"I recall being encouraged to pray at school for the souls in purgatory and, when we had said enough prayers, to move paper slips from one envelope stuck to a bulletin board to another higher up, signifying a soul lifted to heaven."
This particular exercise is quite illuminating. You and the other kids were praying for the souls of people you did not and could not know--people who had done something wrong that landed them in Purgatory, and you were praying that their torment ended and they moved on to Heaven. In other words, you learned that charity, kindness, forgiveness were extensible to EVERYONE whether you knew them or not, whether they deserved it or not. Bringing God's goodness to life.
And in this, the TradCaths and converts like Vance or Rubio have completely abandoned the faith. They believe the object of their faith is to make people suffer. As I noted at LGM yesterday, Vance and those like him are cafeteria Catholics, but while other cafeteria Catholics are moving their trays along the line and taking a cup of soup and a slice of cake, Vance and his ilk are digging through the garbage bins and pulling out moldy rolls and wilted lettuce to put on OTHER people's trays.
As opposed to the Mormons, where I was once involved in their ritual of baptism for the dead, where people in afterlives they'd chosen were forcibly abducted into the LDS church. I actually went down to Maryland with my Scout troop to get baptized for new afterlife recruits. (There was some weird creepy link between the Boy Scouts and the local Mormon church, a link I have never inquired on and I'm not sure I want explained.)
I told the Boy Scouts to fuck right off when I was a proud Cub Scout / Weblows (thus my adult volunteer work for Cub Scouts). My next interaction was teaching survival skills to Boy Scouts. Yeah, it's like that. Wusses.
We designed a patch, made the ready-to-sew printouts. But we decided against it.
It showed a set of big shoe prints, with a smaller set of shoe prints between them, all with a big Red NO symbol over it. Got lotsa laughs but we daren't make it.
Seriously, each and everyone of them is a sick fuck: Trump, the scum with which he surrounds himself, his party, MAGAts, R voters.
I could elaborate but am too exhausted now having done some research on my car's persistent electrical flaws. Suffice to say that surely there are exceptions to the rule, but too few to matter. And if one uses a broad enough definition or standard, for which I can make a case for doing, there are no exceptions possible.
Meanwhile, for those who the issue matters, it seems that Pope Bob from Chicago has a Substack for, amongst other things IIRC, correcting heretics like Vance (not his real name).
My bad and/or early stage Trump Dementia®️: More like a Pope Bob fan thing of sorts.
“Letter from Leo” Substack.
Marc Andreesseen, even with all the time saved from engaging in introspection, can’t tell Team Substack to provide links to publications as opposed to specific posts.
And as we know, Vance is JD’s third or fourth name. I’m assuming all the changes were legal but who knows with those people…
I long, LONG ago left Catholicism behind, but I cannot tell you the joy it brings me every time Pope Bob makes a pro-immigrant or anti-war statement that seems to take direct aim at posers like Vance.
I've said before that conservative Christians wear Jesus like a fig leaf to cover their worst reactionary impulses, they almost point at the sky as if saying "hey don't blame me, it's the Big Guy upstairs who says gays and lesbians are sinners going to Hell." Catholicism simply provides the veneer of intellectualism to their fascism in a way that evangelicalism does not.
JD Vance has replaced Ron DeSantis as Rod Dreher's big political crush, and Dreher's ego is such that having taken credit for guiding him into the faith, Vance could personally shoot children and post the video on twitter and Dreher would still support him.
In fact I expect Dreher wants Vance to shoot children and otherwise spread the misery he thinks we all deserve. There's more than one reason why he was so turned on by the Divine Comedy.
In keeping with his trait of being one of the most un-self aware people alive, Dreher has recently taken a sharp turn away from Trump, allegedly over the war with Iran. Of course, the real reason is Trump's polls are tanking so hard Dreher knows Vance has no chance in 2028 unless Trump goes and Vance can take over. Normal people know Vance has no chance, period. But this is Dreher we're talking about, the man who unfailingly rhapsodizes about any fascist with negative charisma.
