So our parish school is estimated to be about $600,000 in debt.  This per our pastor’s homily/plea for the Feast of Christ the King.  Let that number slowly roll off your tongue.  How does this happen?  Valid question, and I am sure there are probably a lot of things that could be said.  Previous pastors did not manage the money very well?  Sure.  A new parish on our outskirts has plucked a healthy dose of our enrollment?  Sure.  Increasing wages?  Sure.  Relatively low costs for parishioners?  Sure.  And I am sure there are a plethora of other reasons too.  But the ones I have just stated can all be summed up in one word: budget.

Budgets.  Most households have them.  All businesses do, at least all those that don’t end up bankrupt.  It is a relatively simple concept.  You estimate the money you think will come in, based on previous figures and other analyses.  You estimate how much you think it will cost for various services and goods, based on previous figures and other analyses.  The two figures have to match.  If you are conservative, you will build a certain fudge factor into the costs to ensure that there will certainly be enough money to go around for the necessities.  Anything left at the end can be spend on luxuries, or saved, or donated or whatever.  Not that complicated.

Both in the written plea from our pastor as well as the oral one, in trying to assure us that there was a plan in place to ensure this never happened again (therefore, please give us money), he mentioned a budgetary practice that I thought was strange, if not downright insane.  Apparently, he said, the budgets have previously been done in hindsight.  Which I take to mean, we were a pretty well-off parish and we had a sizeable slush fund.  If expenditures were greater than income, they would simply take money from the slush fund to make it all work again.  But it is immediately obvious to the most naive Econ 101 student that this is an unsustainable practice.  If your budget is way off one year, and you dip into the slush fund, it is a clear signal that your budget needs to be tweeked.  To need to do this on a recurring basis, to the tune of 600K, is gross negligence.

So now what? 

1) The parish needs to rise to the occasion to bail out our school.   Our parish just rose to the occasion last year by pledging some $1.5 million to the Heritage of Faith Vision of Hope campaign.  Where is that money?  Can it be used? 

2) Our parish plans to market its school to a wider audience.  Does this mean non-Catholics?  ‘Cause that never ends well.  You end up with a parish largely subsidizing a largely non-Catholic school.  Slowly, the education is watered down to accomodate the new audience.  And lots of people are pissed off.

3) The education is already watered down.  There are obviously a lot of factors involved here, but our kids are receiving a secular education + a religion class.  That is not Catholic education.

4) The fees will be increased, further making this watery gruel of a Catholic education a passtime for rich hobnobs.  Further reinforcing the watering down aspect.  It will become just another private school for the rich.

5) Having said all this, is there an argument to be made for letting the school die?  I understand that there are a lot of people who have received Catholic education and who feel strongly that it should be perpetuated.  But our current system is not what it used to be.  Are there other ways of doing it?  Combining schools?  Regional schools? 

6) Do I, as a parishioner, need to feel compelled to help in this emergency situation? I can’t afford the school now.  I certainly won’t be able to afford it then.  I don’t believe it does the job of forming young consciences.

Steve, our conversation now seems oddly prescient.

The final sections of the new Mass translation have been approved.  Will it be perfect?  Probably not.  Will it be an improvement?  Probably.  Crossing my fingers for an implementation date of sometime in 2010.  Holding off on buying a new missal until then…

I love the Liturgy of the Hours (LOTH).  I haven’t always been and am not always very consistent when it comes to praying it.  But that is because I am not very consistent at anything generally, and am not very consistent at praying specifically.  But any semblance of consistency at prayer that has developed over the last few years has almost exclusively been due to the LOTH. 

My interest in this type of prayer began prior to converting when I read a book by Philip Yancey, though I am not sure which one.  In it, he described arid periods in his prayer life in which the only thing he could do was read pre-composed prayers.  I believe he also commented that ones that he had used were composed by Lancelot Andrewes, an Anglican divine of the 17th Century.  My prayer life being characterized at the time as a state of continual and everlasting aridity, I quickly snapped up the idea.  I found his prayers on-line, edited them for modern day language, shortened them significantly, and made them more consistent (I think) in terms of their structure.  I read those prayers every day as long as I was in the Episcopal Church.  Part of the motivation, I think, was doing something new.  Not just new to me, though it was, but also new to my circle of friends and family.  There was a sense of going against the grain of my surroundings, and also of rediscovering practices of the past, even if it was, in this case, the Protestant past. 

