A Holy Day of Obligation Plea for the Common Man, and some other thoughts.

Today in the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a Holy Day of Obligation for Catholics.

Almost every weekday Catholic holy day I think about posting something like this, and then never do.  But on this occasion, I'm going to.

I don't resent the holy days, and indeed, it would be wrong to do so.  But, in this very localized post, I don't like the way that the parishes handle scheduling Masses for them, or at least I'm whining about it.

Indeed, as this one follows a Sunday, I was hoping the feast had been transferred so there would by no obligation, but it wasn't.

Catholics are required, under the pain of mortal sin, to attend a Mass for a holy day of obligation, assuming that it's possible to do so.  What I think is the case is that sometimes the Church doesn't take into account the daily lives of Catholics, at least here, to make it a bit more easier to fulfill that obligation.  Or maybe it figures that it being difficult is part of the point, I'm not sure.  

Anyhow, what the situation is, is as follows.

Like a lot of Catholics in this region, I worked on Saturday.  I took time out of my work day, however, to go to confession.  I went, and then went back to work.  The confession schedule at the Church I normally go to makes getting to confession very easy.  There's confession on Saturday mornings at 8:00 a.m. On First Saturdays there's a Mass at 9:00 a.m., although I don't attend it.  There's confession again at 1:30 p.m.  The two other parishes have confessions at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday.  One parish has confession on Sunday at 4:00 p.m. and again on Wednesday evenings, and the big across town parish has confession on Thursday evening.  So every parish is making it easy to get to confession.

It's easy to get to Sunday Mass as well.  One parish starts its vigil Mass at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday.  The other two are about 6:00 p.m., I think.  Masses resume at the big parish at 8:00 and run them through the day with two of the three concluding with Masses in the evening, with the earliest being 5:15 p.m.

So far, so good.

All the parishes have weekday Masses, which is where this begins to break down in my view.  

One parish has a morning Mass at 6:30 a.m., way early.  Another one has daily Masses at 9:00 a.m..  Not so early.  Another has one at 8:30, but today, on the holy day, that's been moved to 9:00 a.m.

I used to attend daily Mass. . . at noon. The downtown parish, which has a morning Mass at 6:30, had one at noon as well.  It was well attended in relative terms.  It was also quite short, as the two Priests who conducted the Masses (they now have one) knew that almost everyone there represented foot traffic from downtown.

Okay, so what is the problem?

This is.

I could have made the Mass last night, the vigil Mass.  I thought about it.

But I also attended Mass at 8:30 in the morning, and then headed out to look for elk on my one day off.  It's not so much that Mass twice in one day is too much, but for people who have a single day off, and that's a lot of people around here, what that effectively does is to devote the entire day to Mass.

There is something charming about that, and I think some people do that very thing.  But for a feral person like me, bookending the day that way means that pretty much the rest of the day is lost.

To add to it, while I did bet back in town in time, on this day, like a lot of Sundays in the fall and winter, that would have put me in Mass wearing tiger stripe cargo pants. . . which would look a bit odd.

It might be possible for me to make a 6:30 a.m. Mass, but it would be pretty difficult.  I'm usually still downing coffee at 6:30 a.m. and my days are really long.  If I did that, particularly because of that location, I'd be at work before 7:30 and therefore be putting in a default 12 hour day with no break, most of the time.  

And when I had school age children here at home, it was an absolute impossibility.  When we still had a dog here, which we did until quite recently, it would have been as well, as my long suffering spouse, who has the temperament of a grizzly bear if she's awakened early, and who is not Catholic, would have had to been poked awake. 

And 6:30, frankly, is absurdly early.  Is there a reason this can't be 7:30?  A 6:30 Mass will draw people, but it will tend to draw the retired elderly who don't have much else to do at that hour and who have given up sleeping, as the elderly tend to do.  I know that, as in spite of my whining here, I'm always up early.

I have, I'll note, attended that Mass when I had no other choice.  I frankly was darn near asleep, but it was interesting as I sat right behind two young women who were friends, one of whom was a trad, sort of combining a mochila with a leather skirt, and the other who was wearing street clothes.  My guess is that they were on the way to high school or community college, probably the latter.

