Well, I failed last week.

Sixteen weeks into my promise to God that I’d go to a daily Mass every week besides my Sunday Obligation, I missed a week. My wicked cold and the copious amounts of NyQuil held me in bed too long each ‘morn.

But I planned to make up for it this week by going twice—maybe even 3 times! And no better than to start right away, right?

This morning, the alarm sounded at 5:00, usually enough time to make 6:15 Mass at Prince of Peace in Olathe, which is by my office. But I dilly-dallied this morning, and didn’t hit the PoP parking lot until 6:20, and when I got to the breezeway to the small daily Mass chapel, I heard they were into the first reading.

The daily Mass chapel is a sad little non-descript room next to their Perpetual Adoration chapel that doesn’t seat too many people. I understand why the parish uses the small room rather than the big gymnasium nave for the Sunday Masses, but that little room is an inglorious space for the glory of the Lord. (is it more inglorious than the PoP main church? No. But that’s a whole different topic altogether)

But since the daily Mass chapel is so small, I figured it’d be disrespectful and disruptive if I marched in after the Mass had begun, and I decided to duck into the Adoration chapel for a rosary and maybe a short Lectio Divina. But though the Perpetual Adoration was unlocked, it was empty (Hellooooooo? Perpetual?). Someone had the good sense to veil the Monsterance with a very pretty cover, but the lights were out and I got the impression that they didn’t want anyone there.

The more I think about it, this disturbs me more and more. While our Lord had been attended to, there was really no one there to protect the Sacred Species. The room was unlocked and ignored.

But I left, too. Without thinking. I probably should have stayed, but it didn’t occur to me then. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to think about this.

Alas, it looks like I’ll have the alarm set again tomorrow—this time for 4:50 AM. (!) And I’m going to look into the proper way to temporarily close a Perpetual Adoration chapel—any suggestions on where to start this?

See the whole comic at the exceedingly funny Dinosaur Comics. I love this strip.

My wife agrees that I will be a crochety old man one day.

There’s an old practice among Catholics that helps them deal with the irritations and suffering of life. Catholics call it redemptive suffering, and we say that we “offer it up” to God. Nuns would tell their students that if you have a pebble in your shoe, to leave it in there for a while—then offer up the suffering for Jesus who suffered for all of us on the Cross. It’s a nice little thought that I like very much. Just as we make offerings of our time, treasure and talent to the Church, we can make small offerings of “redemptive suffering” to the Lord. Catholics do it because they know they, themselves, are not perfect. And as a way of trying to make up for their failings, they impose a little self-penance.

Throughout the Bible, God’s people are making material sacrifices to Him. Abram took Isaac to the altar (in the famous last-minute divine switcharoo where God wanted a conveniently handy lamb instead). They slaughtered tons of fatted calves. Every year, Jews would butcher a Passover lamb. But when Jesus offered himself as the ultimate sacrifice, we gave up animal flesh for our own flesh—in a way of speaking.

This is how some people (yes, even today) decide on self-mortification for God. You hear of people whipping themselves, wearing hair-shirts, generally making life hard for themselves. It’s easy to dismiss them as religious nutjobs. In a lot of ways, I’d agree with that assertion. I understand those motives—however, I think I’ll steer clear from the hair shirts for myself.

But in college, I started applying this philosophy a little towards myself-- namely when I found the bottle. On the long mornings after some short nights, I’d forgo the Advil for my headaches. I figured that I’d made my own trouble and I deserved to live with my hangover. It was hardly a high form of suffering, but I gave what I had.

These days, I’ve been thinking more about “offering it up”. When someone cuts me off in traffic or when a coworker is getting on my nerves, I figure this is a way I can atone for some of my mistakes in life. It’s not Karma, mind you. It’s not way that the mythological fates are evening out the world. It’s much more personal than that. I fail at life CONSTANTLY. I am not the person I want to be, and when I fail, I should atone for those shortcomings. In this way, traffic becomes a form of atonement. The cube farm at work is a form of atonement. The hangovers are a form of atonement. The inevitable pebbles in my shoe are atonement. To me, every day is Yom Kippur. Each day is the day where I make up for my sins.

I read on Traditional Catholic messageboards that some people think of going to Mass in the suburban Vernacular Novus Ordo masses as a form of penance. On those Sundays that they don’t make it to the Tridentine Latin Mass at whatever TLM parish they attend (and typically drive halfway across town to get there), a lot of Traditional Catholic families just hold their nose and go to their neighborhood parish, which they consider a penitential way to meet their Sunday Obligation. This isn’t exactly my way of thinking, but I can appreciate where they’re coming from.

In the right context, redemptive suffering can be very satisfying.

But some things are some times where this redemptive suffering seems to fall a little short of a real sacrifice to the Lord.

For instance, right now, I’m suffering with a pretty wicked cold.

I’m not a very sickly person. I drink my Orange Juice and eat well balance meals and generally stay healthy. Hey, we all get a cold in the winter. Me too. But it’s usually the kind of thing where I take a handful of DayQuil pills and go on with life. But I’ve got one of these awful colds where it’s like I’ve just lost a leg. I’m tired, groggy and disoriented. The DayQuil isn’t working, neither is the Alka-Seltzer tablets. Just in case this is some new springtime allergy that I’ve just developed, I’ve also swallowed a few Benadryl tablets (hence the grogginess). But still, I’m coughing and hacking and running through Kleenex like I’m building a parade float in my living room. Really, how much snot does one human being have in their body? I mean, really.

This is indeed suffering. Is it redemptive? Do I blow my nose for the Lord? It’s hard to take redemptive suffering seriously when you’re swilling Green Death NyQuil before your evening prayers. I’d like to think that I could use this suffering to my everlasting advantage, but as an offering to the Lord it doesn’t seem to hold much gravity when I’ve tried to swallow any type of treatment to mitigate the suffering. But I couldn’t imagine any other way to deal with this cold. This thing is a doooooooooooosy here. This is a four-alarm, batten down the hatches, full-fledged MONSTER COLD here. We’re talking a Guinness Book of World Records kind of cold here. A donate my snot to science kind of cold.

Really.

“Offer it up?”

Doesn’t the Almighty God deserve a better offering than these Kleenex?

I just discovered the Catholic Cartoon Blog, but I'm glad I found it.

