The Devout Life

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32 days to lift-off

Judith Leigh Doloughan

April 11, 1944 - June 5, 2007

If you would all be so kind, please pray for the repose of the soul of my mother, who passed away last night.

Well, it's been fun, interesting, uplifting and enlightening.

But we're done.

Good bye.

HJMW

So, it's been what, 21 years since The Voyage Home?

The distance between science fiction and present fact is getting shorter, if I'm not mistaken.

On to more important topics.

Shoes.

(Male readers may want to turn the page and go on to read New Oxford Review or LifeSite or something important like that.)

I've been home sick the last couple of days and I have learned that there is a limit even to my ability to net-surf the political blogs without my brain starting to melt.

I have discovered, however, that it is possible to treat the internet like a fashion magazine/catalogue. I have never been a big one for online shopping (no credit card: mama didn't raise no fools!) but that has all changed.

I often find it very frustrating to shop in modern shops. I can never find anything that is worth the absolutely stupefying amounts of money they are asking. Everything is held together with serging and staples. And for some reason that defies comprehension, the '70's are back in style. I'm afraid I find it very difficult to go to a mall and hide the look of disgust at all the bellbottoms and disco rubbish I see in shops. I like to tell shopgirls that "I remember the 70's and really, I can't tell you how happy I am that they are over and will never return." Platform shoes! Heavens!

Well, yesterday, between blowing my nose and whimpering to my roommates about my aches, I found that you can still buy real clothes, or more specifically, you can buy patterns for real clothes. Or you can just buy them straight up. Really really beautiful stuff. And I don't own a serger.

As always the trouble with making one's own clothes is footwear. Unless one is very ambitious, making one's own shoes is an undertaking beyond the capacities of even the most enthusiastic.

Well, have I got the solution for you. Allow me to introduce Fugawee's

and their shoes...oh! their lovely shoes! such lovely, lovely shoes...

But I'm not going to buy those ones first. I'm ordering these:

Oh my...

They're so beautiful...precioussssss...

Sssssoooooo Beauuuuuuutifulllll

An alert reader (not one of mine, someone else's alert reader) send the following as proof to the as-yet unconvinced: Things were a little different before 1969.

"We need to reaffirm the faith that first made our nation great. To man anew our spiritual frontiers..." So, how's that working out, eh?

 Appropos, a correspondent writes:

The cause of the Asteroid or the Eclipse is staring us in the face; we've just been conditioned to laugh at the mention of it.  The cause was decades of effective communist infiltration specifically aimed at destroying the West.  I have mulled on this and I really think that no further earthly explanation is necessary.  The apostate West  was desperately hungry for faith, and the faith that was available was communism, and many of its devotees worked for their whole lives to destroy their societies.  The current psychosis and delusion in all areas of race relations, for example, is simply a Soviet export. Communism was in turn caused by the bad behavior of rich people, which was in turn caused by the Reformation and the excesses of the Counter-Reformation.  Whether it's all ultimately because of the schism between the Western and Eastern Churches is a question I leave for others.

To which I was momentarily tempted to respond, "Well, duhhh," but thought it might have been misconstrued as snippy. As for Canadian Catholicism, a quick glance through the pastoral letters from any Quebec bishop since the "Quiet Revolution" will tell you everything you need to know.

But of course, Bella Dodd herself said that it was not communism that was the real moving force. Something was pushing it from behind. Conspiracies are easy and, to tell the truth, not really even all that interesting, once one drags oneself out of the Modernist Matrix and can view the world and recent history from the viewpoint of the One Holy C. and A. Faith. We are well aware of the origin and have had plenty of warning about its current manifestations.

We have become conditioned, as my reader said, to laugh at the Red Menace, so effective has been the propaganda. Think about the automatic assocations that pop into your mind when you hear the word, "McCarthyism". Ann Coulter is controversial for many reasons, but possibly mostly because she dares to say, "McCarthy was right." And he was. There really was one under every bed; the proof is in, even if the Gramsciist flunkies at CNN and Reuters don't want to tell you about it.