I'll also note that when I made that 6:30 a.m. Mass it was before they were worried that I might have intestinal cancer and then thyroid cancer.  My stomach has never been the same and mornings is generally where that shows it.  Enough said.

I'm grateful that there are two parishes with evening Masses I can make, although I with the one that has 5:15 Sunday Masses still had a holy day mass at that time.  Now it does not.  It's 6:00 holy day Mass is a Spanish Mass, which is also fine, so I suppose the time was moved to accommodate Spanish speaking Catholics on their way home from work.

What I really wish, however, is that one Parish had a noon Mass.

Any Mass after 8:00 on a weekday really isn't very well scheduled to accommodate working people, or students, in this region.  When I was a student, I was nearly always at school by 8.  I'm nearly always at work by 8, if not 7.  By the end of the day, I'm nearly always beat down and just want to crawl home (a coworker who occasionally does the "let's go get a beer" nearly always gets the reply "I just want to go home).  I'll make one of the evening Masses, but I'll be pretty worn out by that time.

A noon Mass would be ideal. And not just for me, but for others like me, who work in town.  The downtown noon Mass was great, as I could and did walk to it, but I could drive to any of them.

I know, in no small part due Fr. Joseph Krupp's podcast, that Priests are grossly overburdened, so I shouldn't be complaining at all.  But I am a bit.  Masses at 8:30 or 9:00 can only be attended by people, for the most part, who aren't working, and who don't have children.  Masses at 6:30 will probably only be attended by the elderly and the other very early risers, who can accommodate getting something to eat thereafter.

For most working people these just don't work.  Noon won't work for everyone either, but it'll work for some who might otherwise have a difficult time going.

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While waiting for Confession to commence on Saturday, I was stunned to find a large crowed of people in the Church.  It soon was obvious it was a Baptism, and had just concluded.

Quite of few of the men were wearing hats, with at least one wearing a cowboy hat. This is inside the church.

I've grown used to declining clothing standards, and frankly I'm not exactly that well dressed most Sundays.  But wearing hats indoors was something I was taught to never do as a child.  In the service it was normally absolutely prohibited.  "Is your head cold?" was a question addressed in the form of a snarl by sergeants to enlisted men who forgot to remove their hats.

Now people wear hats indoors all the time.  I don't like, and I still don't.  I never see Catholics do that inside of a church, if they are men (and for that matter its pretty rare with women), so my presumption is that these were people who were largely unchurched.

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In looking for Mass times, I looked to see what was offered by the by The Ukrainian Catholic Church's mission to Casper.  I suspect they don't have a service today, but looking up their information is always a problem.  I don't know if its because its a small community and they know what they're doing, and therefore don't feel that they need to publicize it, or if its something else.

The Eastern Rite churches of the Catholic Church are growing, and it'd behoove them to at least make the dates and times of their services known, I'd think.  So far they've also been holding services in non Catholic buildings, which I also don't get.  I don't know what's up with all of this, if anything at all, but here I wish that they'd make use of one of the Catholic Churches and make it easier to find out when they're holding services.  

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It's interesting, at least to me, to note that the word holiday obviously comes from Catholic holy days.  Most of the original holidays were in fact holy days and in Catholic countries, that's still very much the case.

This is a Protestant county.

That gives rise to part of the problems noted.  The US has a hardcore Protestant Work Ethic pounded into the culture by the Puritans, who got it from Calvin.  It's part of the crappiest aspects of Americans culture.  It doesn't add a day to our lives, probably shortens them, and makes them a lot less enjoyable. 

Calvinism, from which that comes, really has threads of steel throughout the culture.  John Calvin was a fun sucker, but he believed in work in a major way.  He also believed that being well to do showed that you were probably amongst the elect.  The Puritans themselves were big on the marital act, but by the time of the English Civil War prominent Calvinist in England figured that if they were well to do, that was proof enough they were amongst the elect, and so pick up a mistress on the side was okay.  

You can see a lot of that in the culture today, particularly amongst those in power.  People don't mind the concept of telling you to work harder while the engage in serial polygamy.  It's strong in the American Civil Religion and some strains of Evangelicalism as well, where some "faith leaders' who have had morally dubious lives see nothing particularly disturbing about that.

The culture lost a lot in the Reformation. 

