Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

St. Patrick's day, albeit one marred by a headcold due to lack of sleep. I had one (very) Irish grandmother, and St. Patrick's Day was always a big deal at our house, though less so since my grandmother Sade Prendergast Duntemann left us in 1965, and my Aunt Kathleen (Sade's daughter) in 1999. If I don't get too wobbly today, I'll be going over to Gretchen's this evening for a corned beef feast. I'm not quite Irish enough to be wild about boiled cabbage, but corned beef, bring it on! (We'll be having Diet Green River on the side--sodas don't get no greener than that!)

I wish I still had a cartoon I cut out of a magazine many years ago, of a mitered bishop behind the wheel of a convertible, with the back seat full of goofy-looking snakes, and the caption, "St. Patrick Drives the Snakes Out of Ireland."

And I sometimes look out at the pantheon of ethnic saints and wish there were one for thoroughgoing mongrels like myself. I had an Irish grandparent and a German grandparent, and ostensibly two Polish grandparents--but my Polish grandmother is said to have had a French mother (this has not been proven) and they both had Austrian citizenship, though what that may mean ethnically is unclear. So I'm all over the map. Is there a St. Heinz somewhere, with eight great-grandparents of entirely separate ethnicities? How about a St. Heinz' Day feast, in which no two items can be from the same country?

If there's no guy (or gal) like that in the Calendar of Saints, could we please canonize one soonest?

In the meantime, I will close with the first stanza of one of my favorite prayers, "St. Patrick's Breastplate," which captures the faith that filled the man, and the gonzo exuberance that drove him:

I arise today by the power of heaven!

Invoking the Trinity;

Believing in the Threeness,

Confessing the Oneness

Of the Creator of creation!

Amen!

• Quick reminder: If I'm on your blogroll, or if you have a link to Contra on any of your pages, please check to see that the new URL is in place. Thanks!
• Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a fantastic technical animation that "assembles" the Space Station one module at a time, while displaying a timeline on the right indicating when each part was orbited and attached. I knew roughly how the thing went together, but this is almost like Cliff Notes. Takes just a couple of minutes to watch. Don't miss it!
• Again from Pete is a site with more information on steam turbine locomotives. I had heard of the Jawn Henry (That's how the Norfolk & Western spelled it) but had not seen a photo until I followed the link in the article. The main problem with coal-fired turbine electrics appears to have been coal dust in the electric motors. Makes sense, but I would never have thought of it.
• Henry Law weighed in from the UK on the merits of Marmite, the original beer yeast leftovers toast spread, as far superior to those of Vegemite. (See my entry for January 4, 2009.) I may have to let Henry duke it out with Eric the Fruit Bat over this, as I have not tasted either but will try some as soon as I don't have to buy a whole jar. Sam'l Bassett suggests that its flavor is heavy on the umami, which makes me a little nervous. I don't taste MSG at all--flavor enhancer is not a word I'd use for it--but it makes me feel almighty strange, even in very small amounts.
• The Boston Globe, of all things, published a piece stating strongly that cities are really, really really bad places to live from the standpoint of health and clear thinking. I learned that twenty years ago; nice to see that the mainstream media is giving the idea some air. Alas, their answer--more parks--is treating the symptoms, not the disease. The disease is overcrowding, and the answer is to revitalize small towns. But that's just me, and what do I know about quality of life?
• I had long known there are "large" Lego blocks called Duplo, but it wasn't until Katie Beth got a set for this past Christmas that I had ever seen Mega Bloks, a sort of "house-brand" Lego and widely despised as a cheap imitation. However, even though Mega has both a Lego and a Duplo clone, they also have Maxi Bloks, which are larger than Duplo and so large, in fact, that no adult human being is likely to be able to swallow them, much less a two-year-old. This was a good idea. I want Katie to be comfortable with the idea of building things, and Maxi Bloks make it unnecessary to wait any longer.
• The February Sky & Telescope has a very defensive editorial from Robert Naeye, countering a tidal wave of accusations that S&T has gone the way of Scientific American and has been "dumbed down" in terms of scientific content. I don't have a link to the editorial online, but its core point is so silly I groaned. Naeye basically said that "We're not getting dumber--you're getting smarter!" Um...no. You're getting dumber. I had been a subscriber for 25 years or so with just a few gaps. I think I have a sense for where it was when I came to it, versus where it is now.
• I'm editing this with Zoundry Raven, as I have since I stumbled on it a couple of weeks ago. I've used Raven enough now so that I can recommend it without significant hesitation. The Zoundry business model is interesting (albeit difficult to describe) but it's also optional--you don't need to participate to use the software.
• Hey. I didn't get this for Christmas. Neither did you. But boy, the 12-year-old in me ached a little when I saw it...
• I'm amazed that I never knew this, but the Anglican term for the Feast of the Holy Innocents (December 28) is "Childermas." He doesn't use the word, but arguably the best song James Taylor ever wrote is about the Three Kings, Herod, and the Holy Innocents. "Steer clear of royal welcomes / Avoid the big to-do. / A king who would slaughter the innocents / Will not cut a deal for you." Indeed. Avoid all kings. Keep them in chains when you can--even the ones we believe that we elect.

• I've posted a significant update of my Carl & Jerry page, with new material on John T. Frye, including the conclusion I've drawn (with help from 1910, 1920, and 1930 census records provided by Bob Ballantine W8SU) that Bailey Frye was not John Frye's brother. Bob also sent out a scan of W9EGV's QSL card, worked up against a 50s cover (not sure precisely what issue) of Boy's Life. New details from newspaper clippings sent me by Michael Holley flesh out the man a little. He was quite a guy. Do take a look.
• Science is good at puncturing legends, and German researchers digging around in the former backyard of Martin Luther have deflated the legend that Luther was a humble monk (and, by implication, starving) but was instead born to an upper-class family and became a prosperous man who weighed 23 stone, 8 pounds (330 pounds for us Yanks) and ate goose, young piglet, several kinds of fish, and (egad) robins. Nor did he pound his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenburg cathedral in a fury with nails, as legend holds, but instead used drawing pins—what in America we call thumb tacks. Oh, the humanity...
• While researching Marian apparitions for a seminar I'm teaching at our church in November, I ran across the Apparitions of Jesus and Mary Reference Chart. It sounds silly, but trust me: The apparition curve has gone exponential in the last 30 years, and you can't tell the Marys without a program anymore.
• I'm in the Chicago area for a few days, and found on my arrival that the legendary Choo-Choo Restaurant in Des Plaines (just down the street and around the corner from our condo) is in danger of being razed to make room for a new police station. There's a Web site for gathering protest and forwarding it to the City of Des Plaines, which apparently can either raze the Choo-Choo or the defunct Masonic temple across the street. I don't quite understand why that's a hard decision.
• Harry Helms sends word that TV Guide, which Rupert Murdoch bought ten years ago for three billion dollars, has been sold for...a buck. Boy, the magazine business is not what it used to be. (If it were, I'd still be in it.)
• Slashdot reports a bit of useful black humor, in that Codeweavers (makers of the Crossover product line) gave the Bush administration a challenge: Reduce the cost of gasoline in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, and they would give away their products for an entire day. Well, courtesy the recent financial meltdown (which was not caused exclusively or perhaps even primarily by the Bush administration, by the way) gas has gone south of $2.79, and while the Codeweavers site has been Slashdotted into paralysis, there is a facility online whereby the firm will email you an unlock code for something. I've been meaning to try Crossover Linux for some time. Here's my chance, I guess. And gas in Colorado Springs is even cheaper than that. Inc(Boggle);

