Friday 20 February 2015

David's Trouble

Whenever I am in Toronto, I run around having brunch, lunch and dinner with everyone I know. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances (and a few enemies, too, it must be admitted, alas) from different walks of life, faiths, politics and even...ahhh.....philosophies within the Catholic faith. I did my theological training with the SJ, after all. I toddle off to the TLM, and I adore my Jesuit/Ignatian pals. 

On Tuesday I had a late lunch with a dear friend who is a Tarot-reading Wiccan. She offered to read my cards, and I explained that as a strict Catholic I couldn't have heread my cards.

"But you told me about Von Balthasar and Meditations on the Tarot!" protested my pal.

"I know," I said sheepishly. I had thought at the time that it might be the way to open up a Catholic-Wiccan dialogue. "But B.A. is very, very strict and he wouldn't like it."

("You said NO, right?" asked B.A. when I told him of this offer. "Otherwise you might be travelling home with demons in your suitcase!")

Yes, I said no. Meanwhile, I hope you are all more shocked with me hanging out with my Wiccan pal (who is really very nice and a talented artist) than you will be to read I had lunch last week with Vox Cantoris, whose long-simmering feud (about which I could say much but won't) with a certain Vatican functionary from Rochester, NY, has become international Catholic blog news.  I mean, when Michael Voris interviews you on his show--holy guacamole. 

It was a very good lunch: I had żurek and cheddar cheese pierogi. (Yes, cheddar cheese is not traditional for pierogi, but Canadians love cheddar pierogi.) What did Vox have? Schnitzel, I think. We talked about Bishop Pearse Lacey, whom Vox knew as a very old man, and also Mary Wagner, who is currently in prison "for life". Little did we know that Vox would become a Catholic blogging cause celebre within a week.

I suppose I could comment at length, but I feel a chill coming on. So I will confine myself to the following statements:

1. Niche television is dead and began to die when blogging was born. The internet is here to stay, and everybody gets to play. Whoever has the most (and the most generous) readers wins.  

2. As the laity has been told that they, too, are "priest, prophet and king" it should not be surprising that the laity--in particular the well-read laity--now have a lot to say about doctrine, theology and what's going on in Rome. 

3. As the Canadian laity have been humiliated by thirty years of revelations of Canadian clerical abuse of boys, teenage boys and seminarians, capped off with the news that Bishop Lahey of Antigonish had been in a homosexual relationship for a decade by the date of his trial for possession of child po*n, it may be understandable that we get a bit snippy about priests who insult the laity, not to mention the Holy Family. Automatic forelock-tugging deference is gone like the beautiful pre-1965 interiors of our churches. 

4. The priest threatening Vox did me a good turn many years ago.  

5. I fervently hope that the lawsuit does not go forward. It would be a terrible scandal, eroding even further Canadian respect for the priesthood.  I am not worried about the anti-Catholic Canadian media--this priest is one of the two or three they like. But I am worried about Joe and Mary Catholic and any financial and spiritual harm to Vox and his Fox, who are also Joe and Mary Catholic. And who knows what this will do to Catholic  bloggers' attitudes towards the Vatican, especially in light of the oncoming Synod! 

5 comments:

  1. Potato and Cheddar seems to be "traditional" or at least most common amongst Polish Americans (I actually prefer Potato and Farmers Cheese, but in parts of the country where we are limited to Mrs T's frozen pierogies? We don't have that option)

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    1. I meant traditional in Poland. The Poles in Scotland were mostly born in Poland, so when I am told "this is traditional" and "this is outrageously untraditional", it's always referring back to Poland itself!

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  2. And yet again, we are reminded that a good amount of our prelates, disregarding the Holy Father's admonitions on overweening clericalism, seem to behave either like a bunch of pagan celebrities (this lawsuit) or a gaggle of teenagers (see the Germans at the Synod, and to a lesser extent the Americans). I'm disappointed, but unfortunately no longer surprised. Nor should I be - after all, we know of many prelates who were like this even in the Age of Faith.

    I will say in a VERY limited defense of Rosica on the irregular Holy Family bit, that the Holy Family is irregular in that Our Lady and St. Joseph did not have relations, unlike well, most good Catholic families. Still doesn't justify the unconscionable, the unlikely, not to mention the utterly impossible.

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  3. UNUSUAL not irregular!!! Irregular implies sinful. It is a theological term, and it is outrageous that a priest would use it to describe the Holy Family. A better defense would be that the priest doesn't tweet his own tweets but has a secretary do it---a thought which just occurred to me. Seraphic

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  4. That was really me. I am having some technical challenges on the road, including the relatively recent disappeance of letter r from my keyboard.

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