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Finally, this is not only holy day, it's a feast day.  The difficulty of getting to Mass will take away from the feasting aspect of it, as will the fact that in a Puritan Protestant county we're not supposed to be feasting on a Monday.  Everyone has to be at work again, bright and early in the morning.

Friday, October 23, 1925. Stray dog, beer and Billy Mitchell.

Dog: 

Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Today -100: October 23, 1925: Of invasions, discre...: War of the Stray Dog News: Greece invades Bulgaria, occupying posts and shelling villages (well, at least one village). Greece, claiming Bu...

Billy Mitchell's troubles hit the front page. 

Beer in Chicago did as well.

Delegates to a Congregationalist convention posed for a photograph.

Last edition:

Thursday, October 22, 1925: Follyology?

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Blog Mirror, Bulgaria, Greece, John Singer Sargent, Monarchy, pornography, Whatever It Is I'm against it

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.

Saturday, October 17, 1925: When two ride one horse.

Hasan al-Kharrat' rebels entered Damascus.

Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Today -100: October 17, 1925: When two ride one ho...: French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand says the Locarno Conference lays the foundations for the United States of Europe. Hurrah! In Locarn...

This item contains an interesting one one regarding modification of the wedding vows in the Episcopal service. 

"What a Protection Electric Light is" advertisement for Edison Mazda . The Saturday Evening Post, October 17, 1925.

 

Last edition:

Friday, October 16, 1925. The Locarno conference ended with several agreements in place and an atmosphere of optimism.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Diplomacy, Europe, Locarno Conference

Christian Nationalism vs Clown World | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

Very interesting interview.

Death of an Evangelical. On Charlie Kirk's Protestant American legacy

Almost (well probably all, up until now) of the religion blogs linked in here are Catholic.  There is, of course, a reason for that.  I'm a Catholic.   

Anyhow, I recently put in a blog link to a protestant (Episcopal) one as it's a really broad blog.  It does have religious content, of course, but a lot more.  Anyhow, in its religious content is this item:

Death of an Evangelical

On Charlie Kirk's Protestant American legacy

I think this may sum up Kirk's religious legacy as much as anything.

I've noted that it appears that Kirk was headed towards Catholicism, and he was.  What I didn't know is that he'd lead his wife away from it.  This is more of a problem for her soul than for his, but it would appear that she was coming back, but hasn't quite made it yet.  She likely will.  Jewish novelist Herman Wouk noted in his novel The Caine Mutiny, about the young WASP Naval officers love interests that lapsed Catholics, such as the love interest, had a way of suddenly and devoutly returning to the Faith.  I've noticed that in people I've known myself.  Catholicism is the original Christian religion, and frankly it's hard not to accept that the more you know of it, which is why entire "Bible Believing" Protestant churches will convert when they go down the road of really studying the Faith.

Anyhow, there's been a bit of an effort, an innocent one, of some Catholics to basically claim Kirk as almost a Catholic.  I don't know how far down that road he'd gotten. He was traveling it, but if we're honest about it, and we should be, his legacy, because it was cut short, will be an Evangelical Protestant one.  

And that's why his death has become such a huge deal in this political climate, where as others would likely not have been.

Reginald Pole, the last actual Archbishop of Canterbury, in case you were wondering.

There hasn't been a legitimate one since, in absolute terms.

A Protestant Dominionist Dictatorship brought to you by Project 2025 and the New Apostolic Reformation or the End of the Reformation?

When Trump was elected President, people, for the second time in a row, thought "oh he won't be so bad".  

He's been as bad as expected, and worse.

A large segment of the politically aware American demographic is wondering, nearly every day, "what on Earth is going on here" as the Trump administration does something odd day after day.¹ A second group, his core MAGA adherents, ignore the oddities and assume that a lot of the nonsense about lurking Marxist must be true, and assume that Trump is doing what needs to be done to save the Republic.

Well, Trump is demented, which explains a lot. But there's something else going on. And that something else is Christian Nationalism with a strong Protestant Dominionist focus.

Round Head flag, English Civil War.  Takinginterest01, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. There were several varieties of this standard, as there was no standardized Parliamentarian flag.