Sam Paris sent me an image that's been bouncing around the Net for some time now, and I roared. It's funny on the face of it, whether you know anything about religion or not—but if you've struggled like I have with the difficulties of understanding the several competing concepts of God, salvation, and the life to come, it was, well, ineffably hilarious.

I understand that it's not real, and in fact was created with Church Sign Generator. I don't know where it came from so I can't credit it, but read it all the way down. Yee-hah!

Where the topic comes up for discussion, I've heard many people say that the descriptions fed to us in childhood of Hell were vivid and very detailed—but Heaven was always vague, colorless, and ultimately boring. I keep flashing on the classic Gahan Wilson cartoon of some guy with wings and a halo sitting alone on a cloud, thinking to himself: "I sure wish I'd brought a magazine."

Although the Catholic Powers go out of their way to deny it, buried deep in Catholic culture and tradition is a very radical kind of universalism. God did not create the physical universe as a temporary nuisance to be endured and then left with no regrets. The physical universe is in fact a crude, low-res reflection of higher realities that we simply cannot apprehend in this life. One metaphor might be Olaf Stapledon's cosmology from Star Maker, in which the Star Maker crafts a steady succession of increasingly mature creations, each creation "better" in a metaphysical sense than the one before. Another metaphor might be one I heard in college 35 years ago: That our physical creation is a faint echo of a higher world, which in turn is a slightly clearer and louder echo of an even higher world, and so on far beyond our ability to grasp. At each level there will be challenges, struggle, and probably suffering appropriate to our levels of spiritual development. Creation was in fact a far, far bigger Bang than we think.

So do dogs go to heaven? Hardly. They are already there. And when we leave this world and continue our long walk back toward the Creator, they will be right beside us.

It's been a low-energy and off-my-peak couple of days here for reasons I won't bore you (or gross you out) with. Had to take a run up to Denver, but mostly I've been sitting quietly and reading. I finished a book that I don't really recommend unless you're chained to the potty and need to kill time: Basilica by R. A. Scotti is a popular history of the construction of the second St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the one that we all know and love, which supports the largest church dome in the world. The book is competently written, but it's a little thin on details of the construction itself. Ms. Scotti is much more interested in politics and personalities, and in truth I did learn a lot about Bramante, Michaelangelo, Raphael, and Bernini (and more than a few popes) that I didn't know before. But she has no good head for architecture, and does not define any terms. I kept flipping into a wonderful DK book called The Visual Dictionary of Buildings to clarify certain elements of church architecture. Now that book I recommend, especially if you're a writer trying to set a scene in a complicated building and aren't entirely sure what an oculus is. (Or—quick, now!—define a "spandrel".) There are some factual errors in Basilica, one of the worst of which suggests that poured concrete was used in some places in St. Peter's. Not so—poured concrete was an ancient technology that was lost after Imperial Rome came apart and was not recovered until the 19th Century, or pretty close to it. St. Peter's was built almost entirely of mortared masonry and sculpted stone.

If you're interested in the peculiarities of St. Peter's Basilica, a better book is The Bones of St. Peter by John Evangelist Walsh, which speaks of the excavations under the main altar just before WWII. The Basilica was built over a Roman graveyard, and there was a lot of fascinating stuff under the floors. More about the Shroud of Turin than about the Basilica is Holy Faces, Secret Places by Ian Wilson, of which I reread a considerable chunk. However, Wilson speaks of the countless weird little crannies in the Vatican complex, in which a lot of interesting things, and not only relics, may be hiding. Secrets are not good in religion for many reasons, but mostly because secrets are a power thing, and power corrupts spiritual organizations mortally. (See Encountering Mary by Sandra Zimdars-Swartz for a good discussion of this problem.) Wilson is a marvelously engaging writer, and potty reading doesn't get a whole lot better.

I also reread several sections in Peter Ochiogrosso's fascinating 1987 book Once a Catholic, in which a number of famous Catholics and (mostly) former Catholics explain what sorts of marks their Catholic upbringing left on them. The book is not explicitly about the gulf between Tridentine (i.e., Latin) Catholicism and Vatican II Catholicism, but the demographics of the people the author chose to interview almost guarantees it. Like them, I grew up Tridentine, and like them, I know what we lost, and why. (Not all that was lost was good; in fact, a good deal of what we lost was desperately in need of losing.) The book is secular in approach and intent, and does not preach, in either direction. It's a character study, of real characters. (One of them is George Carlin.) Highly recommended, and I think I've spoken of it here before.

All these books but Basilica are currently out of print, but cheap on the used market. Reading them was research for a current project of mine—Old Catholics. (Nothing makes you a better writer than simply reading, and reading a lot.)

Finally, I'll throw out an idea I had yesterday, for an invention I wish someone would get to work on. I want something I might charactize as a Miracle Voice Teacher. I want a program that will put a musical score on the PC screen and listen to me try to sing it. The program should average the frequencies that come in from the mic and put a line above or below a note in the score, telling me whether I'm high or low. It should have a metronome, and the ability to play the score as MIDI. It should be able to record what I sing and play it back for me, showing me on the screen where I botched the melody.

And if that's possible, then the program should be able to teach me how to harmonize, by isolating one of the melodic lines and allowing me to sing it, and then gradually adding in the other lines in the headphones while I try to stick with my own line and not get confused. Scarily, such a thing would allow me to sing four part harmony...with myself. The world may not be quite ready for that, but at this juncture I think I am. I went looking for the product and didn't find it, but if you know of something along those lines, I'd like to hear about it.

