Putting the Right Quote in His Mouth

I came across a delightful quote today reading Current Book No. 1. The quote was attributed to George Santayana (1863-1952). It said: “There is no God and Mary is His Mother.” Tell you the truth, that didn’t sound like Santayana to me; but then my memories of that gentle philosopher go too many years back. This one has wit, to be sure, but there is also bite. So on returning home from Jeffrey’s Honda, where, believe it or not such delights visit me at right regular intervals while waiting, I turned to Bartlett’s—and amazed actually to find the quote attributed to Santayana. But the attribution, while assigned to the philosopher, was actually to the poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977), and specifically to a poem in Lowell’s Life Studies titled “For George Santayana.” So the search didn’t end there. Finally I found the poem and herewith reproduce its first stanza:

In the heydays of ‘forty-five,

bus-loads of souvenir-deranged

G.I.’s and officer-professors of philosophy

came crashing through your cell, 

puzzled to find you still alive,

free-thinking Catholic infidel,

stray spirit, who’d found 

the Church too good to be believed.

Later I used to dawdle

past Circus and Mithraic Temple

to Santo Stefano grown paper-thin

like you from waiting. . . .

There at the monastery hospital,

you wished those geese-girl sisters wouldn’t bother

their heads and yours by praying for your soul:

“There is no God and Mary is His Mother.”

Now I’ve been a writer, a poet—and also an editor. So I have sympathies for the editor of Bartlett’s who decided to stick this one in—and under Santayana. Irresistible. Particularly to certain Catholics of the damaged sort like me…

Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

Precisely two years ago I wrote a post (link) on an Apostolic Constitution, Anglicorum Coetibus (Groups of Anglicans). Today comes a story in the New York Times telling us of the first implementation of that constitution. An Episcopal group has been joined in communion with the Catholic Church. Its former bishop, Jeffrey N. Steenson, has been named the Ordinary of the Chair of St. Peter headquartered in Houston. My post explains what an “ordinary” means; by this appointment Steenson becomes a member of the United States Conference of Bishops, indeed the first married priest ever (three children).

Soon after my original posting I noticed that that post began gathering a steady readership. At first I thought the title caused this traffic (When the Ordinary is Extraordinary); then I began to wonder; but the stats don’t really tell you anything. My post had noted an event that had taken place on November 4, 2009 and we had read about in the pages of the The American Conservative. The odd coincidence of today’s story on that subject, first broached January 2, 2010 here, appearing in the paper on January 2, 2012, makes me think: Meaningful coincidence. So here it is, recorded.

A Balanced View of Priestly Sexual Abuse

The Catholic League ran a full-page ad in the New York Times today on the subject of priestly sexual abuse. It is a very thoughtful, balanced, and well-documented text well worth the time that it takes to read. The following link will take you to an on-line version of this advertisement, titled STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH and signed by Bill Donahue, president of the League. Here is how this organization describes itself in the first paragraph of its About Us page:

The Catholic League is the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. Founded in 1973 by the late Father Virgil C. Blum, S.J., the Catholic League defends the right of Catholics – lay and clergy alike – to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination.

Some comments of my own. I’ve been following this subject for years in the papers and on the electronic media. My own reaction has been disgust. Indeed I think that attending to the media even with a moderate amount of concentration will produce the undeniable impression that these media are strongly prejudiced toward religion in any form and toward Catholicism above all—this last emphasis due not particularly to any specific features of Catholic theology but a reflection of the general size, strength, and cohesion of this church which does not look like it will weaken, thin out, secularize, and become, de facto, a mild cheering section for a gentler sort of materialism. The fact that papers have “religion” pages on which articles have quite a different slant than elsewhere does not negate my impression at all.

We’ve been parents of children who have attended both Catholic and ordinary public schools. In all those years we knew of only a single case of alleged abuse of a pubescent minor. It took place in one of the public schools our girls attended, and the party under suspicion was a coach who gave himself some freedoms in touching girls. The school went through all kinds of procedural motions; indeed we frankly felt as if we had done something questionable rather than that jerk, the coach. And, as it turned out, the teacher remained in place—although, after these events, his behavior became extremely circumspect. All institutions tend to behave in similar ways.