There’s an office park not far from where we live that has the most amazing tulips that you’re going to see. They crowd the corners of the intersection and bunch around the edges of the neatly cropped boxwood bushes that run near the sidewalk. These tulips are HUGE, they’re perfect red and yellow, and it seems like they just appear overnight. Tulips are the heralds of each springtime, they’re the first burst of color that tells us the dark and gloomy winter is giving way to fresh air and sunshine. When you walk up to the front door of the Walberg Estate in beautiful Shawnee, Kansas—bunches of daffodils greet you along the path to the front step. I like daffodils as much as tulips, I like how the burst of the flower turns sideways, as if the flower is looking out to the rest of the world. Each daffodil presides over a small chunk of springtime, knowing they have a little part in the process.

Of course, the tulips and daffodils don’t just spontaneously appear. I planted the daffodil bulbs over a year and a half ago, having carefully selected each one, working the soil and laying out where each flower would come up when it breaks out of the ground. Daffodil bulbs, like tulips, are planted in the fall, usually as gardeners are pulling the summer flowers for the compost. Planting bulbs is therapy for gardeners, having worked in the long hot summer days to keep the bright summer colors watered and strong in drought, fought against weeds and critters—as that time draws to an end, the last vestiges of the summer sun are put into the delayed satisfaction of narcissus bulbs. We plant them knowing that we won’t see them for months, that some of them aren’t going to make it, that for all the fussiness of gardening, these bulbs are going to do it all themselves without our winter meddling. Those tulips by the office park are transplants, having been raised in a greenhouse and planted into the earth just as each bloom was going to open up. The pretty flowers of springtime are the fruits of many laborious hours, time and money, sweat and sometimes blood.

The peas are starting to come up in the vegetable garden. They’re around 4 inches tall and just developing their little fingers the plants use to climb up their trellis towards the sun. I put the seeds in the ground a few weeks ago, when the ground was still a cold and damp from the winter that hadn’t quite left us yet. Peas have to go in early, they’re usually among the first crops of May that are ready to pick. Since then, I’ve been breaking ground on the new part of the garden, pulling sod from the yard and turning the ground and fortifying the soil so it’ll be ready for planting when each type of plant is due.

The last few nights, I’ve been running the roto-tiller in the almost-too-wet dirt, breaking up the Kansas clay and grading out the high and low spots typical to a new garden. If the ground is too wet, trying to work the ground causes more trouble than good. The mud cakes onto the tines of the tiller, the dirt clumps together into clods that can take months of sun and rain to break back apart, you end up destroying the soft texture of the garden in your haste to get into the garden too early. The problem is that you can’t wait too long. Some plants have to be in by now, some will have to be in the ground within a couple weeks. Of course, springtime rain is unpredictable too! The famous April Showers are a mixed blessing, to be sure. It’s those April Showers that make everyone’s yard look so good before the summer fatigue. It’s the April Showers that push the rosebushes to turn from short brown sticks to crimsony red with velvety leaves, to the bright green stems holding up the Queen of Flowers. But it’s the same April Showers that delay the vegetables, push back the young flower transplants, that make timing the yard fertilizer and treatments unpredictable. April Showers make each lawn mowing a careful weekend chess match, trying to see if by Sunday afternoon the grass will be dry enough that the cut grass won’t clump. Our soil in this part of the world is almost totally devoid of nitrogen, so if you want the grass to be strong and thick, you’ve got to apply the nitrogen before a rain but 2 days after mowing and at least 2 days before mowing again. It’s hard enough to keep up with the fescue anyway, this is the weather it loves more than any other season. Some days it grows so fast and so tall that cutting the grass feels like cutting hay.

Please don’t take this as complaining, it’s all worth it!

In the hot days of a Kansas August, when the backyard tomatoes are as big as a softball (and better tasting on hamburgers), it’s worth it. In the high-sun days of late June, when the cucumbers are juicy and crisp, it’s worth it. When the grind of another workday ends and you’re welcomed home to the trumpets of petunias at the front door, when you’re setting down to dinner with your lovely wife and vase of fresh cut yellow roses can sit on the table with a glass of cool chardonnay, when you kick back with your friends in the backyard grass with a cold beer and nighttime air holds the call of baseball on the radio, gentle reader: it’s worth it.

That’s what springtime is about. It’s not just a time of tulips. Tulips don’t last, daffodils are not long for the world. They’re only the beginning of each new springtime.

I don’t know if this is what His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI meant when he said the Church in America will know a new springtime. But in a way, it’s apt to remember this: Springtime is when the work gets fun, when the afternoon air portends a promise of summer. But it’s also a time of labor, there’s work to be done in the springtime. Springtime means gentle rain and dangerous thunderstorms, it means warm afternoons and devastating freezes. We could get snow in springtime. We could get floods in springtime. It is creation in spite of a chance at destruction. But for the snows or floods, each day is good—and carries the promise that tomorrow can be even better. It’s a time for getting a little dirt on your hands. But we sow today so we can reap tomorrow.

Then indeed, the harvest will be plenty.

In today's Kansas City Star:

Since the Supreme Pontiff arrived in America, the three branches of US Government welcomed His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI in their own unique ways.

The President greeted the pope at Andrews Air Force Base, then threw a welcome ceremony with 13,500 people, the Marine Corps band and a 21-gun salute.

The United States Congress passed a resolution welcoming the pope, even though Senator Barbara Boxer noted she does not value each and every human life.

For their part, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 to kill people. There are 5 members of the Court who are Catholic: Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas and Alito. They were joined by Breyer (Jewish) and Stevens (Protestant), all voting for more death. The two dissenting justices were Ginsburg (Jewish) and Souter (Episcopalian).

Welcome to America, Holy Father. Ora pro nobis.

Creative Minority Report has a post up that called my attention to a tragedy at Yale. An unknown number of people were murdered by poisioning by Aliza Shvarts, a student at Yale. She videotaped their death, then smeared the blood of the victims on plastic sheets.

Yale University did not call the police. Rather, the Universtiy encouraged the purpetrator and will hang the carnage in a University art gallery. Yale is expected to honor Ms. Shvarts with a college degree.

I am not making this up. The story below, is taken from the Yale Daily News, and is graphic.

For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse
Martine Powers
Staff Reporter
Published Thursday, April 17, 2008

Art major Aliza Shvarts '08 wants to make a statement.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts' project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock . saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

But Shvarts insists her concept was not designed for "shock value."

"I hope it inspires some sort of discourse," Shvarts said. "Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it's not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone."

The "fabricators," or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages.

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself.

Art major Juan Castillo '08 said that although he was intrigued by the creativity and beauty of her senior project, not everyone was as thrilled as he was by the concept and the means by which she attained the result.

