Today is Easter for those on the Old Calendar.
Do the right thing.
Showing posts with label Orthodox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orthodox. Show all posts
Sunday, April 12, 2026
Friday, April 10, 2026
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
Happy Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, Mardi Gras, Carnival, Fastnachtsdienstag.
Holy Ghost in Denver. While you cannot see it in this photograph, opposite this wall is a row of confessionals. Confessions are heard during Mass.
Shrove Tuesday.
Shrove derives from "shrive", which means to give absolution. So, while I don't know how many parishes offer confession the day prior to Ash Wednesday, that's what it refers to.
It's also called Shrovetide, the evening before the Shrove, which makes more sense, really, reflecting the penitential nature of Lent.
Pancake Day.
It's also Pancake Day in England and strongly English countries, for the custom of eating pancakes on this day. Pancakes use a fair amount of fat in them and this was part of the Lenten practice of abstaining from fat during Lent. It's also therefore one of the odd little ways where England's history as a once deeply Catholic nation is retained.
In Ireland the day is known as Máirt Inide, from the Latin initium (Jejūniī), "beginning of Lent". It's still associated heavily with pancakes. That's sort of indicative of Ireland's history of being heavily impacted by the English.
Of some interest here, potentially, the Anglican Church retains confession, but not the requirement that its members annual confess, like Catholics have. Catholicism is now outstripping Anglicanism in actual practice in the UK. It's often noted that Catholicism has declined in Ireland, a prediction that the Church made at the time of the Anglo Irish War when it did not want to become involved in the Irish government and was forced to against its will, but the Irish remain very heavily Catholic.
Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1937.
Mardi Gras.
Of course, it's also Mardi Gras, or "Fat Tuesday", from the custom at one time of trying to use up all the fats in the house on this day, in French speaking countries. Contrary to American belief, Mardi Gras is in fact not unique to New Orleans but occurs everywhere that French speaking people are located.
Knights of Revelry parade down Royal Street in Mobile during the 2010 Mardi Gras season, By Carol M. Highsmith - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID highsm.05396.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11990882
American Mardi Gras, or rather American New Orleans Mardi Gras, has become heavily Americanized which means, like all American holidays, it's associated with booze. It is always a big party wherever it occurs, but the weird boozy topless event is an American thing, not a real French thing or culturally French.
Carnival in Rome, 1650.
Carnival and Fastnachtsdienstag
Carnival, from the Medieval Latin carne vale, "farewell meat", is the same holiday in other Romance Language speaking countries. The same sort of linguistic intent is found in the German name for the day, Fastnachtsdienstag. The latter reflects the fact that European Lutherans observe Lent, but in the same fashion as the Anglicans. It's not associated with the same Canon Law that it is with Catholics, but the observance remains.
We've actually touched on all of this, fwiw, before.
All of these days reflected a period when the Lenten fast was much more severe than it currently is. People were using up fats as they wouldn't keep for the forty days of Lent. Now, in the Latin Rite, there's no restriction on using fats at all, the obligation to fast is just on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, when the obligation to abstain from meat also exist, during Lent. All the Friday's of Lent are meatless for Catholics.
In the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church the fasting rules are much more strict. Starting on Pure Monday, yesterday, As Catholic News Service explains it:
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — In the eyes of Latin-rite Catholics, the extent of Eastern Catholics’ Lenten fasting and abstinence is perceived as particularly strict.
The traditional Byzantine fast for Great Lent includes one meal a day from Monday to Friday, and abstinence from all animal products, including meat, fish with backbones, dairy products and eggs, as well as oil and wine for the entire period of Lent. Shellfish are permitted.
Fasting and abstinence are maintained on Saturdays, Sundays and on the eve of special feast days, although loosened to permit the use of oil and wine. On important feast days, such as the Annunciation and Palm Sunday, fish may be eaten.
“Oil and wine were restricted because, in the past, they were stored in animal skin,” explained Mother Theodora, the “hegumena” or abbess of the Byzantine Catholic Christ the Bridegroom Monastery in Burton, Ohio. “Though this is no longer the case, the tradition continues.”
There are varying degrees of fasting, from stricter to more lenient, depending on one’s work and state of health. Monks and nuns will often submit to the most strict fasting.
Holy Week is not considered part of Great Lent but “an additional, more intense time of fasting and prayer,” said Mother Theodora.
