Happy Holidays!

I am, of course, referring to Saint Andrew's Day (today), Saint Nicholas' Day (usually December 6) and Saint Lucy's Day (usually December 13). Poor old Nick and Lucy have been bumped by the Second and Third Sundays of Advent, so B.A. and I are celebrating them on the Saturday evening before.

I spent some time yesterday scraping candle wax from the toes of Saint Joseph in the Great Parish Clean-up, and it gave me opportunity time to ponder the righteous anger of the Catholic blogs I read or write for.  I was rather shaken by the depths to which Roman Catholics could go when duking it out online. In fact, I was so disgusted by the occasion for sin that is Twitter that soon after I got home, I deactivated my account.

At Boston College I wrote a lot about righteous anger as a response to blasphemy because I was fascinated by the Mohammad Cartoon Crisis. As a university student, I was pretty tired of all the blasphemous images of Our Lord and Our Lady that appeared in undergrad newspapers (although not at BC), wink, elbow, snigger, and it blew my mind when such newspapers, with all other such non-family newspapers, categorically refused to republish the Mohammad Cartoons. The Boston Phoenix was at least honest about it. To paraphrase a lot of swearing, it said the staff was too scared of potential violence.

"Can we learn from the Muslims on this?" I read out from my paper in a Thomistic ethics seminar, and my classmates shifted uneasily. And no wonder. Not only was I acknowledging that a large enough number of Muslims get their way by screaming, committing arson and killing people, I seemed to be suggesting we do that too. Mutual mediation, bruv.

There was palpable relief when I concluded, despite St. Thomas Aquinas' heartening ruling that blasphemers should be executed, that as Christians we may not scream, commit arson or kill anybody as a response to blasphemy. We first should contact the person who has so badly offended us and give them the opportunity to apologize and pledge that he will strive not to do it again. I think my ultimate punishment was sanctions. "Stop doing X or we won't buy your product." Yeah, that sounds pretty weak when people are now so scared of Muslims that they tweet "I love my Muslim neighbours" before Islamist terrorists have even stopped firing.*

It's sad to think that the sure fire way to stop blasphemy against our Lord would be such brutal and sustained violence that world leaders united in their assurances that "This has nothing to do with belief in Christ" while arresting the blasphemers. But, guess what, I discovered that the only thing that got George IV to sign the Catholic Emancipation Act was the solemn assurance that if he didn't, all Catholic Ireland would rise up and slaughter all the Protestants. This was a big fat lie, but that's how Catholicism became mainstream in the UK again.

So yelling-and-screaming is pretty tempting stuff. Traditional blogs metaphorically yelled and screamed all through the Synod (and I helped) and cries to the Cardinals to WALK OUT OF THE SYNOD actually seemed to shake them up. Naturally if our grandparents and great-grandparents had literally yelled and screamed at their parish priests before said priests started smashing up altars with sledgehammers, traditionalists would not be metaphorically screaming so much now.

Meanwhile, I believe that there is a time for yelling and screaming. For example, this Indian bishop sexually coerced a young married woman in front of her English parish, and the very English response was to send her and her fuming husband home. If I had been there, I would have given that bishop a lecture he would take to his grave.

Father Blake's post is actually about worthy reception of the Eucharist, and all the comments except mine reflect that. But one thing that occurs to me is the Impassibility of God. God doesn't literally suffer. Jesus suffered on the cross, but does not literally suffer any more. Our Lady doesn't literally suffer. The Saints don't suffer. We will not suffer either when we attain (God willing) the Beatific Vision. Blasphemers can do terrible things to Eucharistic hosts, but "they can't hurt Jesus", in the words of a priest I know. Those who are hurt by blasphemy are the same people who are hurt when a bishop insists we lick the cake off his fingers: we ourselves. We can't literally hurt God, but we can certainly hurt each other in all kinds of ways: blasphemy, detraction, libel, quarrelsomeness, chambering...

Yes, there is a time to shout, but that time is not ALL the time. And that is why I am starting my own small campaign to keep Christ in Christmas by merely saying "Thank you" when anyone wishes me a "Happy Holidays."  I am going to keep my righteous anger to a minimum, particularly as the madness on Edinburgh's major shopping streets have almost nothing to do with Christian Christmas and everything to do with Secular Christmas. Secular Christmas is the post-Christians' big holiday, so they can keep it, I hope they are successful in their pursuit of fun, and I will go to their parties, if invited.  Christian Christmas begins--for Latin Catholics--on the evening of 24 December. A number of important holy days fall between the First Sunday of Advent and New Year's Day, so anyone who wishes anyone else "Happy Holidays" is not merely being friendly, they are also accurate.