"I really loved the idea of this project, but a lot other people didn't," Castillo said. "I think that most people were very resistant to thinking about what the project was really about. [The senior-art-project forum] stopped being a conversation on the work itself."

Although Shvarts said she does not remember the class being quite as hostile as Castillo described, she said she believes it is the nature of her piece to "provoke inquiry."

"I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity," Shvarts said. "I think that I'm creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be."

The display of Schvarts' project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts' self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.

School of Art lecturer Pia Lindman, Schvarts' senior-project advisor, could not be reached for comment Wednesday night.

Few people outside of Yale's undergraduate art department have heard about Shvarts' exhibition. Members of two campus abortion-activist groups . Choose Life at Yale, a pro-life group, and the Reproductive Rights Action League of Yale, a pro-choice group . said they were not previously aware of Schvarts' project.

Alice Buttrick '10, an officer of RALY, said the group was in no way involved with the art exhibition and had no official opinion on the matter.

Sara Rahman '09 said, in her opinion, Shvarts is abusing her constitutional right to do what she chooses with her body.

"[Shvarts' exhibit] turns what is a serious decision for women into an absurdism," Rahman said. "It discounts the gravity of the situation that is abortion."

CLAY member Jonathan Serrato '09 said he does not think CLAY has an official response to Schvarts' exhibition. But personally, Serrato said he found the concept of the senior art project "surprising" and unethical.

"I feel that she's manipulating life for the benefit of her art, and I definitely don't support it," Serrato said. "I think it's morally wrong."

Shvarts emphasized that she is not ashamed of her exhibition, and she has become increasingly comfortable discussing her miscarriage experiences with her peers.

"It was a private and personal endeavor, but also a transparent one for the most part," Shvarts said. "This isn't something I've been hiding."

The official reception for the Undergraduate Senior Art Show will be from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on April 25. The exhibition will be on public display from April 22 to May 1. The art exhibition is set to premiere alongside the projects of other art seniors this Tuesday, April 22 at the gallery of Holcombe T. Green Jr. Hall on Chapel Street.

I am so upset that I am shaking right now.

ora pro nobis peccatoris

presidents.office@yale.edu

UPDATE! I was not making it up. It turns out, Shvarts was. It's a hoax, but somehow this doesn't make it any better.

The more that the "Performance Art" genre of art-students and their camcorders develops, the more I hate it. Is it wrong to hate a medium? Who cares?

I hate to lessen the amount of writing for a while, but I'm going to be away from my desk for big blocks of time and won't have a lot of time at the keyboard.

This is particularly ill timed. With the pope on US soil, this should be high-time for Catholic bloggers. Additionally, a young blog needs a LOT of content, and stepping away now leaves this site with some sparse content.

Fiddlesticks. Thanks for your patience.

There’s a famous quote, attributed to the late New Yorker columnist Pauline Kael from right after the 1972 presidential election: ”I can’t believe that Nixon won. Nobody I know voted for him!”

This line echoed in my head when I read Lisa Miller’s Newsweek column, Why This Pope Doesn’t Connect (H/T: Off the Record). Please go and read the column. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Finished? Very well.

In the column, Ms. Miller charges that American Catholics are ignorant or disinterested that the pope is coming. Ignorance is easy to understand—after all, the media is the media—Ms. Miller, included. But as for her suggestions that Catholics are disinterested, she offers only anecdotal evidence from three sources. I have no reason to question the integrity of Fr. Gerald Fogery, S.J. who has an obligation to the students of the University of Virginia. Likewise, for Fr. John Dufell, because a parish priest’s obligation is to his parish. I’m not sure why the D.C. lawyer Paul Kane laughed at the idea of seeing the pontiff, but his attendance at church at Georgetown would suggest a couple of ideas. And I haven’t seen any bulletins from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but if Barbara Breshcia has been praying several mornings a week at the noted Cathedral, I have a hard time believing she didn’t know the pope was coming, though admittedly, the Cathedral website mentions it only once, buried in the middle of the “Monthly Events” section of their site. Maybe it’s my point of view from a fish eating, practicing American Catholic, but I have been absolutely fascinated with the pontiff’s trip. I mean, we’re not hosting just some foreign dignitary or religious leader, these United States are welcoming the very Vicar of Christ here. But I think it’s also fair to say that Ms. Miller’s column is part of a bigger problem, that the press just doesn’t ”get” religion. Sure, they understand the broad strokes. Some of them may even be adherents to a religion. But like I, as a sports fan, couldn’t write a column on Major League Soccer that would be passable to any MLS fan (wherever that guy is), most members of the press just don’t see past their nose on religion. They have to reduce the story to some opportunity to show how far out of tune the Vatican is with America, then act like it’s the Church that’s not upholding their end of the deal.

Today’s Chicago Tribune also leads off its papal coverage with mentioning the sex-abuse scandal that rocked the Church in America. I hate this story. I hate it because the scandal was real and was just awful. I hate it because I’ve personally known 2 priests in my own Archdiocese to be wrapped up in the scandal—one of whom I knew well and to whom I looked up to a lot. I hate it because I know it wasn’t just priests in America—Canada had its own problems before they reared their ugly head in the USA. I hate it because I hear the jokes people tell, thinking they’re funny; I hate it because real people got really hurt; I hate it because the scandal has given people concrete reason to walk away from Christ’s Church and never turn back. But I also hate it because it’s the first story that non-Catholics can come up with when they think of Catholicism. A little over a week ago, I wrote some words that my mom told me when I went to college: “If you stop learning about your faith when your 18 years old, you’ll always have an 18 year old’s understanding of your faith.” It applies here, too. If the last time that journalists handled the Catholic Church, it was about Bernard Cardinal Law and his grievous mishandling of the Boston Archdiocese, then that’s the thing they have to mention in their article. Hopefully, for the next few years, the press can offer a story about Catholicism that mentions the Pope’s apostolic mission to the United States, since this is the most recent story they’ll have in their file.

These are heady days to be a Catholic in America. Some churches are being closed and locked for lack of parishioners, others cannot fit enough services into a Sunday morning to handle the crowds, everyone is feeling the impending crisis of a priest shortage, because a whole generation walked out of the Seminaries at once after the Second Vatican Council—and not many are stepping up to fill that void. The pope will land on shores of people who have let go of their faith, who never learned about their Faith, who never taught their children, whose children won’t have anyone left to teach them. The Pope will find dioceses who financially bankrupt, universities who are theologically bankrupt and a citizenry who are morally bankrupt. BUT! He’ll find a church who is rediscovering Tradition in a world that once cast it aside, he’ll find a church that has wandered for a long time, he’ll find a church that is hungry for leadership. A church that wants something to hope for, for a change. A church that has cried a lot of tears lately. A church that wants, more than anything, to be alive again.

