UK COVID Data, Provincetown, And Andrerw Sullivan

A chance mention of the UK's experience with the delta surge sent me to the usual charts on the web, Indeed, the UK experienced a surge in delta-variant COVID cases in late spring, but the surge looks just like every other peak we've had since late 2020. It reaches a summit, and then it falls off steeply on the other side.

In contrast, I looked up the graph for UK deaths. As I pretty much expected, unlike the graph for cases above, there was no peak at all in deaths over the same period. This has been the pattern for every geographical area I've checked. It also lends credence to the remark by former FDA commissioiner Dr Scott Gottlieb, "I think we’re further into this Delta wave than we’re picking up . . . I think, you know, in another 2 or 3 weeks we’ll be through this. This new [masking] guidance will have a negligible impact on it.”

Other remarks by Gottlieb suggest the CDC is continuing to damage its reputation by spreading panic over the delta variant.

Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned Wednesday that the latest CDC mask reversal could have a "negligible impact" on the spread of the Delta variant, telling CNBC that "we're not going to get enough bang for our buck" by instructing those who have already received the COVID-19 vaccine to continue to mask up indoors.

. . . While Gottlieb believes the recent spike in positive cases will likely dissipate in the coming weeks, he worries the CDC's guidance will have a counterproductive impact by further dissuading those already on the fence about the vaccine.

The only reference the CDC has officially released as the basis for its new masking guidance is a study of an outbreak in Provincetown, MA in early July. (Other studies are mentioned in the PowerPoint that was leaked to the Washington Post, but they aren't mentioned in the official CDC release.) There have been numerous objections to this study, including its small sample size and its unrepresentative demographics -- Provincetown is a well-known gay center. Indeed, the circumstances contradict the conventional wisdom that the delta variant is spread by Trumpist anti-vaxxers.

Andrewe Sullivan, who lives in Provincetown, summed all this up in the UK Daily Mail:

Writer Andrew Sullivan says the COVID-19 outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, that infected around 900 people and triggered CDC's mask U-turn was sparked by wild July 4 indoor parties following Pride Week.

. . . Sullivan said many had just come from Pride parties in New York City and packed into bars and dance clubs.

One of the bars is like a 'dang dungeon where sweat drips from the ceiling and mold reaches up the walls,' Sullivan said.

'It might have been designed for viral transmission,' he added.

But all the friends he described in his post on The Weekly Dish experienced mild symptoms after testing positive.

Town Manager Andrew Morse confirmed that most of the 900 people connected to the Provincetown COVID outbreak had mild symptoms. Only seven were hospitalized and no one died, Morse said.

This confirms occasional observations that most people who test positive for the delta variant are asymptomatic, while those who have symptoms suffer only a mild case of the flu -- and overall, the delta variant is little different from a normal flu season. But the public health bigwigs are continuindg to muddle the issues on the Sunday talks:

Fauci, speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, said he doesn’t foresee more lockdowns in the U.S., but warned that the situation surrounding the coronavirus pandemic will continue to get worse because so many Americans are still unvaccinated. While this week the nation saw a surge in Americans getting the shot, as coronavirus cases rise driven largely by the more infectious delta variant, still only about 60% of Americans are fully vaccinated.

But wait -- isn't the big takeaway from the Provincetown study that even the vaccinated can spread the virus, and this is why the vaccinated need to wear masks? If it doesn't matter if you're vaccinated or not, why get vaccinated?

The CDC Has Lost The Bubble

I woke up this morning to see new signs -- unusual for a weekend -- that the CDC is losing control of the narrative. A big one is that people there are leaking. As of Thursday, an internal PowerPoint reached the Washington Post:

It captures the struggle of the nation’s top public health agency to persuade the public to embrace vaccination and prevention measures, including mask-wearing, as cases surge across the United States and new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus.

. . . The data and studies cited in the document played a key role in revamped recommendations that call for everyone — vaccinated or not — to wear masks indoors in public settings in certain circumstances, a federal health official said. That official told The Post that the data will be published in full on Friday.