But also, the increased structure of this type of prayer helped me immensely to just do it.  There was no need to try to come up with a steady stream of stream-of-consciousness words, non-repetitive in nature, at 5:00 am.  I could get up and do it.  There was surely some time of “personal prayer” incorporated, but it didn’t need to occupy the whole time.  I could finally pray, offer a significant chunk of my time to God, first thing in the day.  Over time, this has developed into a pretty strong habit.  Not one that I necessarily have adhered to with alarming consistency, but one that I certainly notice when I don’t do it.  It now takes a deliberate act of the will to omit my prayers, as opposed to the opposite.  I do, though, deliberately will to omit them more than I should.

I had been exposed to the writings of Kathleen Norris also, around the same time.  She is one of those Protestants who is very open to co-opting “whatever works”, and is thus very open to the goodness of certain Catholic traditions and practices.  Her books are often structured around the rhythms of the LOTH, and so I developed an intense fascination with the concept of regular, rhythmic prayers that followed a seasonal structure.

So all of this was fertile soil for the time when I was first exposed to the LOTH, during our weekly RCIA meetings.  Every Monday night, we would end our meeting with Night Prayer, with various people filling in the various roles.  In hindsight, having multiple people doing different parts made it more confusing than it needed to be.  But we all eventually caught on.  And I have never looked back.  My own cobbled-together Lancelot-based prayers went in the trash. 

For my birthday, which was 8 days post-conversion, I received the Shorter Christian Prayer, which I used regularly.  But before long, I upgraded to the larger Christian Prayer book.  But it later came to my attenton that I was missing the Office of Readings, which contains great season-appropriate readings from the Church Fathers.  So I slowly purchased the complete set of the LOTH, two books for Ordinary Time, one for Advent and Christmas, and one for Lent and Easter.  Surely that was it.  But no, it came to my attention last year that there is a Psalter out there that makes it easier to chant the liturgy.  And so I purchased the Mundelein Psalter.  Very cool.  Though it is difficult to chant at 5:30 am.  My voice stinks most of the time, but is particularly bad in the early morning, while trying to mute the sound so as not to wake the children.  So I don’t use that all that much, except when I am trying to change things up a bit.

I suppose learning the structure of the LOTH is a bit of a challenge, but there are plenty of websites to help (this one helped me a lot back in the day).  One of the hardest things for me, and one that I still need to look at the instructions for, is to figure which parts to say on specific feast days.  Depending on whether it’s a feast, a memorial, an optional memorial etc, different psalms are supposed to be recited.  I did it wrong for years before figuring out there was a rule.  Also, Night Prayer typically ends with a Marian antiphon.  And I have heard whispers of rumors that there are specific antiphons designated, maybe not officially, but perhaps traditionally, for specific seasons.  But I am not sure.  Also, none of the recent saints (e.g., Padre Pio) have an office yet.  Maybe that will change soon, I dunno.  Lastly, some of the translations, especially of the Bible readings in the Office of Readings, are horrendous. 

That said, without the LOTH, my soul would wither and die.  It is my lifeline to God, the only assured means of keeping the lines of communication open for me.  Other’s mileage will vary.

We watched the first episode of V last night.  It was good enough for us to come back for a second view, but not enough to commit to anything long term yet.  That or we were making such fun of it that that was enough to bring us back for more.  Juliet From Lost is in it, melodramatic as ever, looking off into the distance pensively.  There’s a scene where she goes down a trap door into a dark subterranean tunnel, and you’re like, hmmmm, where have I seen this before?  There’s also another Party of Five Guy (POFG) in the show (though not Jack Shepherd this time), increasing the sense of deja vu.

As for the rest, we couldn’t figure out if the show was trying to rip modern culture, or if the writers were so immersed in it that they didn’t realize how shallow it is.  In the first interaction you see between the V and humans, POFG hits on the leader of the V, and she hits right back.  Really?  This is how things start between two alien cultures?  And then the aliens are especially well-loved once they promise to provide “universal health care”.  Really?  And the V have these ridiculously cheesy “We are…” slogans.  And the first time the V show up at all, the humans…clap.  What universe is this?  Has no one watched any alien movies in this alter-universe?  Do they not know what inevitably happens next?  Later, we are told that the aliens were so well received because they showed up at a very opportune time.

OK.  So, granted, I’m not a great big Obama fan, to say the least (you’re like, whoa dude, where did that come from?).  But I was unaware that I was a lunatic conspiracy theorist.  And that’s what I must be, because everything I’ve written in the previous paragraph (other than the mutual hitting) makes me think that the writers are very transparently using Obama and his cronies as their template for this alien invasion.  But that can’t be, because it’s on regular TV and slamming The Holy One is pretty much up there as the 11th Thou Shall Not.  So I guess I’m a loony.  Which, you know, at least I now know where I stand and who I am.