*To be honest, though, I am more inclined to think that "I love you, complete strangers!" and "I'll ride with you" is more about white people comforting ourselves that we are still in charge, still keeping outsiders oppressed/contained, and it's up to Us Nice Ones to protect "minorities" from the Bad Ones among our White Demi-God, Climate-Changing Selves. In short, "I'll ride with you" is paternalist, patronizing and probably racist. It is most definitely about expressing power---in a very weird, counter-intuitive way.

The Grey Lady Links

I loved my Canadian theologate. B.A. says I made this clear in my CWR piece about BC, and I think I made it clearer in the combox, when a chap told me how difficult it is for "traditionalists" to understand Ignatian spirituality.

I love the memory of my college so much, I didn't name it in my piece. Although I have marched into the fray, I don't want my college to be dragged into the Douthat Affair. And I don't want to be seen as a Jesuit-basher. Indeed, I don't want to be a Jesuit-basher, for I owe the Jesuits of Upper Canada a lot. I spent three of the most intellectually and spiritually fruitful years of my life among them. My one and only complaint is that my professors didn't warn me against going to BC, but I acknowledge that they probably didn't have enough data to make such a judgment, as Lonerganians would say.

Ironically, it was the Canadian Jesuits' very goodness that made me totally vulnerable to the completely different atmosphere at BC. I am reminded of my elementary school the years the "Grade 2" class was taught by a gentle, pretty, loving lady, and the "Grade 3" class was taught by a witch. The witch's excesses had mostly gone under the radar--weird how children of my generation seem never to have told their parents about abuse--but eventually I heard my mother repeating parental reports about Grade Threes wetting their beds and waking up screaming in the middle of the night. My mother concluded that the switch from Miss Super-Nice to Miss Witch was just too sudden.

When I was at BC, I was asked to help with an Accepted Students' Day, and I spent it encouraging Accepted Students who actually believed the Catholic faith in its entirety to go to Notre Dame instead. (I didn't know anything about Ave Maria, Christendom or any of the new American Catholic colleges.) Naturally I was not asked to help with Accepted Students' Day again, but I think I managed to help fellow believing Catholics. And this was my motive in writing the piece for CWR and anything else I have written about BC.  It was not to slag off the Society of Jesus.

There are very good men in the Society of Jesus, and the ones who are orthodox Catholics suffer a lot, both from the assumptions of orthodox Catholics that all Jesuits are dodgy and from the suspicions of their heterodox /obscurantist superiors and/or colleagues. Looking back on it, my Canadian theologate seemed to be an oasis from this ecclesiastical civil war. I honestly thought, when I returned from Boston, that this war had not reached Canada. It turns out I simply didn't have the data. We vulnerable students had been shielded from all that. Our Jesuit Fathers were truly fatherly.

In the past few days, I have thought about the promises I took in 2005 when I was inducted into the Jesuit Honour Society, Alpha Sigma Nu.  They involved carrying out scholarship "with intellectual integrity", loyalty to the ideals of my education  and service "realized in genuine concern for my neighbour" "for the greater honour and glory of God." Nobody could be sorrier than I was, as a student at BC, that this included facing the reality of the toxic environment around me. A "faith that does justice" includes crying out against such environments to defend believing Catholics and their faith.

Despite what critics may think, I was not at all consciously a traditionalist when I went to BC. I honestly thought I would be a "Jesuit collaborator" (as lay women like me were actually called without malice or irony) for the rest of my life. Ironically, it was the experience at BC that led me more firmly to tradition, and so in a weird way I must be grateful to it, too.

After all this long apologia, here is the link to Ross Douthat's New York Times blogpost.

Update: And one to an article in the American National Catholic Register.

She Knew Not How To Suffer in Silence

When I was grumbling about something or other as a child, my mother quoted with great maternal sarcasm, "It was frequently said of her, 'She knew not how to suffer in silence.'" It sounded so poetic, I assumed it was from the Bible or 19th century poetry. But now I have just googled it and its source is apparently Lucy van Pelt of  "Peanuts" fame.

Woot!