Well, he's a heartbeat away, there's always that, but what does he think happens next? The American People will rally to the charismatic leadership of JD Vance?
So many politicians just seem incapable of receiving the message "We're just not that into you." Look at the presidential ambitions of Mike Bloomberg, for example.
I meant no chance in 2028. Plus, people need to be reminded that Vance killed Pope Francis. Nobody can tell me otherwise. Francis was very elderly, in poor health, and he died within 24 hours of Vance's audience. The frail old man simply couldn't survive being in the presence of that much smug hypocrisy. It finished him off.
It must frustrate Vance to no end that his pope-killing awfulness seems to have no effect whatsoever on another elderly occupant of a high office. "Just LOOK at me, don't you just wanna DIE? No? You sure?"
The Republican party is hard at work on the Vance Charisma Problem as we speak. His insurmountable problem is he is Not a Celebrity, but as Paul Manifort likes to say "its not the votes that count, its who counts the votes".
Don't forget the misogyny! In the church you and I were raised in, women are second class citizens, excluded from the hierarchy and designed by god to be servants/property of their husbands. In pretentious intellectual terms, women have no agency. Men make the rules, women follow them. You can see the appeal.
Yeah, there were massive drawbacks. Like the Church I knew was sorta ecumenical, post-V2, but we still definitely weren't taught to embrace our Jewish brethren. And St. Paul left a misogynist tradition they still haven't fought their way out of. I don't kid myself about that.
I try to remember the good stuff and forget the bad. Part of my reason for leaving was that while they talked a good line, they didn't live up to it. We were taught that racial prejudice was wrong, but they still kept black students to a few tokens, for ex.
Religious instruction was not much emphasized in my household back in the day—the parental units were both lapsed Catholics—and I was sixteen before I learned that I had actually been baptized…Episcopalian. Years later I mentioned this fact to a couple of coworkers, native San Franciscans who’d been educated in schools with “Saint” in their names, and one remarked that the nuns had encouraged the tykes in their charge to confine their circles of playmates to co-religionists, but that if they 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 socialize with non-Catholic children, Episcopalians were the safest choice.
Dave Emery would in those occasional times when he loosened up and had a laugh, might bring up that the home-grown nazis' canard about the Jews owning all the banks was way off – he'd snort "It's the Episcopalians!"
Meanwhile, all the volunteers who work to keep your average parish afloat? Who run the bake sales, the catechism classes, Bingo night, the first Communion ceremonies, vacation Bible school, who make cakes and cookies and coffee for after-funeral receptions, who clean up after the weddings, and organize the altar flowers? 90% women. Possibly more.
I grew up unchurched, so from my perspective I've always found overt piousness cringey and bizarre. It reminds me of the same sort of theatrics employed by creepers trying to get laid by flattering their marks, a flimsy cover for nefarious intent and always a red flag. That's certainly how I read JD Vance without having to read his freaking book, and I have to wonder what kind of fool would buy it. As for the current fashion trend of costuming oneself in Catholicism, David French had a fine line in the NYT yesterday re: the Church of the Smoke Machine having to compete with the Church of Incense. LMFAO.
I didn't think the book-publishing business was doing so great here in post-literate America, not well enough to afford an obvious clunker like this.
But I suppose some right-wing foundation will by 'em by the truckload to be given away to unwilling recipients at every event they hold, until the remaining 50,000 copies finally get pulped.
I always used to enjoy checking out the remainder tables at Barnes & Noble, seeing the face of Sarah Palin or Dick Cheney on a book cover with a "$1" sticker affixed to their forehead. "Not low enough", I'd think.
I wonder just how efficient heaven actually is - Say there's some sort of cataclysmic event, some sort of war , say, were just about everybody goes to meet Elizabeth at once - are we going to be stuck in some celestial line for a millennium? Will there be some place for us to charge our phones? Say I get stuck in line next to JD (not his real name) and after about three or four hundred years I can't help myself and beat his stupid ass senseless. When the roll is called will that count against me?