The media also treat some religious persuasions as if they were, indeed, untouchable. But that’s another story. All forms of biased reporting, for or against—all disrespect for those who exercise their conscience, whether approved by modernist ideology or not, falls outside the pale of professional journalism. It is too bad that the Catholic League has to expend big bucks to put a balanced view of priestly abuse in the New York Times—rather than encountering that view, as a matter of course, in the pages of the newspaper of record.

When the Ordinary is Extraordinary

I spent much time during the last half of 2009 getting to know Dante and his era. Dante saw his times with anguish. The universal state (the Holy Roman Empire) just would not take hold over the secular sphere. And Dante thought that the Church had fallen into corruption. Indeed, the poet wrote two centuries before the unity of Christendom formally fell apart beginning in 1517 when Luther wrote The 95 Theses.

With this as background, I was oddly surprised yesterday to learn of an event that had taken place on November 4. We were in the sunroom, Brigitte reading aloud from The American Conservative (February 2010 issue). She came to an article that made us both sit up. The article, by William S. Lind, was titled “Come All Ye Faithful, Benedict’s Counter-Reformation.” As the story unfolded, it struck me that the tide Dante saw receding might now be returning after centuries—and what I might be hearing is news of a change with possibly far-reaching cultural consequences. I’d label this “A Ray of Sunlight” if it were not, at this point, extremely tentative.

In brief. Pope Benedict XVI published an Apostolic Constitution on November 4, 2009. Such a “constitution” is a change in church law. In this one, entitled Anglicorum Coetibus (Groups of Anglicans), Benedict announces that entire Anglican congregations—people, clergy, parishes, dioceses—may enter the Catholic communion at their initiative while retaining their Anglican rites, liturgy, identity, and self-governance. The constitution is available here. It is subtitled “Providing for personal ordinariates for Anglicans entering into full communion with the Catholic Church.”

Those who follow the trials and tribulations of churches know why the Pope may have acted and why some Anglicans may respond to his invitation. The mainstream Protestant churches have been secularizing, so to say, embracing a social gospel while letting the traditional faith erode. And in implementing changes pleasing to Modernity these churches have alienated large elements of the traditionally devout within them. Anglicanism is already cleaving into parts.

A brief look taught me that I’m inadequate to understand fully, or fast enough, the vast complexities in canon law and history involved here, but Lind’s interesting article seems to be on target, and I recommend it. It isn’t available online, but a subscription may be obtained here and I’ve seen The American Conservative on sale at Borders, for instance. Here I will merely cite three points that Lind himself highlights (among many others)—and are in the linked constitution in much dryer language. First, existing married clergy would be eligible for ordination under Anglicorum Coetibus. Second, all Anglicans who rejoin the Catholic Church at Benedict’s invitation would be required to profess the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism contains the doctrine of papal infallibility. Lind sees problems here but hopes that ways may be found to ease that pain, especially in light of the fact that the Anglican break with the Church predated that doctrine's promulgation (in 1870). Third, the incoming Anglicans would be under the rule of their own ordinaries, not subjected to existing bishops.

So what is an ordinary and what is an ordinariate? An ordinariate, I discovered, corresponds to a diocese, but one without a geographical boundary. The Church already has many such ordinariates to serve far-flung military commands. The ordinary, consequently, is the person responsible for such groupings. Webster’s definition: “a prelate exercising original jurisdiction over a specified territory or group.” He may be a priest or a bishop. Every bishop is thus an ordinary, but not every ordinary is a bishop. A personal ordinariate (in the language of the constitution) means one without a geographically-defined territory.

All this, of course, is Extraordinary! Brigitte and I grew quite lively at the prospect that some kind of unification of the faithful may eventually emerge from all this, the Anglicans representing the tip of a melting iceberg. Global Warming in a new sense. If it happens it will take a long time, no doubt as long as the breakup of Christendom took from the time when Dante noted the appearance of ugly cracks. Brigitte and I will long be gone. Lind sketches the possibilities of this in sufficient detail so that possible, even plausible, paths leading to unification of the faithful become thinkable.

Tirschenreuth: One of Our Cradles

In the fall of 1944 the chance of war deposited our family in a small Bavarian town called Tirschenreuth. We lived there for five years, formative years for me. I was eight on my arrival and thirteen on departure. I look back to that time as a great grace, gift, or sheer luck. Tirschenreuth gave me direct experience, in the twentieth century, of what it might have been like to live in an earlier and much more religious era of Europe. The following excerpt from a family memoir will convey the feel of the place. The account is historical, but it really felt like that still in my day.