However, this didn't happen. Instead,

The White House on Friday struggled to explain to reporters why it suddenly stopped holding coronavirus briefings after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued its latest masking guidance.

“Why are the doctors not here in the briefing to take our questions?” asked NBC reporter Kelly O’Donnell during the White House press briefing on Friday.

. . . Since President Joe Biden took office, he promised regular public briefings with federal health officials to talk about the ongoing battle against the coronavirus pandemic.

. . . But the briefings stopped after the CDC announced new masking guidelines on Tuesday, even for fully vaccinated Americans.

“Of all the weeks not to hold have a COVID briefing, why this week?” asked CBS reporter Weijia Jiang.

That the legacy media, NBC and CBS, would be asking essentially hostile questions is a bad sign. The ongoing mask mandates are increasingly unpopular, and the masks cause stress. Add to that the normally high stress level of air travel, and the result should be predictable:

Nearly one in five flight attendants say they have witnessed physical incidents involving passengers this year, and their union is calling for criminal prosecution of people who act up on planes.

A union survey supports what airlines and federal officials have been saying: There has been a surge in unruly passengers this year, who sometimes become violent.

The most common trigger is passengers who refuse to follow the federal requirement that they wear face masks during flights, according to the survey by the Association of Flight Attendants.

And then add to that the sense that arbitrary increases in controls are inevitable.

President Joe Biden confirmed Friday that Americans should expect more coronavirus-related restrictions, as the Delta variant of the virus continues to spread.

Biden spoke about more restrictions on Americans after CBS reporter Weijia Jiang asked him if he expected more restrictions as the virus spreads across the country.

“In all probability,” he replied as he left the White House for a weekend trip to Camp David.

. . . The White House continues to fail to explain to Americans why fully vaccinated people in some areas have to wear masks, leaving future restrictions entirely up to public health officials.

Another commentator in independent media said,

That response set off alarm bells on social media, with lots of expletives being shared. Most Americans are simply not up for another round of science-less proclamations made to protect politicians more than people.

So is there something in the works here? Or is Biden just doing the “old man says stuff” routine he’s so fond of?

Earlier today, CDC Dir. Rochelle Walensky stated that there will be no national mask or vaccine mandates, claiming that any prior comments to that effect were speaking strictly about private entities. Further, Deputy White House Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre said that lockdowns were not in the cards despite indicating a day earlier that Biden would do whatever the CDC recommends.

Given that, what other restrictions could Joe Biden be talking about? While I could spend the next few minutes racking my brain to try to come up with hypotheticals, I think the answer is simple enough — Joe Biden does not know what he’s talking about.

It's interesting that the CDC gave the impression that it was issuing a national mask mandate, or recommendation, or exhortation or whatever it was, on Tuesday, but by yesterday, Dr Walensky said she hadn't done that at all, except that President Biden thinks they're going to go ahead and issue more something or others. Meanwhile, the New York Post Editorial Board says It’s time to take CDC chief Rochelle Walensky off the air:

Even if it were better qualified, the message all too many Americans get is that the agency’s advisories are arbitrary and senseless — or, worse, that it has lost confidence in the vaccines to protect us right now.

It’s not that her science is wrong, but that she has no understanding of how to communicate to the general public — or that, as is the habit of public health bureaucracies, her only concern is that something awful will happen without her having covered her butt in advance.

This pandemic is over; loose talk about remote possibilities is the last thing the public needs as it strives to get back to work, to school and to normal socializing.

The last time Dr Walensky took such a high media profile was last March, when she said, verging on tears,

I'm going to lose the script, and I'm going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to so much promise and potential of where we are, and so much reason for hope. But right now I'm scared.

The basic problem, I'm beginning to conclude, is that Dr Walensky is a ditz. We basically have a ditz feeding policy advice to a guy who's not all there. I'm not sure how this is going to turn out.

Something's Hinky About The COVID Data

I've never stopped checking the daily Los Angeles County COVID statistics. The graph above is a screen shot from today's report. While other graphs show sharp increaes in positive tests and hospitalizations, there's been no eqwuivalent rise in deaths. The graph is based on seven-day averages to compensate for daily fluctuation. By early June, the averages reached a floor of about four deaths per day in the county of over 10 million. Since then, they've fluctuated between two and four, with no increase equivalent to those for positive teats and hospitalizations.