However, Eastern Catholics don’t plunge into fasting and abstinence cold turkey. “Meatfare” and “Cheesefare” weeks help them enter into the Great Fast gradually. By Meatfare Sunday, one week before the start of Lent, Eastern Catholics will have emptied their refrigerators and pantries of meat products. By Cheesefare Sunday, they will have cleared out all of their egg and dairy products, ready to enter into the Great Fast that evening, after Forgiveness Vespers.
In an effort to keep Eastern Christians faithful, yet creative, in the kitchen, cookbooks with fast-friendly recipes have been published.
By Laura Ieraci, Catholic News Service. The rules for the Eastern Orthodox are similar, although I'm never certain of the degree to which the Orthodox are required to observe them. Orthodox churches using the "Old Calendar" start Lent this year on February 23.
With all this, Catholics in the US enter Annual Question Time and the time of slightly difficult observances, the latter taking note of the fact that unlike some past times in the country, we're not likely to get killed or anything, so its nothing like it used to be. Rather, as the US is not only heavily Protestant, but Puritan, Lenten practices baffle non Catholics.
Puritans disapproved of pretty much everything, including observing Christmas as a special day, so Lent was way beyond the Pale for them. English culture, on the other hand, loved sports, so when the English dumped the Calvinist, which they did as soon as they could, their love of sports came roaring back. American culture has been impacted by English culture in every way, so Americans love sports but don't understand the Apostolic Faiths very well, in many instances, and in fact sometimes fail to realize that their own branches of Christianity are fairly recent innovations not reflecting the original Apostolic faith.
So for Lent, including its beginning, and its end in Holy Week, Americans just don't really have any observations, other than using Mardi Gras, like St. Patrick's Day, as an excuse to drink. They way it shows up for Catholics, however, is that things that are fairly easy to observe in Catholic countries, like Holy Week or Ash Wednesday, are a lot tougher to do in the US, and of course, you'll be getting a lot of questions if you are Catholic about "why do you do that" and "why can't you . . .".
Sunday, October 19, 2025
How Super Bowl LX should be informing American Catholics why the populist far right will betray them as soon as it gets a chance.
Last weekend we ran Catholic Ross Douthat's interview with Doug Wilson. In his interview Douthat kept trying to pin Wilson down on whether there was a place for Catholics in Wilson's vision of a Calvinist theocratic United States. Wilson came down on yes, but he hedged his bets a fair amount.
The real answer to whether members of the New Apostolic Reformation feel that was has been provided by Super Bowl LX.
I don't like football at all. I won't be watching the halftime game which I always find to be much like professional football itself, grossly overblown. But it does provide a weathervane to the culture. The music associated with professional football shows very much who football feels to be the up and coming audience.
The performer chosen was "Bad Bunny".
Bad Bunny is one Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. He was born in Puerto Rico. He sings in Spanish.
Well the late Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA is having none of it. It's going to offer its own “All American Halftime Show”.
Oscasio is an American. Puerto Ricans have been since March 2, 1917. They're fully American, and frankly, Puerto Rico ought to be granted statehood, there being absolutely no good reason for it not being a U.S. State at this point. And, Oscasio is a Christian. He's a Catholic, whose mother is apparently very devout.
Here's the thing. Turning Point USA is exhibiting a populist far right Freudian Slip. Some members of the organization are just too ignorant to know either of these points, but some know them and don't believe that Puerto Ricans are "real" Americans, or that Catholics are Christians.
The last point is particularly ironic. Lots in the Evangelical far right like to say they're "Bible Believing" Christians, by which they mean sola scriptura Christians. Sola Scriptura is itself Biblically indefensible as St. Paul informed the Thessalonians that they should stand firm in the "traditions" that they had been brought, indicating that there were in fact traditions already. We know now what those traditions were, as Christians had been writing many of them down in other texts that didn't end up in the Bible almost from the very beginning. But more ironic yet is this, the Bible is a Catholic book.
This isn't a matter for debate. It just is. We know how the books of the Bible came about, who wrote them, and what they believed. There was, at the time, just one "holy, catholic and apostolic church", and that was the Catholic Church. You can add the Orthodox churches to this list today as they directly descend from it. But in a strict sense, members of various Evangelical churches don't fit into this category. Indeed, fear of not fitting into it by various Protestant groups has lead some of them to claim membership all along, such as various branches of the Lutheran, Anglican and Methodist churches. They don't dispute that the Catholics and Orthodox are direct descendants of the original Catholic Church, and indeed, they agree that the Catholic Church is the uninterrupted Christian church that Christ founded. Evangelical churches that don't hold that view are frankly ignorant on this point.
