Daniel Taylor, countertenor, an Ottawa treasure

I have a CD of him and some friends singing love songs in the language of Shakespeare and I am listening over and over.

This song is on it, but sung at least an octave lower

New blogger over at PJ Media--Michael Walsh

A sample:

Don’t take it from me, take it from Barack Hussein Obama who famously said on the stump in 2008: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Many gullible voters took that to mean that the end of the George W. Bush era was at hand, and little more. Ho-hum: politics as usual. But the minute I heard that, I knew exactly what Obama meant. “Fundamental transformation” is the Holy Grail of the modern Left — I do not say “American Left,” since much of itsinspiration and sustenance is most definitely not American — and by “fundamental transformation” they mean the utter destruction of the founding principles of limited government, individual self-reliance and personal freedom. In their place, they bring the poisoned gifts of fascism, central planning and rule by a credentialed aristocracy of like-minded fellow travelers.

And when they say “by any means necessary,” you had better believe they mean it. Election 2012 is not a clash of political parties but an existential struggle for the soul of America. To treat it as anything but that is both willful blindness and arrant foolishness.

Catholic lay people---stand up for your rights!

Peter Stockland has a most interesting column in the Catholic Register, speaking to those Catholics who have been complaining lately that their bishops have not been outspoken enough.  An excerpt:

Avoiding that undesirable response need not, however, mean sitting passively back and waiting for Church leaders to do all the heavy lifting. While they speak for the Church, we as lay Catholics have both the prerogative and the obligation to speak out against affronts to faith and morals. Rather than aiming and firing upward, we should all answer the call by addressing the threats horizontally, that is by what is directly in front of us in the lives we live as Catholics each day.
For whatever newspapers are still worth as opinion formers, hundreds of thousands of Catholics should be deluging letters to the editor mailboxes daily. Ditto open line shows. Of course, every available means of social media should serve the cause of Catholic resistance to what is being forced upon us.
It need not end there. What would happen if every faithful Canadian Catholic took it upon himself or herself to have at least one respectful personal conversation a day objecting to the forced march off a cliff that is state-organized medical killing? 
We remain, after all, in the millions across this country. We remain a strong majority. There is no reason on Earth that we should hesitate to use our majoritarian influence to protect our Church and its teaching.
It is true the political opinions of the faithful properly span the democratic spectrum. On specific issues, and even approaches, our differences are a sign of the catholicity we share.
Surely, however, we all agree the Church herself must not be made to bow before the state’s raw monopoly on force that is exercised through its legislatures and courts. Surely we agree our constitutional rights to freedom of religion and conscience, guaranteed through the Charter and more ancient safeguards, are worth speaking up for. 
If we feel hesitation, here is an image that might help us overcome natural reluctance. In the next issue of Convivum magazine, we have a 10th anniversary retrospective on World Youth Day 2002 in Toronto. As part of the look back, we asked those who attended to tell us their most compelling memory of WYD 2002. The one mentioned time after time was the almost overpowering visual of Pope John Paul II walking down the steps of the arrival aircraft even though he was elderly, ill and struggling just to stand.
Using all the strength he could muster, the Bishop of Rome stood up for us. Why would we, in return, do any less for all the bishops who lead us in our faith?

Electricity suppliers could shut the lights off in Greece

Wow.

Fresh signs that the wolf is knocking on Greece’s door. That nation’s power-grid operator is in arrears to foreign electricity suppliers to the tune of 327 million euros. Consequently, at least four suppliers from Germany, Bulgaria, Switzerland, and Italy have now cut off or reduced electricity exports to Greece. This is what happens when countries cannot or will not pay their bills.
At the end of May the world’s biggest trade credit insurer, Euler Hermes, suspended underwriting new policies on exports to Greece for fear of lack of Greek payment. Athens certainly does not boast the most modern economy in Europe, but even so, the Greeks are going to find it hard to do much at all without electricity. What is the Greek word for “candle,” anyway?
Finally, Spanish borrowing costs were driven to new highs as Madrid announced it will formally seek a too little, too late bailout for its banks on Monday. Spanish interest rates are the market’s way of saying “game’s up, folks.”