This website is the best place to visit, if you are looking to keep the fires of the 16th Century burning brightly.  And who isn’t, really.  I discovered it while doing general searches on that whole Anglican provision thing that PBXVI so deviously promulgated.  Always looking out for some poached Christian, that guy.  Anyway, at this site you will relive in their own words the myriad reasons the Reformers thought the Pope was anti-Christ.  And how everyone the website author has ever disagreed with is…well… wrong.  You can take polls about what living people currently believe, and when they started believing it. 

We are Protestant (= Catholic), Reformed, Calvinistic, Evangelical Anglicans adhering to the non-revisionist views of The Thirty-nine Articles (1571), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Irish Articles (1615), the Canons of Dordt (1619), and the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms (1646). Yes, we are aware of a few places of inter-confessional disagreements, but not too many.

You will need to pay close attention, though, because they use words in different ways than do most people.  That seems to be why they are Protestant = Catholic, though the Pope is Anti-Christ.  But nevermind silly definitions.  Nor minor “inter-confessional disagreements”.  The enemy of my enemy is my best bud.  And because we are all fixed on how bad the Romish Whore Pope of Rome is, well, those disagreements practically vanish.

So, the word “despair” has been playing around in my mind of late.  So today, I decided to do a little bit of reading, if possible, on the theological virtue of hope.  Being at work, most of the sites that casme up on google were banned under the title “religion”, so I went to about the only link available to me.  I obviously haven’t read that much of it, but it seems like a good little book by Josef Pieper, called Faith, Hope, Love.  I landed on page 99 and read on through page 123.  What particularly captivated me was the discussion of acedia, as “the root and origin of despair is the slothful sadness of acedia” (pg 122).  Acedia is a little diddly that has captured my attention previously. 

Our Man on the Scene says:

In the classical theology of the Church, acedia is understood to mean “tristitia saeculi”, that “sorrow according to the world” of which Paul says, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (7:10), that it “produces death”.

This sorrow is a lack of magnanimity; it lacks courage for the great things that are proper to the nature of the Christian.  It is a kind of anxious vertigo that befalls the human individual when he becomes aware of the height to which God has raised him.  One who is trapped in acedia has neither the courage nor the will to be as great as he really is.  He would prefer to be less great in order thus to avoid the obligation of greatness.  Acedia is a perverted humility; it will not accept supernatural goods because they are, by their very nature, linked to a claim on him who receives them.  [...]

The more acedia advances from the regon of emotion into that of intellectual decision, the more it becomes a deliberate turning away from, an actual fleeing from God.  Man flees from God because God has exalted human nature to a higher, a divine, state of being and has thereby enjoined on man a higher standard of obligation.  Acedia is, in the last analysis, a “detestatio boni divini”, with the montrous result that, upon reflection, man expressly wishes that God had not ennobled him but had “left him in peace.”

So Doc, what’s there to be done?  Despair is destroyed “only by that clear-sighted magnanimity that courageously expects and has confidence in the greatness of its own nature and by the grace-filled impetus of the hope of eternal life.”  I’m affraid the diagnosis is a little better than the cure, at least in the little I have read.  For it seems to boil down to, despair is a fruit of acedia, and is cured by courage and hope.  But, being a hopeless coward, that leaves me in a bit of a pickle.  Maybe the book concludes with a chapter like, “Helpful Next Steps” or something.  I guess I’ll check that out later when I have more time.

I have been surpised about how little play the whole Father Cutie incident has received in Catholic circles.  It is true that I don’t check that many blogs anymore, and so it possible that I have simply missed the discussion.  However, it certainly received play in the MSM.  Which is to be expected.  A hot Catholic priest from South Beach leaves the Church over indiscretions of a vow-breaking nature, joins the Episcopal Church (!), and marries his little lady.  This irks me on so many levels. 

1) I have attended Mass at his parish.  He was a good priest.  He had a huge and orthodox (if perhaps a bit mushy) ministry.  He was hot, celibate and orthodox.  He was a poster child for a vibrant, young, relevant Catholicism.  He was one of us.  So I feel slightly more betrayed by him than when some loony Shera of a priest goes all Episcopagan.

2) Episcopalian?  Really?  Specifically, in a diocese that…blows.  This is the more disturbing part for me.  It betrays such a fundamental lack of understanding of who and what he was and still is.  They have no Holy Orders.  No Eucharist.  They affirm pretty much every Pelvic Disorder.  Which, of course, they are free to do.  I don’t care what Episcopalians do, but I do care that an apparently good and orthodox and dynamic Catholic priest can so easily be led to repudiate (charitably interpreted) what he once held dear. 