I heard that pundits who were fine with terminating USAID funding, a thing which will probably cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, are now losing their shit because he used the F-word.
As the Anti-Social Socialist, I hold Karl Marx as an ivory tower idiot, because his outcomes depend on the perfection of human nature. Har dee har har. Uncle Joe Steel took that and ran with it, "The dictatorship of the proletariat" Bull. Shit. Stalin murdered way more Russians than the Germans did, by far. No, oddly, I'm one of the most vociferous opponents of communism, but not remotely like American bullshit (I know I never said 'Under God' in elementary school. Got a few licks over it. Later found out my instinct was right, that's not in the original). No, planned economies don't, and cannot, work. Can't wrap your head around it, anybody's head. It's suicidal, e.g. USSR)
Now, Socialism. Capitalism, which concentrates wealth by nature, MUST be offset by something. Used to be social and religious obligations of those 'malefactors of great wealth'. No more. Gordon Gecko rules. Greed is good. But, capitalism will eat itself. We're seeing it now. There has to be an offset if only to save capitalism from itself.
Vance is such a repellent opportunist and cheerleader for cruelty I refuse to give even a nano-moment of thought that his conversion was sincere or anything more than a way of giving soft headed centrist pseudo-moralists cover to write unreadable thumbsuckers about faith and spiritual struggle in his run-up to 2028.
I grew up in a splinter of the Mormon church, 4th generation on my mother's side, and when I was about 20 I decided to convert to Catholicism. I think I'd seen too many old movies from the 40s and 50s and found the idea romantic. Anyway, the Catholic Church of the mid-1980s was nothing like the movies, and they found my pro-choice and LGBT views repellent. I was bounced out of the catechumenate and spent six or seven years pissed at religion, then became a Lutheran ELCA for 20 years. That religion's main appeal was that it was the same kind of frozen chosen, liturgy bound thing that Roman Catholicism had been. When I left the ELCA, it was more because I finally came to realize that what I had always thought of as Faith was really just hope, as in, I hope this shit is true 😂
I am glad to be able to think for myself, and as the years have passed, I can even feel a little empathy for the younger me and other people who need some dude in the sky to make the rules for them, but I am permanently done with religion.
Because it is Easter Monday, I must say I kind of miss the simple rhythms of the liturgical year, the changing color of the vestments like autumn leaves, traditions of my Polish ancestors relived in a faraway land. But there's also the hurried sermons empty of meaning, the guilt of being Christ's crucifier, the terror of confession of my childish sins (and failures to educate about adult sins). I for one disbelieve 75% of what I was taught in Catholic school, but 25% nobody does it better than Francis and Leo.
Easter Monday round these parts (specifically out our back window) means that the African American community is invited to enjoy the thrills and chills of the National Zoo. Today.
"According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in 1878, the White House hosted its inaugural Easter Egg Roll; however, African Americans were not allowed to attend. Local Black families decided to join together and cultivate their own traditions and in 1891 began gathering at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo on Easter Monday. Over time, attending the National Zoo on Easter Monday became popular."
Anyway, nowadays it's just another day at the zoo, but with tradition attached.
The thing I find most amazing about JD is how every single attempt he makes to present himself as not a lizard person in a human skinsuit only serves to make him look even more like a lizard person in a human skinsuit.
"I long, LONG ago left Catholicism behind, but I cannot tell you the joy it brings me every time Pope Bob makes a pro-immigrant or anti-war statement that seems to take direct aim at posers like Vance." You have plenty of company on all points (and so do you, Roy)
Asked an Orthodox priest Sunday to discuss ex-communication of war criminals in Tubby’s regime. He refused to answer. Got a bit angry. Asked a second Orthodox priest. He sez it’s possible. (Seems Darrell Issa is the one prominent EO in Washington).
Wondering about the Pope ex-communicating JDV for war crimes.