Obama biography blasts holes in Obama memoir

But the author did not intend it that way.  An excerpt of a PJMedia piece by Ron Radosh:

Poor David Maraniss. The best-selling biographer of the just published Barack Obama: The Story is not only crying all the way to the bank, but also shedding crocodile tears that his new biography is giving the Right ammunition against the president. Yesterday, Maraniss told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien the following on Starting Point:

I’m not writing it as a fact-checker. I’m writing it as an historian. Other people for ideological reasons are pouncing on that part of what my book is, but in fact I’m trying to tell the truth.
A memoir is far different from rigorous factual biography. It’s not as though I’m trying to say, aha, I got you, at each point, I’m just trying to present the way I really found it, which in many cases was different from what he presented.

Let me pause to parse the above paragraph from the distinguished journalist and historian. Here is my translation of what Maraniss is actually saying:

My book has been taken up by Obama’s enemies just because I told the truth. Give the president a break. He was writing a memoir, and everyone knows a memoir is different from the truth, since Obama is the first post-modern president. His memoir was his truth — even though it wasn’t true, it was to him. I didn’t mean to show he lied — pardon me — unintentionally fabricated his own story. I only sought to show the truth was different than he said it was.

Get it now? If you don’t, Maraniss also said on the program that Obama sought to write it through the “prism of race.” He went on to note that the “right-wing” is “cherry-picking” negative things in the book, which “is almost why I didn’t want to write it.” As he went on, he got deeper into the problem:

He wrote it when he wasn’t running for president, and had no thought that people like me would come along and tell the real story.

So what is the real story? Fortunately, Buzzfeed has given us a good summary. The Maraniss bio, Ben Smith tells us, “is the first sustained challenge to Obama’s control over his own story, a firm and occasionally brutal debunking of Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father.” And this is important because I and so many others can tell you about how many people voted for and supported Obama for president precisely because of what he related in his own memoir.

Mark Steyn on Eurodaddy's inability to admit he is lost

He writes on the Euro crisis:

So much "progressive" debate boils down to Ring Lardner's great line:
"Shut up," he explained.

It's an oft-retailed quote. But fewer people know the line that precedes it (in Lardner's novel The Young Immigrunts): a kid asking, "Are you lost, Daddy?"

As any motoring pater knows, it's not easy to give an honest answer to that question. And the hardest thing of all is to turn around and go back, retracing your steps to the point where you made the wrong turn. If you're a politician, it's even harder. Leviathan has no reverse gear: "Forward!" as the Obama campaign's 2012 slogan puts it. Yet in the end, if any of the Western world is to survive, it has to find a way to turn around, to go back.

Take the euro. It should not exist. It should never have been invented. And, ultimately, it is necessary to find a way to disinvent it. Yet even one of the least deluded of Continental leaders cannot acknowledge the need to turn around: To Angela Merkel, the euro is not a mere currency but what she calls a "Schicksalsgemeinschaft" — or "community of destiny." Forward — to — destiny! Frau Merkel, like M. Hollande in Paris, has determined that what the Greeks and the Portuguese and the Spanish need is "more Europe." Onward!

A decade ago, just before the euro was introduced, I noted in Britain's Sunday Telegraph that, whereas the currencies of real nations display images of real buildings (the White House on the $20 bill, for example), the handsome edifices on the new euro notes do not, in fact, exist. Europe is full of impressive buildings — Versailles, the Parthenon — but they are unfortunately located in actual countries, and so the designers of the euro notes preferred to use composite, fantasy, pan-European architectural marvels prefiguring the Eutopia that the new currency would will into being. "In the normal course of events," I wrote, "monetary union follows political union, as it did in the U.S., Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and so on. In this instance, uniquely, monetary union is in itself an act of political binding. What's important on Tuesday is not the introduction of the new currency but the abolition of the old ones — not the symbolic bridges on the back of the new notes, but the burning of the bridges represented by the discarded currencies." In a "community of destiny," there is no road back.

Continentals talk in these Eutopian terms because of their recent history. The European Union is, philosophically, a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem. Except that, in one of those jests the gods are fond of, it seems to be delivering the Continent into the very situation it was explicitly designed to prevent. The 'tween-wars fascists sold themselves to their peoples by telling them that the world was run by a cabal of sinister foreign bankers. When the neo-nationalist Golden Dawn and the hard-left Syriza parties both reprised this line to such great effect in the recent Greek election, it had the additional merit, as Nixon liked to say, of being true. The euro has made the age-old conspiracy theories real: If you're a Greek, your world is run by a cabal of sinister foreign bankers — the Germans and the other "northern Europeans" who control the European Central Bank, plus their chums at the IMF.