Trump himself isn't really a sharp enough tool in the shed to do what's occurring. quite frankly, and at any point in his life, he probably wouldn't be interested enough to care anyway, as long has people are praising him and he seems to be getting what he wants..  To the extent he has any deep thoughts at all, and he likely doesn't, many of his real thoughts and desire run contrary to much of what's occurring.  Trump, after all, is nothing much more than a wealthy playboy.  He likes money, women, and has bad taste. M'eh.

But Trump was savvy enough to know he needed muscle and backing to get into office and moreover back into office.  The intellectual muscle has been provided by far right populist, Protestant Evangelicals and their fellow travelers, the latter of which will live to regret ever being associated with the movement.  Trump supporting Catholics are going to come to particularly regret traveling on this bus.  

We've often said here that the United States is a Protestant country, culturally.  It's so Protestant that people who aren't Protestant often are, culturally. Right now we have a really good example of that in the form of Stephen Wright, who is Jewish by heritage and perhaps by practice, but who in views is a raging Calvinist.  It's pretty easy to find run of the mill, and even some non run of the mill, Catholics in the Trump fold who likewise culturally looked not to Rome, and not even to Luther, but to John Calvin.  

The very first religiously significant group of English colonist in North America were religious dissenters, something very much worth remembering. The Puritans were Calvinists, not members of the dominant and official religion of England, the Church of England.  Their landing in 1620 came in the context of an ongoing struggle in England over what England was to be, in terms of its faith.  The Anglicans were in control at the time the Puritans left for North American shores and they were also suppressed for their religious radicalism in their native land.  England was now solidly Protestant, sort of, with latent Catholicism seemingly having been beaten down with the peasants losing the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, but whether England would be radically Calvinist or sort of looking back at its Catholicism with the Church of England had not been determined.  That question would provide much of the background to the English Civil War in which the parliament sought to depose an Anglican king, while being lead by a Calvinist who would be declared the Lord Protector.  Ultimately, Calvinism didn't sit well with the English, and while parliament won the war, the crown would be restored and playboy king seated on the throne, who would convert to Catholicism sometimes prior to his death.

Calvinist would flee to North America upon the crown being restored.

The early English colonies in North America were frequently religiously intolerant.  They were commonly sectarian and aggressively enforced the religion of their founders.  The Puritans did not come to North America for religious freedom in the manner in which so often portrayed in grade school when I was a kid, but rather to avoid suppression under the crown and enforce their version of Christianity where they lived.  People living in Puritan colonies had mandatory worship requirements at the local Calvinist church.  It's not as if, if you lived in one, you could sit that out, or for that matter declare that you were a Catholic and would worship elsewhere.

Puritans on their way to church.

Mary Dyer, a Quaker, was executed in Massachusetts for preaching her variant of Protestantism in that colony.  

Christian Dominionist look back to the Puritans and the 1600s for their concept of what the state should be like.  Not to the 1770s to 1790s.  They may not all do so consciously, but they do.  When they say that the United States is a Protestant nation, they mean its a Puritan one.

We all know, of course, that 1st Amendment protects the freedom of worship. That text states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

When that law, and that's what it is, was added to the Constitution in 1791 the infant United States was much different that the loose group of sectarian colonies of the 1600s.  Indeed, the mother country itself was much different than the one that had fought the English Civil War.  Having endured that experience, and with its own history of sectarianism, what the drafters of the Bill of Rights wanted was to avoid there being a Church of the United States, which if it had been created, would have been a branch of the Anglican Church.  The amendment protected the right of various people to worship as they saw fit, or not at all.  Modern conservatives have decried the Courts for decades about this amendment being misinterpreted, but it isn't.  The Bill of Rights inserted religious tolerance ito the law.

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that the country remained a Christian nation.   Other religions made an early appearance, setting aside native religions, very early on, but they were a distinct minority.  A Jewish house of worship existed in New York, for example, as early as 1654.  But overall, non Christian religions were practiced to a very small degree.  And early patterns of settlement meant that the sectarian nature of the colonies continued to reflect itself into the early 1800s, and even into the mid 19th Century, although patterns if immigration began to heavily impact that, particularly the immigration of Catholics, who were largely detested by everybody else for a very long time.  Be that as it may, American culture reflected Protestant Christianity well into the 20th Century and still does today.