No toast for me either. Wait a minute, there was only milk if you paid the 3 cents, and there was the pre-mass tally to get the correct count of cartons to deliver to the classroom.
I, too, am a Cradle Catholic who is now an Adult Atheist, but in-between there were several years as an honest to Yahweh altar boy (never diddled, thankfully). Like most any religious person in the USA or elsewhere, I was Catholic because I was born into it, having come from a line of Italian-American New Yorkers where being Catholic was as natural as eating rigatoni.
While my mother, uncles, grandparents, etc., grew up hearing Latin mass and getting their knuckles bloodied by nuns, my experience was better. I spent many a mass listening to stories of Jesus trying to get shit done, telling people that the lowest of the low was as worthy as anyone else, and to never turn your back on your fellow man. Turn your cheek 7 times 70, the Good Samaritan, trashing the temple of grifters...the stuff that evangelicals dismiss, but is real ideology for Catholics.
Even as an adult in my business life, I still see Catholic Charities helping to pay rent or supply food, and Providence House providing aid to survivors of domestic violence. That, and maybe some light exorcisms, is what I still expect from the Catholic Church, even with all its warts and foibles.
Vance comes from a whole other universe, where he gets off on the pain and suffering, as if The Passion of the Christ was too PG-13. No wonder he hates every Pope that comes along and says "love thy neighbor."
Postscript - I didn't mean to speak too highly of the Catholic Church. It's got a lot of problems. But it's also got pretty buildings, so it all balances out.
“Cathnip” - lol. You gotta trademark that!
Groan! I sure hope Autocorrect resisted mightily.
But you made up for it with “a kind of cigar bar for misogynist reactionaries”.
Yeah, I was gonna highlight that one myself, it's a lovely image and fun to say. Roy writes good.
OK, OK, I'll renew my subscription.
Thanks to Viewers Like You!
AND WE DON'T EVEN GET A TOTE BAG 😮💨
Maybe next pledge drive!
I am totes sticking around for that!
Yes, suffering a severe tote bag shortage, there are only like 50 hanging on the doorknobs in my house.
I saw a PBS tote bag at the Amvets store the other day and almost bought it, just on principle
"I recall being encouraged to pray at school for the souls in purgatory and, when we had said enough prayers, to move paper slips from one envelope stuck to a bulletin board to another higher up, signifying a soul lifted to heaven."
This particular exercise is quite illuminating. You and the other kids were praying for the souls of people you did not and could not know--people who had done something wrong that landed them in Purgatory, and you were praying that their torment ended and they moved on to Heaven. In other words, you learned that charity, kindness, forgiveness were extensible to EVERYONE whether you knew them or not, whether they deserved it or not. Bringing God's goodness to life.
And in this, the TradCaths and converts like Vance or Rubio have completely abandoned the faith. They believe the object of their faith is to make people suffer. As I noted at LGM yesterday, Vance and those like him are cafeteria Catholics, but while other cafeteria Catholics are moving their trays along the line and taking a cup of soup and a slice of cake, Vance and his ilk are digging through the garbage bins and pulling out moldy rolls and wilted lettuce to put on OTHER people's trays.
"you learned that charity, kindness, forgiveness were extensible to EVERYONE whether you knew them or not..."
It was sort of the positive flip side of being encouraged to imagine the torments of hell applied to oneself, so as to be scared into good behavior.
As opposed to the Mormons, where I was once involved in their ritual of baptism for the dead, where people in afterlives they'd chosen were forcibly abducted into the LDS church. I actually went down to Maryland with my Scout troop to get baptized for new afterlife recruits. (There was some weird creepy link between the Boy Scouts and the local Mormon church, a link I have never inquired on and I'm not sure I want explained.)
Huh.
Was there a merit badge for that? If not, shoulda been...
I don't think I managed to earn ANY merit badges in my short time with the Scouts.