The message seemed to be that it is noble to keep silent about one's suffering--which it often is, I imagine--and just crack on with things and smile, smile, smile.  I admire people who can do that unless they tell outright lies or don't speak out of sheer cowardice. It is really saintly, for example, never to mention how much physical pain you are in to people who can do nothing about it, so as not to embarrass them. I hope to be like that one day. "How are you, Seraphic?" "Oh, mustn't grumble!"

But frankly I do not know how to suffer in silence, and generally fuss and complain and shout and burst into tears, and I get away with it all because I work from home and have editors instead of proper bosses. Yay!

I am not always this way about actual relationships, of course. When I was younger, I would put up with outrageous behaviour from others without saying much of anything. I did not, for example, think of blowing the whistle on the sexual bullying of my playground until I heard some brat shout filth at my sister. Not only did I challenge him to a fight after school--absolutely bizarre behaviour for a girl in that milieu--I decided it was time to talk to the principal. And indeed, I have never shut up about childhood sexual bullying since I escaped.

The importance of keeping secrets was banged into my head during my three mostly happy years in the MDiv, and so I am pretty good at keeping other people's secrets. The perfidy of calling up the bishop and complaining about my profs was also banged into my head during the MDiv (mostly in a joking way), and so I was never tempted to report any of my profs to anyone for anything they said until one day in 2007 when I totally lost it. The subject of my ire had arrived later in the term, and by the time he actually taught a class, it was too late for me to drop it.

It was a terrible class, and not being able to drop it or keep my mouth shut, I argued all the way through. The prof got really frustrated, probably because he really didn't know much about dogma and doctrine, which he seemed to think were European colonialist impositions on Local Church.  (How he could have passed his Comps was a mystery to me.) When he described the torments of European missionaries who lost their faith in the dungeons of culturally superior Japan, he positively relished in their suffering. Take that, colonialist, white supremacist Christian missionaries! I did not say, "Whose side are you on?" but I came close. (I think I may have mentioned that my great-uncle survived a Japanese death camp.)

In Toronto, arguing with colleagues was great fun--I didn't argue much with profs, as whenever one failed his first lecture, I just dropped his course. In Boston, I didn't argue as much with colleagues as I did with profs and that was no fun at all, especially when they shrieked back or snapped the chalk or whatever. With colleagues what really depressed was just the ordinary stream of conversation about sex and intrigue and politics and racism and sexism and zzzzz.

The interesting thing is that some of my classmates were suffering in silence. Or at least one. One wrote to me about my CWR exposé, and what I found interesting is how much this person suffered despite his or her practice of keeping his/her head down and his/her mouth shut. It was a comfort because for a year after I left, I blamed myself for not being more prudent. Why couldn't I have just weathered all the storms? Why couldn't I have just let all the nonsense wash over me, nodded outwardly while cringing inwardly, pretended to be a fellow traveller, flattered the powerful, done the bare minimum to get to the Comps, written my thesis and gotten the heck out of Dodge?

Because it was all so unfair, that's why. It was totally unfair to pull a now-we're-Catholic, now-we're-not bait-and-switch on a poor Catholic foreign student who actually believes the Catholic faith has some resemblance to what John Paul II and Benedict XVI, not to mention all the Councils of the Church, says it is. And when I think something is unfair, I complain.

That said, I waited eight years to publish my complaints. Well, except for the story about the arm-twisting pastoral theology prof who acted like an officer of the KGB (or SB)  exhorting corrupt Polish seminarians: "How do we get the Archbishop to disobey Rome?"  I piped up about children's rights before anyone suggested beating him to death and stuffing him in the boot of a car.

There was, in fact, an openly gay student present, and as he was a really nice guy I liked lot, that made defending Roman Catholic doctrine (to all these Roman Catholics) even harder. It was simply an abysmal situation to place all my seminar class in, without warning, with complete strangers to witness the whole. Anyway, I did write about this in the Toronto Catholic Register some time ago.

But what I wanted to say is that despite having deep-sixed my academic career, I feel I am doing very well in the fields of Catholic discourse: I write, I'm published, people read what I say, and sometimes they ask me to come to them and lecture out loud. And to my shock, I discovered on Twitter today someone who had tweeted I am her "favourite female theologian." Oh man. How humbling. Thank you.

Synod on the Family: Small Group Reports

Well, my dears, it's not Aquinas, but it's public. So here is a link to the Small Group Reports.

