In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...