In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...

I posted yesterday about how C Wright Mills was deeply involved in creating from the start a Castro "third way" narrative that belatedly tried to create a new revolutionary model that, while totalitarian by nature, wasn't directly tied to Stalinism. This lasted, if it was ever very effective, only until the fall of 1962, when Kennedy, always a hawk in any case, tied Castro directly to Moscow in the Cuban missile crisis. (Although the resolution of the crisis itself has subsequently been portrayed as only a partial win, if that, for Kennedy, it's generally acknowledged that the outcome resulted in Khrushchev's deposition in 1964, so winners and losers are hard to pick.) The outcome of the missile crisis in popular culture is best illustrated in Hitchcock's 1969 film Topaz . I rewatch both Vertigo and Topaz almost compulsively, in part because I now think, although it's a close case, that Topaz is Hitchcock's greatest. (Both have a peculiar devi...