Among other things, it's hard not to conclude that whatever the reason for an increase in hospitalizations, there are far fewer deaths resulting from them. So I went to find a graph of total COVID deaths in the US. Here it is at right (click on all the images for larger copies). A key takeaway is that, if in the past the public health authorities took cases as a leading indicator of deaths, so far, this doesn't seem to be happening with the delta variant.

As you can see, there's an uptick in the cases graph at right that simply doesn't appear on the deaths graph above it. These were taken from screen prints of web searches, both using New York Times data, within minutes of each other this morning. A smaller takeaway is that the uptick in cases that had Dr Walensky in tears on national TV last April, which she took as a leading indicator of deaths, was in fact never reflected in any actual increase in deaths. (It's worth revisiting what she and Dr Fauci said then, which I covered at the time in this post.) It's also worth noting that deaths began to decline in mid-January nationally, well before significant numbers of people were fully vaccinated.

It's hard to avoid a conclusion that as the pandemic proceeded, aftrer mid-January 2021, the disease itself became less fatal, and medical treatments became more effective. It's also hard to disagree with conclusions by variouis observers that herd immunity based on people who were already infected but had recovered was an important factor in the overall improvement.

I also ran across an intriguimig story at the Foundation for Economic Educdation, Despite ‘Delta’ Alarmism, US COVID Deaths Are at Lowest Level Since March 2020, Harvard and Stanford Professors Explain. Rather than using raw totals as the graphs above do, this graph from the story normalizes the data to deaths per million, but it draws a very similar conclusion.

[T}he actual number of COVID-19 deaths is at a nadir. Harvard Medical School Professor Martin Kulldorff pointed this out on Twitter, writing that “In [the] USA, COVID mortality is now the lowest since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.”

He shared this graph [the one at right] from OurWorldInData which clearly shows how COVID deaths per million are at, relatively speaking, extreme lows. Far more people were dying from COVID-19 months ago as we were winding down restrictions than are dying today as some call to reinstate them.

. . . Now, some would cite rising COVID-19 case counts or hospitalizations in certain parts of the country as evidence that the pandemic is indeed once again spiraling out of control. But many COVID-19 cases recorded as positive are either asymptomatic or come with very mild symptoms—especially the cases confirmed among vaccinated individuals—so high case counts are not necessarily proof of a serious problem. Hospitalizations are concerning, yes, but primarily insofar as they lead to high numbers of deaths, which, thankfully, is not the case so far with the Delta variant.

Others would say that deaths are a “lagging indicator” that come in several weeks after the increased spread of the disease. But the Delta variant has been spreading in the US for months now, and deaths have remained relatively flat, in part due to widespread vaccination.

I think a major difference between now and 2020 is that the population is getting smarter and will push back more readily against new calls for controls. Governors like DeSantis and Abbott will publicly resist reinstatment of masking, social distance, and whatever else, and the problem for the public health authorities will be that there will be no difference in statistics between states like Texas and Florida and the rest of the country.

Why the calls for reinstatement are coming is another question, which i'll tackle tomorrow if nothing intervenes.

Really, Is Fr Hunwicke OK?

I couldn't help but notice a post yesterday at Fr Hunwicke's blog, which reads in its entirety:

Like Vatican II, TC has now (after only twelve days!!) sprouted its own ghastly SPIRIT, which can even be directly contrary to the wording of TC, but still has to be as ruthlessly enforced.

According to Fr Zed, an American cardinal called Gregory has forbidden an Authentic Form Mass in an American church which ... is NOT a "parish church".

Simply a tyranny, isn't it, all this. You have to guess what Hitler or Stalin or that North Korean chappy really want, then you have to enforce it. If you know what's good for you.

This is what tyrants and their lackeys always really expect. They don't really take seriously even their own wretched enactments. They just want you to grovel.