The pursuit of the trivial---a form of madness called displacement

Dr. Sanity:

What do you do when faced with the 'collapse of demographic, economic and military strength?' Ban lightbulbs because lightbulbs are the imminent threat you can deal with.

What do you do when faced with the threat of a nuclear Iran? Why, legalize illegal immigrants; or improve your golf skills; or, even work on your re-election campaign. In the end, you can always blame Bush or the Republicans or Congress. 

The entire purpose of displacement is to gain control over the conflict you won't acknowledge. By focusing on something you have some control over, the psyche is much less threatened. You can even pretend, that if it weren't for X,Y, or Z, everything would be perfect hunky dory.

Anything is preferable to focus on instead of the real danger.

Displacement can be thought of as an slightly more mature type of projection. In projection, the individual remains oblivious to the fact that he owns and is responsible for the emotions that he imagines are in the person or group into which he is projecting. In other words, ownership of the idea and/or the emotional affect is banished from the self.
In displacement, the idea or emotion is deflected from one object to another, less threatening one, but the ownership of the negative emotion or idea (e.g. animosity, anger) is retained--and is often raised to a virtue. A common example is the person who is angry at a loved one, but settles for kicking the dog. The anger is evident in the action and is still owned by the person experiencing it, but the object of the anger has been displaced by the dog.

The relentless pursuit of the trivial is a way of avoiding the essential. It allows you to lie to yourself and maintain that oh so important self-esteem (i.e., "saving face") that is also relentlessly pursued in today's world.. 

Does poverty cause crime? Or does crime cause poverty?

Interesting article about violence and crime in the inner city over at PJ Media:

My brother drove a chemical tanker in Chicago. He was a big, powerful man who had been an amateur boxer. One day, while he was setting up his hoses on the south side to pump chemicals into a factory’s tanks, a group of teenagers surrounded him and demanded his money. He carried a spiked billy club for such purposes and instead of producing his wallet produced a lesson in night stick justice. When he returned to his yard, he told his dispatcher that he’d never deliver to that business again. Next time, he said, the kids might have guns and a shot would explode the flammable chemical truck and take out a city block.

Cardinal Ouellet's penitential pilgrimage in Ireland

From an article in the Washington Post about sexual abuse by Mathew N. Schmalz who teaches religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. :

But perhaps a fuller view of what reform and reconciliation might look like is emerging in Ireland.  In preparing for the 50^thInternationalEucharistic Congress, Cardinal Marc Ouellet went on a penitential pilgrimage to Lough Derg.  By walking barefoot and fasting, Cardinal Ouellette was undertaking penance and making reparation on behalf of the Catholic hierarchy.  In his homily at Lough Derg, Ouelette asked for forgiveness from the victims.  Nowhere in evidence were the defensiveness and evasion that have so often characterized the Catholic church’s approach to clerical sexual abuse.  Cardinal Ouellet’s efforts have been appropriately called “ a gesture,” for they are only a beginning.  But honestly acknowledging moral cowardice can lead us to a fuller understanding of what moral courage can and does mean--both in extreme circumstances and in the normal, often unexamined, course of our daily lives

Mark Steyn: I hate to say I told you so. Actually, I don’t. I love it

Great piece by Mark Steyn in Macleans Magazine on the battle for freedom of speech in Canada.

“Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it.”
Thus, Ray Bradbury in his prescient 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451. On June 6, the day after Bradbury’s death at the age of 91, the House of Commons passed Brian Storseth’s private member’s bill repealing Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Fahrenheit 451 draws its name from the temperature at which books burn; Canada’s Fahrenheit 13 is its frosty northern inverse—the temperature at which the state chills freedom of expression. Free speech is the lifeblood of free societies, and, as this magazine has learned over the last half-decade, our decayed Dominion was getting a bad case of hypothermia.
We’re not alone in this. In Britain, Australia, France, Denmark, the Netherlands and many other places, democratic societies have become far too comfortable in policing the opinions of the citizenry. But even by comparison with our Commonwealth cousins and Western Europe, Section 13 and its provincial equivalents are repugnant—practically, philosophically, and operationally.
As a practical matter, an extremely narrow licence to combat the mortal threat to Canadians of 1970s answering machines effortlessly metastasized into investigating the country’s most-read magazine for publishing an excerpt from a No. 1 Canadian bestseller. Which was entirely predictable to everyone except genius jurists on the Supreme Court—because make-work bureaucracies are never going to content themselves with being a little bit pregnant.

