of the Western Rite. and comments on it, almost as bombastically, A hundred years later, most ordinary Latin Catholic churches have abandoned it. Those that use it in celebrations of the Ordinary Form use a version in which, at its most sacred heart, the text has been messed around with. And from Bergoglian Rome come rumours of new liturgy wars. Surely, this ...

I guess the obvious answer is that Vaughn Treco was removed from active ministry as a priest in the US ordinariate, while Fr Hunwicke continues as a priest in good standing in the UK ordinariate. But my question is why. In January 2019, Treco was removed from his post at the ordinariate Church of St. Bede the Venerable in Minnesota for remarks in a homily that, by this account, criticized the Second Vaican Council and the post-Conciliar popes : Father showed us a clear picture of the post-conciliar church and the concessions to modernity and the world that the post-conciliar popes have made. He pointed out how this faithlessness is what allowed this rot in the Church to fester for so long and provided several ways for us simple faithful to move forward. As I observed on the old blog, it isn't entirely clear precisely what statements or other factors were the proximate cause of his removal; he appears to have rubbed people the wrong way in his duties as a hospital chapla...

Somehow I ran into a piece in the National Review on the Catholic bishops' vote to draft a teaching document on eucharistic coherence, generally assumed to define the eligibility to receive communion for politicians who support policies that go against Church teaching. I had only time to scan it before a popup arrived to tell me I had to subscribe to read more. Like the Wall Street Journal, NR now wants me to pay for nothing. The last time I spent much time at that site was around 1998, when they still ran Mark Steyn, and Jonah Goldberg had a sense of humor. Anyhow, the point of the piece they wanted me to pay for was that the USCCB did nothing but debate and talk, and we couldn't expect much from the Catholic bishops. I can't quote from it, because they won't let me go back to the piece. NR is generslly locked in a time warp. Under Buckley, it was a nominally Catholic publication, though as I reflect on things, Buckley himself was a Catholic for the 1960s, which...

The period leading up to major holidays, especially the Fourth, doesn't have much actual news. The big subject over the past week has been the condo collapse in Miami. But there are other data points. NBC News, a stalwart of legacy media, caught a major Wuhan lab figure in an untruth : In March, Dr. Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan-based virologist who has been accused of conducting risky experiments with bat coronaviruses, flatly denied allegations that the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted studies with the military, an NBC News report said. But the network reported that it uncovered evidence linking Shi to military scientists. She collaborated with Ton Yigang, a military scientist, on coronavirus research in 2018 and then with Zhou Yusen, another military scientist in December 2019. Zhou who was listed as deceased in the footnote of an article published in 2020, the report said. The report said it could not confirm the cause of his death. For those who've been following th...

California had a modified limited reopening on June 15, with certain exceptions for transit, large events, and medical facilities. But even at Kaiser, though we still have to wear masks, the attitude is more relaxed, and the Polizei at the entry yelling "pull your mask all the way up!" are gone. A retail store I visit apologized that the building owner still wants masks there, but I can live with it. About a third of the people at mass wear them, but so far, it's at individual discretion. The Delta variant is an intereating case. Pretty clearly in the US, a fairly small minority has wanted renewal or continuation of masks and social distance due to the Delta variant. Los Angeles County has "strongly recommended" continuing masks and social distance, but detailed updates to the public health order as of June 28 are very limited. It's especially significant that CDC head Dr Walensky has reiterated that fully vaccinated people don't need to wear mask...

As I've said, I've got no dog in the fight over the Latin mass. There's no canonical requirement that I attend it, and I'm more than pleased with our novus ordo parish. I have, though, taken a contnuing interest in the fate of Anglicanroum coetibus . Pope Benedict XVI's constitution setting up a personal prelature for former Anglicans, which over more than a decade has not had a happy life. The latest controversy is over a second volume of its liturgy, covering the daily office and liturgy of the hours. Let's remember that the total world population of ordinariate members under Anglicanorum coetibus is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000, divided about evenly between the US and UK, with essentially miniscule and declining memberships in Australia and Canada. [A visitor reports that according to the latest official figures available from the 2020 Annuario Pontificio, the membership of the North American ordinariate is 6,040 while that of the UK is 1,85...

Yesterday I posted about the Hunter Biden venture capital firm's investment in a for-profit startup that worked with the Wuhan lab to perform gain-of-function research. The image above is a screen shot that comes from another Natalie Winters piece in the National Pulse , dated yesterday, where she refers to a 2018 presentation at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill by Ralp;h Baric, a close colleague of Peter Daszak, entitled “Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic – and Preventing it!” In yesterday's post I offered half-crazy speculation that anti-computer virus tech tycoon John McAfee was suspected of creating the computer viruses for which his company sold the antidotes only as a way to suggest such opportunities conceivably exist. Natalie Winters seems to be on a similar wavelength. The slide outlines what type of stocks and industries surged during the Ebola outbreak, which he uses to extrapolate financial advice on how to “make money in the next pandemic....