In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

There are two former Anglican converts to Catholicism that I frequently rely on to keep my own Catholic bearings. Both of them explain important things that weren't brought up in my Episcopalian confirmation class. One is Fr Dwight Longenecker, a moderate-to-conservative former priest in the Church of England, now a priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston, SC. (He came in outside either Anglicanorum coetibus or the Pastoral Provision.) At a Lenten mission at our Catholic parish, he gave a quick overview of the kinds of Anglicans, and he made the point that he'd have to listen for a while to what any particular Anglican had to say before he could give a rough estimate of what party he belonged to. The second is Frederick Kinsman, who was Episcopal Bishop of Delaware from 1908 to 1919 before resigning to convert to Catholicism. He wrote several highly underrecognized books critiquing Anglicanism. Significantly, he was an Oxford-educated member of the Anglo-Catholic...

I never gave Fr Hunwicke much thought. I knew he had a large following for his blog , although I only occasionally glanced at it, in part because active involvement with a real Roman Catholic parish and active study of scripture and Catholic thinkers meant I saw little need to visit. I did, thoiugh, have an impression that he had a certain Blimpish persona with "Rule Britannia" always playing faintly in the background. Then Pope Francis began to speak of "traditional" and "rigid" internet priests, by which I assumed he meant men like Frs Zuhlsdorf and Hunwicke. As a good Catholic, I wanted to get a better idea of what he meant, especially as Fr Z, as he became more controversial, lost the support of even the conservative bishop in whose diocese he lived. So I decided to look at Fr Hunwicke more closely as well, as just the other day I found him calling the Holy Father a heretic as he underwent surgery and insisting that even the OF Roman Canon had...

Just so we have our priorities straight, the UK photographer who published this image as part of a lighthearted series was forced to apologize . Masks are very, very serious. But even the New York Times has begun to take a different perspective -- and since it's of, by, and for the elites, its perspective is through the lens of social class, which for elitists is a very, very serious topic. From this past Saturday, Are Masks A New Signifier of Social Class? (This is normally behind a paywall, but the Times will let you sign on to read it for free.) On a recent Sunday night at Le Bilboquet, a see-and-be-seen restaurant in the Hamptons, well-heeled diners nibbled on $475 tins of Osetra caviar. A handsome man showed off his gold Audemars Piguet watch to his sparkly female companion. A party of 10 in polo shirts and striped rompers danced to a tropical house remix of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” They were all unmasked, while the waiters, bartenders and other ...

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...