Sunday Snippets—A Catholic Carnival (Vol. 4-24)

Welcome again to Sunday Snippets, your portal to a small collection of obscure but deserving Catholic writers on a wide range of topics. 

Yes, I know I haven't had one of these up for a while; despite my copious free time, I haven't produced a lot the last couple of months.

Anyway, here's how it works for those who are seeing this for the first time: Writers like me create a single post with links to the articles they've written for the week. This single post includes a link back to RAnn's blog This, That and the Other Thing, where the single post will be submitted as a link on the page. Follow the link back (I've provided two!), and it'll take you to RAnn's page, where you can find those other obscure but deserving writers I mentioned above.

What have I produced this week?

In Outside the Asylum I have two major posts, both of which touch on the topic of right-wing dissent, or conservative "cafeteria Catholics". The first is "'Mere Catholicism' vs. Real Catholicism™", in which I use a couple of pre-Vatican II sources to dispose of a false distinction and remind my fellow papist bloggers that we're granted neither the presumption of infallibility nor the power of excommunication. In the second, "Pope Francis and the libertarians", I take apart a couple of key free-market contentions held by libertarians, and argue that libertarianism places too much emphasis on the autonomy of the individual to be compatible with Catholic social doctrine.

In The Impractical Catholic (this blog what you're reading now), I started off with the musical question, "Has Ralph Nader become a Distributist?" It covers an article written by the consumer advocate and perennial presidential candidate, which reviews a book published in the 1930s by Herbert Agar and Alan Tate, Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence, and is adapted from Nader's own new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left/Right Alliance to Stop the Corporate State. (Be on the lookout for a future review of this book by Your Humble Blogger!) The next, "Seventy years ago today" (actually published a day early), is a reflection upon the men who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and on the few men and women still alive who served in all the theaters of World War II. Finally, there's "Separating truth from manufactured outrage in Galway", which takes apart the various strands of the story that became the myth of "800 babies thrown into a septic tank", and is based on an Irish Times interview with the historian who first brought the story to light.

Here you go, then! Follow the link back to RAnn's page, and happy reading!

Separating truth from manufactured outrage in Galway

Galway historian Catherine Corless. (Source: Irish Times)

"I never used that word 'dumped'," Catherine Corless told the The Irish Times. "I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words."

Later on in the story, the County Galway historian repeats herself "with distress": "I never used that word 'dumped'. I just wanted those children to be remembered and for their names to go up on a plaque. That was why I did this project, and now it has taken [on] a life of its own."

Indeed it has ... an ugly life; through the process of sensationalism, the real story has spawned a Doppelgänger, an evil double who lives only to spark controversy and recriminations. Separate strands of the story were mashed together to create this undead creature.

Thread 1: From 1840 to about 1924 the township of Tuam operated a workhouse just off of what is now Dublin Road (R 332). A map reportedly from 1892 marked the building as "Children's Home"; however, the building didn't become a home for unwed mothers and their babies until it was taken over by the Sisters of Bons Secours in 1925. The home closed in 1961 and fell into disrepair.

Thread 2: In 1975, 10-year-old Barry Sweeney and his 12-year-old buddy, Frannie Hopkins, managed to climb over the two-and-a-half-meter wall into a part of the home's property. "We used to be in there playing regular. There was always this slab of concrete there," Sweeney told the Irish Times. On this occasion, the boys decided to pry up the 120 cm x 60 cm slab to look under it. "There were skeletons thrown in there. They were all this way and that way. They weren’t wrapped in anything, and there were no coffins. But there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that." [Bold type mine.—ASL] Sweeney puts the number at closer to twenty.

Seventy years ago today

There's so few of them left.

My father wasn't old enough to serve even with Grandpa's permission until after October 1945; by a fluke, he was still awarded the World War II Victory Medal (Harry S Truman, for reasons I don't know, didn't declare an official end of hostilities until 31 December 1946). However, my granduncle, Lt. Joseph P. Cronin, served with the 36th Infantry (Arrowhead) Division when the Seventh Army invaded southern France 15 August 1944; he was killed outside of Montélimar nine days later. And a fellow Knight of my council served as a platoon sergeant in the 23rd Infantry (Americal) Division in the South Pacific; I don't know how, because he doesn't talk about it, but he was awarded the Bronze Star. And I once lived by a man who'd flown B-24s — where and with which Air Force, I'll never know.

The real heroes usually don't talk about it. When they're with friends from their old units, they swap funny memories. And they're the first to deny that they're heroes. Almost to a man, they say: "The real heroes never left."

Has Ralph Nader become a Distributist?—UPDATED

A new Distributist triad?

Ralph Nader getting a whole article published in The American Conservative? Wow, who'da thunk it?