Four of the groups are  English-speaking . The one I found most interesting was Group D, which does a relatively careful critique of Instrumentum Laboris instead of waxing lyrical about "God's dream", etc.

The Reality of Other People

Benedict Ambrose is a big fan of the novelist-philosopher Iris Murdoch, and Murdoch had this to say about love and reality: "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love...is the discovery of reality."  

B.A. quoted this at a dinner party, and both ladies present looked highly skeptical that the realization that something other than oneself is real is extremely difficult. Was Murdoch some kind of monster, or were we just not getting it?    

Then I remembered something Father Bernard Lonergan wrote about Eddington's two tables. Eddington observed that every table is the table is the table as it appears to us AND the table as it is to itself, i.e. atoms surrounded by emptiness. Lonergan described the difference between things as they are in relation to us, and things as they are in themselves. 

We can even see God in this way: when we consider the Incarnation and salvific history, we are most definitely seeing God as He is in relation to us. But when we contemplate God in His Triune majesty, we worship Him for who He is. At a certain point in prayer we have to leave off asking for gifts and saying sorry for sins and just contemplate He Who Is in Himself. Simultaneously God is for us and also wrapped up in an eternal dance between Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Yes, it's a mystery.

People are also a mystery, to a certain extent, and the one way I know you can come close to seeing a person as God sees them is to fall in love with him/her. And I mean really him/her, virtues, warts and all. You see that he is an alcoholic or a fibber or lazy or chews his toenails or whatever, but you know--truthfully--"I can accept that." This is not a "should" by the way, and most definitely not something to talk yourself into. It is just a phenomenon that happens or doesn't. And what a phenomenon! Hopefully you also see him for who he IS in himself, and not just who he is in relation to you, e.g. "My idol."

So I think what Murdoch was getting at is that everybody and everything is something outside of ourselves and not contingent on us. If we shut our eyes, the people around are still there. If we were to wink out of existence, reality would go on without us. If I should keel over dead, my mother would be very sad, but she would probably still go on her next river cruise. I certainly hope so. 

Children have a hard time seeing their mothers as anyone other than their mother. This drives some mothers crazy, and they try to impress upon their children that they are something other than "Mother" to themselves. I am not sure if this is a good idea or not, but possibly it is necessary so that the mothers don't go crazy and burn their homes down. Children have no power, no money, few rights, and little understanding; possibly believing that their mothers' lives revolve completely around them is necessary for their sanity. 

But eventually the child "gets it" and sees that his mother is neither goddess nor slave but a woman at least 14 years older than himself, with her own interests, own friends (hopefully), own opinions (which are sometimes wrongheaded, but not the war crimes they seemed when he was 14), and own experience of herself. I'm sorry to say the first literary example that comes into my head is from The Vampire Lestat, when Lestat turns his mother into a vampire, and she stops being his mother to assert herself as Gabrielle. 

Only a very childish person sees everyone around himself solely in relation to himself, and what he can get out of them, or what he wants them to be. In the brutal words of one young man I know, re: the girls who chase him all over the shop, "I can see why they are interested in me, but I don't see why they think I should be interested in them."  As staggering as this statement may sound, it implies "They aren't considering who I may be or what my interests are, are they?" 

Imagine Prince William at the University of Saint Andrews, and how difficult it must have been to make friends who actually liked him for himself and not because he was, you know, the second in line to the throne. The question "What could Prince William do for me?" must have jumped to hundreds of adolescent minds, however subconsciously. This sort of selfishness is easily noted by the thinker and regretted as base, but I pity whichever young things on campus got a random smile from Prince William and allowed themselves to spin this everyday pleasant social convention into "OMG! He likes me! Maybe we'll get married! I'll be the QUEEN!" 

Well, I would say more, but I must away to a funeral. I am thinking of the reality of my husband and how he will feel if I don't meet him at Paolozzi's giant foot sculpture outside the Cathedral when I said I would. 

We Could Care Less

Helen of Troy

This post is inspired by Australian Julia, who described her bout of anxiety over her looks after mentioning another girl's beauty to three guys. Going nuts with fear that we have lost the genetic lottery in the eyes of all the men around is something I am sure all we modern girls can understand. My solution is that we care less about what men think. After all, they don't care as much about what they think as we too often seem to do. In fact, sometimes they don't even think.