I told the Boy Scouts to fuck right off when I was a proud Cub Scout / Weblows (thus my adult volunteer work for Cub Scouts). My next interaction was teaching survival skills to Boy Scouts. Yeah, it's like that. Wusses.
We designed a patch, made the ready-to-sew printouts. But we decided against it.
It showed a set of big shoe prints, with a smaller set of shoe prints between them, all with a big Red NO symbol over it. Got lotsa laughs but we daren't make it.
Trust me brother, you really don't...
Seriously, each and everyone of them is a sick fuck: Trump, the scum with which he surrounds himself, his party, MAGAts, R voters.
I could elaborate but am too exhausted now having done some research on my car's persistent electrical flaws. Suffice to say that surely there are exceptions to the rule, but too few to matter. And if one uses a broad enough definition or standard, for which I can make a case for doing, there are no exceptions possible.
Meanwhile, for those who the issue matters, it seems that Pope Bob from Chicago has a Substack for, amongst other things IIRC, correcting heretics like Vance (not his real name).
"Vance (not his real name)" is very funny. Where's the Substack?
My bad and/or early stage Trump Dementia®️: More like a Pope Bob fan thing of sorts.
“Letter from Leo” Substack.
Marc Andreesseen, even with all the time saved from engaging in introspection, can’t tell Team Substack to provide links to publications as opposed to specific posts.
And as we know, Vance is JD’s third or fourth name. I’m assuming all the changes were legal but who knows with those people…
I long, LONG ago left Catholicism behind, but I cannot tell you the joy it brings me every time Pope Bob makes a pro-immigrant or anti-war statement that seems to take direct aim at posers like Vance.
I've said before that conservative Christians wear Jesus like a fig leaf to cover their worst reactionary impulses, they almost point at the sky as if saying "hey don't blame me, it's the Big Guy upstairs who says gays and lesbians are sinners going to Hell." Catholicism simply provides the veneer of intellectualism to their fascism in a way that evangelicalism does not.
JD Vance has replaced Ron DeSantis as Rod Dreher's big political crush, and Dreher's ego is such that having taken credit for guiding him into the faith, Vance could personally shoot children and post the video on twitter and Dreher would still support him.
In fact I expect Dreher wants Vance to shoot children and otherwise spread the misery he thinks we all deserve. There's more than one reason why he was so turned on by the Divine Comedy.
In keeping with his trait of being one of the most un-self aware people alive, Dreher has recently taken a sharp turn away from Trump, allegedly over the war with Iran. Of course, the real reason is Trump's polls are tanking so hard Dreher knows Vance has no chance in 2028 unless Trump goes and Vance can take over. Normal people know Vance has no chance, period. But this is Dreher we're talking about, the man who unfailingly rhapsodizes about any fascist with negative charisma.
"Normal people know Vance has no chance"
Well, he's a heartbeat away, there's always that, but what does he think happens next? The American People will rally to the charismatic leadership of JD Vance?
So many politicians just seem incapable of receiving the message "We're just not that into you." Look at the presidential ambitions of Mike Bloomberg, for example.
I meant no chance in 2028. Plus, people need to be reminded that Vance killed Pope Francis. Nobody can tell me otherwise. Francis was very elderly, in poor health, and he died within 24 hours of Vance's audience. The frail old man simply couldn't survive being in the presence of that much smug hypocrisy. It finished him off.
It must frustrate Vance to no end that his pope-killing awfulness seems to have no effect whatsoever on another elderly occupant of a high office. "Just LOOK at me, don't you just wanna DIE? No? You sure?"
My theory: Trump's own amoral narcissism creates a protective force-field against Vance's odiousness.
The Republican party is hard at work on the Vance Charisma Problem as we speak. His insurmountable problem is he is Not a Celebrity, but as Paul Manifort likes to say "its not the votes that count, its who counts the votes".
I thought that was Yogi Berra talking about who gets into the Hall of Fame?
Where do you think Manifort stold it from?
Ain't enough eyeliner in the world for 'charisma'.