No amount of media spin is going to change the facts, but it is the existence of the spin itself that is, perhaps, the best evidence that McCarthy was telling the truth. One doesn't have to look up VENONA in Wiki or read Whittaker Chambers or Bella Dodd to get the gist. But is it shocking? Is it a surprise?

It shouldn't be. Catholics knew the real score; we had been warned by the Son of God to expect attacks on the Truth, on the Church, all along and they have not been lacking. We also had more specific warnings in more recent times. The infiltration of the Church has resulted in lots of disasters, but among the worst has been the erasure of recent Catholic history. In our parents' time, all Catholics knew the story of Pius IX, the secularist revolutions of 1848

In the theatre, the drama of any given plot line depends, as Aristotle told us long ago, upon the audience's pity and fear. There must be conflict, and tension and sympathy. We must associate ourselves in some way with the characters, "identify" with them, as we say in the modernist psychobabble parlance, and come to think that what is happening to them is happening to us.

We must also not know the entire plot and outcome before sitting down. There must be some question whether it is going to go well or ill for the characters. (It is why even fantasies and scientifiction programmes must be plausible, that is, not step outside the bounds of the basic rules of the universe. It is also why I never saw any reason to sit all the way through the silly lightshow in Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey: nothing is happening that makes any sense and whatever it is, isn't happening to anyone I cared about so...yawn...).

But for a Catholic, particularly for a Catholic traditionalist who has read a little history, the story really isn't all that tense. There's conflict, but the conclusion is fore-ordained. A happy ending has already been obtained, even though there is going to be plenty of suffering before the curtain falls.

That is not to diminish the grande drama of the Christian life, but it does help us identify the location of the real action. Many of us, especially bloggers, are activists and that is a good thing to be. It's important and necessary work, but really it's just a job. The most important theatre of the war is necessarily, from a dramatic standpoint, the one where the outcome is not a foregone conclusion. The world is saved, but each of us still hangs in the balance.

Peter Hitchens say:

It was a multinational state, though not a multicultural one. It was a profoundly Christian society, in which religion was part of the language, of the state and of daily life in a way quite unique in Europe. It was a hierarchical country, in which people understood authority and respected it without grovelling to it, for it was also a society of individuals, nonconformists, dissenters, troublemakers, grumblers--self-reliant, given to banding together in unions, friendly societies and clubs, believing in law, but devoted to fairness. It was an educated, literate country with a strong musical tradition. Through its great literature, its verse and its hymns it had obtained an idea of itself that was comforting and powerful. It believed in the family and the home, that great zone of private life in which the state has no business.

Wha' happen?

The mechanics of the Eclipse: The breakdown has indeed been comprehensive. The sexual and feminist revolutions have radically weakened the most fundamental human ties. Television and other forms of electronic entertainment have separated the British people from reality and from each other. Things as various as the loss of empire, the reverses of the Second World War, and the abolition of capital punishment have brought traditional authorities down to the common level. Suburbs, supermarkets and motorways have weakened local social networks. The education system has been transformed, in general philosophy, in how history and literature are taught, and in expectations and discipline. It is now designed to promote a new form of society rather than pass on the inheritance of the past.

is a good place to start if we are thinking about What It's All About.

We all know it happened. Most who have thought about it have given it names and attempted to date it, trace its philosophical ancestry. I have sometimes called it The Asteroid, in reference to the massive change of all life on earth that was supposedly brought about at the end of the age of the dinosaurs. A change so radical, so deeply rooted, so all-encompassing, that the world of our grandparents is more alien to us than the world of tenth century Germany would have been to Jane Austen.

It is this Before Time to which I am referring, half unconsciously, when I talk about a restoration of the traditional society. But we are all children of the Changed World. How can we ever internalize its lost presuppositions? I think we cannot, but we can rebuild what we are able to rebuild for those who come after us.