After much planning and preparation, our new niece Juliana Leigh Roper officially joined the Catholic community last night, as all of the immediate family we have left gathered around Bill and Gretchen's huge dining room table for the Mass and baptism. Rev. Mary of the Old Catholic Church presided, as she did back in December 2006 for Julie's older sister Katie Beth. Once again, Gretchen hand-made a christening dress for Julie, and Carol gave Julie the little christening shoes that she herself had worn back at her own baptism in 1953. Again as for Katie Beth, Carol and I promised to keep her on the path as best we can. Godparents don't have to be theologians; what they have to be are good examples and good cheering sections. Carol and I had excellent godparents, and the example was not wasted on us. And yes, words are my thing and I am going to attempt a simple catechism for small children, but we're a couple of years off on that yet. (Which doesn't absolve me from starting to take notes right away. Kids grow up fast.) Theology for ten-year-olds can start very simply, and I will begin with what I learned from Juliana's namesake: Lady Julian of Norwich, who taught that God is infinitely loving and forgiving, and that all manner of thing would ultimately be made well in God's own time. Sooner or later, children must also learn that that there is death and suffering and injustice, but those lessons must be learned from a platform of solid belief in the goodness of creation and God's ultimate victory over all evil and suffering.

The goodness of that creation and God's affection for his creatures was the subject of Mary's short homily from the head of the dining room table. Partway through, Julie began to fuss a little, in the time-honored tradition of infants making a ruckus in church. Without missing a beat, Mary scooped little Julie up in her arms and calmed her down as only a mother (and grandmother) can, continuing to preach her sermon with a baby on her shoulder. (This is something you don't generally see in Catholic churches.) Julie soon returned to sleep, and barely stirred when Mary took the seashell and poured the (warm) blessed water over her forehead, baptising her in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Afterward there was time for good talk, good wine (we had a Frey organic zinfandel and a Bartenura moscato) and Bill's superb grilling skills, with fresh Polish sausage and hamburgers, Hawaiian salad, baked beans, and various small sides. QBit and Aero ran around in circles in the back yard while Katie watched, laughing with delight, and even though the evening was muggy and drippy, Carol and I called it a complete and unvarnished success. Come 9:30 we packed up the puppies and headed for the door, but Katie cried and kept reaching for Carol, who had read her One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish several times. Earlier, she had been brushing what's left of my hair with her new hairbrush. She is beginning to learn about godparents and their uses, heh.

After a pretty grim ten years or so on the family front, family is happy and growing again. For many years Gretchen and I thought that our part of the Duntemann line ended with us, but God sometimes answers prayers, and midevening, when our two little prayers sat together in the big chair for pictures, somehow we knew that All Manner of Thing will be well—in fact, as far as we're concerned, we're most of the way there right now.

I elbowed a bit of a wasp's nest yesterday, in briefly recounting the story of Paul Z. "PZ" Myers, the biology professor who put out a call for Catholics to mail him consecrated hosts for public desecration. There's backstory that fairness requires me to relate: Webster Cook, a student at the University of Florida, went to Mass at a Catholic Ministries liturgy held on campus, took Communion, and went back to his pew without consuming the host. Why he did this is unclear—I had a great deal of trouble sifting facts from hearsay in this case, which exists mostly in the blogosphere—but he took the host out of the building even though some of the people from Campus Ministries noisily demanded that he either swallow it or give it back. He refused, and the host went home with him in his pocket. Thus began...Crackergate.

I may catch some flack here from my Catholic readers for saying this: The church should have left it at that. But no, the well-known William Donohue, head of the Catholic League, got into the act, and suddenly it's a category 5 barroom brawl. Donohue has made a career of jumping on anybody and everybody who says something that puts Catholicism in a bad light. How effective he's been is open to debate. He was certainly instrumental in getting ABC's warm-hearted but liberal-slanted Catholic sitcom Nothing Sacred canceled back in 1997; beyond that it's hard to tell. He's gone after solid milk-chocolate statues of Jesus and tried to organize a boycott of the film version of The Golden Compass. I'd suggest that there are other, better places where that sort of energy might be spent, but let it pass. Most moderate Catholics would love to find another village that would take him.

Webster Cook returned the undamaged host to the church about a week later, but not before the Catholic lunatic fringe had begun sending him death threats. And then Prof. Myers jumped into the game, eager to play the dozens and keep the pot at a full boil. Here are his exact words, posted on his blog:

I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There's no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I'm sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won't be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I'll send you my home address.

Here's the full post on Pharyngula.

Ok. Does any of this sound to you like a pack of seventh graders mixing it up on the playground? It sure does to me. The detailed facts seem to change depending on whom you read, but Cook is claiming that he was "restrained" by a woman who turns out to be about half his physical size. He is now filing charges against the Campus Ministries for violating university hazing rules that prohibit forced eating. And Bill Donohue is trying to get PZ Myers fired. So far, as best we can tell, no desecrations have taken place.

My primary comments on all this:

• Genuine death threats are illegal and actionable. If you get one, don't just bitch. Go to the cops. That's what laws are for.
• If your opponents are insulting you, meeting them insult-for-insult is precisely the wrong thing to do if you want the moral high ground, or to simply avoid looking stupid.
• Respect is an inner virtue; less something you show than something you are. Desecration happens in the man (or woman) and not to the host, flag, book, shrine, or image.
• Allowing people to make you angry gives them power over you.

Atheists who are cheering on Myers seem blind to the fact that Myers is making atheism look bad. Which leads me to ask: What is atheism actually for? If its goal is to win people away from religion, making sane arguments in a respectful manner would seem more effective than insults and ridicule. If (as seems to me at times) it's a sort of tribal venting society, then go for it, keeping in mind that few people recognize therapeutic venting for what it is, and you won't get a lot of converts from ordinary folks who are not axe-grinders by temperament. You'll just look churlish.

I'm sure I've already given this more attention than it really deserves. I've begun wondering if Webster Cook was challenged over a drink to come up with the college prank to end all college pranks (judged by the ratio of effort required to publicity generated) and he may have succeeded. I've also heard that PZ Myers is considering desecrating a copy of the Qur'an as well. I'll believe that when I see it.