Several things interest me here. It appears Fr Hunwicke thinks Cdl Gregory forbade a celebration of the Latin mass "directly contrary to the wording of TC". But Article 2 of Traditionis Custodes simply says,

It belongs to the diocesan bishop, as moderator, promoter, and guardian of the whole liturgical life of the particular Church entrusted to him, to regulate the liturgical celebrations of his diocese. Therefore, it is his exclusive competence to authorize the use of the 1962 Roman Missal in his diocese, according to the guidelines of the Apostolic See.

We can question Cdl Gregory's judgment in this particular case, but he's doing nothing "directly contrary" to the guidelines of the Apostolic See. § 2 of Article 3 says the bishop

is to designate one or more locations where the faithful adherents of these groups may gather for the eucharistic celebration (not however in the parochial churches and without the erection of new personal parishes)

But it does not imply that any non-parish church is automatically eligible for celebration of the Latin mass. The basilica involved is a non-parish church, but it happens not to be one that the bishop has designated. And the fact is that if a bishop orders something, the Church orders it. Full stop. One thing I'm picking up when I make these visits to Fr Hunwicke is that if I go back and read whatever document he's referring to, it usually turns out not to say what he claims it says.

By the same token, he refers to a post at Fr Z's blog, which I diligently looked up (he didn't provide a link). Fr Z quotes a release from the Paulus Institute, whose celebration of the Latin mass was canceled (italics in original):

We ask this unfortunate reply be met with controlled reactions, whether with strength, substance, and opposition, but without polemics and inflammatory or coarse words, which The Paulus Institute rejects.

So naturally, Fr Hunwicke compares the pope to "Hitler or Stalin or that North Korean chappy" and calls him a "tyrant", with Cdl Gregory his "lackey". Except that Cdl Gregory has had to "guess" nothing; he's acting entirely within his episcopal authority. And even the Paulus Institute is saying yuu may disagree with the cardinal's judgment, but by using intemperate language, you're making Pope Francis's point for him.

But this brings me back to a more basic question. Where does comparing Pope Francis to Hitler, Stalin, and Kim Jong-un stop and calling him the Antichrist begin? There are hundreds of Protestant denominations that have no problem at all with the comparisons Fr Hunwicke is drawing. Pastor John MacArthur, a highly respected Evangelical, insists that the Roman Catholic Church is not a Christian denomination. Might those views actually be more friendly to Fr Hunwicke in his current state?

In fact, Anglicans of old had no problem at all denouncing the Bishop of Rome. Indeed, Article XXXVII makes it plain:

The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.

As Wittgenstein would suggest, the solution to Fr Hunwicke's problem will come from the disappearance of the problem. If he will simply renounce his misguided and clearly ill-informed conversion to the Roman church and return to the traditionial and long-established church of his own nation, which gives and has almost always given him full latitude to celebrate whatever liturgy he wants, he'll be much, much happier. Or do I have this wrong?

The Ordinariate Refuses To Confront Its Systemic Racism

A visitor sent me the above screen shot from a Facebook thread on one of the ordinariate groups there. The backstory appears to be this, according to the Black Catholic Messenger blog:

A planned council of the Knights of Peter Claver & Ladies Auxiliary at an Ordinariate parish in California has been quashed—and likely due to racism, according to the prospective council head.

It would have made history both as the first KPC unit at an Ordinariate parish, and also as the first in Orange County (an affluent region in Southern California that is only ~2% Black).

Last year, Gunnar Gundersen led the effort at Irvine's St John Henry Newman Catholic Church, a parish of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter. The plan was initially approved in December by the parish administrator, Fr Evan Simington, after the POCSP bishop Steven J. Lopes gave the green light in August.

The visitor suiggests that Fr Simington's apparent turnaround came about because Mr Gundersen is an angry guy, to say the least. In one post attacking Bp Barron, he says

Having specialized in building an online presence tackling the challenges presented by mostly White and angry atheists, he has sought to be equally relevant in the social-justice-movement debate that is growing in the United States and around the world.

He has done this by writing a series of essays on Word on Fire, and in other outlets and formats (including interviews). That effort has involved framing most modern social-justice activism as “woke” and rejecting “wokeness” as “vile"—an adjective he used in an interview with the Babylon Bee podcast.

