Let’s Get the Calendar

Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar was on social media March 19, proclaiming it as “Medicaid Day of Action.” I expected that shortly thereafter, 46 other blue Senators would repeat the same talking points. Can I ask some mole to please get us the calendar of Democratic secular holydays of obligation? Because they’re more numerous than the novenas, tridua, feasts, solemnities, and octaves at the height of the medieval Catholic liturgical calendar. (Just look at the 50-some solemnities, feasts, and memorials on the “LGBTQ” calendar: here.) I need to know when I should be observing “Medicare Awareness Day,” “Food Stamp Support Day,” “Foreign Trans Gangsters Day of Solidarity,” “International Anti-Necrophiliaphobia Day,” and other essential sacred times and seasons. In case you don’t know, March 20 is “National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.”

On the Subject of Calendars…

The Jesuit magazine America argues for instituting a feast of “St. Joseph the Migrant” (see here). No. St. Joseph was a multidimensional person whose identity should not be conflated to one dimension, especially when others (father, terror of demons) are arguably more important and remain perennially relevant. But it’s time also to push back on those who would turn the liturgical calendar into a vehicle for their ideological fetishes, with a dash of holy water. This is already apparent when it comes to December 28 — Holy Innocents — where the murdered children are sidelined to turn the feast into the next “asylum-seekers and refugees” commemoration (see here for more on this). P.S.: Best summary of St. Joseph’s life I saw on social media: “Want to imitate St. Joseph? Then just be quiet and do what you’re told!”

Preference of Orders

What surprised me most this week was the response to a simple X comment I made regarding a picture of Vice President Vance giving a White House tour to Fr. Henry Stephan, O.P. I wrote that I was happy Vance hangs around with Dominicans rather than Jesuits. To my surprise, I got about 100 “likes,” a far greater reaction than anything — especially anything of some substance — about which I usually comment. I was educated by Jesuits, to whom I am very grateful, but when it comes to sensus fidei (or especially the spiritual life) I turn to the Order of Preachers. I’m glad to see that sentiment towards the Domini canes is shared by so many others. 

Unaccompanied Minors

Target and McDonald’s in Flatbush, Brooklyn, have instituted policies banning teenagers from their establishments unless accompanied by an adult (see here). I know why they are doing this. They are suffering economic losses from theft. They have to deal with fights and unruly behavior. They get robbed. Still, this is bad news. It’s bad news because in a normal society teenagers should be able to go places without parents in tow. Not because I want them to do bad things, but because independence is part of growing up. Kids learn to stand on their own two feet (and move out of their parents’ basement) by doing things on their own. And that’s good.

The immediate cause of this problem is family collapse, primarily feral kids growing up in homes without fathers (which is why the Solemnity of St. Joseph deserves more attention). But it’s also a problem of les extremes se touchent: we need to assess how much “helicopter parenting” has deformed today’s young people. Kids who never got to fall down or fight their own battle without woke parents “dialoging” together don’t know how to act on their own in the world, and so they approach that world with a sense of entitlement taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. America is suffering as a consequence.

You Read It Here First

Last year I did a Narthex essay on the moral question of taxation (here). I did so because I thought we need to balance some Catholic social principles. The Church affirms that society has a right to tax and that the decision about proper tax levels is communal, because it should serve the common good, which no single interested individual can objectively adjudicate. My argument was that, in the growing welfare state with womb (okay, maybe a couple of days after birth)-to-tomb (sooner maybe than you expected) “protection,” the cost of government seems unbridled. If traditional Catholic social ethics recognized that the individual has in-built interests disqualifying him from setting common good tax policy, how do we restrain a Leviathan whose hunger for more affirms the truth of John Marshall’s maxim: “the power to tax includes the power to destroy.”

Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer appeared on the ABC television show “The View” March 18 to berate Americans who want tax cuts. His remarks made clear to me that the issue I raised last year remains valid: We need to rethink where the practical gravamen in tax policy lies. It perhaps needs to shift from “the common good requires you to pay X” to “prove that the common good actually demands you need this much money from me in taxes.”

The “Good Name” Feint Marches On

I also wrote here about how the Vatican’s latest modus operandi to stonewall pervert priest/coverup clergy cases seems to be “protecting the ‘good name’ of the accused.” On March 19, The Pillar reported the latest example of that feint: a Vatican appeals court blocked Libero Milone from pursuing his appeal in his wrongful dismissal suit until the appeal strips out information that could harm the “‘good name’ of curial officials and departments” (see here). Auditor Milone claims he was fired because he uncovered too much financial legerdemain in Vatican finances. He insists that the material the Vatican court deems it had a “public interest” in excluding is essential to making his case that his termination was wrongful. The court branded the “at least immoral and certainly indecent” accusations as inadmissible in the appeal. “Don’t tell us these bad things because we don’t want to hear them (rather than disprove them)!” Isn’t this an interesting tack by which the “anti-clerical” Vatican protects its clerics? Or is having that “hermeneutic of suspicion” about the judges my immoral impugnment of their “good name”?

Heaping Helping of Synodality

Pope Francis, from his hospital bed on oxygen support battling double pneumonia, has approved a detailed three-year plan for more “synodality,” to culminate in an “Ecclesial Assembly” (which is not a “Synod”) in Rome in 2028. I find that interesting: I am 23 years younger than the Pope, with both lungs, and – as NOR readers can see —  rather prolific a writer. That said, I had a simple upper respiratory infection in early March that laid me in bed for a week, where I did not even want to touch my laptop, much less articulate complex, nuanced decisions. I see this announcement as an attempt (along with College of Cardinal stuffing) to bind Francis’s successor’s hands: in the various “consultations” leading up to the next conclave, the question of what to do with the “Ecclesial Assembly” will be used to sift papabile, with the hope of a Francis II.

Phil Butler articulated part of the problem when he asked simply, how would you pitch this announcement to a jaded secular newspaper editor? Headline: “Pope Calls for Bishops to Meet to Talk about What They Should Talk About.” We won’t even get into bait-and-switch “synodality” that dilutes the episcopal role in the synod.

Meantime, the German bishops’ President Georg Bätzing put out his Lenten Letter, the primary message of which is mehr Synodalität! (See here.) Interestingly, he cites a survey that says only 32% of German Catholics agree that “Jesus Christ is God’s definitive revelation of Himself.” That doesn’t seem to shock him. If I was bishop in a local church where two-thirds of Catholics can’t cough up saying Jesus is God’s definitive Self-Revelation, the unadulterated focus of my pastoral letter would not be “synodality” but basic faith. German Catholics appear to need Catechism 101, not another talkfest.

Cardinal Grech tells us laggard dioceses need to get on-board with this next synodal round as an expression of the “ordinary magisterium.” I wish I had seen such solicitude for the “ordinary magisterium” – especially on settled questions like the immorality of contraception, abortion, homosexual activity, etc. – during the pontificates of Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. No, we are to keep talking about talking. “You’re all invited back in three years to this locality, to have a heapin’ helpin’ of synodality/ Roman that is, set a spell (at a round table), take your shoes off. Y’all come back now, hear?”