(As you can see, we have moved far from questions of Catholic liturgy, or even of Catholic doctrine and disciplines. This matter of Traditionalism is more broad even than that.)

"The effects of the introduction of this [Darwinian] pseudomythos into Western Culture can scarcely be overestimated. C. S. Lewis, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge, makes a strong and well-substantiated case for the contention that between the early nineteenth century and the twentieth there was a change so radical "a transmutation of culture so complete" that it far exceeded all the changes that had taken place throughout the rest of Western history. He argues that between the age of Jane Austen and the very earliest Western civilisations known was a greater kinship than between her age and ours: that they were, for all their differences, together on one side of the divide and we on the other.

"We do not have to go so far in order to uphold the view that a cultur­al change of quite enormous proportions took place during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Nevertheless (and bearing in mind that Professor Lewis was only considering the patriarchal Iron Age in the Western world and had not seen the Eclipse) this contention is worthy of serious consideration. Never before had the world seen a substantialist culture. The changes in literature, thought and all other areas of life were phenomenal. While the philosophy of substantialism had been with us since these seventeenth century, it had not penetrated the blood and bones of the culture, and then, relatively suddenly, it did. The world was quite rapid­ly transmogrified into a different place.

In many ways, the human soul suddenly found itself cast adrift ” cut off from all its metaphysical moor­ings. And the world itself was, or rather appeared to be, cut off from its moorings. The things about us, seemingly severed from their oontological roots in the Celestial Archetypes became to us but random accidents floating in an aimless, meaningless void. For the first time in history, the mass of educated people, as opposed to a handful of hard-line theoreticians prepared to think substantiaism through to the bitter end, were suddenly cast into an accidental, non-Essential cosmos.

"From this psychological earthquake flow innumerable consequences, from the neurotic iconoclasm of Cubism, Dada, atonal music and modernist poetry to the extreme political fanaticisms of the twentieth century. All reflect a world where Form and order, and consequently all sense of proportion have departed. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the "mod­ernism" of the twentieth century was by no means uniformly malevolent. The tide of battle had turned decisively in favour of substantialism, but the war was not over, and great things yet remained to be done before the Eclipse closed off all healthy possibilities."

Telegraph say Pope, after "cautious" two-year start, is planning massive reforms of the Catholic Church.

Telegraph say English Catholic gelded socialworkers bishops nervous.

Telegraph say Benedict smarter and wilier than his predecessor.

Telegraph says the Pope NiceGuy routine has all been a ruse to lull our enemies into a false sense of security.

Telegraph say, "The new Pope realised that he had enemies in the Church, and decided not to play into their hands by, for example, instigating a witch hunt against gay clergy or reinstating the Latin (Tridentine) Rite of Mass."

Telegraph say, "Benedict is a bit like Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York: he believes that by fixing every broken window, fining every litter-lout, a city can be transformed. But his task is immense. It will not be easy to drag the lazy old precinct captains out of the donut shop.

Last month, the Pope issued a magnificently well-written document, Sacramentum Carititatis, ignored by the English bishops, which contained explicit instructions about the greater use of Latin and plain chant. Soon, liberal bishops in Europe and America could find their loyalty really put to the test.

Benedict is rumoured to be on the verge of removing restrictions on the celebration of the ancient Tridentine Rite, which liberals see as elitist. For two years, Catholics have wondered what sort of papacy this will turn out to be. Now they are about to find out."

What does Telegraph know?

At the Newman Centre of the University of Rochester.

I'm shocked! What is he trying to do anyway? Turn back the clock? And why aren't there any extraordinary ministers? Is he trying to subjugate the laity into an inferior role?

He's going to get himself drummed out of the Liberal Bishops club at this rate! What's next? Banning serverettes? Firing the dancing girls?

Complaints/Compliments can be sent to:

Pastoral Center

1150 Buffalo Road

Rochester, New York 14624

Telephone: (585) 328-3210

Toll free: 1 -800-388-7177

"Until the last hippie is strangled by the entrails of the last commie..."