But they are persistent in their ignorance. So much so, that many of them don't believe that the original Christians, the Catholics, are Christians at all.
We put the Bible together, and the New Testament was written by inspired Catholic authors, but they ignore that.
As I've noted before, and as Wilson conceded, this is a Protestant nation and moreover Wilson was also right that it was founded as a Calvinist one. That's a major reason that for much of this country's history the Irish, Italians, and other Catholics were detested and even regarded as a separate race. It's part of why Hispanics are regarded as a separate race today. Stripped of his fishing tackle piercings, Bad Bunny could look like a Spanish Conquistador. . . not a "Pilgrim".
Something about the election of Barrack Obama really brought out latent racism in this country. The Obergefell decision really unleashed a deep dormant conservatism in the population, but one that followed the American Civil Religion rather than real Christianity. The New Apostolic Reformation took advantage of that and has been advancing its cause under the radar, until recently, when it started doing it more openly, although still not so openly that the fact that we're in the midst of a Christian Nationalist coup right now is appreciated. Quite a few conservative Catholics, not really well schooled in what far right Evangelical Christians believe, or just badly catechized themselves, have joyously gone along with it, as it seems to address, and to some degree if fact addresses, the cultural rot that has set in, in the Western world.
But it will catch up with us.
Welcome back to the Ghetto.
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Thursday, September 17, 1925. Establishment of the Polish Orthodox Church.
The Eastern Orthodox Church granted autocephaly to the Polish Orthodox Church. The church has approximately 500,000 members today, of which 156,000 live in Poland.
Metropolitan Dionysius, head of the Polish Orthodox Church in 1925. He'd be removed due to Communist pressure in 1948.
The Escadrille Cherifienne, a French Foreign Legion unit composed of Americans, bombarded the city of Chefchaouen, considered a holy shrine of the Jebala people.
Syrian rebels attack Al-Musayfirah. The attack was at first successful but deployment of the French Air Force caused the rebels to withdraw.
Last edition:
Wednesday, September 16, 1925. B. B. King born.
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Monday, September 14, 1925. Mitchell's comments draw a rebuke. Rif siege at Tétouan broken.
Billy Mitchell was in trouble:
Mitchell was frustrated about the post World War One direction of airpower, and had lambasted the Navy on September 5 (which I missed). At that time, he stated; "Brave airmen are being sent to their deaths by armchair admirals who don't care about air safety."
Yikes.
He was referring to the Shenandoah Incident and the recent Navy long distance flight to Hawaii. I didn't really cover either. I should have, as this was a big event.
The Spanish broke the siege at Tétouan.
The Byzantine cross appeared in the sky over Athens during an old calendar service of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Exaltation of the All-Honourable and Life-giving Cross of our Savior. The Orthodox Church was being repressed by the Greek government at the time.
Last edition:
Saturday, September 15, 1925.
Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Tuesday, September 9, 1975. Welcome Back Kotter.
Albania issued a decree requiring minorities to adopt names reflecting a Muslim origin, which of course they did not have. It impacted Catholic and Orthodox minorities.
Welcome Back Kotter premiered. Set in a gritty high school class in Brooklyn, it was one of the best television series of the 1970s. It ran until 1979, and debuted John Travolta.
Last edition:
Monday, September 8, 1975. Leonard Matlovich on Time and the UFW.
Labels: 1970s, 1975, 1980s, 1988, AIDs, homosexuality, Mental Health, Military, Personalities, U.S. Air Force, Unions, Vietnam War
Saturday, July 12, 2025
Monday, July 13, 1925. Pregnant lady.
Archbishop Vasileios Georgiadis was elected by his peers as the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
A figurine of a pregnant woman was unearthed in Czechoslovakia that is believed to be 31,000 years old, one of the oldest examples of the same.
Walt Disney married Lillian Bounds in Idaho.
Last edition:
Saturday, July 11, 1925. Spain and Morocco agree to cooperate.
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Thursday, May 20, 325. The opening of the Council of Nicea.
Well, at least probably.
It seems fairly clear that the Council convened on this day, and that Emperor Constantine arrived to observe, not to participate, fourteen days later. He had sought the council, however, given the Arian Heresy, which had an extremely widespread following in the Church.