Ah, Hilary, such a joy to read

Mr. Descartes, we are not separated beings; our bodies are not just meat suitcases for carrying our souls around. A human being is an infused soul, you are your body, your body is you.


snip


I relate a funny little story with regard to that thing of dressing up and automatically assuming a role. When I was five, my mother and I travelled the old fashioned way to England, on a boat. We embarked in Seattle and the boat took us down the coast, through the Panama Canal and across the Atlantic on the other side. It was quite memorable, though I was still only five. 

During that trip, we met a new friend, a dancer and mime who was headed over to Europe to do a tour of a one-man show. He took quite a shine to me and my mother and we had lot of fun. When the ship's children's entertainment department announced that there would be a fancy dress party for the chidren under ten, he insisted on dressing me up. Out of the odds and ends and make-up he had with him, he cobbled together quite a passable geisha costume for me, complete with wig, flowered kimono and white-face make up. I absolutely loved it, and my mother was delighted when I took first prize. 

What she always told me, though, was how surprised she and Adam were at how naturally and spontaneously I assumed the role of a polite, demure little miniature geisha. My mother had been interested in Japanese culture all my life and there were always books around with pictures of Japanese ladies in their traditional clothes and records of koto music. Japanese customs and culture were a frequent topic of our conversations. I think by that time, I had already been taken to see Bunraku because I remember being obsessed with the costumes and puppets. She had also studied Japanese and I think by that time was already teaching me a little to paint the characters. Later we went to see Japanese films (which I thought were painfully dull) at the university cinema and I remember being introduced to her instructors. I had always been fascinated and deeply attracted by the extreme, artful formality of it all. 

I wouldn't have thought, though, that this would have been enough to create this automatic role-producing effect, but Adam, who was by then already a well-seasoned artist and popular in Japan, said I was spot on. He particularly noticed how I took tiny little steps (3:00) in that peculiar way that Japanese ladies do when wearing the full gear. 

Latest news from the Perth Archdiocese

I have taken this from the website of the Archdiocese of Perth.   I have added some emphases. The homily is so beautiful and personal it brings tears to my eyes.

Ordination of the Very Reverend Fr Harry Entwistle

16 Jun 2012

Article and Photo by Fr R Cross

The Most Reverend Timothy Costelloe SDB, Archbishop of Perth, ordained to the Priesthood on Friday 15 June in St Mary's Cathedral Perth the Very Reverend Harry Entwistle.

 

Above: Bishop Geoffrey Jarrett, Bishop Peter Elliott, Fr Harry Entwistle, Archbishop Timothy Costelloe and Bishop Donald Sproxton

 

Also present at the ordination were Bishop Geoffrey Jarrett of the Lismore Diocese, Bishop Peter Elliot, Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne, Bishop Donald Sproxton, many clergy of the Archdiocese of Perth as well as family and friends of the newly ordained Fr Entwistle. Traditional Anglican Community Archbishop, the Most Reverend John Hepworth, was also present in the congregation and later expressed his goodwill and support and said he looked forward to the day when the Church would be without division and speak with the one voice of Christ.

 

Immediately prior to the Ordination Mass, approximately 40 members of the Traditional Anglican Community were received into the Catholic Church by Monsignor Kevin Long. These and many of their friends were also present at the ordination Mass. Fr Entwistle was himself received into the Church at St Charles Seminary last Sunday, where he was also ordained a Deacon by Archbishop Costelloe.

 

The significance of the ordination Mass was added to when the Most Rev Peter Elliott rose after Communion and read the Decree of the Erection of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, under the patronage of St Augustine of Canterbury, issued by the Congregation of Doctrine and Faith on the 15 June 2012.

 

Bishop Elliott was particularly pleased to be present and read the Decree of Erection as he has worked assiduously as the project delegate for the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference and the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to prepare the way for the erection of the Ordinariate.

 

After the announcement of the Ordinariate, Archbishop Costelloe was pleased to read a Decree from Pope Benedict XVI announcing that the Very Reverend Father Harry Entwistle had been appointed the Ordinary of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. This announcement was greeted with great joy by the new members of the Ordinariate. Fr Entwistle will be based in Perth but will be responsible for the Ordinariate throughout Australia.