This is the stuff that you don’t find in Newsweek.

Hope isn't printed on the pages of Newsweek.

It’s in a different kind of book.

Hope.

My neighborhood parish is sponsoring a house or two for Rebuilding Together, an organization that works to address health and safety issues in the houses of low-income homeowners. The parish group has been together for several years now. They used to operate under the organization of Christmas in October with the Kansas City branch of Rebuilding Together. But over the last few years, they’ve decided that they were large enough and stable enough that with the cooperation of some other large Christmas in October groups, they could start a new chapter of the organization in Shawnee, Kansas and the larger Johnson County area. My folks have been on the Christmas in October team for several years now, and usually help run 2 or 3 houses at the same time.

Usually they do a fundraiser selling sodas and water at the Old Shawnee Days concerts, but Old Shawnee Days has new leadership this year and the word came through the grapevine that the Christmas in October/Rebuilding Together group would lose the longstanding fundraiser and were on their own to find another source of funds. This year, they decided to do a taco dinner on Cinco de Mayo at the parish. Unfortunately, they didn’t reserve the church basement in time to get the weekend before May Fifth, so this year, they’re throwing a Diez de Mayo taco dinner instead.

I have a broad history in the hospitality industry, having worked for a NUMBER of bars, restaurants and hotels in my working days. So they asked my lovely wife and I if we could join the committee and help with planning the dinner. We agreed—the Lord’s work needs time and talent, not just treasure, right?

Well gentle reader, I’ve decided that I don’t do very well in committees. I’m just not very good at it. The problem is that I’m realizing that I’m a headstrong person with definite ideas on how to do stuff; and I don’t tolerate input very well on subjects that I think I’ve got all figured out. No one does, I know. That’s not the point. I guess my point is this: why ask people to be on a committee if you don’t want to listen to their input? If you just need bodies to cut tomatoes and brown the ground beef, then you don’t need a big planning committee. You just need volunteers on the day of the event.

In a way, I think this self-realization came just in time.

The parish bulletin has been running an announcement that the parish will elect three members to the Pastoral Council, the advisory committee to the church for “liturgy, social concerns, social activities, and church properties”. While I could have some good input for all of these topics, lately I’ve been mostly interested in the liturgy of the parish. The biggest problem is that liturgy isn’t the kind of thing that is decided by a committee—at least not in the strictest understanding of Catholic liturgy. Of course, in the real world it is a function of committee. But the Church puts a lot of ink in a lot of books to specifically deal with the liturgy of the Holy Mass. Very little of that ink suggests that Catholicism should be handled by parliamentary procedure.

Which makes me want, all the more, to be on the Pastoral Council—because someone ought to get in there and set ‘em straight, right?

I don’t think I’d get along well on the Pastoral Council. I don’t work well in committees, especially ones where I already have my mind made up. Furthermore, I’d bet that most people make it onto Pastoral Councils because they already have their minds made up. I wonder how much consultation goes on in their advisory role, anyway. And when it comes to things like suggesting a different Music hymnal or digging the cœnopæum tabernacle veil out of storage or gauging interest in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, I’d probably not get a lot of support from the Council—even if I could get elected to the Council in the first place. These aren’t usually things that people are interested in discussing in committees. Truthfully, I don’t think I’m interested in a committee’s opinion on the subject, either.

There’s a lot to be liked about my round spaceship parish. A lot indeed! They have a good, well-balanced congregation, they’re active at doing the works of Christ, and they regularly place among the top of the large parishes in their support to the Archdiocese and her ministries. Please don’t get me wrong. I like it there, I even registered outside of my parish boundaries to join them. But, like so many things and people we love, I love the parish in spite of the areas where it falls short.

But for the time being, I think I’m going to stay out of the committees. No, I think I’d rather make salsa, swing hammers and print t-shirts for the parish than get on any more committees. Volunteer, yes; committees, no. Sometimes I think they’re a particularly cruel form of penance. And I’ve had enough.

Have Mercy!

I was walking through the halls of a campus building at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, when a flyer caught my eye.

How interesting.

This flyer carries the "Anonymous" tag on the bottom, the group that protests scientology wearing masks.

I see that the sign was received and approved by the college to post on campus, otherwise it would have been taken down-- JCCC regularly patrols their bulletin boards for rogue handbills. I don't disagree with posting the notice, but I am interested in why the posted it-- it seems like the kind of thing that a public college would refuse to hang up.

Well, have you seen it yet? http://www.WhyAreTheyDead.net

For the fine folks of beautiful Kansas City, the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas has posted a notice that Time Warner Cable will be dedicating their Channel 5 MetNet to His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI. Popeavision will run 17.5 hours a day, and hopefully won't stink. I've always wondered what the seemingly useless MetNet was for, apparently they were holding it for the Pope.

I remember as a kid that EWTN was on the standard cable package, but I didn't watch it. These days, you have to pay extra for the fancy extended channels-- we just don't think it's worth it to us. I kind of doubt that I'd watch much EWTN if it were on my tube today. But it's nice that we Catholic Americans can get some good comprehensive coverage of the Pope's trip to the USA.

Don't be shy! Emails are for winners!

Quick check: It’s April 11, how is your New Year’s Resolution coming? Do you even remember it?

My New Year’s Resolution was to be a better Catholic, which is to say that I was/am going to do a better job at the outward signs of the Faith. And though I didn’t define it very well, I’m happy to say that I’m still holding strong at my resolution. We’ve already discussed daily mass, but there’s more to it than just churchgoing.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve given up meat on Fridays and altogether during Lent. It’s an old practice of the Church that we basically gave up on in the 1960’s, and in a lot of ways, it may be somewhat peculiar. After all, there’s nothing un-Catholic about cattle. But it’s been pretty amazing to me how the little outward things have made a big impact on my inward self. Let me explain: on a random Tuesday, I’ll eat whatever I’m feeling like. If we’re out to dinner and a cheeseburger sounds good, I’ll order a cheeseburger. If we’re making dinner at home and we’re in the mood for taco night, we’ll have taco night, ole! But on Fridays, things are different. Our Good Lord died on a Friday, and Catholics are called to make His sacrifice part of our sacrifice.

Don’t get me wrong. Crab legs =/= Crucifixion.