• For a little over a year, I've been buying dry-roasted peanuts from Safeway that do not contain MSG. Recently we noticed that the packaging had changed, and checked the ingredients. MSG returns, gakkh. Dry-roasted peanuts are a much better snack than their rep would have it, but MSG makes me feel weird in the head, so the search for MSG-free dry-roasted peanuts resumes. Interestingly, I had a couple of Planter's dry-roasted peanuts the other day (knowing full-well that they have MSG in them; I had a few, not handfuls) and they do not taste any different. Not better. Not worse. Not a little bit. Not at all. So the companies that print "monosodium glutamate (flavor enhancer)" on their peanut labels are being ripped off. MSG does not enhance flavor. What it does do is mess some people over (like me, and countless others) and cost the vendors money. MSG is cheap, but not free. When will food packagers realize that they could save money and increase their market by just dumping it?
• Pertinent to the above, Jay's Barbecue Potato Chips also lack MSG, and are the only barbeque potato chips I've ever seen that don't have it. They are a Chicago brand, and so far we haven't seen them in Colorado Springs. But when I'm here, I gorge.
• I'm a big fan of lashup railcars, but I startled a little when Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a model of a pink Galloping Goose. The paint schemes are described as "authentic." So was there ever a Rio Grande Goose in pink and white livery? I've not been able to determine that—but whoa, somehow I doubt it. That's a spit-and-baling-wire, real-man's tin-roof rough-and-tumble item that reminds me of Mad Max as much as it does of the Old West. Pink? Sheesh!
• A tenured professor at the University of Minnesota has put out a call for Catholics to send him consecrated Eucharistic hosts...so that he can desecrate them. I had hoped this was an urban legend, but the Washington Times generally knows better. I wonder if he (and his clueless university) understand that this doesn't hurt the Church at all, but makes higher education in general and university professors in particular look mean-spirited and ridiculous. (Quick: Somebody test that guy for toxoplasmosis...)
• From Michael Covington comes a link to a Modern Mechanix item from 1933 that may be the original "watt dog" cooker, which spawned a famous Carl & Jerry story cautioning young tinkerers about the hazards of messing with line current. A board with nails pounded through it, facing up...with 110V on the nails. Wow. (And while you're there, click on the cover image to get a closer look at what was prompting young geeks to buy magazines in 1933. Maybe the Flynn Effect really does exist.)
• On second thought, probably not.
• Thanks to Baron_Waste, I discovered that the United States' net carbon emissions declined by 3% between 2000 and 2006. Of the top 17 carbon emitters, only France reduced emissions more—and I'd wager that that's because France has had the good sense to stuff their antinuclear crackpots in the Bastille and forget about them.
• Nertz. Wrong. France closed the Bastille in 1789. Well, hey: Today is the 158th birthday of the ice maker.

• I've had a difficult week here; new dental problems have arisen, culminating in an unplanned root canal this past Thursday, followed almost immediately by a much-delayed flight from Denver to Chicago for an Easter visit, where they happened to be having a blizzard. (The earliest Easter since 1913 corresponded with a lingering winter across the Midwest.) Tooth troubles continue, so if my posts have been (and continue to be) a little sparse, that's most of the reason.
• Our early Easter this year caused some people to ask how the date of Easter is calculated. Well, it's not pretty. At least next year it happens in April, whew.
• Here's a nice article describing a problem that is by no means recent: The split between people in the Catholic Church who can worship with a light heart, and people who invariably equate reverence with grimness . This has been an issue at least since Pope Pius IX lost the Papal States in the mid-1800s, after which the Papacy became obsessed with its authority and lost any ability to laugh at itself or anything else. (Pope John XXIII bucked the trend, but we didn't have him anywhere near long enough to make a permanent difference.) Roman Catholicism needs a sense of humor far more than it needs a Pope, but this may be one of those things that won't be solved within my own lifetime.
• In keeping with its long history of contempt for the consumer (which, in all fairness, is rife in Japan) Sony attempted to charge purchasers of its laptops $49 not to install a crippling load of crapware on the machines. Apparently they've taken so much flak for it that they recently dropped the fee. What I find boggling is that they willingly cripple their own machines by selling huge numbers of crapware slots, which makes you wonder how much money they make in the crapware business. We may be heading down the same path here for laptops that printers have followed, in which the printer is a thin, shabby thing sold for very little that makes money for its parent company by consuming artificially expensive ink/toner cartridges.
• It seems that I've been hearing a great deal within my own circle of contacts about people who try to help nontechnical folks (often parents) make Vista work with existing peripherals and software. The script goes like this: Nontechnical person brings home a new Vista PC or laptop from Best Buy and tries to install older software or connect it to various external hardware devices. Install fails; system aborts in various weird ways; technical person tries to fix (or simply understand) the failure, to no avail. Moral here: Do not use Vista. Everything that isn't needless window dressing is there for Microsoft's or Big Media's benefit, not yours. (Reread the venerable Vista Failure Log if you haven't read it for awhile.) You can still order PCs from vendors like Dell with XP preinstalled. Do it while you still can. And failing that, start researching Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
• Speaking of failure, WiMax (which we have seemingly been waiting for since the last ice sheets retreated) may be a failure because it's lousy technology. The wireless DOCSIS technology mentioned in the linked article as a solution has been around for some years and doesn't have a much better reputation. We may in fact be asking too much of low-power microwave broadband systems—fixed point-to-point broadband is totally at the mercy of topography and even vegetation—and I keep coming back to the conviction that some sort of "roof-hopper" mesh network may be the best path to follow. People are doing this in some areas; why it isn't seen as a more general solution puzzles me.

Even diehard comics fans have generally never heard of Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact—unless, of course, they went to Catholic grade school between 1946 and 1972. It was a comic book produced in Ohio for national distribution to parochial schools, and maps well to the era of Postwar Triumphal Catholicism. I was a grade schooler between 1958 and 1966, so Treasure Chest was always kicking around somewhere, along with Our Little Messenger, Young Catholic Messenger, and numerous other things that the George A. Pflaum Company of Dayton was always pumping out. I read Treasure Chest when it was handy, though I did so absent-mindedly and was never a big fan. The comic ran the gamut from preachy (always) to silly (often) and the quality was very uneven. The larger and long-running series were often beautifully done from a writing and art standpoint, though much of it glorified sports, which was a Catholic fetish at that time, in the hopes that young boys exhausted by sports will not go off by themselves somewhere and, well, you know.

I was chasing memories around the Web the other night when I discovered the Treasure Chest archive at the Washington Research Library Consortium. This is a wonderful thing, but for copyright reasons it only has the magazines from 1946 through the end of 1963, which is unfortunate for reasons I'll relate shortly. I remembered only three of the continuing series; the rest of it had fled my brain cells until I started skimming the archive. There were textual letters from some priest (probably advising young boys not to go off by themselves somewhere and, well, you know), illustrated lives of the Saints, and insufferable lectures by Patsy Manners on etiquette and how to throw good parties. (Mixed parties! No, don't read that! We don't do such things in Chicago!) It was a real and sometimes classic comic; if you read nothing else, check out Kidnaped by a Spaceship from 1959. If they ran more like that I might have been an enthusiastic fan, but no; most of what we got was like Chuck White and His Friends, which was about an older guy who took young boys off on wholesome adventures, I'm sure so that they would not go off by themselves somewhere and, well, you know. Funny animals were big, and for a bit of prescient comic surrealism (I flashed on Cerebus) skim The Bear and the Wicked Wainwright. (At one point the Wainwright calls the Bear a "base poltroon," which became faddish on the playground for a few weeks, though I may have been the only one of us sixth graders who bothered to look up "poltroon.")