This began to break down, as so much in our modern culture has, in the 1960s with the Baby Boom generation. Baby Boomers, or at least many of them, outright rejected many of the basic tenants of Christianity and brought in the really loose cultural Christianity, although with a leftward tilt, that we see today.  One religion was a good as another, Christianity was basically "be nice".  The warnings that St. Paul had given in his letters were ignored. 

Things decayed.

On this site we've tracked some of that decay.  While not meaning to spark a mass debate, we've noted the erosion of hetrosexual religious standards starting in the late 1940s and which were in full bloom before the Baby Boom generation with the massive success of Playboy magazine, and the concept of the loose moral big boob dimwit and sterile "girl next store", who was always ready to have sex. By the 1960s the erosion was becoming generational.  By the 1970s it was becoming part of the culture and homosexuality began to openly emerge.  Marriage started taking a big hit by the 1980s, with divorce becoming increasingly common by the late 1970s  A culture in which divorce had been hard to obtain had evolved into one where marriage wasn't necessary at all, and ultimately into one where same sex couples could marry, the original meaning of marriage having been pretty much lost.

Enter (Evangelical) Christian Dominionism.

In 1975 Evangelicals Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright had a meeting in which they claimed to receive a divine message related to the culture.  They were shortly thereafter joined in their infant movement by Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer..  They claimed a mandate from the Devine to invade and achieve dominion over the "seven spheres" of society identified as family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government.  The New Apostolic Reformation is informed by this movement.  And this is the Evangelical wing that is active in the Trump Administration and which have heavily influenced Christian Nationalist.

Dominionist, no matter what they may say, are not democratic.  They are part of the Illiberal Democracy movement, and in the United States, they are the very core of it.  Believing that the culture has been hopelessly corrupted in the seven spheres, they do not seek to convert by example, but to seize control of the culture, force a reformation of it, and bring about a Puritan nation on the model, sort of, of the original Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Puritan flag of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

This heavily aligns with the concept of Illiberal Democracy.   You can have a democracy, the Dominionist and Illiberal Democrats hold, as long as it fully accepts the predominant cultural world outlook.  No countering that is allowed.

Now, something careful observers will note is that this movement is now all over the European world.   And some of the early Christian Nationalist are most definitely not Evangelical Christians.  R. R. Reno is a convert to Catholicism from the Episcopal Church.  Patrick Dineen is a Catholic, although he's notably moved away from the Republican Party and is now openly part of the American Solidarity Party.  Rod Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism and then converted to Orthodoxy.  He's also now moved on from the Republican Party to the American Solidarity Party.  The head of the Heritage Foundation, which is responsible for Project 2025, is Kevin Roberts, who is Catholic.  And of course, J. D. Vance is a Catholic convert.

How do we make sense of this?

Well, one way in which we can makes sense of this, although not in the case of Dineen, Reno or Dreher, is to admit that a large segment of Catholics are heavily Protestantized, although this notably excludes younger Catholics and recent converts who most definitely are not.  Gen. Jones Catholics and Gen. X Catholics were often very poorly catechized and therefore you can find quite a few who have gravitated to the far political right and who will state very Evangelical views of things which they have picked up from it, sometimes theological views that  Catholics don't hold at all.  Boomer Catholics went through the entire Spirit of Vatican Two era and are sometimes pretty beat up by it, and the younger ones experienced the Kennedy betrayal of religious adherence which caused many Catholics to follow suit.  Some Boomer Catholics were on the very liberal Church end as well to the irritation of nearly everyone else in the Catholic sphere, who are glad to see their waning influence, but who contributed to the atmosphere the same way that poorly catechized late Boomer/Jones/Gen X Catholics were, but with a certain added massive whineyness on some occasions.

Anyhow, while it happened later than the birth of the Dominionist movement, intellectual and younger Catholics have moved towards an increased conservatism for quite some time, and it is now really visible in the Church.  Overall it's a very good development, because it's so Catholic, and it reflects the view expressed in the letter to Diognetus more than any Seven Mountain tract.  But the decay in the culture, which is particularly evident from the much more informed Catholic perspective, has caused some intellectuals, notably Dineen, Reno and Dreher, to despair of the culture and, in the case of of all three, to openly maintain that liberal democracy is an experiment that has failed.²

They aren't dominionist, however. They're more in the nature of Catholic Integralist, a movement that long predates Christian Nationalism or Dominionism.