. . . His definition and criticism are premised on the notion that those who are woke are not Christian, do not believe in objective morals, and do not seek to develop cooperative social structures.

The visitor comments on the controversy:

The young black Ordinariate member from Cincinnati [Jordan Arnold in the Facebook thread above] accused the KofSPC of embracing Critical Race Theory and promoting Marxism, which seems unlikely. A more plausible explanation is that the chapter or whatever it’s called was “gathered” and really has little connection with SJHN, Irvine. This is of course the danger with these little Ordinariate groups, as we saw at St Bede, St Louis Pk. They are easily hi-jacked by a few potential trouble-makers who have wandered in from other Catholic parishes where they did not have the influence they feel they deserve.

I am not accusing the KofSPC group of being such, but these small communities are always vulnerable. It was mentioned that the Knights of Columbus group at SJHN is inactive. Of course the KofC has no connection to “Anglican Patrimony” and is part of the post-Anglican cultural mix of the Ordinariate.

Well, one issue I keep returning to here is that Critical Race Theory, which is closely aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement, isn't Marxist, because it represents an alliance of the Lumpenproletariat, the petty criminal class and street rabble, with the wealthy elites. Both are opposed to the working class broadly considered, but Marx also understood that the Lumpenproletariat is not a reliable ally for anyone. The alliance, however temporary, feeds the narcissism of the elites and is momentarily convenient for the lumpenproles.

I think narcissism is key to understanding the larger phenomenon we've been seeing for nearly a decade with the North American ordinariate: it's attracted fewer of the disgruntled high-church Anglicans it was meant to reach than it has the tiny wandering cliques of fringe cradle Catholics of many different stripes, who've been frustrated at the unwillingness of larger novus ordo parishes to nurture their particular rage. Thus we see the odd alliance in the Facebook thread above between Peter Smith, a prominent white cradle trad who's drifted into the ordinariate, with Mr Gundersen, who self-identifies as black and woke, against Mr Arnold, who strikes me as a black member of the down-to-earth class that works for a living. Narcissism, I hate to say it, is a dominant feature in this thread; the putative class alliance here is purely for show and transitory.

But this goes to the question of Fr Simington, who in my view made the correct call. Althogh he is a graduate of the Episcopalian high-church Nashotah House seminary, he opted to spend additional time in Roman Catholic seminary formation. In his assignments since ordination, I believe he's had part-time positions as an associate in diocesan parishes and also, I believe, has lived in diocesan rectories. (I'm open to correction here.) He's celibate.

This means he has probably developed friendships with celibate, working diocesan clergy, and maybe just as important, networking contacts. He's much closer to what I see every day with real Catholic priests, which means he's far better equipped to make the kind of call he made. A priest who just recently left residence at our rectory to resume a position as a pastor said in his farewell homily, "I realize that sometimes I'll need to say 'no' in my new assignment." Looks like Fr Simington has developed this necessary priestly faculty, and I take it as a sign of maturity.

I've got to think better work will emerge for Fr Simington. He shouldn't be wasting his abilities in nickel-and-dime situations like this.

On The Prescience Of Die Hard

My wife and I normally record each night's TV schedule to watch the following night so we can fast-forward through the commercials, but if there's not enough history or animal or true crime stuff, I go looking for a film. The other night, I settled on Die Hard (1988), which neither of us had seen, and for which my expectations were low. After all, it's the dregs of summer season. It turned out not to be High Noon, but it was actually watchable, and remarkably insightful into modern culture very much like the Jason Bourne films that I've already discussed here.

The Bourne films carried the strong subtext that the CIA of Allen Dulles, North by Northwest, and Topaz isn't the CIA we have. But I made the point that the Bourne trilogy appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Remarkably, Die Hard makes a similar point, that the FBI is no longer the FBI of G-men and J Edgar Hoover. And it said it in 1988, long before Ruby Ridge, Waco, the bungling of 9/11, and conspiracies to kidnap Gov Whitmer.