If Treasure Chest is currently famous for one thing, it was for the 1961-62 series This Godless Communism, which still gets the lefties het up. I rolled my eyes a little then and still do; the problem with Communism is not its godlessness but the fact that it murdered a hundred million people in the 20th century alone. Treasure Chest understood its working-class Catholic audience and was completely comfortable with praising organized labor in one of its illustrated civics lessons. No contradictions here; being a liberal has not always meant being a Marxist.

And Treasure Chest was fundamentally liberal, as the term was understood in its time. If it has been famous primarily for This Godless Communism, it may soon become even more famous for something else: a 1964 series called 1976: Pettigrew for President! inked by the well-known comics artist Joe Sinnott. Again, it was a multipart civics lesson: A very slightly futuristic tale of how a candidate runs for President during the election of 1976—12 years in our future—with a little political huggermugger thrown in to keep it from being completely boring. (There were a few scenes with the SST, but in truth not a lot of other futuremongering. I was disappointed. What? 1976? No flying cars?) What none of us noticed at the time is that we never actually saw Mr. Pettigrew full-on. We saw his back, his hands, and so on, but never got a good look at him. I guess we all figured that it was about the process and not the man himself, and in truth we were all taken in and completely poleaxed when on the final page it was revealed that Timothy Pettigrew was Black! He got the nomination, but beyond that the story was open-ended. Here's what the final panel said, courtesy NPR:

"And so this man Pettigrew became the first Negro candidate for the President of the United States. He then went out across the land, this black man, to campaign for the highest office. Would he win? Well, the year was 1976. It was the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Could he win? Well, it would depend in part on how the boys and girls reading this comic grew up and voted ... it would depend on whether they believed and, indeed, lived those words in the declaration -- All Men are Created Equal."

Alas, I have yet to see the comic scanned and posted anywhere, since content published in 1964 and after is automatically still in copyright. (The earlier issues had not been renewed and thus passed into the public domain.) The best we can do is a YouTube video, of all things.

It's a measure of our progress that what was seen as an inspiring piece of comic book science fiction in 1964 smacks of tokenism today: So we should vote for him just because he's black? Or dare we ask whether he has a chance of running the country? (The country may end up doing a lot of growing up next year, heh.) And if you ever wanted to invest in comic books, now's the time to hunt down and grab Treasure Chest Volume 19, issues 11-20. They're going to be worth something soon, no matter which way things go this fall.

Groundhog Day. Snowing like hell here, and not only didn't our groundhog see his shadow, he couldn't even get out of his burrow. Nor did we get out of ours: Carol and I slept in and spent part of the afternoon watching...Groundhog Day.

I was going to write a longish essay on what may be the finest film of the past fifty years, but I realized that someone else had already written it. Basically, What He Said.

To be human is to learn better, no matter how much it hurts. Some catch on faster than others, and while it's clear that a lot of people die before they learn much of anything at all, I'm not going to be so arrogant as to claim confident knowledge that death is the end of all learning. Maybe we're only beginning. Of course it's better to learn sooner than later—but if the alternative is to keep banging our shins on things without end, I'm guessing that even the worst of us will eventually figure it out.

That's the message of Groundhog Day: You repeat Sixth Grade until you learn the lessons. Then it's on to Seventh Grade. (I'm good with that. You can have Eternal Rest. Give me Eternal Challenge!)

Christmas Day. Somewhere between those who cannot abide religion and those who cannot live without it is a group that doesn't get much press: Those who sense transcendence and are drawn to it, but who cannot frame a rational response to the impulse. "I'd love to have faith in God but I don't know how to do it!" is how one person put the problem to me. Others have freely admitted that they don't know what faith is or how it happens within a person. Is faith inborn? Can faith be learned? What are faith's limits?

I know how they feel. I've struggled with the issue of faith for my entire life, and much of that struggle was and remains pure torment. I don't know for sure if faith can be learned—to be honest, it seems to be something you're born with in some measure, all of us scattered across a bell curve on the faith scale, as we are for so many other things. I think, however, that I can define faith, at least as it works for me: Faith is taking something seriously enough to act appropriately.

Taking something seriously is the core of faith. If you're in the outfield and you believe that you have a chance of catching a pop fly ball, you'll start calculating its trajectory and moving toward it. If you don't take the game seriously—or if you don't take your own ability seriously—you may just let someone else run for it. If you believe that an upcoming exam is going to be tough but unavoidable, you'll cracks the books and do what you can to improve your score. If you don't take the exam seriously, you may just blow it off.

Saying, "I believe in God" doesn't mean much unless it changes the way you act. What changes those might be will vary with your culture and the way you think about God. It's possible to be interested in the divine as a concept, and in religion as a fascinating thread flowing down through human history, but if you don't somehow convert that interest into a system of guidelines for everyday action, it's just an interest without any least hint of faith.

The flipside may be true as well. I find it fascinating that there are a great many people who will state flatly that they don't believe in God at all, but who nonetheless act in accordance with the universal principles espoused by all the major religions: Be honest, be truthful, be faithful to your spouse, do not engage in cruelty; and in general do unto others as you would have them do unto you. They would claim that they have no faith at all, but virtue is a decision, and whether or not we can fully explain how we came to that decision matters much less than simply getting there. Taking virtue seriously enough to be virtuous may not be religion, but it is definitely a sign of faith—and if I were God, I think I'd grin and say, "Mission accomplished."

There's much more to the issue of faith than that, but I'll let it rest for now. Carol and I wish you and your loved ones all the best in this Christmas season. Thanks for reading, thanks for your comments, and above all thanks for your friendship. Friendship is the best clue I've ever found indicating that God is real and at work in the world. Have friends. Take them seriously. All the rest will follow from that!

People regularly ask me, "How can you be a Catholic and be against the Pope?" It's an odd question but an understandable one. I am not against "the Pope," though I am very suspicious of idealists like John Paul II. (Irrespective of his nickname "The Grand Inquistor," I am much more at ease with pragmatist Benedict XVI.) What I am against is the whole concept of a Papacy that has evolved to give all authority within a global, billion-member church to one man, with the clear implication (if not always explicit statement) of infallibility. I am against the concept for a simple reason: It is a single point of failure for the entire Roman Catholic Church.

