Daily Office:
Tuesday
¶ Matins: The book that I ordered was Garry Wills’s What Paul Meant. The book that I got was Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World. That’s how it is with QPBC sometimes. You print one shaky digit on your reply card* and you’re screwed. I ought to have put what I got out on the windowsill. Instead, I started to read it.
¶ Tierce: An ongoing sad story: the catastrophically depleted ranks of Roman Catholic seminarians. Here’s a story about Dunwoodie, the late-Gothic pile on a hill that, when I was a child, loomed over brash new highways, greatly intensifying the bogus feel of the image. Already the Church seemed not so much traditional as airlocked.
¶ Nones: The Papal Schedule (He’ll be up bei uns at six on Friday afternoon). The Papal Apology (same old, same old).
¶ Compline: This just in (Dept of ROTFLOL): John the Doorman has assured us that the Pope is going to make a little parenthesis on Friday, to Bless the Bratwurst at Schaller & Weber.
Oremus…
§ Matins. And on every single page I think, I can’t continue with this. And yet something keeps me glued to the story. Well, not “glued,” exactly, but willing, certainly, to put off the moment of decision.
Now I’m trying to deal with the discovery that Lionel Shriver is a woman. It shouldn’t mean anything, right? But what seemed “obsessive” and even “prolix” in a male Lionel is “only to be expected” and “understandable” in a female Lionel. I can’t believe myself! What a total trog!
In short, I am out of my depth. Ordinarily, I can tell in two paragraphs, outside, if a book is worth reading. With this one, my uncertainty has made it all the way to page 50. That alone is a kind of commendation.
The heroine, Irina, has just given Mr Wrong a fatal kiss. He’s not Mr Wrong, exactly; he’s just Mr Not-Her-Husband.
* QPBC encourages its members to order online, where the chance of such mistakes is reduced almost to nil. The whole charm of QPBC for me, however, is that one orders by mail, or, more daringly, by fax. But as to how and why I’m still receiving monthly catalogue packets from QPBC, I’ll have to write a page about it one of these days.
§ Tierce. You have to wonder what kind of man would enter the priesthood today, and David Gonzalez’s story does little to relax my eyebrows. On the plus side, seminarians are older and more experienced. But the bad news:
The other great shift in recent decades has been a growing conservatism among seminarians, marked by an emphasis on ritual and on being set apart from the laity. In interviews, some older priests said their ministry was rooted in a deep understanding of the social and material needs of their congregants. Younger priests and seminarians emphasized the sacramental aspects of their vocation.
The official blah-blah is that priests are celibate because Jesus’s apostles were celibate. This completely steamrolls the very complicated history of the priesthood’s first millennium. The Wikipedia entry notes:
It is sometimes claimed that celibacy became mandatory for Latin-Rite priests only in the eleventh century; but others say, for instance: “(I)t may fairly be said that by the time of St. Leo the Great (440–61) the law of celibacy was generally recognized in the West,” and that the eleventh-century regulations on this matter, as on simony, should obviously not be interpreted as meaning that either non-celibacy or simony were previously permitted.
True enough; but between Leo and the unequivocal ban in the mid-1000’s, Western Europe endured not one but two extended periods of civil unrest, during which such niceties as celibacy might have threatened the Church’s survival.
“You do what you can, as well as you can, for as long as you can, and hope it works,” said Bishop Gerald Walsh, the seminary’s rector. “I’d be optimistic if we had enough clergy present for young people and willing to talk to them.”
We shall see what the Church is prepared to do, shan’t we.
§ Nones. A surprising number of my neighbors have been surprised to learn that the Pope will be in the neighborhood this week. Quite a few were unaware that the “Church of St Joseph” is the one with the green copper cupola that they can see everyday from their windows. I have to ask myself what I’m unaware of out there. Plenty, probably — but I can’t think of anything.
Another beautiful day, although not quite as warm as billed. On the way from a doctor visit to lunch, I stopped in at Pier One to look at seat cushions for the chairs on the balcony, which desperately need new (and clean) ones. I came home, dropped my bags, and went back to Pier One for seven cushions and pillows, one of which fits the love-seat bench, and all of which were almost too much to carry.
I found an old bag of Italian morning-glory seeds on the balcony floor, and decided to plant them. Why not? If nothing happens in a week, I’ll still have plenty of time to start another batch. Meanwhile, I’m off to the florist in a little while to see what potted plants are on offer.
The doormen tell me that the FBI was here the other day, scoping out the roof.
§ Compline. And visit the Heidelberg, too, thus hitting up all three surviving German joints in Yorkville, née Germantown.
The Night Shift confirmed the FBI visit. And added that the sharpshooters are going to position themselves… atop Radio Shack, a four-floor walkup at the corner of 87th and First, pretty much across from St Joe’s.
So nice of the Pope to finally mention the pedophilia scandal. He’s been Pope for what, three years, and this is the most he’s said, and my cynicism must be fueling the observation that he mentions it only on the way to the US.
My reaction to the Pope’s comments on pedophile priests was largely the same as that of Fossil Darling’s. As to the growing conservatism among seminarians, that has been my (second-hand) experience; as a lapsed ‘cradle Catholic’ (a term I only recently learned of from a friend who has just converted to Catholicism), I have been astonished by some of the comments related to me by my mother and my recently-converted friend as having issued from the mouths of younger priests in their parishes. The present Catholic Church seems quite different from the Catholic Church in which I was raised. Being something of a cynic myself, especially where organized religion is concerned, form over substance seems to be the rule of the day (but not only in the Catholic Church).
I would love to see the Pope sway along to the music of “oompah-pah-pah bands”. Achtung wild! The sharpshooters are going to have a blast.
In the 60’s, we were always taught that the Church was a bulwark; everlasting and unchanging in an otherwise roiling sea of social upheaval. I lived through/grew up in the Vatican II changeover. While it energized many Catholics, it also alienated older ones, for whom ritual was all – some for ritual’s sake and others for what the ritual represented, a rock to cling to. The fact that new seminarians (both of them) have developed hard-line views and espouse more conservative views than their older bretheren only shows that the Church, like any institution, is influenced mightily by the times in which it exists. Young people everywhere had shifted hard right some time ago. It is only the immense amount of baggage that the Church, like any monarchy, hauls around that makes it take its sea changes more slowly, as a great passenger liner – sometimes to the detriment of the passengers (just ask Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet) If I had to bet, I would say the Church is a slow moving version of Madonna, able to reinvent iytself, but glacially, so as not to scare the horses. It will be interesting to see what happens when the final older “Politburo” members of the curia die out and the “Flower Children” priests, who must now be gradually assuming the reins of power, take the Papal tiara upon their heads…