The president of the council seems to have been Hosius of Cordova, assisted by the pope’s legates, Victor and Vincentius.
The creed:
I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Wednesday, January 1, 2025
New Years Day. Looking at 2024 through the front of the Church doors.
I noted in our post New Year's Resolutions for Other People, sort of that we weren't going to post resolutions, but we did have some comments. That's true here as well.
New Years Day is the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God, a Catholic holy day of obligation. Like a lot of Catholics, I went to Mass last night.
I didn't go last night as I intended to go whoop it up on the town.1 I've never been big on celebrating "New Years" anyhow, although we did last night with family and sort of extended family, as we have a at this point another person in the second half of their twenties whose pretty much incorporated into the family, but not officially or by blood. Anyhow, it was pretty low key and I was in bed before midnight. I think last year I made it to midnight to observe the fireworks some neighbors set off. This year I did not. I'm amazed that the same people, who really like fireworks, set them off again, as we've had hurricane force winds for the past day or so.
Anyhow, the reason I'm posting this comment is due to a particularly troublesome year for American Christianity in 2024.
American Protestants don't like to believe it, but the United States is and has always been a Protestant Country. It's so Protestant, that the Protestants can't recognize that, and even people who claim to have no religion at all are pretty Protestant. Even a lot of Catholics are pretty Protestantized and I've known some fairly secular Jews who were fairly Protestant.
Protestantism is a pretty big tent, with there being all sorts of tables within it, and with some of the tables really not liking others. For much of the country's history the Episcopal Church was the dominant Protestant Church, which made a lot of sense. The Episcopal Church is, of course, part of the Anglican Communion and the English descent is dominant in American ancestry. Supposedly this is 26% of the population now, but that figure is probably inaccurate by at least half simply because people whose ancestry stretches back away have simply forgotten it and is not celebrated the way other ancestral inheritance is. I'm of overwhelming Irish ancestry but even I have a little English ancestry of the Anglo Norman variety, brough in through Ireland.
Anyhow, as in the 18th Century most residents of British North America were from Great Britain, most were members of the Church of England, outside of Canada, where of course they were French and Catholic.
The Episcopal Church has never been in the only Protestant Church in what is now the US, however. Right from the beginning there were bodies of dissenters from the established church who came here to be able to practice their faith without being molested for it. That doesn't mean they were keen on others practicing their faiths, and they often didn't tolerate other Protestants at all. But they were there, and that gave rise to a sort of rough and ready loosely organized Protestantism in some regions, particularly the American South. These groups really prospered following the American Civil War as they hadn't gotten behind the war the way Southern Episcopalians had. These groups really spread across the nation following the 1970s. Looking back, its amazing to realize that growing up I knew exactly one Baptist kid (he's now a Lutheran) and the three big Protestant churches in this category didn't exist here. Wyoming is the least religious state in the US, but at that time almost all the Protestants I knew were Lutheran or Episcopalian. I knew a handful of Methodists and of course Mormons, but Baptists or Assemblies of God? Nope.
So what's this have to do with 2024?
The Election of 2024 saw a really strong association of Evangelical Christianity, which is very much an American thing, and the vote. It's distinctly different than anything that's occurred before.
Evangelical Christianity has been nationally significant in elections since at least 1950 or so, but it wasn't until 2024 that the "Christian vote" meant the Evangelical vote outside of the American South. Because they are fractured, they are not the largest Christian body in the country. Oddly enough, while 67% of the population self identifies as Christian, and something like 44% identify as Protestant, Catholics are the largest single denomination.
The back story to this however is that the Reformation, which started in 1517, is ending.
The Reformation was able to start in the first place due to a large element of ignorance. This can't be said of Luther, who wasn't ignorant, but who was opinionated and wrong. Luther opened the door, however, to people like Calvin, Zwingli and Knox who were fundamentally ignorant in certain ways.
The spread of cheap printing and ultimately the Internet makes ignorance on some things much more difficult to retain. For centuries bodies of Protestant Christians held to sola scriptura and a belief that they were like the first Christians, even though there's always been Christian texts dating back to shortly after Christ's crucifixion.2 Now, all of a sudden, anybody can read them. This has in fact caused a pronounced migration of really serious sola scriptura Christians to the Apostolic Churches, as well as a migration by serious "mainline" Protestants. Some bodies at this point, like very conservative Anglicans and Lutherans, are mostly Protestant out of pure obstinance.