Read enough history of the Roman Catholic Church from non-Church sources and you'll soon see what I mean. The early Church had a distributed system of government based on overseers ("bishops") in larger cities, who settled disputes by meeting periodically and hashing them out as a group. What we call "the Papacy" was originally nothing more than the office of the bishop supervising the Church in the city of Rome, and was a very different creature until well after the Roman Empire adopted Catholicism as its state religion in 313. Several of the earliest Popes, in fact, may not even exist; contemporary records are so poor that we may never really know, and the lesson we can take from them is that the Bishop of Rome was not considered anything special or different from any other bishop in any other city of that time. Power corrupted the bishops of Rome, who at first were considered (given Rome's status as the center of the Empire) "first among equals" by other bishops but not in any position of authority over them. The downward spiral of the Papacy through corruption and ultimately into chaos continued, hitting a low point around 1410, when there were three different people claiming to be Pope, all of them scoundrels who would probably be doing life terms if they lived today. (One of them was in fact a highwayman/pirate who was said not even to have believed in God.) We no longer elect pirates to the Papacy, but we have not reversed the sad situation that the Church is now an appendage of the Pope, and bad decisions made by one man without consultation can seriously alter the Catholic Faith.

How this happened is a fiendishly complex and interesting (if perhaps depressing) business, and it took a lot of reading to get the whole story from enough different viewpoints to feel like I had something like objective history in hand. Several of the secular histories that I've read are decidedly polemic; as interesting as De Rosa's Vicars of Christ may be, its author is clearly grinding an axe the size of Sardinia. Chamberlin's The Bad Popes is better and much more objective, but is more biography than history, and does not speak in detail of the evolution of the institution of the papacy itself. I didn't find a book that really answered my questions until I bought a copy of The Pope and the Council, published in 1869, just before the opening of the First Vatican Council. Pope Pius IX had made no secret of the fact that he intended to declare Papal Infallibility an article of faith. Two Roman Catholic theologians wrote and pseudonymously published (as "Janus") a long and heavily footnoted argument against Papal Infallibility and the general assumption by the Papal office of absolute authority not only over spiritual matters but also matters of secular government. One of the authors was the very formidable Johann Joseph Ignaz von Dollinger, who went on to lay the theological and eccelsiastical foundations for the European Old Catholic Church, from his excommunication in 1871 until his death in 1890.

I recommend the book to anyone who takes such things seriously, but the book has been out of print since 1873, and when I bought it (2001) copies were very uncommon and extremely expensive. More copies are available online now, but you'll only rarely see one for less than $50, and you'll generally pay $75 and up for something that will leave crumblies in your hands as you read it and not survive a great deal of thumbing. So I did the obvious: I scanned my copy, OCRed the text, laid it out again, and am offering it on Lulu for $21.95.

Note well: This is not an easy read. It was written by scholars for scholars, and was translated from the German on a very tight schedule. You may have to be clergy or a church geek like me to truly appreciate it. However, if you really want to know why I cannot accept Papal Infallibility, this is my answer. Buy it here. Softcover, 330 pages. $21.95.

The film version of The Golden Compass opens tomorrow, and people have been asking me what I think of all the frothing over Phillip Pullman's anti-religion polemic. I read the books a couple of years ago; I also know a little bit about the history of Christianity. So let me respond here:

• Pullman is not specifically dealing with Roman Catholicism in the stories, neither in the story's politics nor in its metaphysics. The metaphysics are those of Gnostic Dualism, which teaches that a very nasty and powerful—but hardly omnipotent—being called the Demiurge created the physical world as a trap for spirits. The Demiurge has helpers called archons that are basically bad angels with names like Metatron. Pullman calls his Demiurge the Authority, but the Authority is not God as most people define Him. ("Killing God"—what Pullman himself tells us the stories are about—is an absurdity.) Gnostic dualism as a system of metaphysics was tossed out of Christianity over a thousand years ago, though bits of it still stick to our boots as Manichaeism.
• Close readers of Pullman's trilogy may remember that in Pullman's alternate universe, the Protestant Reformers conquered the Roman Catholic Church (instead of fighting it to a draw) and installed John Calvin as Pope. Calvin was a tyrannical megalomaniac, called (even during his own life) "the Pope of Geneva." Pullman's Magisterium is a reasonable guess at what sort of church a psychopath like Calvin would create, with the entire resources of the Roman Catholic Church at his disposal. Pullman has thus created a weird sort of fully imaginary Gnostic sacramental Calvinism as his heavy, and there is so little of genuine Catholicism left in it (some non-Catholic sects have nuns and bishops too) that the accusations of anti-Catholic bigotry are pointless.

With that in mind, Pullman's anti-religion themes are misdirected to the point of silliness. Railing against Christian Gnosticism in 2007 is a lot like trying to organize a present-day protest rally against the Eisenhower Administration—there wasn't a lot of material there to begin with, and hey, it's been over for a long time.

Pullman is a superb writer. The first two books were dazzlingly well done as fantastic literature, and if you decide to read them you should stop there: The third book, The Amber Spyglass, was a total botch, and basically ruins everything the first two books so carefully establish. Interestingly, it's The Amber Spyglass where most of the polemic takes place. I wonder if Pullman got "anti-religion" while working on the first two books and didn't fully express it until the third, when he felt he could get away with it. If so, it looks like the sort of self-indulgence trap that a lot of writers fall into once they become successful.

Railing about religion is the least of it. What really troubles me about His Dark Materials is that it is, in fact, so dark: There is a grimness to the whole business and a casual disregard for human life that was repellent enough to temper my early enthusiasm for the concepts and the writing. The trilogy contains absolutely no joy and nothing like triumph, and at the end of the third volume a huge squirming mass of mismatched pain-soaked themes and metaphysical loose ends descends into terminal incoherence. I wouldn't give it to my own children, that's for sure—at least not until I was absolutely sure that they understood that cynicism is cowardice, and that they had the courage to make their own decisions as to whether life is meaningful or not, rather than take some tenured cynic's word for it.

I will probably see the film, even though the trailers seem dark and muddy and singularly unimaginative. If that's the best they can muster in terms of preview, I'm not sure that New Line Cinema will make their $180M back. I'm also not sure that anybody can see the CGI polar bears and not think of Coca Cola's mascots of several years ago.

Maybe we're all getting a little tired of cinema fantasy and anthropomorphic animals. (I certainly am.) We need another run of good starship movies, but as best I know, there are none on the horizon. How about Ringworld? Marooned in Realtime? Startide Rising? Or Varley's flawed but startling Titan/Wizard/Demon? Is there no escape from witches, magic, vampires, and stylish cynicism? (So much for movies. I'm gonna go read a book.)