 I think I must actually be bad.

* ~ * ~ *

I'm home, sick. Wonderful.

Must've picked up something or got myself overtired or something. I guess long roadtrips are a game for the young. We left Toronto about 10:30 on Thursday and arrived in Washington by about 8 pm. The boys went off to the Hilton to set up our snazzy display in the conference hall and Gudrun and I went to bed early.

Up the next morning very promptly at four thirty and had to be completely on. Do the hair, put on a bit of maquillage and press the blouse, try not to fall off the high heels. Turn up the charm volume as high as it will go and we're ready.

The National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is a kind of one-day conference with speakers and things that entertains the big Catholic movers and shakers of the US. But the most fun part for me was being with the LifeSite gang in person. We all live in different places and work together through electronic media and it was the first time I had met some of them in person. Of course, it could have been awful. All five of us in the car together for ten hours and if we had discovered we couldn't stand each other... well, it's horrible to contemplate. But the happy truth was that we had a blast. Talked shop and admired the beautiful scenery of upstate New York and Pennsylvania and Maryland. Gobs o' fun.

Once at the actual thing it was really quite exciting. The President was expected so there was a thing like airport security. Very polite security guards looked through all our stuff, purses, computer cases, camera bags etc. There were sniffer dogs and special policemen and a lot of rather burly looking fellows in large suits standing about with little wires sticking out of their ears. Secret Service guys.

We hobnobbed and glad handed, chatted and took pictures. For those who follow the wars, you will recognise quite a few names. Judie Brown from American Life League was next to our table signing her books. The speakers were Scott Hahn (a crashing bore) and Richard John Neuhaus (terrific) and Archbishop Donald Wuerl (snoozed through his talk, so no opinion) but the real highlight was President Bush.

I know, I know, one isn't supposed to be impressed with celebrity or be a respecter of persons, but I have always been a Bush fan. Can't help it. I know there's lots of our American friends who are disappointed with him and have all sorts of very good reasons. But to tell the truth, I don't actually know very much about that stuff, believe it or not. I'm willing to believe the people who say he hasn't done well, on the grounds that they are just more likely than I to know.

But the man himself has always struck me as honest and good. I know that he is a real Christian believer and, as I said to one of the American Oratorians yesterday, if he's faking sincerity at least he seems to be doing it sincerely. As good as one can get with high level politicians. And he has had it harder than most.

We were seated with a couple of nice Americans and before he came in, I leaned over and asked, "So, what is the proper thing to do when the President comes in?" My table companion, a very nice ex-Methodist minister who runs an organization dedicated to teaching parenting skills to inner city poor people, knowing I was a Canadian said, "Don't worry; it's like the Queen. You just stand up."

Anyway, one does not get to the top of the heap of electoral politics without having an enormously powerful presence and as a man George W. Bush really seems to embody all that is good in the American character. There were maybe a thousand people there and everyone knew that we were just waiting for Bush. He was a few minutes late and the program was going on without him, when suddenly the announcement came: "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States," and we all stood up.

His speech was fine, he said enough of the right things but the content seemed beside the point: it was, to put it simply, thrilling to be there. He seemed to be happy to be in a room full of people who liked him.

After Bush, I was assigned to cover Richard Neuhaus' talk and I'm sooo mad! John Henry got a long interview with Dawn Eden, even though he seemed not really to know anything about who she is and why she is so cool. He doesn't have time to cover the blogs, which is more or less my department. When I saw that she was there, and not being interviewed by me, and furthermore, was looking like she was going to leave before the end of the talk I was supposed to be covering, I couldn't stand it. I left the tape recorder running and went over and just barged in on her conversation with John Henry.

"You're Dawn Eden right?"

"Yes!"