Indeeed, the latest scandal over Richard Trask, the agent who led the undercover team that appears to have been the leadership and most of the co-conspirators in that plot, who was arrested for slamming his wife's head into the night table after a swingers' party, seems the best possible illustration that this is not your grandfather's FBI. Forget the night table, Mr Hoover would have thrown the guy out if there was even a whiff about swingers' parties. Seems like the FBI would be having a better time lately if it paid more attention in general to who's a horndog, but as they say in the government, that's above my pay grade. (By the way, who would want to go to a swingers' party with that guy?)

According to Wikipedia, expectations for the film weren't high. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone had already turned down the lead role, and Bruce Willis was definitely Plan C or worse. But the film was an unintentional success, in part due to Willis's portrayal of the character as an uncertain, conflicted hero forced into his situation.

But I think an unacknowledged factor is the film's depiction of both the Los Angeles Police Department (which had yet to disgrace itself in its handling of the 1992 Rodney King riots) and the FBI, whose failings were still in the future. Somehow, I think the public sensed an authenticity in the film's portrayal of official hot-dogging, cowardice, and careerism that were yet to be fully visible in events.

The broad outlines of the plot are that a New York cop, John McClane (Willis), travels to Los Angeles to reconcile with his estranged wife, who is an executive. He meets her at her company's Christmas party in a high rise. However, a terrorist gang suddenly arrives to seize the building and rob the vault that holds the company's valuables. When it becomes plain that the terrorists intend to kill people, McClane escapes and uses his law enforcement skills to begin killing each of the terrorists, one by one.

The police, despite McClane's efforts to contact them, refuse to take his alarms seriously. Once the terrorist attack becomes impossible to discount or ignore, the LAPD brass arrives, but it decides it can't decide who's the bad guy, and it decides McClane could well be a terrorist himself, what with all the shooting and stuff. Amid LAPD's dithering, the FBI arrives and takes command, but they agree with LAPD that McClane is a terrorist. It's plain by then that no matter any other outcome, McClane is destined for a cell at the Colorado supermax, just down the corridor from the likes of Ted Kaczynski.

The climactic scene has the terrorists shepherding the remaining hostages onto the high-rise's roof, on the pretext that helicopters will be sent to rescue them in accordance with their demands. However, McClane suddently realizes that in fact, the terrorists mean to blow up the roof once the hostages assemble there, so he has no choice but to get to the roof himself and, with no other option, he fires his weapon over their heads to get them to go back downstairs.

Just at that moment, the FBI helicopters arrive and see McClane firing his weapon over the hostages' heads, which only confirms their view that he's a terrorist. A couple of hot-dogging FBI agents in the helicopter congratulate each other that they've caught the bad guy in the act. However, the terrorists then blow up the high rise roof, although the hostages have barely escaped due to McClane's quick action, but the explosion catches the FBI helicopter, which crashes, and the hot-dogging agents are killed.

There's more action to go, but the key event is that at least the agents who could have testified against McClane and put him in the supermax are out of the picture, which strikes me as perhaps the unintended moral of the whole film.

According to Wikipedia, "Deemed 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant' by the United States Library of Congress, Die Hard was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2017." Along, I might remind the reader, with Animal House.

I Got Some More Insights Into Traditionalism In Yesterday's Post From Fr Hunwicke

Naturally, in. the current controversy over Traditionis Custodes, it's important to understand our fellow Catholics on the other side of the issue. Yesterday's post by Fr Hunwicke, while it seems simple on the surface, carries two subtexts that lead to a deeper understanding of his, and traditionalists', mindset. It begins,

I have always had a soft spot for S Anne, not least because she is the Patron of my wife's college at Oxford (we sent two of our children there) . . .

In his thumbnail, he says he himself has been Senior Research Fellow at Pusey House in Oxford. But just so we're all on the same page, for those of us in the US at least, you need to substitute Yale, or possibly Princeton, for Oxford. Yalies in particular never let you forget they've been to Yale; two recent examples are Glenn Reynolds, whose actual intellectual mentors are Ayn Rand and Hugh Hefner, and Michael Medved, who lost his radio show when his NeverTrumpism became too boring even for the Salem network. Fr Hunwicke's fellow prominent Oxonians include Ghislaine Maxwell.