 Female thought process

I'm serious. One of the big differences between men and women is that men are capable of switching off thought. When you ask a man what he's thinking, and he says "Nothing," he's actually telling the truth. When you say "What do you think of Sharon?" and he says, "I don't," he 's not being bitchy. He just doesn't think of Sharon. And the fact that you think about your looks all the time doesn't mean that men think about your looks all the time. Male thought looks like this: A-->B-->C-->D-->E. Plod, plod. Female thought looks like this (see photo):

Besides all the other signs that Bruce Jenner is a man, his fond belief that womanhood can be achieved with a lipstick, knife and silicon (A-->B-->C) is pretty obvious. But it is not nice to make fun of the mentally ill, so I shall return to the only people over whom we have real control, and that is ourselves. 

Our inner selves, I mean. We could have whole new faces carved on into our own, risking scars and horrible misshapen silicon shifting under the skin, and even if they looked great (doubtful), our inner selves could still be wailing away: oh, but what do men think?  A better question is, DO men think? That is, DO men think about me? And the answer to that is, Why should they? I know a gazillion men, and I think of very few of them, and even then of most of them only occasionally. 

"I owe it to the public to look my best," said some celebrity or another. "They have to look at me." And I think this is the right point of view from which to see your grooming habits. It is a duty not to offend against community standards. Therefore, you must wash and tidy your hair before you run for your bus. You must put on clean clothes that proclaim you to be an inoffensive, if interesting, member of society. If you are twelve, you shouldn't grieve the middle-aged ladies on the bus by wearing "sexy" clothing. If you are fifty-two, you shouldn't embarrass the twelve year olds (and everyone else) by wearing the same thing. If you are going to a wedding, you wear a pretty dress--not white--and shoes. If you are going to a Sunday church service, you cover your shoulders and cleavage. If you are going to a Goth bar, you wear black. (Wearing blue jeans to any of these places is just rude. Daily Mass, okay. You pop in between this activity and that. But Sunday Mass? Come on. Even if you just milked the cows, you surely have time to wash your hands and put on a skirt.)

But as far as "beauty" goes--try to forget it. Either any given man is going to be attracted to your face and figure, or he is not. End of. Apparently men are attracted to faces brightened with makeup--duh, lipstick is red, and our eyes are drawn to red--but I have never heard a man who wasn't a homosexual make-up artist say to a woman "I really like your make-up."  (Usually women say it to each other, and then there is a conversation about make-up tutorials on youtube.)* And the British press is full of unkind remarks about features that have obviously gone under the knife or needle: "trout pout" is the one that first comes to mind. 

Actually, I take back the "End of". A man can be attracted to your face and figure without liking you. All unusually pretty (or "common denominator" pretty) girls know this, and by the age of 21 are experts at identifying it. A man can even hate a woman because he is attracted to her face and figure, for he sees his attraction to her as her power over him, which he must resist by punishing her. So on, so ISIS. A man who honks his horn and says, smiling with every tooth, "Hey, looking good, baby" is not lying about being attracted to you, he is lying about LIKING you. Obviously he doesn't like you; he doesn't even know you. 

So either any given man is attracted to your face and figure, or he is not. Start of. If only a few men appear to be attracted to you, then you are more vulnerable to anticipate foolishly and just hope that (rather than discover if) he likes you, too.  But whether a guy likes or dislikes or hates you, on top of being attracted to you, can be known only from social interaction. And by social interaction, I mean around other people in the community. The guy on the Boston street who forced his phone number into my hand saying, "You gotta call me! You just gotta!" probably would not have recognized my voice had I been silly enough to call him. ("Sandra, right? No--Charlene! Oh yeah, of course, baby, just havin you on. Of course I remember you! Heh heh heh!") Actually Facebook most definitely counts. You meet a guy, he befriends you on Facebook, and he has fewer than 200 Facebook friends, or he actually sends you a message... Well, I think that counts as social interaction in the community.

If, however, all the guys you know who seem to like you don't seem to be attracted to you, don't sweat it. Big fat deal. Are you attracted to all of them? No. But you still like them okay? Well, great. You're more than a sexual object, and they're a lot more than sexual subjects. You're a sexual subject, too, by the way, and you'll notice men don't browse the make-up counter, wondering how to make their eyes look bigger. You're just attracted to any given man, or you're not. 