But it does become a spiritual act to eat dinner. There’s a conscience decision to do what I do for a reason other than wanton cheeseburgery. I hope I’m explaining myself correctly here.

A few years ago, I was working a part-time night job slinging pizzas at a restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas. As part of my training, I worked with this guy who went over all the items on the menu, then we ate some of the items that we just went over—it was one of his perks of training that he got dinner out of the deal. He said that we were going to talk about one of their pizzas, but we weren’t going to order it, because it was made with 2 different kinds of pork sausage and that, as a Jewish guy, he didn’t eat pork. I commented that there weren’t a lot of people that kept Kosher laws anymore, and that most of the Jewish people I knew in college were bacon-cheeseburger eaters. Then he explained: now we think that a lot of the Kosher laws came from pretty practical roots: before modern sanitation or refrigeration, a lot of now-common foods were kind of rare. And handling them could get kind of dangerous, because of the way that animals were slaughtered and their meat preserved made people pretty susceptible to foodborne diseases that could kill; even today, pork and shellfish can get contaminated or compromised pretty easily. But if Kosher laws started as a way to prevent trichinosis, today, they do a way different task. He explained it as part of defining his Jewish identity, that he was asked to forgo ham as a way of setting himself apart from the rest of the world. It wasn’t about pork; it wasn’t about shellfish; it was about making each thing he ate a small act he did for God.

Woah.

I cook most of the meals we have around the house (because I spent so much time in restaurants, I really enjoy cooking; my lovely wife is happy to oblige), so I started slipping in fish-Fridays at the beginning of the year. I don’t know if she noticed it at first, but before Lent started, I said that I was going to go carne-vale (Latin, loosely translated “goodbye, meat!”) for Lent. She blankly looked at me as if to ponder the madness that had crawled inside her husband’s brain, having long ago given up asking why I did half the stuff I do. She reluctantly consented to the idea. I won’t expand on it here, but I’ll say that it was easier and harder to do than I thought, but by the closing notes of Easter Vigil Mass, I was calling to make reservations at the late-night two-patty bacon cheddar Jack Daniels beefathon at Thank Goodness It Is a Friday Restaurant.

I’ve never read Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I admire the essence of the book—that people are so far removed from what they eat that people don’t even consider to think how an egg becomes a McNugget. If someone handed me a cow and told me to make a cheeseburger out of it, I think I’d try to sell the cow and go to Wendy’s. But it’s also what drives the National Catholic Rural Life Conference with their super motto: “Eating is a Moral Act”. Specifically, NCRLC is interested in educating people that the decisions they make at the dinner table affect people all around the globe. I’m inclined to agree, but that’s another topic altogether. What I like best about both Pollan and NCRLC is that they ask people to make recognizable decisions about their supper that go beyond simple urges for buffalo wings.

I do loves me some buffalo wings.

Early in Lent, one of my co-workers was eyeing my baked potato and steamed broccoli in the lunchroom and asked if I’d eaten my sandwich on an earlier break. I replied that it was my lunch and that I’d given up meat until Easter… and got the most slack-jawed look I’ve ever been given. He looked at me as if I just said that I eat moon rocks. Another rolled back in his chair and chortled “Looks like it’s going to be macaroni and cheese for a while!”

Well yes, actually. Who doesn’t like macaroni and cheese?

On Easter ‘morn, I had my share of Easter turkey (and ham!), but by Friday, my lovely wife and I were back to fish-sticks. She’s been very gracious about the whole thing. Good Midwesterner that she is, my wife had never really eaten a fish until just before we met, now it makes up practically 1/7 of her regular diet.

All in all, I have to admit that it’s not really a penance to forgo meat on Fridays. I love fish and I enjoy cooking vegetarian. It’s really not that hard. But what it does do is make dinnertime an offering to the Lord—I do this because of Him. Furthermore, I’ve come to think of it as part of my Catholic identity; being Catholic means more to me than 9:00 AM church services and 10:02 AM doughnuts, so why limit my Catholic identity to a hour on the weekends?

Little things like this don’t mean much by themselves. And as an offering to God, they probably don’t mean much, either. But as a small step on my understanding of Faith, they’ve come to mean a lot to me. Once or twice a week, I wake up early to spend a little time with God. And when we make our weekly dinner plans, I go grocery shopping for Jesus.

I know it may sound silly to you. But I don’t do it for you.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but as a kid, I think a lot of people hoped I’d be a priest one day. I hope I didn’t disappoint anyone, but my calling is to my domestic church at the Walberg Estate with my lovely wife in beautiful Shawnee, Kansas. But I was struggling in Math class in 8th Grade, and my teacher said I could get extra credit if I wrote a report on the priesthood and interviewed a priest about his calling.

My dad suggested a fun young priest at a neighboring parish who was also the Vocations Director to the Archdiocese; I nervously called up the rectory and asked to schedule an appointment. A couple days later, I was greeted by the priest and invited to his office to ask a handful of questions that I had scribbled on a notepad. I don’t remember much of the interview, except that I messed up the tape recorder and didn’t record the interview, but I did have some notes scrawled that I could use for the essay. But more importantly, I passed Math class. Most importantly, I remember a powerful lesson that he gave me about God’s call: it is quiet.

He told me that the calling to the priesthood is subtle. The Holy Spirit fills you slowly. It doesn’t have a specific voice, and it’s easy to overlook or put out of your mind. When the Lord speaks to you, he’ll put a small inkling into your mind—just a passing thought to consider becoming a priest. And you can “change the subject”, and get back to Super Mario Bros. or to the baseball game, and that thought goes away. Except it does not go away… You’ll be tooling down the road one day and cross the railroad tracks when you have a fleeting notion to be a priest. And you can ignore that thought and do something else instead; but it’ll crop up again later. Sometimes much later-- like years later, it’ll sit in your craw and pop up when you’re not expecting it. That is God’s voice, that’s what it sounds like. And I’ve found over the years, He doesn’t just talk to us about priesthood. He calls us back to his Church, he calls us into the confessional, he calls us to our vocations—even if it’s not a vocation of the cloth.

I’ve got a friend who I believe is waiting for his “Saint Paul” moment. Saul was a pretty bad dude, a Pharisee who earned his fame in the days after Jesus’ resurrection by persecuting, arresting and executing Christians in the earliest days of the Church. Remember, it was dangerous to be a Christian in the early days of Christianity. And Saul was one of the reasons it was so dangerous. He famously joined the mob who stoned St Stephen the Martyr in the 6th chapter of Acts of the Apostles. And one day, when Saul was taking a band of vigilantes to break up and arrest a Christian gathering, he was struck by lightning, thrown from his horse, and laid on the ground while hearing the voice of Jesus calling him to be one of the greatest apostle in the history of Christ’s Church.