 

In a media statement prior to the Ordination, Archbishop Costelloe said he welcomed the announcement of the establishment of the Ordinariate for groups of Anglicans who wish to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church while retaining elements of their own Anglican patrimony.

Archbishop Costelloe said, “Those people from the Anglican tradition who have decided to avail themselves of the opportunity afforded to them by Pope Benedict XV1 have done so after a long period of careful and prayerful discernment.”

“The Catholic community will welcome them with great joy and generosity of spirit. We look forward to fully sharing with them the richness of our faith. At the same time we hope to gain from the witness of their own faith and the beauty of their liturgical and spiritual traditions, which they will bring with them.”

+ + +

Homily of the Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB

on the Occasion of the Ordination of the Very Rev Harry Entwistle

On the 11^th of November, 2009, Sr Maria Boulding, a Benedictine nun of Stanbrook Abbey in England, died after a prolonged battle with cancer. Sr Maria was a renowned writer and spiritual director whose life and work have touched many people.

 

In 1982 Sr Maria edited a collection of essays in which monks and nuns of the English Benedictine Congregation shared the story of their journey into and in religious life. For many of them it was the story of a journey into communion with the Catholic Church first of all, and then, once at home there, into a new and deeper experience of faith through their commitment to the monastic life.

 

One of those stories, written by Dom Alan Rees, concludes with a beautiful prayer, part of which I would like to share with you this evening. While it is a prayer which simply reflects one man’s experience of God’s presence in his life, tonight, on this historic occasion, I suspect that it might catch up the thoughts of Harry and his wife, Jean, and the thoughts of the people of Harry’s community who themselves have been received tonight into full communion with the Catholic Church and who for that reason are rejoicing both for themselves and for Harry. Perhaps too it will enable all of us to reflect on the strange but faithful ways of God who calls us into life in ways that we don’t always anticipate and certainly don’t always understand.

 

Father, you have always been there, even from my earliest years, gently leading me on. You have always been there, Lord, leading me out of darkness into your own wonderful light; from ignorance into truth; from the isolation of self into the community of love.

 

Despite my wanderings, despite my complaining, despite my unwillingness to go forward, you have never deserted me. You have always remained faithful in the midst of my infidelity.

 

In the day time of my joy, your hidden brightness, the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, has gone before me and drawn me after it; in the night-time of my isolation, despondency and fear, your pillar of fire, the refining Spirit, has been there working in my heart, thawing my iciness and purifying me.

 

But, Father, pilgrim that I am, I still wander into the byways of pride, self-pity and fear. Forgive me as I turn my eyes back to you. Sharpen my awareness of your Son, Jesus, my Brother, who takes me by the hand and pulls me along in my reluctance.

 

Lord God, how thankful I am that you are continually searching for me; how thankful I am that your grace prompts me to recognise you and to give myself to you even in my imperfect way. Lord Jesus, how thankful I am that your love, stronger than death, will never let me go.

 

As we gather tonight in the Cathedral to witness, and even more to be a vital part, of this extraordinary moment as our friend, brother and, for many of you, your Father in God, receives the precious gift of priestly orders within the Catholic Church, I am sure that Harry can echo every word of this prayer. The mystery of God’s strange ways continues to unfold for Harry as he opens himself yet again, as he has done so often before, to the insistent call of God, of Christ, to “come follow me.” After all the call to the priesthood is one that Harry first heard long ago, and one to which he responded when he stepped forward to be ordained as a priest within the Anglican communion in 1964, forty eight years ago. Who knows how many people’s lives have been transformed by God’s Holy Spirit, working through Harry’s ministry as an Anglican priest and later as a bishop? Tonight, as Harry receives the gift of the priesthood within the Catholic Church, both he and we give thanks for his many years of faithful service and ministry within the Anglican tradition. We give thanks, too, for the ways in which the beauty of Anglican spirituality and worship has nourished and formed Harry and enabled him to hear and respond to the voice of God, calling him to this new path and this new ministry. Father, you have always been there, even from Harry’s earliest years, gently leading him on.