As I have said I zillion times, I am not (nor have I even been) particularly beautiful according to conventional standards. (My hair is by unconventional ones, and I used to have the muscles of a Greek goddess, weep weep.) Nevertheless, I have attracted more than one guy who actually liked me in the last thirty years, not including Paweł the wonder child who fell for me when we were six. I am not sure I attracted one guy a year--and knew about it--but maybe I did. I don't know. I care only for illustrative purposes. As men on the prowl for women like to say, "It's a numbers game." 

The chap who first said that me, a neighbour, used to chase chickens when other work was scarce, so he slapped a "Not My League" label on civil servant me shortly after we met. I rather liked him; he was a good soul, although prone to giving out his phone number to waitresses at the same bar and wondering why they didn't call. As women, we are lucky that we aren't actually expected to hand out our unsolicited phone numbers to men. At most, we have been expected to trail ourselves through crowds of men like fishing lures. I suppose we can still do that, as long as we are trying to catch the fish that are most attracted to "Nice Catholic Girl With Too Much Self-Respect To Say Nothing of Respect for Nice Catholic Men To Dress Like a Hooker." However, I think it best that even then we just dress for success, and then forget all about it. 

Fisherman (and fisherwomen) must get cranky when they stand knee-deep in frozen streams without catching anything, but surely they don't resent the fish. Still less do they freak out that they will never, in their entire lives, catch a fish. Of course, they will catch a fish---unless, of course, they stop going to the stream and take up gardening instead.

*All the same, I think men prefer women wearing an average amount of makeup because most men are by definition conventional, and women conventionally wear some makeup. If men are turned off by female leg hair, it is because women conventionally shave, wax or melt off the hair on our legs. WHY, o WHY did we start doing that?!

Laudato Sii

I, your humble auntie, almost never read papal encyclicals, so it is very unlikely I am ever going to read Laudato Sii.

The two great papal encyclicals that have a major importance for my life are Humanae Vitae (Paul VI) and Mulieris Dignitatem (Saint John Paul II).  WAIT! Hold the phone. Apparently Mulieris Dignitatem is not even an encyclical; it is an Apostolic Letter.

Five years of theology school, and I do not know the difference. Moan, groan. How can this be?  I graduated Cum Magna Laude from my theologate, and I fled the anti-theologate, so you would think I would know.

Meanwhile, even I know that Benedict XVI's most important work (for me),  Summorum Pontificum, is not an encyclical but a motu proprio which is a ... hmm...

Wait! The internet has jogged my memory. Encyclicals are to BISHOPS.* BISHOPS are supposed to read the encyclicals, ponder them in their highly trained theological brains, and then come up with a plan to filter the information down to their not-so-highly-trained priests and laypeople.

Sadly, bishops do not always have highly trained theological brains and are chosen for their administrative skills instead. In such circumstances, they turn to priests and professors they trust, with mixed results.

Well, unless you are a bishop or your bishop is going to call you up to tell him what to think, the fact that Laudato Sii is for BISHOPS lets me and you off the hook. We can wait until our bishops write little guides to Laudato Sii and then read them.  And I am sooo glad because I do not want to plow through 200 pages written by whoever wrote them before Francis signed off on it. Not all popes write their own encyclicals--that is definitely something I remember.

But I am relatively sure Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who were two of the most formidable and skilled Catholic intellectuals of the 20th century, wrote their own encyclicals. I really ought to read them. When I was a teenager, I tried to read JPII and gave up, thinking I just wasn't smart enough. Little did I know that it wasn't me, it was his writing style, not to mention the difficulty of translating philosophical Polish into English and, presumably, Latin.

To be honest, it wasn't until the past six years that I really got an insight into Saint John Paul II's greatness. Reading and rereading Mulieris Dignitatem until I understood it was a real eye-opener, a fantastic experience.

So, really, before I read anything by Pope Francis (or his advisors), I think I will read all the papal writings of Saint John Paul II. This may take some time.

Meanwhile, here is quite a thoughtful essay on the topic by Canada's most under-appreciated brilliant prose stylist, David Warren.

Update: Here is a cool and handy guide, courtesy of EWTN, on the relative weight of papal pronouncements. Apparently a motu proprio has even MORE authority than an encyclical.  I just did not know that. Does this mean Summorum Pontificum has even more weight behind it than...Humanae Vitae? (!!!!)

*Oh wait. EWTN doesn't say encyclicals are just to bishops. Sigh, sigh, sigh. It's all so confusing. It's like trying to find out if Pope Francis actually studied anything in Germany or just sat around the Mensa in Sankt Georgen reading Tintin in German--just like little me.