The ultimate irony of all of this is that the mainline Protestant churches have collapsed in many places. Part of this is due to the massive increase in wealth in the western world which has hurt religion in general, but part is also because it gets to be tough to explain why you are a member of one of these churches if you can't explain a really solid reason to be, as opposed being in an Apostolic church.
At the same time, and not too surprisingly, similar forces have been operating in the Evangelical world in the US. As already noted, quite a few serious Evangelicals are now serious Catholics or Orthodox. Others, however, have retreated into a deep American Evangelicalism that is resistant to looking at the early Church, even though they are aware of it. This is rooted, in no small part, to the go it alone history of these bodies.
At the same time that this has occurred, the spread of the American Civil Religion has grown which sort of holds that everyone is going to Heaven as long as they aren't bad. Serious Catholics and Orthodox can't accommodate themselves to that but Evangelicals have attempted to, while at the same time realizing it really doesn't make sense.
Obergefell, as we noted, was the watershed moment. At that point, Christians of all types were faced with realizing that the US had really strayed far from observing its Christian origins, or at least the Christian faith, with there being all sorts of different reactions to it. In Catholic Churches there was the realization that we really hadn't become as American as we thought, and we weren't going to. Trads sprang up partially in reaction with now every Church having its contingent of Mantilla Girls giving an obstinate cultural no.
In Evangelical circles it helped fuel a militant conservatism that expresses its most radical nature in the New Apostolic Reformation which believes that we're on the cusp of a new Apostolic age, which will be Protestant in nature, and more transformational than any prior Great Awakening. They believe that the United States is charged with a Devine mission and some have concluded, as unlikely as it would seem from the outside, that Donald Trump is an improbable Cyrus the Great who will bring this about.
The support of Southern Episcopalians for the Southern cause in the Civil War damaged in the South to such an extent that the non mainline churches, like the Southern Baptist, came up as a major force after the war. The Baptists and Protestant itinerant preachers had warned during the war that wickedness was going to bring ruin. It seemed that their warnings were proven by the results of the war. Episcopal linking to a wicked cause diminished their credibility.
Donald Trump is not Cyrus the Great. Mike Johnson is not standing in the shoes of Moses. This will all have a bad end. Or it might. As noted, the Reformation is dying and in some ways this is the last stand of it. Those linking their Christianity to a man like Donald Trump are pinning their hopes, and their faith, on a weak reed. The question is what happens when it breaks and how much damage has been done, including to Christianity in general, in the meantime.
Moreover, the question also exists if you can claim to bear a Christian standard while not observing parts of the faith that are established but uncomfortable, let alone contrary to what is now so easy to determine not to be part of the early faith. Can those who clearly don't live a Christian life really be the shield wall against decay?
Footnotes:
1. As with my observation on Christmas in The Law and Christmas, being a Catholic puts you in a strange position in regard to the secular world, or rather the larger American culture. Lots of people start celebrating New Years pretty darned early on New Years Even, which means as an employer you start to get questions about whether we're closing at noon and the like, pretty early on. And also, while in the popular imagination people hit the bars at night, quite a few people have celebrator drinks here and there by late morning in reality. If your concern is getting to a vigil Mass soon after work, you aren't one of those people. And if you are one of the people hitting Mass in the morning, you aren't having a late night.
2. Sola scriptura never made sense and is obviously incorrect in that the New Testament itself mentions traditions outside of the written text. But the Bible, moreover, which is the scripture that "Bible Believing" Christian's look to is the version that was set out by the Catholic Church as the Canon of Scripture. Nowhere in the Bible does is there a Devine instruction as to what books would be included in the Bible.
Indeed, this position is further weakened in that Luther put some books he personally didn't like in an appendix, and later Protestants removed them. That wasn't Biblical. Moreover, the Eastern Orthodox Bible contains the Prayer of Manaseh, I Esdras, II Esdras, III Maccabees, IV Maccabees, Odes, and Psalm 151 and the Orthodox Tewahedo biblical canon some pre Christian Jewish books the others do not. While Catholics can explain why the books they include in their canon and can explain the relationship to the other Bibles, Protestant "Bible Believing" Christians flat out cannot. All of the texts in the Orthodox Bibles are genuine ancient texts without dispute. Moreover, there are early Christian writings which are genuine that are wholly omitted from any Bible. The Sola Scriptura position just accepts the King James version of the Bible on the basis that it must be the canon on a pure matter of faith, which is not relying on scripture alone.