Now he’s in an invalid marriage, and once he is “ordained” he will be illicitly confecting and distributing the Eucharist (provided form, matter and intent are maintained).  May Our Lord grant this man repentance and clarity.

I was thinking about what I might possibly mean when I ask Our Lord, “Oh Lord, come to me in power and fill me.”  Because, that is precisely what he does in Holy Communion.  Instead of of begging him to come in power, I might as well just go to Mass and shut up.  And it occurs to me that it is a remnant from my non-Catholic days.  He wasn’t in Holy Communion then, so I had to ask him to come via some other means.  But more than that, I think that it is really a cry from desperation.  Lord, come and overpower me with your grace, so much so that it will overpower my free will and make me good.  Fill me to the point where I will make wise and good choices.  But this is a non-starter with Our Lord who, desiring our holiness, nevertheless does not negate our free will.  Some try as I might to sway him otherwise, it ain’t happenin’.  He does indeed come to me in power and glory on a daily basis (were I disciplined enough), but will never do so in a manner that cancels freedom.  So I guess I’m stuck with my bad choices.  ‘Cause my freedom isn’t very free.

Michael Berg reflects on the formative sexual relationship he had with older woman Hanna Schmitz as a young teenager in this poignant drama set in post-World War II Germany. The passionate affair ended when Hanna disappeared.

That’s how the movie, The Reader, is described on Netflix.  We received it because it had been nominated for all sorts of stuff.  We hadn’t heard of it, though, as we haven’t heard of many things, being way out of the Media Circle.  In fact, to my shame, I hadn’t even read the description before queuing it up.  Anyway, we received this movie at the same time as Doubt, which had been recommended on relatively high authority, despite the subject.  To those who don’t know, Doubt is about the doubt surrounding allegations about a Catholic priest’s dealings with a certain boy.

The irony is that Doubt is a movie that doesn’t work, except on the obvious assumption that sexual dealings with children are heinous sins.  Check.  And yet, reread the description of The Reader.  A passionate affair between a child and an older woman.  It would seem that sexual dealings with children in some situations are heinous, but in others, they amount to “passionate affairs”.  Check.  What gives, I ask.  It would seem that pedophilia is heinous when Catholics do it, but not when others do it.  Or that it is heinous when men do it, but not when women do it.  Or something.

Anyway, as Mark Shea says, the day is fast coming when the Church will be shouted down, not for committing such sins, but for standing againt them.

The phrase “divine maternity” is really…cool…technically speaking.  It rolls off the tongue beautifully and lends an air of splendor to Our Lady.  It can be a confusing term, though.  There was a period where I didn’t really understand what it meant.  As I understand it now, it refers to Our Lady’s prerogative as the Mother of God.  Her divine maternity refers to her role as the Mother of the Divine Man.  All well and good.  But it can be somewhat confusing too.  After all, the phrase could very easily be understood to refer to the fact that her maternity is divine.  That is, that there is something about her that is divine.  And it can be argued that even that is true, to the extent that the order of grace renders her (and all of us) a daughter of God, adopted into the divine family.  But I don’t think that it what divine maternity is intended to convey.

All of this was brought home to me over the last week as I read the print version of this homily in the Catholic Standard and Times.  The CST is by no means a hack job of a Catholic newspaper.  Their authors and editors really do seem to attempt to put together one of the best Catholic weeklies in the country.  And our Cardinal is top-notch.  However, on page 23 of the print version of the linked homily, the title of the second part (it starts on page is “Mary’s divinity ‘poured out upon the Church’.”  That’s quite a statement, and one that would make my in-laws bristle.  And rightly so.  But this title is only a condensation of the following sentence from the homily:

In accordance with the eternal plan of Providence, Mary’s divine motherhood is to be poured out upon the Church, as indicated by statements of Tradition, according to which Mary’s ‘motherhood’ of the Church is the reflection and extension of her motherhood of the Son of God” (Redemptoris Mater, 24).

What appears to have happened is that the editor has confused “Mary’s divine motherhood” with “Mary’s divinity”.  He seems to be confused by what is meant by the phrase “divine motherhood”.  What the homily states makes perfect sense.  If she is the Mother of the Son, she is also the Mother of his body, the Church.  But her divinity is not poured out upon the Church.  And to say so only confirms our separated brethren in their darkest suspicions about us.