We established our secret identities by various blogger secret handshakes and I bought a copy of her book and she signed it. She is doing a promotion tour for The Thrill of the Chaste, which I know is a tiring business. I read some of the book in the car on the way home and will probably be writing about it a bit soon.

I soooo wish I had known she was there; I would have loved to have had a chance to chat properly. I'm sure there'll be a next time.

After that, things seemed to wind down and we betook ourselves to an Indian restaurant for lunch, got back to the hotel and packed up and were headed off to Pittsburgh by 2:30. (I begged to visit the Smithsonian, but no dice. I can't believe we went all the way to Washington and I didn't get to say hello to the big elephant at the Natural History Museum. I always visit the elephant when I'm in Washington. It's a thing. I hope he wasn't offended that I didn't come.)

We stayed with more LifeSite people in Pittsburgh, and learned one of the big American secrets. Pittsburgh is a great town! It's beautiful, all built on the sides of the mountains. Lots of cool bridges, tunnels, and a wonderful shopping district where I bought a lot of very expensive cheese. At least, it would have been expensive if I had bought it in Toronto. Definitely go to Pittsburgh if you can.

1) to talk about the weather?

2) to congratulate them on having defeated the crisis in the Church?

3) to condemn Nestorianism?

I would like to continue talking about the issues we have been raising and discussing here on the Apocalypse, The Eclipse, the Inversion, Tradition, and the Restoration. I see we have a number of new people coming in for a visit and due to the developing nature of the blog server I am using, I have not figured out how to make more than 20 posts appear on the site at one time and the archives only list posts by the year.

So I am going to create a sidebar file for the AEIT&R discussion posts to help people keep up with the conversation. I hope my Honourable Friends in the League and the OuterCathoblogging world will not mind if I also link to their posts on the subject. And don't forget the commboxes, since that is where most of the good stuff is.

While I'm in an adjusting sort of mood, I'll also put in a "TradCatholic Eye Candy" File to keep stuff that's nice to look at and makes you feel good. Like the Massimo Miracle Mass pics, Oratorians-in-hats, nunpics, etc.

The most recent information I have is:

We're going through another 'this could be it' warning from the hospice people, I think this is the third or fourth one, but eventually they'll be right.

She's had cancer for a long time and we've been here before and she has rallied. More updates as they come in. Many thanks to all who have remembered her in prayer.

My mother. Got an email this morning saying that she is dying. Don't know any more than that.

I'm off to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington. Say a quick one for me that I don't say anything stupid in front of anyone important or get arrested.

I see that Jeff has posted pics, making him, his lady wife and charming kids (plus a goat or two), look...

well...

normal.

A walking anachronism, he ain't.

Since we are sharing,

As we can see, no more Cyndi Lauper.

Hey, anyone remember the 80's? Life before 9-11? Before AIDS, gay rights, Islamization, before cell phones?

Before the internet?

Remember ska? Devo? David Bowie? Madness? The B52's, The Cure? Sweet Dreams made of this? Remember how much fun everything was? No one cared about anything, particularly and no one really expected anything. I know I didn't. Except for my hair. I really cared about my hair.

Between about 1984 and 1989 I Paid Attention to pop culture. (Some day I might post a photo of myself at about 21 with a haircut like the blonde guy above.)

My own version of it was blonde enormously spiked hair wrapped with various scarves. Long jangly earrings, oversize pink t-shirts and narrow-legged matching pink jeans (ankles so narrow they had to have little zippers at the hems to get your foot through) with a little pink bandanna wrapped around one ankle and a long string of pearls wrapped around the wrist. Jellies for shoes.

I am happy to say that I find this stuff cringingly embarrassing now, which is, I believe the correct reaction to one's youthful enthusiasms. Unlike the previous generation that clings to them to this day. But if we are talking about our genuine "tradition" and deciding that we are not entitled to anything not strictly from our own lifetime, or directly handed to us by our parents, then it's back to the Cyndi Lauper/Molly Ringwald look for me!

If you need help remembering, this oughta bring you back.