 

For many years Harry was a prison chaplain, first in England and later here in Perth. That ministry, I’m sure, brought Harry many moments of struggle and challenge but hopefully too many moments of joy and gratitude as he saw God’s grace bringing hope into hopeless situations. This is the life of every priest and it has been yours, Harry, for many years, as it will continue to be in the years ahead in the new and demanding ministry you take up tonight. Father, in the day time of Harry’s joy your hidden brightness, the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, has gone before him and drawn him after it; in the night-time of his isolation, despondency and fear, your pillar of fire has been there working in his heart.

 

Those moments of joy and of darkness were not restricted to Harry’s life as a prison chaplain. In 2006 Harry again heard the voice of God this time calling him into the Anglican Church of Australia, the Traditional Anglican Communion, where he was ordained a bishop and appointed Western Regional Bishop. It was, I suspect, a decision formed in the crucible of confusion and suffering, as well as hope. You must have wondered, Harry, about the strange ways of God yet again upsetting everything and asking of you more, perhaps, than you thought you might be able to give. The decision to say “yes” to God is not one that we make once and then forget about. It is a new decision every day and your life has been marked by a deep conviction that giving your “yes” to God every day is at the very heart of what it means for you to live your life with integrity and faith.

 

Now in 2012 the Lord has once again invaded your life calling you to let go of so much in order to be able to receive all that he now wants to offer you. Last Sunday you entered into full communion with the Catholic Church just as your community has done tonight. It must have been a bitter-sweet experience for you as I’m sure it is for your brothers and sisters who have joined you tonight. The rich Anglican tradition has formed and nourished you all and has been the home in which you have discovered the beauty and the call of God. It is hard to leave something so cherished, but it is perhaps the genius of Pope Benedict that he has opened a door for you to enter into full communion with Peter, and retain, joyfully and proudly, the Anglican heritage of liturgy and spirituality which you bring as your special gift to us. Lord God, how thankful we are that you are continually searching for us; how thankful we are that your grace prompts us to recognize you and to give ourselves to you even in our imperfect way. Lord Jesus, how thankful we are that your love, stronger than death, will never let us go.

 

With your ordination as a Catholic priest tonight, Harry, you become the first to be ordained for the new Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, which comes into being today by the will of the Holy Father. The gifts you bring, so many of them formed and nourished by your Anglican tradition, will now be strengthened and deepened through this new outpouring of the Holy Spirit. You will be reshaped by God’s grace so that, even more than in the past, you will be a living sign that Christ is among his people as their good shepherd. As you have for so many years, tonight I simply want to encourage you to continue to keep your eyes fixed on Christ. In the challenges and storms which lie ahead it is he who will reach out his hand, take you by your hand, lead you to safety and calm the storms around and within you, just as he did for Simon Peter as he came to him across the water through the wind and the waves.

 

We all rejoice as we welcome Jean, your wife, and your community among us and as we welcome you into the brotherhood of the priestly ministry in the Catholic Church. We thank you for your courage, your fidelity and your profound openness to God’s call. We promise to accompany you in the years ahead with our prayers, our affection and our support, and we ask you to remember us each time you come to the altar of God.

 

We now invited you to step forward with open hands and open heart to receive the wonderful gifts of God.

 

 

 

Great news from Australia!

On Friday, the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Holy Father established the Personal Ordinariate of the Southern Cross and made former Traditional Anglican Communion  (TAC) Bishop Harry Entwistle, who was ordained a Catholic priest yesterday, the Ordinary.

This sends such a positive message, finally, to the TAC as many (me included) have felt like we were treated like we were unwanted at the Ordinariate banqueting-table and likely to scare away the wanted guests from the Canterbury Communion.

So now we have a former Church of England Bishop as Ordinary in England and Wales (Msgr. Keith Newton) and a former Episcopal Church Bishop as Ordinary in the United States and soon of a Canadian Deanery and a former Traditional Anglican Communion Bishop in Australia.

Sadly, the positive message may be too late for the TAC, which has for the most part abandoned hopes of unity with the Catholic Church and said no thanks to Anglicanorum coetibus.

But there may still be Anglicans in other countries hoping for Ordinariates there.  We hope some day to have our own in Canada eventually.  

Here are some excerpts of a story from the Catholic News Agency,  my emphases.

Father Harry Entwistle and Pope Benedict XVI.

 

You can find the whole story below here.

Melbourne, Australia, Jun 15, 2012 / 04:22 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- On June 15 Pope Benedict officially erected the Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross for Anglican groups and individuals who want to enter full communion with the Catholic Church.
 