Related thread:
Virgin Mary Mural in Salt Lake City
Sunday, December 22, 2024
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Wednesday, December 17, 1924. An election and a promise.
Constantine VI, the Metropolitan of Derkoi, was elected as the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
Prior to his election, Turkey had warned that they regarded him as subject to deportation as he was an immigrant to what was now Turkey.
All but one of the owners of the teams in the American League presented a statement to Commissioner Landis that actions would be taken to bring League President Ban Johnson's behavior to heel. He had been criticizing Landis, but ceased to do so.
Last edition:
Tuesday, December 16, 1924. Looking back.
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Thursday, November 13, 1924. Polish Orthodox Church.
The Polish Orthodox Church was created as an autocephalous Orthodox Church by the signing of the Patriarchal and Synodal Tomos by Patriarch Gregory VII of Constantinople, recognizing the situation that had been created by the Russian Revolution and Poland's independence.
Mussolini introduced a bill to grant women the franchise in Italy.
Last edition
Thursday, November 12, 1914. Wanted horses.
Sunday, November 3, 2024
Sunday Morning Scene, part Pars Duo: Please, stop.
Next year with be a Jubilee Year in the Catholic Church. For some reason, the Church felt it needed a mascot for this.
This is what it came up with:
How does a 2,000 year old institution in possession of much of the Western World's great art, come up with something so juvenile, and indeed something that looks like its out of Pokemon?
In announcing this, Archbishop Rino Fisichella stated that the cartoon imagine, titled "Luce" (light in Italian) was inspired by the Church's "to live even within the pop culture so beloved by our youth." This presents the classic problem of the elderly, now the Baby Boomers, recalling the desires of "youth" in terms of when they were fairly youthful themselves. Indeed, in my mind it brings to mind attending the "Teen Life Mass", or whatever it was called, that used to be held on Sunday evenings. I generally tried to avoid it, but when I did, you'd find a guitar band with bongos for the music, lead by a Boomer, and a bunch of aged Boomers who would sway and whatnot to the music.
In contrast, if you hit some Masses with a lot of young people, you'd find young women, some down in their teens, wearing mantillas.
I'm pretty convinced that in 2024, with ready access to the Internet, and all the news that's on it, combined with all the sewage that's washed up with it, such as horrific political arguments, the revival of racism, far right and far left extremist, Hamas murder and rape of young people in Israel, an aged geezer in the Kremlin trying to revive the Soviet Union, and young women prostituting themselves on TikTok, a childish cartoon from the 1980s isn't really going to win hearts and minds. Indeed, its even worse than the Comic Sans Serif font and 1970s vintage art that was officially used for the Synod on Synodality. And it gives emotional support to the Orthodox who are looking for reasons not to come back into the Church, even if superficially. This sure doesn't look like something Saints Cyril and Methodius would have passed out.
I've long held, and have stated it here, that Western culture had experienced Post World War Two materialism and found it lacking, and that the generations that have come up in the wake of the Baby Boomers are struggling to through the cultural innovations of the 1960s and 1970s off. We don't believe that "Greed is good" or that the Sexual Revolution was freeing. The problem is that so much was destroyed that recovering is hard, particularly when the aged hand remains on the tiller. Often that aged hand reaches out with what it thinks the young want, not grasping what that is, and actually making things worse.
This cartoon is really bad. Somebody should look around the Vatican and see if something serious might be available. The young Catholics in blue jeans, the mantilla girls, and myself, will all be thankful.
Postscript
I'm hating this image slightly less after some Twitter person made some interesting riffs off of it, but I still don't like it.
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Sunday October 8, 1724. A schism and a reunion.
Upset by the consecration of Cyril VI Tanas as Patriarch of Antioch, Orthodox Patriarch Jeremias III of Constantinople declared Cyril's election to be invalid, excommunicated him, and appointed Sylvester of Antioch.
The division was over Cyril's desire to reunited the Orthodox Church with Rome. Jeremias' action caused a schism which ultimately lead to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church's uniting with Rome, a branch of Catholicism that has over 1,500,000 members today.
Last edition:
Good Friday, April 7, 1724. Bach's St. John's Passion played for the first time.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)