Don't forget the misogyny! In the church you and I were raised in, women are second class citizens, excluded from the hierarchy and designed by god to be servants/property of their husbands. In pretentious intellectual terms, women have no agency. Men make the rules, women follow them. You can see the appeal.
Yeah, there were massive drawbacks. Like the Church I knew was sorta ecumenical, post-V2, but we still definitely weren't taught to embrace our Jewish brethren. And St. Paul left a misogynist tradition they still haven't fought their way out of. I don't kid myself about that.
I try to remember the good stuff and forget the bad. Part of my reason for leaving was that while they talked a good line, they didn't live up to it. We were taught that racial prejudice was wrong, but they still kept black students to a few tokens, for ex.
Religious instruction was not much emphasized in my household back in the day—the parental units were both lapsed Catholics—and I was sixteen before I learned that I had actually been baptized…Episcopalian. Years later I mentioned this fact to a couple of coworkers, native San Franciscans who’d been educated in schools with “Saint” in their names, and one remarked that the nuns had encouraged the tykes in their charge to confine their circles of playmates to co-religionists, but that if they 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 socialize with non-Catholic children, Episcopalians were the safest choice.
Fair
Dave Emery would in those occasional times when he loosened up and had a laugh, might bring up that the home-grown nazis' canard about the Jews owning all the banks was way off – he'd snort "It's the Episcopalians!"
"Pedophile-Lite" as a member of that church described Episcopalian to me. I thought that was quite funny.
Meanwhile, all the volunteers who work to keep your average parish afloat? Who run the bake sales, the catechism classes, Bingo night, the first Communion ceremonies, vacation Bible school, who make cakes and cookies and coffee for after-funeral receptions, who clean up after the weddings, and organize the altar flowers? 90% women. Possibly more.
It is clear women at that time were chattel, Period full stop.
"Biblical marriage", Oh, you mean two wives and two concubines - hey it worked for Abraham, who has some connection with the religion(s).
I grew up unchurched, so from my perspective I've always found overt piousness cringey and bizarre. It reminds me of the same sort of theatrics employed by creepers trying to get laid by flattering their marks, a flimsy cover for nefarious intent and always a red flag. That's certainly how I read JD Vance without having to read his freaking book, and I have to wonder what kind of fool would buy it. As for the current fashion trend of costuming oneself in Catholicism, David French had a fine line in the NYT yesterday re: the Church of the Smoke Machine having to compete with the Church of Incense. LMFAO.
"I have to wonder what kind of fool would buy it"
I didn't think the book-publishing business was doing so great here in post-literate America, not well enough to afford an obvious clunker like this.
But I suppose some right-wing foundation will by 'em by the truckload to be given away to unwilling recipients at every event they hold, until the remaining 50,000 copies finally get pulped.
I always used to enjoy checking out the remainder tables at Barnes & Noble, seeing the face of Sarah Palin or Dick Cheney on a book cover with a "$1" sticker affixed to their forehead. "Not low enough", I'd think.
Every library will buy a few copies. He's the VICE PRESIDENT, after all.
There are always doors that must be stopped.
Customers? Sure. Phineas Taylor Barnum was an optimist.
"I grew up unchurched, so from my perspective I've always found overt piousness cringey and bizarre."
Same here, and thank you for articulating this, which I was never able to do.
I wonder just how efficient heaven actually is - Say there's some sort of cataclysmic event, some sort of war , say, were just about everybody goes to meet Elizabeth at once - are we going to be stuck in some celestial line for a millennium? Will there be some place for us to charge our phones? Say I get stuck in line next to JD (not his real name) and after about three or four hundred years I can't help myself and beat his stupid ass senseless. When the roll is called will that count against me?
No, because a score of other people, many of them women, will have beaten you to it.
Die early and beat the rush!
This just in: How many angels can dance on a pin head? Results vary.
“Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way”
This guy is SO not going to be the replacement for Donald Trump it's not even funny.
So, you didn't find Tubby's Easter message inspiring?