-snip-

The decree establishing the new ordinariate came from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“The supreme law of the Church is the salvation of souls,” the decree said. “As such, throughout history, the Church has always found the pastoral and juridical means to care for the good of the faithful.”

Fr. Entwistle said that membership is open to former Anglicans who accept what the Catholic Church believes and teachers, as well as to former Anglicans who have previously joined the Catholic Church. Those who have close family members in the ordinariate may also join.

The Pope has also created ordinariates in England and Wales and the U.S. Their leaders welcomed the Australian ordinariate.

-snip-

Fr. Entwistle was born in Lancashire in England on May 31, 1940.

He studied at the University of Durham and was ordained for the Anglican Diocese of Blackburn in 1964. He emigrated to Australia in 1988. He has served as a parish priest and a prison chaplain.

In 2006 he joined the Anglican Catholic Church in Australia, which is part of the Traditional Anglican Communion. He was ordained a bishop for that church body in November 2006.

He married Jean Barrett Bolts in 1967 and has a married son and a single daughter.

Fr. Entwistle said Pope Benedict has made it “very clear” that Christian unity is not  achieved by agreeing on “the lowest common denominator.” Those who join an ordinariate “accept the Catechism of the Catholic Church as the authoritative expression of the Catholic faith,” he said.

Tags: Pope Benedict, Ordinariate

Happy Birthday to me! (A little early)

Well, it is not quite my birthday yet.   It is Tuesday, June 19, which often falls on Father's Day, or even once recently, on the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

But Mary, Qunyh and Barbara treated me to lunch today at a new Korean barbecue and Asian food  (sushi, Chinese foods, Japanese noodles, Vietnamese Pho etc.).

Mary even brought some lovely roses.  And I received some wonderful organic locally-grown garlic---hard to get this time of year---and some gluten-free cookies from the farmer's market in Carp.  The candle has special significance, because it also illuminated a little cake for Barbara last week when the four of us celebrated her birthday at the Green Door.

Those are two of my favorite paintings by my late grandfather in the background.

Anglican patrimony---Catholic Church

At the Toronto Anglican Use Sodality last Sunday:

Salt and Light TV's coverage of the Eucharistic Congress

Opening ceremonies and Mass



Cardinal Ouellet's homily is around the 2:40:00 mark

And how lovely to hear this at around 3:10:24

Smart people fell for this ---not this time, I hope

From American Thinker: 

In his book, Branding Obamessiah, Mark Edward Taylor wrote about Obama's "Devotional Code" -- religious-sounding rhetorical themes that permeated Obama's communication during his campaign for the presidency. Taylor identified the "Sacred Six" characteristics -- a creation story, sacred words, sacred images, sacred ritual, true believers, and a messianic leader -- that created a public perception that Barack Obama embodied "hope and change" for the future, that created an image of him as "The One." 

Knowing that he was an inexperienced candidate (arguably the most inexperienced ever), Mr. Obama's campaign staff in 2008 sought to downplay the importance of experience, even to make it appear undesirable. Thus was born the idea that Obama would be portrayed as a "change agent" bringing in fresh new ideas and pushing out the stale, outmoded ones. Taylor wrote, "Obama talked about 'Change' in a way that made both Clinton and McCain pay the price for their years of experience. Obama's ad copy 'Change' trumped the 'Experience' of his opponents and made them appear to be just a couple of recycled Washington insiders ... it turned Obama's major liability into an asset."

 Obama's advisers admitted to relying on the axiom, "Your strength is your weakness, and your weakness is your strength." Mr. Obama's savvy strategists for 2008 figured ways to make the Ivy-League elitist into an "everyman." With inherently vague, evocative rhetoric, the presidential candidate allowed the voters to "fill in the blanks" while he promised everything in general, but nothing specific. It didn't suit their purposes to explain the kind of change that was coming; indeed, it would have spelled disaster to have elaborated on the "changes" that Mr. Obama envisioned. No one on Team Obama -- in particular those who really knew, like, for example, Valerie Jarrett -- wanted to address the specifics of the "fundamental transformation" Mr. Obama intended to make happen. It was enough to build up people's anticipation that their hopes -- no matter what those hopes were -- would finally be realized. As Taylor said, "[t]rue believers read into the [campaign] language a meaning that suited them."