Most of us don’t hear directly from God quite like that.

Is that what my friend is waiting for? I don’t know. I don’t know how to tell him about the Call, either. I don’t think he reads this young blog, and don’t think I’d ask him too, either. Personal ramblings aren’t exactly the forum fit for evangelization. And I can’t hear his call for him. But I pray for him constantly, that one day he’ll know the power and peace of the Lord. I think he’d actually like St. Paul a lot, the apostle could teach him quite a bit; here’s hoping one day he’ll listen to that little whisper in his ear.

I keep hearing that there are more and more people my age finding the church. I'm still pretty fresh in this journey myself, but anecdotally, I'd say they're onto something.

Reuters:

One reason for this search is that many young Catholics were not brought up with a strong sense of religious identity, in contrast to parents and grandparents who were altar boys or procession flower girls, ate no meat on Fridays and thought it was a sin to enter a synagogue or a Protestant church.

"You get a lot of searching. One challenge is that parish life is not as central as it was 30 or 40 years ago," he said.

I won't make a practice of cross-posting things I see on other blogs, but I liked this a lot and wanted to share. Hat Tip:American Papist

I'm looking for a copy of the Index of Leading Catholic Indicators by Kenneth C. Jones. It is currently out of print.

Does anyone have a copy I could borrow or buy?

Man, I can’t get over how many altar boys they use in the Tridentine Latin Mass. At the High Mass, there’s roles for 4 or more altar boys, but it’s not uncommon to have a ton of altar boys. The FSSP congregation of St. Philippine Duchesne has what seems like 3 dozen altar boys marching down their aisles and perching beside the altar.

I was an altar boy from when I was 11 until maybe 13, and generally wasn’t very good at it. I’d chalk it up to training. The dozen or so boys in my class in Catholic School who signed up to be altar boys were trained in a 2 hour session by the school custodian who was in seminary when he was a younger man. Otherwise, we learned it “on the job”. There wasn’t much to do, so I don’t think the custodian was going to spend much time prepping us for Mass when he had floors to sweep instead.

We’d typically have 2 altar boys, one who was in charge of holding the book and ringing the bells, the other would help walk up the cruets and hold the water/basin and towel for when the priest washes his hands. Most of the time, the altar boys would prefer to take the non-bell side because you didn’t have to be as responsible for as much—not that there was much to do anyway. Later, they’d add two more servers, but the extra two didn’t do anything other than walk up and down the aisle with the priest at the beginning and end of Mass.

I never really got the hang of where to stand and how to hold the sacramentary book for the priest. Monsignor Curtin would try to push me into place and push my hands up to hold the book higher, but I would forget and do it wrong the next time. The bell-ringing server manned a small set of altar bells during a couple points during the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The bells sat by the kneeler pad on the side of the altar steps over by the credence table. Sometimes I’d miss my cue for when to ring them—but most of the other altar boys had the same problem. Again, spotty training.

Besides the wine and water cruets, we also had to walk the bowls of unconsecrated hosts from the credence table up to the priest at the altar table. The bowls back then were short, squatty ciborium footed bowls rather than tall chalice-looking ciboria, though I haven’t seen those at St. Joseph’s for years now. At the Sunday Masses, there’d be a heavy gold pitcher full of tart communion wine too—but I haven’t seen that in years, either. That’s the thing about the Novus Ordo—if you don’t like the way the priest offers the mass, just wait a few months and something will change.

One day when I was bringing the ciboria from the credence table over to the altar, I kicked the bells halfway across the sanctuary. Monsignor swung his head over in horror while I hurriedly put the ciborium bowls on the corner of the altar table, then scrambled to fetch the bells back to their position by the kneeler pad. Monsignor would later tell me that he thought I dropped the ciborium full of (unconsecrated) hosts and that it’d take a while to clean up the hosts and refill the bowl with new ones. That would have been way worse.

The year after the next, the Knights of Columbus took over altar-boy training; and all of us current servers were asked to re-train. Because re-training was held during school hours, we all jumped at the opportunity to get out of English period and brush up on serving; only the old retired Knights were holding training, since all the non-retired Knights were at their jobs, and some of the old guys were a little mixed up in how we were supposed to do the job. I don’t think they’d thought much about how to train us. There were a bunch of new parts, like bowing or genuflecting when we criss-crossed the sanctuary, but there was some confusion as to whether we should bow or genuflect and if we should face towards the tabernacle against the wall or the massive crufix suspended way above it, or if we should bow or genuflect towards the altar table out in the middle of the sanctuary, if we had to kneel during all of communion or if we had to stand in our stations during all of communion—it was all pretty confusing for them and us. I figured it was just old guys being old and mixed up, little did I know it was symptomatic of the whole Church trying to re-invent the Mass and retain the Mass at the same time.

Sometime thereafter, I asked to be taken of the server schedule. I was pretty confused as to what to do, and didn’t really feel like it was all that important. I was just about the last of my classmates to be still serving anyway, and figured it was something better suited to a new crop of 5th graders anyhow.

We all wore the black & white cassocks and surplices then, but they were pretty really pretty worn out and ratty. All of the white surplices had little burn holes in them from leaning across the candles and a lot of the black cassocks were frayed at the sleeves and hems. Shortly after I gave up being an altar server, they mercifully and sadly replaced all the worn out altar boy wear with boring plain white polyester albs and a white rope cincture more befitting the new co-ed servers. This was an improvement in my 13-year-old mind from the dorky cassocks and surplices, but I thought they looked a little… plain.

All in all, I never understood why men of my parents’ generation were so excited about being an altar boy. It really just wasn’t all that cool. But to hear them talk, it was a really special honor to be a server at Mass. Ho hum. There wasn’t much to it.