On one hand, it's never a good idea to cite your alma mater as evidence of your worth; there are too many felons, grifters, and general by-blows among your fellow alums. But in addition, that sort of constant name-dropping -- Fr Hunwicke effectively got four Oxfords into one short sentence -- is evidence of a deep insecurity. Trads seem to cling to figures like Scott Hahn, who not only converted to Catholicism but converted to Latin mass after that, going so far as to call it "superior" to the novus ordo, except he never explains why, just that he likes it. Again, this reflects an insecurity among many trads.

A remark by a visitor brought another issue into context. The visitor suggested that Latin masses tend to be attended by young families with large retinues of children, while novus ordo masses are less that way. The visitor suggested the trads are visibly following the Church's teaching on contraception, while the novus ordo Catholics are not. That's a matter for the confessional in the end, but the visible part is actually a problem.

I thought back to Honor Moore, daughter of Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Jr, who noted in her memoir that, as her parents had baby after baby en route to a total of nine children, she kept wondering who they were trying to beat. It later emerged that Bp Moore had been a closet bisexual all his life. Large broods of children, especially if the girls are wearing chapel veils, are a statement, not just an outcome.

They can certaimly reflect insecurity, and I hardly think the Moore family was unique in using a large brood to cover for serious behind-the-scenes issues in a marriage. Honor Moore's memoir suggests that a divorce would have ended Bp Moore's career, so there was a mutual interest in maintaining appearances for the sake of lifestyle, though his first wife did not follow him to New York, and they effectively separated. Fr Chad Ripperger, a trad priest, has noted that the kind of stuff that reaches him in the confessional makes him worry that the Latin mass is not having the salutary effect some might claim for it.

So the first issue, which I think applies at least to Fr Hunwicke's constant name-dropping (cf his recent reference to a private e-mail from Prebendary Moreton), is the apparent deep insecurity this reflects.

But there's another issue, which is the self-contradiction that verges on ditziness. This past Friday, Fr Hunwicke placed St John XXIII in his gallery of Hitler popes, or quasi-Hitler popes or something, for promulgating Veterum Sapientia, which did nothing more than assert that Latin is valuable to the Church because it is "universal, immutable, and non-vernacular.” And since Fr Hunwicke is most definitely on the side of universal, immutable, and non-vernacular, he ought to like St John XXIII, but that guy is actually Hitler (or something).

In yesterday's post, he then basically just reprints a Latin hymn to St Anne, no translation, as of course all his readers are naturally expected to be fully conversant with the universal, immutable, and non-vernacular. But they're nevertheless expected, apparently, to hurl anathema upon St John XXIII during the implicit Two Minutes Hate, at least when it suits Fr Hunwicke. I'm sure if anyone calls him on it (I receive copies of comments left on his blog that he won't approve), he'll excuse this in some way or other, oh, no, no, no. he never meant that at all. But isn't there, in the end, a sedevacantist subtext here?

Looking for a picture to use at the top of this post, I found it. Fr Longenecker had already used it in a 2016 post at his blog, where he quotes a traditionalist blogger who says,

. . . young advocates of traditional liturgy like me found ourselves heading to worship God every Sunday in the company of individuals who, as often as not, seemed dour and judgmental. They spoke in effusive terms when they described their Mass, but appeared pained when they actually attended it. No smiles ever seemed to touch their lips, and they would glare at women (like my wife) who would at times forget their chapel veils, or wear makeup, or fail to provide some means of instant corporal punishment at the first sign of a squirming toddler.

He himslf concludes,

[W]hy does there still have to be the sour, negativity, suspicion and persecution complex among some who call themselves traditionalist? . . . The more radical ones play the victim saying they are a persecuted minority, but they sure don’t mind loading their weapons and taking pot shots at everyone with whom they disagree.

The problem is that, in the current controversy, they wind up making Pope Francis's point for him. I think insecurity, based in part on their own uncertainties over Church teaching and a resulting overcompensation, is one cause of the suspicion and persecution complex among the trads. I can't disagree that the Latin mass thing has gotten out of hand.