 Candidate Obama, the secular ideologue, used "Sacred Words" to shape himself into the image of an evangelical believer. The radical leftist Saul Alinsky acolyte told voters what they wanted to hear, convincing them that with Obama they could "make progress" (another generality that voters could shape into their own interpretation).

 Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/obama_reinvents_sacred_themes_for_2012.html#ixzz1x3kNs5Rh

My girlfriend Hilary did not warn me not to eat soup or drink before watching this

Via Orwell's Picnic.

Heh heh heh.

Luka Magnotta's human rights complaints

Blazing Cat Fur has the scoop:

Canada is a veritable Human Rights Pariah State according to the U.N. offering Luka Magnotta numerous defenses to prevent his extradition.

Fascinating story about Cardinal Danielou

Sandro Magister wrote piece last month and a friend sent me the link.  Here's an excerpt:

ROME, May 11, 2012 – "Windows open on the mystery": this is the title of the conference with which, two days ago, the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross broke the silence on one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, the French Jesuit Jean Daniélou, made a cardinal by Paul VI in 1969.
A silence that lasted almost forty years, and began with his passing away in 1974.
In effect, the memory of Daniélou is today reduced, for many, to the mystery of his death by heart attack, one May afternoon, at the home of a prostitute on the fourth floor of Rue Dulong 56 in Paris.
When in reality the true mystery on which Daniélou opened the windows to many, in his activity as a theologian and a spiritual man, is that of the triune God. One of his greatest works was entitled "An essay on the mystery of history." A history not governed by chance, nor by necessity, but filled with the "magnalia Dei," by the grandiose wonders of God, each more astonishing than the last.
Today, few of his books are still available for purchase. And yet they are still of extraordinary richness and freshness. Simple and yet very profound, as few theologians have been able to do over the last century, apart from him and that other champion of clarity named Joseph Ratzinger.
Daniélou stands alongside the current pope because of the historical rather than philosophical framing of his theology, his expertise in the Fathers of the Church (the one enamored with Gregory of Nyssa, the other with Augustine), the completely central role given to the liturgy.
Daniélou, together with his Jesuit confrere Henri De Lubac, was the brilliant initiator in 1942 of the series of patristic texts entitled "Sources Chrétiennes," which marked the rebirth of theology in the second half of the twentieth century and paved the way for the best of Vatican Council II.
An author, in short, absolutely to rediscover.
But the mystery of his death and of the taciturn explanation that followed it must also be resolved.
Mimì Santoni, the prostitute, saw him fall to his knees with his face on the floor before he breathed his last. And to her "it was a good death, for a cardinal." He had gone to bring her money to pay for a lawyer capable of getting her husband out of prison. It was the last of his works of charity carried out in secret, on behalf of despised persons in need of help and forgiveness.

Read the whole thing.
No good deed goes unpunished, as it were.

June and the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Lifted from Archbishop Prendergast's blog:

BEHOLD THE HEART THAT HAS SO LOVED MANKIND

Just as May has traditionally been devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, so the month of June is devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Catholic piety.  John O'Brien SJ has recently described the imagery of the Sacred Heart and the meaning of the imagery:

Pope Benedict has invited the faithful to renew their devotion to the Sacred Heart and with good reason: as a symbol – and object of meditation – it contains many dimensions of the mystery of God. Let’s reflect on a few of those.

First, the heart is visible. Jesus does not conceal his love, but makes it readily available to all. It is offered to us. He is vulnerable in that respect. It calls us to let down our barriers.

There are thorns that encircle it. This is not a valentine, but a passionate love that has and will suffer for the beloved. Just as our own vulnerable love can sometimes suffer, so does Christ’s for us.

There’s a cross on top of the heart. John and Mary stood at the foot of the cross when others had run away. This is an invitation to us to stand with them for Jesus. However this plays out in our lives, this is love in action.

The wound. It reminds us of the blood and water that flowed when the heart was pierced by the soldier’s lance. Both elements signify the life (Eucharist and baptism) that results from his sacrifice. It is also the birth of the Church.

The fire blazing. The most dramatic element, it tells us about the fierce love that God has for his people. It offers light and warmth to all who approach, and its blaze melts the hardened parts of our hearts. This fire is also contagious, and will inflame us in going out to set the world on fire. 

[To read more of his presentation, including word of a new book that explains the spirituality of the Heart of Christ, go to this site:http://iboetnonredibo.blogspot.ca/2012/05/heart-of-world.html#more].

Projecting much?