Defende Nos in Proelio...

Growing up in the northeast you couldn't swing a dead cat around by a rosary without hitting a Catholic church. Here in North Cacalacky we are not so blessed. It as thus made me appreciate more the majesty and thoughtfulness of my parish in New York, or at the very least its professional choir. But having enjoyed a lovely evening of singing carols at Love Feast last month, I am saddened to announce that one tiny little Methodist church has more singers who can carry a tune than the entire Catholic population of Durham.

And it's certainly not for lack of trying. Oh, do they try. Encouraging as it is to see an enthusiastic congregation at each Catholic church in the city, genuineness of faith is no excuse for laziness. Making mass a pleasant experience requires more than just showing up and at the very least requires the cantor to get her vowels right, particularly if she isn't bothering to pay attention to the key. Why, oh why, must we sing Gaelic folk songs and Caribbean allelujahs when there is nary an Irishman or a Jamaican in the place? And surely someone close to the "choral director" is aware of a mass setting that was not written by Marty Haugen.

But the hand-holding. Oh the hand-holding! As if I didn't have enough crosses to bear down here, I have to suffer through the whole congregation grabbing each others' hands, sometimes across the aisle, during the Our Father, as if that's the best time to invoke traditional camp-fire activity. And color me a literalist, but I don't think you can call it the Agnus Dei (tr. "Lamb of God") if you don't say, um, "Lamb of God." Look, if I wanted to kum-ba-ya like in a hippy-dippy liturgical clusterf*ck, I'd be Protestant.

So, anyway, this was the (extremely uncharitable) mindset I was in when visiting the future in-laws in an even more southern state (Georgia) for Christmas. We came dangerously close to going to an Episcopal church for midnight mass until God stepped in and totally got us lost and made us run out of gas. Providence is either truly mysterious or simply a synonym for absent-minded. Needless to say we went to the little local church the next morning and prayed for the best...

... Boy, you sure do find those RadTrads in the strangest places. Now I admit I used to troll the Catholic blogs back in the day (still do sometimes) so I knew they existed but I'd never seen any up close. And these guys were good! It was very subtle; you had to know what to look for. Everything was just a little bit off, like those bells I haven't heard since I was a kid or when the little altar boy stuck a plate under my hand just in case I spilled a few crumbs of the Eucharist. Little stuff that made you go hmmmm.

Again, everything was just a little off, that is until the end of the mass, when the entire congregation prayed, in full Stepford unison, for St. Michael the Archangel to protect them from the demons and evil spirits that prowl the world in order to prey on good souls. Oh yes, they said "prowl".

It was that moment when we knew we had to flee lest we be discovered, moderate cradle Catholics in the bowels of the RadTrad beast!

But the kicker (and this is where I really believe that the good Lord is testing me by fire) is that in the midst of a clearly conservative, traditional congregation complete with totally suppressed prayers to heavenly warriors, I still had to hold hands during the Our Father! Will the indignities never end!

Dawkins and the Pope

This weekend there was an article about Intelligent Design in the New York Times Magazine. While the author doesn't say anything particularly new, one paragraph at the end pretty much sums up my entire position about evolution v. theism, namely that it's not an either/or situation. He writes:

One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows. As the arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins has observed, ''Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.'' But Darwinism permits you to be an intellectually fulfilled theist, too. That is why Pope John Paul II was comfortable declaring that evolution has been ''proven true'' and that ''truth cannot contradict truth.'' If God created the universe wholesale rather than retail -- endowing it from the start with an evolutionary algorithm that progressively teased complexity out of chaos -- then imperfections in nature would be a necessary part of a beautiful process.

He perfectly juxtaposes an avowed atheist and an avowed theist in the same paragraph, something that needs to be done more frequently. I'm becoming more and more convinced that we need an organization called "Christians for Darwin" or something like that. Kind of like "Jews for Jesus" only not as cult-y...