Really, it's not all that strange, as: 1) Nader's article, "Who Owns America?", is drawn from his new book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left/Right Alliance to Stop the Corporate State (Nation Books, $16.43 in hardcover from Amazon), 2) it centers on a group of political conservatives in the 1930s who advocated "decentralization", and 3) as The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named points out, The American Conservative has no qualms about printing common sense even if it comes from a ritually impure source.

What interests and even fascinates me is that the article, which outlines Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (eds. Herbert Agar and Alan Tate, ISI Books, $23.70 in hardback from Amazon), describes a position on economics, ownership and government that wouldn't be out of place in The Distributist Review. The decentralists held corporate ownership to be a corruption of private ownership, one that inevitably led to plutocracy and oligarchy. At the same time, they distrusted state ownership; whatever small faction controlled the capital resources of the country, the endgame would result in the death of liberty. The only way to stave such a result off, they believed, was to spread out the means of production, especially land ownership, as much as possible.

Who knew solving our energy needs could be so freakin’ COOL!?

Okay, I'll admit it: The first time I saw this video on Elite Daily, I went into "full geek" mode. As in screaming, “THIS IS FREAKIN’ COOL!” Or maybe it was that part of the Y chromosome that interprets such gadgets as “toys”, no matter how utilitarian they’re meant to be. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to find the Solar Roadways concept slathered in awesome sauce.

Catholic Stand: Dancing with the Devil — The Final Cut

This post is the final version of an essay I published on May 9, 2014 in Outside the Asylum, and updated twice with additional news and commentary. It was rewritten for Catholic Stand at the request of my editor, Diane McKelva.

“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.”

—Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

In today’s academic milieu, you should expect that a Black Mass performed by a group calling itself “The Satanic Temple” under the auspices of an Ivy League university to be a bold, daring exercise in transgressing boundaries, right? Especially if the celebrants use a consecrated Host for the ritual desecration that was retrieved at a legitimate Catholic Mass.

Well, not so much. For one thing, a spokesperson for the Temple, Priya Dua, officially denied the use of a real Host (after initially confirming it) in a conversation with Elizabeth Scalia (The Anchoress). Later, the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club released a statement that read in part, “Our purpose is not to denigrate any religion or faith, which would be repugnant to our educational purposes, but instead to learn and experience the history of different cultural practices.” A still-later statement repeated the peaceful intent, albeit in the midst of a blither of revisionist history and boilerplate insults calling Catholic objections “closed-minded” and “based on intolerance and ignorance”. (See Thomas L. McDonald’s post in God and the Machine for an acerbic yet accurate outline of the relevant history.)

But Doug Mesner, aka “Lucien Greaves”, supposedly the head of The Satanic Temple, didn’t seem to be reading the same script. According to Kaitlyn Schallhorn of Campus Reform, Mesner asserted that the HECSC Black Mass “[would have] mock[ed] rituals of other mainstream religious rituals [sic]”, so Catholics wouldn’t be the only ones dissed. On the question of the consecrated host, Mesner was suspiciously coy, telling The Anchoress that he doubted anyone would “waste time going to all that trouble” to get one (Really? Only falling off a log would be less trouble), but telling Schallhorn “he couldn’t call it a ‘consecrated host’ as Catholics do” … which, The Anchoress pointed out, implied that Catholics could call their host consecrated.

On May 12, the event was “postponed indefinitely”; like Eliot’s hollow men, it ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

Read more at Catholic Stand!

Before you start junking all your Google™ stuff ...

Full disclosure: Blogger, of course, is a service provided by Google. So is AdSense. I also have a couple of Gmail accounts, and use Google's Calendar app, which coordinates with my Android smartphone's agenda app. And other things. Right now, I'm almost Google's Siamese twin.

So how should I feel about this recent message from LifeNews?

Google Bans Ads From Pregnancy Centers After Lobbying From “Pro-Choice” NARAL

by Steven Ertelt | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 4/28/14 4:53 PM

Google has banned ads from pro-life pregnancy centers that offer women and their unborn children abortion alternatives. The decision came after extensive lobbying from a national “pro-choice” group, NARAL, that appears to favor just one choice, abortion. 

Upset that pregnancy centers were allowed to bid on the keyword “abortion clinics,” along with facilities that kill unborn children in abortions, NARAL launched a national campaign to complain to Google. Now, the national search engine company has banned the ads.

According to NARAL, people using Google to search for “abortion clinics” got ads advertising the crisis pregnancy centers about 79 percent of the time — which cuts into the profit margins of abortion clinics.