So when I first found the Latin Mass as an adult, I was really taken aback by the servers. Why did they need any more than 1.5 servers?! And they all wore the black & white cassocks and surplices that I wore as a child. The B&W’s looked great, really. In a way I wasn’t expecting them to look—they seemed to fit the feelings of the Mass, in a tidy formality that the white polyester robes just didn’t seem to capture. But here were divisions of altar boys marching in procession to bring in the priest to the Holy Mass. And as each of them marched up the sanctuary steps, they smartly genuflected and parted, filing in to flank the altar. And during the mass, they crisscrossed the altar in rigid efficiency and I began to think—aha! This is why the grown men today so fondly remember being altar boys, this was really something to be proud of! I think the youngest boys were around 8 years old, the oldest appeared 15 or 16 years old, and the young boys seemed to be in “training” for the day where they could ring the bells or present the ciboria or position the missal around the altar, or the coolest job of all—handling the cencers to incense the priest, congregation and the other altar boys. Of course they’d be proud! There was choreography involved, responses that were the job of the altar boys to assist in the mass—for most of the prayers, the altar boys were the only ones who could hear what was going on, since the priest was talking to the Lord, not announcing the prayers to the crowd. Clearly these kids weren’t trained by a custodian on his lunch break or by confused septuagenarians with happy-hour plans at the K of C hall's bar next door.

That was a special role, it wasn’t just the lame parts like book-holding or just kind of standing on a side-step. Sure, there were those parts too; nearly a dozen of the altar boys seemed to be particularly cast to just stand there in the sanctuary in their B&W’s at attention. But those boys don’t seem out of place, I wonder if they see their job as important cast members, or if they feel like they’re just there to stand around. From my seat in the pew, I think it’s great. If there was just one or two extra, then it wouldn’t have seemed so neat to me. But in a chorus of a dozen extra servers, it is pretty cool.

Pretty cool? I wouldn’t have ever thought I’d say that about being an altar boy. I think I understand how so many of altar boys would want to become priests one day, since they had been so close and so intimate to the action of a Mass that could sometimes seem so distant. My altar boy time was just the opposite, the Mass had been re-thought to so be so open and public that the altar boys seemed more like conspicuous props on display rather than players in the sacrifice of the Mass.

Hey, I understand why we ended up with an open and public Mass. Conceptually, I even agree with it. But sometimes I wonder just how much we lost when we threw out the bathwater.

Saint John Berchmans, patron of altar servers, Pray for us!

It was a rainy night in beautiful Kansas City last night—it’s still raining right now, actually. Do rainy nights make you sleep better?

My lovely wife and I met her brother and his wife out last night to watch our Jayhawks become NCAA Basketball 2008 National Champions. (fun fact: KU’s St. Lawrence Center celebrated the Traditional Latin Mass last semester for the first time in decades. Then the Jayhawks win the National Championship. Coincidence? Hmm…)

Last night, I didn’t sleep well. I’m sure it was a combination of late-night pizza, cold beer, an exciting game, thunder and lightning—but it was one of those nights were you wake up every 90 minutes or so and think you’ve overslept. I’m sure I’m not the only one that has occasional nights like this.

Sometime in the 2:00 AM hour, I woke up worried that today was a Holy Day of Obligation and that I was going to miss it altogether. I wouldn’t have time to go before work and I have night school on Tuesdays and that I was going to not oblige my obligation again. So I sat up and studied the clock for a moment, thinking that maybe there’d be an early-morning mass I could try and make, and what time would I need to re-set the clock to ensure I’d make it.

Then I figured out it was not a Holy Day and that I could just go back to sleep.

So I’m a dork. A panicked Catholic dork. And other than priests (maybe), I wonder if I’m the only one to wake up in the middle of the night wondering if it was a Holy Day of Obligation. The list of lay people to whom that has happened must be very short.

I wanted to point everyone to a unique Catholic blog in Kansas City, Journal of God's Call. Fr. Rossman is a young priest in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, and he currently got a post up titled ”I have issues…”about some questions posed to him by his parishioners at Prince of Peace in Olathe, Kansas. Two children’s groups and an adult mothers’ group have asked some interesting questions that he will endeavor to answer on his blog.

I’m really interested to see how the answers turn out for some politically, liturgically, morally and rhetorically charged questions.

Over the years, I’ve had a number of blogs and websites. Some of them were reasonably popular, some of them were basically unknown and unheralded.

Though I’ve only had WhollyRoaminCatholic.com up for a few days, I get the modest impression that this site might attract some traffic & interest.

So let’s discuss cross-posting or reproduction of this site: basically, if you want to quote on your blog, go ahead. Frankly, the World Wide Web is basically the Wild Wild West and it’d be hard to enforce a “don’t quote me” policy. And really, who writes a blog and asks for no recognition? I mean, really?

But if you’re going to quote from this site, just attend to these two basic rules:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/

(1) Attribute it correctly
Blog: a link to the permalink would be satisfactory. For example: if you were quoting this site, you would also include a link to <http://whollyroamincatholic.com/2008/04/wherein_we_discuss_attribution.html>.
MLA: Walberg, Joe. “Wherein we discuss attribution.” Wholly Roamin’ Catholic. 7 Apr. 2008. WhollyRoaminCatholic.com. (date accessed). <http://whollyroamincatholic.com/2008/04/wherein_we_discuss_attribution.html>.
APA: Walberg, Joe. Wholly Roamin’ Catholic. (2008, April 7). Wherein we discuss attribution. Retrieved (date retrived), from <http://whollyroamincatholic.com/2008/04/wherein_we_discuss_attribution.html>.
Chicago: Walberg, Joe. Wherein we discuss attribution. [updated 7 April 2008; cited (date accessed)]. Available from <http://whollyroamincatholic.com/2008/04/wherein_we_discuss_attribution.html>.

(2) Don’t change stuff
Please don’t put words into my mouth, er, text. It’s one thing to notate a blog in the style of good Fr. Zuhlsdorf with (emphases and comments), but please don’t change the original text when you share it. I carefully compose most of the posts on this blog and usually go through a fair amount of re-writing to get things to say what I want them to say.

I should also note that I am not a theologian or formally educated in Catholic issues. So, take care with what you post and how you use this site. It’s mostly my impressions of the world, and of questionably academic value. But I’ve learned that when you put something up for the Google to find, people use your work indiscriminately; hopefully I can minimize the damage of misuse and still be a good voice of a lay Catholic’s view from the pew.

Yesterday, I really meant to go to the Old St. Patrick’s mass at Our Lady of Sorrows. This 9:15 service is where I accidentally discovered the Tridentine Latin Mass in 2005—a fun story that I’ll share sometime. But I missed the 9:15 Mass. Oh, you don’t care about excuses, but I was rocking my chalk until the late hours of Saturday night and wasn’t ready for Sunday morning to come so soon.

‘Lo! The sweet problems of fanhood!

But I decided instead to head up the Blessed Sacrament Church, home of the St. Philippine Duchesne Latin Mass community for an Extraordinary Mass.

It is interesting to me the differences in congregations between SPD and OSP’s congregations, in ways I cannot exactly put my finger on, but I admire them both very much.