• There's an ancient and (from all appearances) abandoned German cemetery at the southeast corner of Rand Road and Golf Road in Des Plaines, just northwest of Chicago. I passed it on my walk yesterday, and took ten minutes to walk the rows and look for any familiar names. I didn't see any names from my own family tree, but it was interesting nonetheless. Of the 80-ish graves I saw (and it looks like many have long since been removed) at least half were of people who died in the 19th century, though one man was buried there as late as 1975. Many markers are broken or mostly buried, and there is one foundation for a now-gone mausoleum. A little Googling showed it to belong to Immanuel Lutheran Church, on Lee Street in downtown Des Plaines, but there is no sign on site to that effect, and there is no fence nor much evidence of any care save the occasional mowing of weeds. I did find a page with a summary of readable markers. For you geofreaks, it's located at 42° 3'9.79"N 87°53'40.49"W.
• After an insane amount of time wasted screwing with the drivers, configuration, and application setup, I finally got LightScribe to work on one of my Dell SX270 XP machines. I have yet to get it to work on any Win2K machine, and I've begun to wonder if there's something in LightScribe that (intentionally or not) simply doesn't play well with 2000. However, once I burned a few LightScribe labels, I must say that I don't recommend it, even on XP. The contrast is very poor, and if the text is small enough to express titles for 20 songs, it's virtually unreadable. Don't bother.
• One of my favorite hymn tunes is Gustav Holst's Thaxted (named after the town in England where he grew up) which most people recognize as the great anthem around which Holst built the Jupiter movement of The Planets. Anglophiles may also know the tune as that of the WWI-era patriotic hymn "I Vow to Thee, My Country." The Wikipedia writeup indicates that it has a meter of 13 13 13 13 13 13, which is extremely uncommon and may be unique among Christian hymns. Is that why it still gives me chills after hearing it literally hundreds of times? Why are we moved by some tunes (absent words to carry emotional content) and not others?
• Saw something today (at Trader Joe's) that I'd never seen nor heard of before: The pluot. Quarter plum, three quarters apricot. They look like plums, but were not for sale individually and I didn't want to buy a whole package without knowing a little bit more about what they were. I like both plums and apricots, though; how can I lose?
• George Ewing's review of the first Carl & Jerry books is now on the stands in CQ Magazine, page 35. Although we still don't know much about John T. Frye, a chap who used to live in Logansport, Indiana wrote this afternoon to tell me that John's younger brother Bailey WA9OWH is still alive and still living in Logansport. I'm hoping to contact him in the next few days to see if he can provide any additional details. John T. Frye himself died in 1985.

I'm old enough to remember when the Catholic Mass was in Latin. I'm old enough, in fact, to have been an altar boy and memorized all the Latin responses. The priests in our parish were pretty fierce about the Mass and brooked no mistakes, so when serving at Mass it all went like lightning, as we were always paying absolute attention to what was going on. The consequences of not doing so were unthinkable.

However, most of the time we were out there in the congregation, fidgeting with our peers. (At our school we began every single school day with Mass. Fidgeting was an art form.) The Mass itself was mostly incomprehensible, even if you were an altar boy. The translations in our St. Joseph Daily Missals didn't track the Latin with great precision, and in any event we were not taught Latin systematically.

So there was this 45 minute daily challenge (a full hour on Sundays) of what to do while God was at work up there at the altar, in a foreign language. Nuns (on schooldays) and parents (on Sundays) kept a tight lid on moving around and/or talking to our peers. About all we were left with was our imaginations...and our missals. The missal was a fat book full of prayers, but it had other things as well, including short bio clips of the saints who were significant enough to get their own feast days. We read them out of boredom, and some of my friends paid close attention to the juicy details of how some of the martyrs were offed, which came up now and then in playground conversation. The Romans, for example, cut poor St. Agatha's breasts off in the process of killing her. One of the other saints had her teeth yanked out, again by those ever-creative Romans. I skipped past such stuff; I got nightmares enough watching bad monster movies like The Crawling Eye on Channel 7 Thursday afternoons. Interestingly, the newer missals given to school kids in sixth grade (1962-ish) omitted such details, but the mid-1950s missals that our class had, well, it was all there.

I've picked up a number of other Tridentine-era missals at bookstores over the years, and some of them are packed full of things to browse through, not all of it prayers. The 1949 printing of Benziger Bros' Saint Mary Every Day Missal is an amazing thing. It had everything our St. Joseph missals had, plus a history of the Catholic Church, a history of the United States, and (for that matter) a history of the world. Most oddly, sprinkled in amidst the saints and the prayers like "easter eggs" in modern software were short histories of the Catholic Church as it evolved in each American state. Delaware, for example, was tucked right between St. Boniface and St. Norbert. My copy has no index (though the pages at the end are loose and it may have fallen out); if you wanted Illinois, I guess you simply had to hunt for it. (I haven't found it yet.) The type on this additional material was astonishingly small, smaller than anything I think I've ever seen on the pages of a book intended for the general public. The pages were 3 1/2" wide and 6" high—and there were 1,335 of them! To get an example of just how small the type was, keep that page size in mind and download this scan of a typical page spread. (2.8 MB jpg.)

I suspect that the Powers within the Church knew all about this problem (they had, after all, been kids once) and when the Second Vatican Council redid the Mass and translated it into English, the emphasis was on following along and participating. Not long after that, fat-book missals left the Catholic experience entirely for several reasons. Most importantly, the post-VCII propers (Scripture readings and associated prayers) were three times as long and difficult to fit into a single book, but I think the notion of missal-as-distraction was right up there somehow, heh.

Nonetheless, I think a lot of us learned about the saints out of sheer boredom, and I certainly picked up more Latin than some just by trying to correlate the mysterious Latin prayers with their (loose) English equivalents. Maybe those of us who still go to church could increase religious literacy among kids by bringing back missals and not requiring that they follow along with the grown-ups. It worked in 1961. I don't see why it wouldn't work today.

Easter Sunday. The ancient affirmation "The Lord is risen indeed!" (given in response to the primary Resurrection declaration, "The Lord is risen!") used to puzzle me a little, but in looking back, I suspect that I was just thinking too small. Anyone who has ever looked at the center of our galaxy through even a junkbox telescope knows that God does nothing by halves. To me, "indeed" here means to me that God's redemptive mission is complete, absolute, and unconditional: If Jesus didn't save everybody He saved nobody. We live in an extravagant universe, which to me at least points to an extravagant God, who settles for nothing other than the restoration of all things to Himself, what we call apokatastasis.

Many fans of Hell argue tortuous circles around the embarrassing Bible statement that Jesus descended into Hell to preach to those imprisoned there, but I take it at face value, and I suspect that what Jesus told them started out something like this: "Guys, listen up: There's a way out of here. Take notes."