So now many of my colleagues in the Catholic blogosphere are calling for a boycott of Google — or, at least, emails of protests. Some are even vowing to shed themselves of Android phones and tablets. Me? As I said about the various Chick-fil-A flaps, I'm not really one to man the barricades; the only boycott I've maintained successfully so far is against Starbucks. (And, believe me, it hurts — I do love their Fr'appucinos. *sigh*)

Catholic Stand: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"

This article originally appeared as two separate posts in The Impractical Catholic: "Good Friday" and "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" Since the two posts complement each other, I decided to collapse them into one larger post.

*     *     *

Dear God.

First, the frenzied, howling Sanhedrin. Slapping, punching, spitting all the while … perhaps kicking him if he fell. During the night watch, his anxiety and fear for what he knew is coming is so great that the net of blood vessels around his sweat glands constricted, then hemorrhaged. Hematidrosis. As a result, his skin is extremely fragile and sensitive; every punch and slap is exquisitely painful.

The humiliation of the crowning as Rex Iudaeorum - not a wreath or circlet but a cap woven out of branches from the local thorn bushes, each thorn a nail in his scalp, with a staff made out of reed for a scepter,  a scepter with which he’s struck like a club.

But that isn’t enough. Two Roman soldiers with flagella - whips of leather, with small bones tied to the ends that rip the skin off his back and tear pieces of muscle out. Tied to a post, there’s no way he can move, even involuntarily, that could avoid the clawing fragments that shred his back. There’s no way I can not hear him screaming his agony; slaves have been known to die as a result of the forty lashes.

Then the crossbeam is loaded onto his shoulders, raw and bleeding from the whips, bringing a fresh agony. Weakened, his heart already beginning to be squeezed and his lungs filled by fluids, he stumbles along the travertine-paved road from the castra praetoria to the place called Golgotha. He has probably already lost a liter of blood, if not more: category 3 shock numbs his mind, but doesn’t deaden the pain. He stumbles once, twice, a third time … a passerby is dragooned into helping him, not for mercy’s sake—what Roman soldier chooses mercy over duty?—but to speed things up: the Galilean isn’t moving quickly enough.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

And you thought the "zombie apocalypse" was a joke

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

—Rubén Blades

Zombies are fictional undead creatures regularly encountered in horror and fantasy themed works. They are typically depicted as mindless, reanimated corpses with a hunger for human flesh, and particularly for human brains in some depictions. ...

Intimately tied to the conception of the modern zombie is the "zombie apocalypse"; the breakdown of society as a result of an initial zombie outbreak which spreads. This archetype has emerged as a prolific subgenre of apocalyptic fiction and has been portrayed in many zombie-related media after Night of the Living Dead (Paffenroth, Kim [2006]. Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco: Baylor University Press). In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread (usually global) rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization. Victims of zombies may become zombies themselves. This causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis: the spreading "zombie plague/virus" swamps normal military and law enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilian society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness.

—Wikipedia, "Zombie (fictional)"

Take a good look at the sign the protester is carrying: Pro-life? Eating raped murdered animals makes u a hypocrite! It's not my purpose here to debate the morality of killing animals for food; nevertheless, somewhere in this person's arguably college-educated brain, it's logically and morally consistent to eschew eating unfertilized chicken ova for breakfast yet approve, instigate and even compel the medical murder of a developing baby ... especially her own. The sad thing is, her attitude is far too common to qualify for a Darwin Award.

And, by the bye, who rapes dead cows?

The futility of pride

I laugh at myself more than I laugh at anyone else. The sin of
pride most often begins with taking yourself too seriously.

One day I say, "I'm sick and tired of 'argument by meme'." The next day I produce one of my own or find a different one to continue the pointless trade-off.

 

Really, it's not so much that memes are simple; rather, it's that they often encapsulate, in a few choice words, the creator's failure to understand the other person's position. At minimum. At maximum, they often betray poor education, poor reasoning and poor wit as well.

 

The other day, a friend who works for eBay posted a meme in rainbow colors which had this admonition:

 

GAY PRIDE WAS NOT BORN OF A NEED TO CELEBRATE BEING GAY, BUT OUR RIGHT TO EXIST WITHOUT PERSECUTION. SO INSTEAD OF WONDERING WHY THERE ISN'T A STRAIGHT PRIDE MOVEMENT, BE THANKFUL YOU DON'T NEED ONE.

 

Which led me to ask, "Was I wondering?" There's really nothing more pompously asinine than to chide people for asking a question that's crossed nobody's mind. If sexuality is not a choice, then by right I should be no more proud of being straight than of having brown eyes or a hairline that has not merely retreated but fled the battlefield in a rout. No one wonders why there's not a "straight pride" movement ... but there may very well need to be something of a "Christian pride" movement in the not-too-distant future. Although it would have to be called something else, because "Christian pride" is an oxymoron.