In 1692 Tirschenreuth was just a little village under the rule of the great Cistercian Abbey of Waldsassen to the north. That year the typhus struck Tirschenreuth. People called it the “searing fever.” The mother and sister of one Johann Zottmeyer fell ill. He was a shoemaker. He prayed to the Sorrowful Mother to heal his family and promised that if they recovered, he would fashion an image of Mary for her veneration. Untreated typhus kills 10 to 60 percent of those infected. Zottmeyer’s sister and mother survived. He then engaged the artist Adam Beer to make an image of Mary for him out of white clay. White clay, kaolin, is common in the region and is the source of Tirschenreuth’s famous china. Zottmeyer hung this image near the church in a grove of lindens. In 1714 a lens grinder named Georg Sandinger was traveling south from Eger. He stopped on his way. He had drunk some bad water before departure and gotten quite sick by the time he reached Tirschenreuth. He lay down under the linden trees; he thought that he was dying. He glimpsed Mary’s image up in the tree beneath which he had come to rest.

(Wonderfully mediaeval this story. The Age of Enlightenment had begun, but Tirschenreuth has always been behind the times—like me.)

Sandinger now prayed for relief. Instantly, it seemed, he felt fine again. In gratitude he fashioned a roofed frame for Mary’s image. Three years later a journeyman whose left side had been lamed by stroke was instantly healed when, awkwardly, he climbed the linden tree and lit candles placed on the little ledge Sandinger had made to frame the image. These stories spread. By 1719, pilgrimages began to arrive in Tirschenreuth and grew huge as scores of healing stories spread across the land. People came from as far as Hungary. The Cistercians in Waldsassen took notice. A group came south and organized this phenomenon into an annual event.

The pilgrimage was suppressed in 1803 at the culmination of a period of secularization carried out by absolute monarchs in Europe. The Abbey of Waldsassen was dissolved and lost all of its holdings.

We didn’t know, living in Tirschenreuth after the war, that the place had been something akin to Fatima once—and would be so again, if still only on a tiny scale. The pilgrimage was authorized again in the 1970s. Today a monthly pilgrimage takes place in Tirschenreuth on the 13th of every month. There is now a Legion of Honor of our Dear Lady of Tirschenreuth, and those who make the pilgrimage three times are named its knights. Tirschenreuth is getting ready for the coming dark age now preparing all around us…

In a way we experienced an echo of those times. Several annual religious festivals in Tirschenreuth preempted all other activities. Every spring the parish staged a so-called Mission at the main church on the square. Afternoon and evening sermons followed high masses in the morning. Vast throngs attended these emotional events. There was the organ, the choir, and the voice crying for repentance from the golden pulpit of a cavernous dark church. An Easter celebration caused the streets to deck out in flowery booths, and floats passed the watching crowds. In autumn we attended the Harvest Festival (das Erntedankfest). Christmas was always also rather splendid.

My sister reached the age of first communion while we were there. She received it in that magnificent church with many dozens of young girls all wearing splendid white dresses that had taken quite some labor to obtain and fit. The whole family this time, all of us together, sat dressed in our very best and watched her proudly as she made her way toward the altar. I think each girl carried a lit candle. There were boys there too, of course, but we only had eyes for our daughter and sister.

I was confirmed in that church.

In those days the church was dark, almost gloomy. Old, forbidding, but mysterious. It was a dark and mysterious time—and the preachers at the annual Mission had a ready audience. Years later, in the 1970s (but unaware that pilgrimages had resumed), Brigitte and I once—on a visit to Europe to attend a conference—entered that church mid-morning on some weekday. Eight women sat in a single pew toward the front and recited a litany in rhythmic, cheerful voices. I could barely believe my eyes. The church had been restored to its original baroque splendor. It was all bright and yellow and pink and gold and red and the blue of the sky. The statues were milky white. The marble had been cleaned so that it shone and showed off the fine graining of its native stone.

* * *

Throughout my earlier childhood, we had moved with such frequency all over Hungary—my father having been an officer in the Army—that no place left any deep impression, only a few sharp highlights. For this reason for me, and my sister Susie (our little brother was too small to have experienced this quite so sharply) Tirschenreuth became, oddly, our home town, one of the cradles of the Ghulfs.