I’ve read a little rumbling that while the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas is shuttering churches whose congregations are disappearing, the Latin Mass congregation is filling their pews while sharing a building with another congregation—apparently indefinitely; I don’t have a well-formed opinion on the subject, but it’s an interesting point of view. And, indeed! SPD had a full house at the 11:00 service on Sunday. I haven’t been to too many services at SPD, but from what I hear, that’s a pretty regular occurrence.

Sunday was a day where I was having a hard time centering myself for Mass (and no, it wasn’t because I was celebrating raucously on Saturday, thankyouverymuch), but I wasn’t really ready to sit and be still when I got to Mass. Ever have those days? But I marched into the church, blessed myself with some Holy Water and took a seat on the end of the pew by myself.

I don’t own a 1962 Missal and usually grab one of the red little Ecclesia Dei missals before I take a kneeler, but I just wasn’t really putting my frazzled self together yesterday and sat down without one. It didn’t really occur to me that I didn’t have a missal until they rang the bell to announce the start of Mass. By that time, I turned around to look over the marching divisions of altar boys to see if I could spot a table or perch for the red books—but no. I was in this one on my own.

Gentle Reader, I don’t speak Latin. Nor do I know the TLM well enough to totally follow along just by sitting in the pew. I figured I’d be lost and miserable for the next hour and a half; I decided to just do the Catholic Calisthenics (sit stand sit stand kneel stand kneel stand sit stand kneel) whenever everyone else did it, and to chirp in the 2-2-0 whenever I heard people start their Et Cum Spiri’s.

I don’t think I’ve ever tried this before, no matter what form of the Mass. I usually like to follow along in the missal in the Ordinary Form of the Mass, reading the scriptures along with the lector. And I enjoy grabbing my hymnal and singing along with whatever blithe Marty Haugen song we’re moaning through in the Novus Ordo. At the Extraordinary Form, I flip along in the red book to try and figure out where we are in the mass. That is kind of hard. Remember? I don’t speak Latin. So even though I’m trying to follow along, I have a hard time reading slow enough while the choir is singing the 27 notes in the word “Deo” and not thinking that I’m either way behind or way ahead in the book. This tendency has lessened the more I go to the Latin Masses, but I still have a tendency to look at the picture of the priest and count along with the bell ringings to see where we are.

But yesterday, I settled in with the idea that I’d just be lost.

You know what? It wasn’t half bad.

There was a strange sense of calm that came over me, somewhere before the Introit (I think), that I really didn’t need to know where we were in the Mass. I got the quiet confidence that the Priest was offering the Mass, and I could assist him by submitting myself as one of the obedient faithful. How liberating! I was there to glorify the Lord while the Priest could perform the sacrifice. He didn’t need me to croon out any dippy sing-alongs!

In front of me was a middle aged couple who were attending with a guy about my age. It appeared to be this guy’s first Latin Mass, because he kept getting lost in the red book while his accompaniers were pointing out where he was in the book. Every now and then, the man would lean over and give some expository bit of information on what was going on. “That guy’s got it lucky”, I thought. My introduction to Tradition was (read: is) a bit more… stumbling. On the other hand, I think that yesterday was pretty lucky for me, too. The stumbling got a little easier when I could just surrender myself to the Mass.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I’ll likely go to the Holy Mass unprepared to participate again. I’m still planning on getting a 1962 Missal, and still plan to use the red booklet until I get one, but if I’m lost again, I know that the Good Shepherd can still find me. That’s what he does, you know. And I am proud to be in his flock, no matter where I become lost.

From the Creative Minority Report:

If the Holy Spirit desires the eventual restoration of the traditional liturgy, He does not need a 'schismatic act' to achieve that end. Submission in humility is much more likely to achieve the desired end ever more promptly than any act of disobedience. It is for these reasons that I do not accept as axiomatic the concept that "without the SSPX (as it is now) and those consecrations, we would have no TLM."

It's an interesting read, where he asks if the end justifies the means and if the Tridentine Latin Mass was actually hindered because it was inexorably linked to the Society of Saint Pius X. My opinions on the subject are quite mixed, and I feel blessed to live in a community with FSSP and ICRSS communities (as well as SSPX, which I do not attend). I also admire how brave the founders of the FSSP were to walk away from the SSPX and back into Rome when it would have been so ecclesiologically dangerous.

(Is “ecclesiologically” a word? My spell-checker rejects it.)

So I think it's time that we become better acquainted, don't you?

My name is Joe, though over the years I've used a few different monikers--both online and in real life. Some people have known me as Joe, George, gjoe, or GJ--but despite the multiple identities, I'm the same on the inside.

I was born, raised and currently live in beautiful Shawnee, Kansas with my lovely wife and our 9-pound dachshund, Frank Furter. My lovely wife and I both graduated from the University of Kansas. Together, we own a custom-printed t-shirt company, Kansas Tees.

We are parishioners at St. Joseph's Church in Shawnee, though I also attend Old St. Patrick's Latin Mass community at Our Lady of Sorrows.

I went to Catholic School from the time I was in 4-year-old preschool until I graduated High School. I was well schooled in how to be a good person, but not a lot of education in how to be a good Catholic. I hated 5th and 6th grade religion class--it was boring and kind of hard, we read all of the major stories of the bible from Creation through Solomon, learned all the parts and equipment for the mass, and were generally bored to death. Looking back, this was the most "Catholicy" part of my Catholic education, and pretty much the last time I ever had any type of formal catechesis.

Like everyone else my age, we had D.A.R.E. officers in the schools, sex-ed in the curriculum, and watched Star Wars as an illustration of how Luke Skywalker was like Jesus who came to save us all.

You know, the typical stuff.

By the time I was a senior in High School, I was confused about God, under-nourished in religion, and smart enough to talk myself out of the whole religion thing altogether. I wouldn't call myself an atheist, at least not in absolute terms. I wouldn't call myself an agnostic, either--agnostics continue their search for knowledge. No, I was just disinterested.

My mother asked, like parents should do, if I was going to church while I was in college. I told the truth: I was not. I think it really let her down. They'd spent a lot of time and money on educating my soul, and I wasn't holding up my end of the deal. Mom told me something that really stuck in my craw and kind of made me mad at the time. She said "If you stop learning about your faith when your 18 years old, you'll always have an 18 year old's understanding of your faith."

I didn't like being told that. But inertia is hard to overcome, and I was an object at rest.

Over the next few years, I'd call myself a Catholic, but wasn't doing anything about it. I could do the prayers, know when to stand, sit and