God and Torture

I was perusing the National Review on-line this afternoon and I read two things that I need to comment on. The first was about George W. Bush and God. It's mostly about how often God is mentioned in presidential inaugural addresses. Mostly....

Despite all this history, if George W. Bush mentions God in his second inaugural, especially in a meaningful way, he can expect to be attacked by those abysmally ignorant of U.S. history, by those clueless as to the real meaning of separation of church and state, by those seeking to expunge any vestige of God from public life.

I, for one, couldn't care less if the president mentions God in a speech and while I'm not terribly ignorant of U.S. history, I think it is very important to hear how he mentions God. Andrew Sullivan, who is sometimes a bit paranoid about these things, has brought up a few points in recent weeks. First, when apparently a GOP insider said "Mitt Romney is going to have a hard time connecting with the social conservative base of the party given his Mormon faith--just a fact of life. For what it's worth..." Second, when Bush himself in an interview said "On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord."

Having faith should not be anathema to holding public office but it shouldn't be a prerequisite. And apparently, to be a Republican now, you have to be of a particular faith because apparently Mitt Romney, who is uber-conservative, will have a hard time getting support because he is Mormon. So, the question I have about God and Bush, when the president mentions God in his inaugural address, how much do the politics of his religion (not his religion itself) affect his public politics? His intentions, not his reference to God, are what is dangerous to a secular society. We shouldn't expunge God from public life but we shouldn't try to get Him involved in politics.

The second article that caught my eye was one defending Alberto Gonzales' testimony during his confirmation hearings....

With the facts separated from hyperbole, Senator Cornyn turned to the substance of Gonzales's legal thinking. The Democrats arranged for a handful of witnesses to criticize Gonzales, but none of them truly refuted (or even rejected) his legal stance. Indeed, the witnesses — a pacifist opposed to the war in Afghanistan altogether and two law deans specializing in international law — seemed, by the conclusion of Cornyn's questioning, to have little argument at all. To the senator's principal question, "Did they agree that all lawful means to gather intelligence likely to save American lives should be permitted?," they all answered affirmatively.

This may all be fine and good; I too believed that Gonzales acted legally. But just because terrorists aren't entitled to the Geneva Convention doesn't mean that they aren't entitled to human rights. I certainly don't believe that the the level of questioning should be kept to name and rank, as the Geneva Convention requires, but we certainly don't need to haggle over how far we can go without actually reaching the level of torture.

We're America. We're supposed to go above and beyond the call of duty. We go above and beyond with foreign aid, with protecting the world from terrorism, with personal freedoms for our own citizens. Shouldn't we be going above and beyond when it comes to preserving human dignity, no matter how ignoble or barbaric the human in question might be? And when did it become un-conservative to care about human rights?

We're either that kid that everyone hates because every teacher loves him and gets straight A's and is captain of the lacrosse team and homecoming king, or we're the kid that everyone hates because he beats all other kids up on the playground and won't share his ball unless he makes up all the rules. Quite frankly I'd rather be hated because I'm generally better than everyone else, not because I carry a bigger stick.

Hail Holy Queen...

Ave Maria gratia plena Dominvs tecvm
Benedicta tv in mvlieribvs
Et benedicta frvctvs ventri tvi, Iesvs
Sancta Maria, mater dei
Ora pro nobis pecatoribvs
Nvnc et in ora mortis nostrae

Once a year I get to fully indulge in goddess-worshiping paganism. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception is my favorite church holiday because Mary, um, kicks ass. Protestants just don't understand. To be sure, there is a lot more subtlety to Marian theology than Dan Brown might have you believe, and us good Catholics can easily tell the difference between goddess-worship of the divine feminine and Marian devotion. No matter what science or the lavendar mafia might be trying to do, we all have a mother, even the Son of Man. Ours might not be as chaste or as gentle or as sinless as the Blessed Virgin, but she helped make us who we are and we should be proud.