Bell, Book, and Kindle

Google’s Library Project, an initiative to capture digitally the contents of major libraries across the world, has made it possible for someone like me, far from the centers of academia, to look at old books at my leisure. Google’s Book Search will discover and display very old objects; if the books are in the public domain, I can read them in the original—if I don’t mind staring at a screen or paying for the paper and the toner. An example of such a book (Google also let’s you “quote” it electronically) is the sampling of a 1758 biography you can see here. I could have lifted the page into this blog as well, because Google also let’s you “quote” it electronically; I didn't because it is too big.

Speaking of paper and toner, if my expenditures on these, used strictly to print books from the web, begin to approach $200, I would be well advised to spring for a digital reader; the cheapest of these are now available at around that price point. In addition to Amazon’s Kindle, I encounter BEBOOK and Plastic Logic as competent competitors—and my guess is that electronic giants (Sony comes to mind) will magically morph their handheld phones into almost paper-thin but pleasingly rigid book-readers with roughly pocketbook-sized displays easy to slip into a briefcase.

Dime novels surfaced about midway through the nineteenth century, but these were a far cry from serious books. As I recall my youth in Europe, books were expensive but highly-valued products in family cultures like my own. Their value—and here I mean both price and content—turned generations into obsessive collectors (and rescuers) of books. And every time we move, we re-live the curse of Marley’s ghost condemned to drag along behind him, where’er he goes, a chain of heavy ledgers; Marley had it easy compared to me. But these are burden we gladly bear; and people in my generation—and, as I’m observing, those in the next one too—put dumping books into the trash just short of infanticide.

The incredible power of symbolic compression that electronic storage has put in our hands pemits us to store 1,500 books on a Kindle 2—and the weight of those volumes in no way increases the weight of the reader itself. That weight? 10.2 ounces. But the Kindle is possibly not even a Model-T yet in this category; storage will increase. As people are wont to say, these days, looking at devices of this type—habituated to relentless, domineering, all-flattening, steam-roller Change—“That’s the future.”

Full Stop.

Bell, book, and kindle? The Encyclopedia Britannica informs me that the parent of that phrase refers to the ceremony of excommunication or anathema in Catholicism. The bell signified the public nature of the act, summoning the community of all believers; the book represented the Church’s authority; and the candle meant to symbolize that the anathamized individual might still repent. The thirteen clergymen administering the ceremony (a bishop and twelve priests)—and I like that number, always lucky for me—also carried candles as they entered the presumably always dark chamber in what is invariably called the Dark Age.

Now thinking of this I had one of those attacks the Germans call Galgenhumor, meaning “gallows humor.” What if, I thought, Bell, Book, and Kindle (here we could think of Bell as telephone) was another analogous ceremony? What if it symbolized the anathematizing of Modernity? Alas, such thoughts occur. But I’m just trying to be my age; old men are supposed to be grumpy. On a more sober level, the thought runs along these lines. Okay, assume that Kindle and its kind do indeed get cheaper, faster, slimmer, handier—indeed better and better and better. And suppose that books begin to fade away, as newspapers already seem intent on doing. Suppose that real books made of paper, glue, and board become cult objects discussed by tiny groups of aficionados. By analogy, yachting lives but transport by sailing ships is “The Past.” Let’s assume that all this happens. Could this curve really continue to go up, up, up and never down? Is that the way curves really work? I doubt it.

To change the subject—but yet still to stay on course—what is the future of fossil fuels? My favorite image is that humanity has been travelling on the surface of a huge bubble of oil. Imagine a soap bubble, if you please. We’re a vast, invisible bacterial culture on its surface. Now I have another image. It is that of the last spastic techie purchasing the last Kindle which contains every letter now contained in the Library of Congress—instantly accessible, perhaps, by a brain-implanted chip. And at that very moment, the bubble of oil bursts. I leave you with that image. I wonder if a drastically slashed per capita energy consumption obtained at much, much higher cost (see further here) will support what today we piously anticipate as The Future.

P.S. Brigitte after reading this (puns are contagious): "Could the grandchildren of our grandchildren go to bed with a candle instead of a Kindle?"