Do they have overpriced golf courses in St Augustine?
Does the big bear do his business in the forest?
I heard that pundits who were fine with terminating USAID funding, a thing which will probably cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, are now losing their shit because he used the F-word.
“Augustine gave me, a VERY borderline intellectual, a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way”
FTFJD.
God forbid (literally) that we should understand Christianity in some silly EMOTIONAL way, like "Love your neighbor" and all that gay shit.
Not to mention that wild notion of "do unto others..."
"That's commonism, right there"
Common, yes. Just being a decent human being is surprisingly common, although you wouldn't know it from the news.
As the Anti-Social Socialist, I hold Karl Marx as an ivory tower idiot, because his outcomes depend on the perfection of human nature. Har dee har har. Uncle Joe Steel took that and ran with it, "The dictatorship of the proletariat" Bull. Shit. Stalin murdered way more Russians than the Germans did, by far. No, oddly, I'm one of the most vociferous opponents of communism, but not remotely like American bullshit (I know I never said 'Under God' in elementary school. Got a few licks over it. Later found out my instinct was right, that's not in the original). No, planned economies don't, and cannot, work. Can't wrap your head around it, anybody's head. It's suicidal, e.g. USSR)
Now, Socialism. Capitalism, which concentrates wealth by nature, MUST be offset by something. Used to be social and religious obligations of those 'malefactors of great wealth'. No more. Gordon Gecko rules. Greed is good. But, capitalism will eat itself. We're seeing it now. There has to be an offset if only to save capitalism from itself.
Vance is such a repellent opportunist and cheerleader for cruelty I refuse to give even a nano-moment of thought that his conversion was sincere or anything more than a way of giving soft headed centrist pseudo-moralists cover to write unreadable thumbsuckers about faith and spiritual struggle in his run-up to 2028.
I grew up in a splinter of the Mormon church, 4th generation on my mother's side, and when I was about 20 I decided to convert to Catholicism. I think I'd seen too many old movies from the 40s and 50s and found the idea romantic. Anyway, the Catholic Church of the mid-1980s was nothing like the movies, and they found my pro-choice and LGBT views repellent. I was bounced out of the catechumenate and spent six or seven years pissed at religion, then became a Lutheran ELCA for 20 years. That religion's main appeal was that it was the same kind of frozen chosen, liturgy bound thing that Roman Catholicism had been. When I left the ELCA, it was more because I finally came to realize that what I had always thought of as Faith was really just hope, as in, I hope this shit is true 😂
I am glad to be able to think for myself, and as the years have passed, I can even feel a little empathy for the younger me and other people who need some dude in the sky to make the rules for them, but I am permanently done with religion.
Life is hard and full of suffering so we should really do our best to help one another through it. There, that's MY religion.
Works for me and the Dalai Lama —
And the best part is no weekly meetings!
If we take the Dalai Lama as an example, every damn minute is a meeting.
Yeah, I never meet the moment, I'm always at least 15 minutes late.
Golly, now I feel like I'm living in the future!
"That religion's main appeal was that it was the same kind of frozen chosen, liturgy bound thing that Roman Catholicism had been" AHEM AHEM NO
Because it is Easter Monday, I must say I kind of miss the simple rhythms of the liturgical year, the changing color of the vestments like autumn leaves, traditions of my Polish ancestors relived in a faraway land. But there's also the hurried sermons empty of meaning, the guilt of being Christ's crucifier, the terror of confession of my childish sins (and failures to educate about adult sins). I for one disbelieve 75% of what I was taught in Catholic school, but 25% nobody does it better than Francis and Leo.
Easter Monday round these parts (specifically out our back window) means that the African American community is invited to enjoy the thrills and chills of the National Zoo. Today.
"According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in 1878, the White House hosted its inaugural Easter Egg Roll; however, African Americans were not allowed to attend. Local Black families decided to join together and cultivate their own traditions and in 1891 began gathering at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo on Easter Monday. Over time, attending the National Zoo on Easter Monday became popular."