This past December 31, the Colorado Springs Gazette published an article that so infuriated local Evangelicals that the paper eventually pulled the article from its archive. You can still find the article in Google's cache, but that will go away eventually, so read it now if you're interested. It's a history of how Ted Haggard had a vision on the side of Pike's Peak that Colorado Springs would become a sort of City of God, and how, for a long time, everything went his way. Haggard's fall made national news, but that's not what irritates a lot of the local Evangelicals. The part that bothers them is this, quoted from the article:

ANOINTED WITH COOKING OIL

In 1984, a nobody pastor named Ted Haggard had what he described as a vision after three days of fasting and praying on the side of Pikes Peak.

Colorado Springs was already a conservative town. But its political coloration was dictated by its large contingent of active and retired military, not its churches.

Haggard saw a city transformed: There was “a huge, lifegiving church” on a hill. Christian organizations poured into the city like crazy, creating “a fountain with young people coming in, having positive spiritual experiences, and going to the darkest places in the world.”

Part of his teachings focused on Colorado Springs being a chosen place that needed to be claimed for the Lord. The New Lifers walked the sidewalks, praying and blessing, block by block, business by business, all over the city.

One evening in the mid-1980s, Haggard found a handful of congregants praying over a 5-gallon bucket of cooking oil. They said God had told them to anoint the city, and so they did, block by block — using a garden sprayer.

“It’s a little unusual,” Haggard wrote of the oil in his book Primary Purpose, “but so is Colorado Springs.”

The Evangelicals complained that the paper was trying to make them look silly. Assuming that this actually happened (and it's taken from Haggard's book, so I suspect it did) the paper wasn't doing any "making." I doubt that "Saturday Night Live" could have come up with a better parody of Evangelical Christianity. Holy canola oil, Batman!

It's actually kind of sad. This is not how sacramental anointing works, any more than you can baptize downtown crowds by hooking a firehose to a tanker of holy water and dousing anybody within reach. It's not about the water, and it's not about the oil. To think otherwise is to descend to a kind of ceremonial magick, and that's what the incident suggests to me—and, ironically, what Evangelicals sometimes accuse Catholics of doing. I've sometimes wondered why the rest of Evangelical America doesn't disown them.

Ah, well. At least those guys are all on the north side of town.

A very cogent post by Bishop Sam'l Bassett on one of the Old Catholic email lists I subscribe to forced me to think a little harder about the reasons for the Roman Catholic Church's devastating priest shortage. Everybody seems to think (and I confess to leaning in that direction) that celibacy is the key issue. I'm sure that requiring that priests be celibate thins out the pool of candidates considerably. On the other hand, I personally know a handful of people who are not married, nor even dating anyone. They are interesting people: extraordinarily self-contained, not hermits but quite social. They definitely need human friendship. What they do not seem to need is sex. There is even a term for it now (asexuality) and an organization: AVEN, the Asexual Visibility and Education Network.

So such people exist, and are probably commoner than we think. Why, then, wouldn't they want to become priests? A very serious reason occurred to me while I attended Mass with Carol's family the other day at a local Roman church: Being a Roman Catholic priest is probably the most unpleasant and least rewarding job in the entire Roman Catholic Church.

Why? Think for a second: Various sources tell me that 75-85 percent of Catholic women who have sex use birth control of a proscribed sort. Divorce among Catholic Americans has risen to par with non-Catholic Americans. An overwhelming majority of Catholics believe priests should be allowed to marry, and a clear majority support the ordination of women. All of these things are vehemently condemned by the pope and by RC bishops who want to stay on the Pope's good side. Well. Where does the laity meet the hierarchy? Right down the street in your neighborhood parish. And who's stuck in the middle between these two warring camps? Guess.

There was a time when Roman Catholics would "pray, pay, and obey" without argument. Those times are past. Back in the days of "The Terror" (which ended with Vatican II) priests were required to grill women in the confessional about their sex lives, and particularly as to whether they used contraception. No more. When the subject comes up at all these days, the laity push back, and it's the parish priest who has to listen to angry and increasingly educated parishioners who have read popular books on the controversial topics and frame questions that are difficult and painful to answer, especially when the answer is "Because the Pope says so."

Who'd want a job like that?

The real reason for the priest shortage may well be that the Roman Catholic Church has painted itself into a corner with paint that (as some wag said) takes forever to dry. Imagine being a parish priest trying to counsel a woman whose husband has turned vicious and begun beating her. "No, you can't have a divorce. If you get one, you are automatically excommunicated. I'm sorry."

Q.E.D.

Carol and I went to Mass today, and I was shocked to see that January 1 is no longer the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus Christ, but instead "The Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God." I'm a little surprised that I hadn't run across this before, since the change happened a long time ago, but I was a lapsed Roman Catholic for decades before returning to the faith through the Old Catholic Church back in the 90s, and I'm sure I've missed other things as well.

I've spent a little time trying to scout out a reason for the change in the feast, or even the precise year when the change occurred, and have come up empty. The cynic in me wonders if the Church would rather not admit that Jesus had a foreskin, or any sex organs at all. (If they weren't reluctant to admit it before, they probably are now, in the wake of umpty zillion copies of The Da Vinci Code in Catholic hands.)

Interestingly, circumcision is not an inherently Catholic or Christian procedure. Christians were relieved of the Jewish obligation to be circumcised within a few years of Jesus' death, at what we now call the First Council of Jerusalem, which is described in Chapter 15 of The Acts of the Apostles. The Council released gentile Christians from the bulk of Jewish ritual and dietary protocols, including circumcision. What gentile Christians were required to observe are what we call the Noahide Laws, which pre-date Moses and go back to Noah. The Noahide Laws are the precursors of the Ten Commandments, and are supposedly those laws that God holds binding on all human beings, not simply the Jews. They include abstention from idolatry and blasphemy, dishonesty, murder, fornication, and the consumption of meat cut from a living animal or from an animal that had been strangled. (The text in Acts is pretty terse and there is some argument about the details—for example, dishonesty is not explicitly mentioned—but that's the gist of it.)

Jesus really was a Jew, and thus was required to be circumcised. The near-universality of circumcision among American Christians is something of an anomaly, and doesn't hold true in the rest of the world. I haven't found a good historical treatment of circumcision as an American medical and cultural obsession, but I suspect that the elimination of the Feast of the Circumcision simply reflects a lot of general Church squeamishness over matters sexual. Mary has all kinds of feast days, and I would think a feast that put the lie to the heresy of Docetism (which denies that Jesus was truly human as well as divine) would be a good thing to retain. Alas, it is not to be, and it's one of a number of things I do miss about Tridentine Catholicism.