Anyway, nowadays it's just another day at the zoo, but with tradition attached.
If life gives you lemons, organize a picnic.
The thing I find most amazing about JD is how every single attempt he makes to present himself as not a lizard person in a human skinsuit only serves to make him look even more like a lizard person in a human skinsuit.
“Women want him.* Men want to be him.”
*dead
"I long, LONG ago left Catholicism behind, but I cannot tell you the joy it brings me every time Pope Bob makes a pro-immigrant or anti-war statement that seems to take direct aim at posers like Vance." You have plenty of company on all points (and so do you, Roy)
And the Catholic head of chaplains in the US military just said he can't see how Tubby's war meets the "just war" standard.
I did some checking and this "just war" business started with St. Augustine, hey isn't that the guy Vance has an intellectual hard-on for?
All I know about the papacy I learned from watching Young Pope/New Pope on HBO. Really underrated show. The costumes the popes get into are crazy.
Along with the bells and smells, there's the drape. Hard to beat.
The smoking purse!
"Darling I love your dress but your purse is on fire." You know that one, right?
No! Tell.
"And I don't mean 'on fire' in a good way"
When we rummaged thru the Old Souk in Damascus, the proprietor of the silks parlor claimed the papastry was adorned with stuff from his shop.
Hoping this is true gives me a little tingle just thinking about it...
Asked an Orthodox priest Sunday to discuss ex-communication of war criminals in Tubby’s regime. He refused to answer. Got a bit angry. Asked a second Orthodox priest. He sez it’s possible. (Seems Darrell Issa is the one prominent EO in Washington).
Wondering about the Pope ex-communicating JDV for war crimes.
"....quarter-pint cartons of milk and warm buttered toast."
TOAST!! You got fucking toast? You were truly blessed.
No toast for me either. Wait a minute, there was only milk if you paid the 3 cents, and there was the pre-mass tally to get the correct count of cartons to deliver to the classroom.
You're right. There was a charge. I think ours was a nickel, though.
Cartons! We ’ad to drink our milk out of a rolled-up newspaper.
A bored school employee would point at the cow we kept on the playground and say, "Suck all you want."
I, too, am a Cradle Catholic who is now an Adult Atheist, but in-between there were several years as an honest to Yahweh altar boy (never diddled, thankfully). Like most any religious person in the USA or elsewhere, I was Catholic because I was born into it, having come from a line of Italian-American New Yorkers where being Catholic was as natural as eating rigatoni.
While my mother, uncles, grandparents, etc., grew up hearing Latin mass and getting their knuckles bloodied by nuns, my experience was better. I spent many a mass listening to stories of Jesus trying to get shit done, telling people that the lowest of the low was as worthy as anyone else, and to never turn your back on your fellow man. Turn your cheek 7 times 70, the Good Samaritan, trashing the temple of grifters...the stuff that evangelicals dismiss, but is real ideology for Catholics.
Even as an adult in my business life, I still see Catholic Charities helping to pay rent or supply food, and Providence House providing aid to survivors of domestic violence. That, and maybe some light exorcisms, is what I still expect from the Catholic Church, even with all its warts and foibles.
Vance comes from a whole other universe, where he gets off on the pain and suffering, as if The Passion of the Christ was too PG-13. No wonder he hates every Pope that comes along and says "love thy neighbor."
Postscript - I didn't mean to speak too highly of the Catholic Church. It's got a lot of problems. But it's also got pretty buildings, so it all balances out.
I pretty much dislike the Catholics, but I do remind myself that Oscar Romero was a Catholic priest.
We from the city of St Francis give a shout (or, I dunno, maybe a modest murmur...)
Never mind that – what happens when you are faced with turning the cheek the 491st time?
Tubby is President for 3 more years, so I'll let you know.
You get dizzy?
Well I should think SO!
It's a cheek-turnin' DANCE PARTY!
https://youtu.be/PGNiXGX2nLU