Integralism argues that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society, wherever the preponderance of Catholics within that society makes this possible.  It formed out of the chaos of the late 19th Century in Europe and was strong in traditionally Catholic Romance language speaking countries.  It never supported the concept of a state religion, but rather subordinating the state to the moral principles of Catholicism, rejecting morality from the state, and, in its European form, favoured Catholicism as the proclaimed religion of the state

Integralism really fell away from Catholic thinking as a discussed topic after World War Two for a variety of reasons, one being that modern liberal democracies quite being hostile to religion, which frankly most had been before the Second World War.  Indeed, over time, the Church increasingly disapproved of clerics being in politics, and ultimately banned it.  But in 2014, with an essay by Dinneen, it started to reappear.  It's adherents claim that its the official position of the Church, but fail to acknowledge that on many things the church's "official" position can be pretty nuanced.  Even prior to the Second World War it had always been the case that integralist took the view that imposing a Catholic view of things on a population couldn't be done on a non Catholic culture.  In more recent years the Church has really emphasized that there's a civic duty to participate in elections, which while not rejecting integralism, does demonstrate a view accepting democracies and requiring Catholics to participate in their democracies.

The revival of integralism came about the same time, however, that dominionism started to gain steam, and for same, but not identical, reasons.  Dineen's essay came out in 2014, but the following year the Supreme Court issued the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, and just as we predicted here, thing have really gone off the rails.  Justice Kennedy's decision lead directly the populist outrage and right on to Donald Trump.

Obergefell was just a bridge too far for many Americans, but the drift towards societal libertinism it expressed had been going on for a long time.  As we've noted, you can trace it back at least to 1953 and the release of Playboy, but savvy students of culture would point out that perhaps the signs were there as early as the very first movies, which took a run at pornography right from the onset until being reigned back in.  Mass communications of all types, including mass media, had a big role in this no matter how much society attempted to restrain it.  The moral shock of the First World War lead to the Roaring Twenties which foreshadowed the 1960s, interrupted only by the economic deprivation of the 1930s and the Second World War.  At any rate, the decay had set in pretty deep even by the early 1970s.

Anyhow, Integralism and Dominionism are not the same thing. Pope Francis, noting a rising connection between Integralism and Christian Nationalist, approved a publication criticizing the drift in this direction.  Catholics getting tied up in the far right Evangelical movement's goals are going to be in for a surprise when they learn that many in that community would not even regard Catholics as Christians.  The re-Puritanization of the country would not be a good thing for Catholics, who after all hold a very broad view of Christianity rather than a nationalistic view of it, and who don't share the same millennialist views of things at all.

Dominionist, for their part, would be shocked to learn that Integralist hold a lot of things that Dominionist frankly accept as abhorrent. They may be united on abortion being evil and transgenderism being contrary to the moral law, but modern American Evangelical Christians would be surprised that the mass of the Catholic Church holds divorce to be a great moral wrong and condemns easy remarriage.  They'd also be surprised to learn that Catholics condemn sex outside of marriage, including all sexual acts outside of the unitive type, to be grave moral wrongs, and that's the Catholic concern with homosexuality.  

Rod Dreher, who seems to have joined the Christian Nationalist movement, or who had joined it (I'm not sure about his current position, given that he's a member of the American Solidarity Party), early on advocated a sort of walled in approach to societal moral decay in his book The Benedict Option.  I criticized that approach here, and he seems to have retreated from what he seemed to indicate that book espoused.  Anyhow, looking at the situation overall, this is a really dangerous moment in American history, but also one from which Western societies might emerge into something new, and better.

Much of this comes in the context of the collapse of the Reformation, and it stands to accelerate it.  At the end of the day, holding Donald Trump as any sort of "Godly Man" is absurd. The direct attack on American democracy, which is occurring as we write, is highly dangerous, but probably won't succeed.  Forces on the other side have taken forever to react, but are finally starting to, including a reassessment of the really radical and downright goofball positions the left has advocated for some time.  The New Apostolic Reformation and Dominionist movement carrying the flag is causing "Christianity" to be condemned, but among thinking Christians is causing a reassessment of the Reformation churches and a massive movement away from them back into the Apostolic fold, as the theology of the Reformation churches simply can't be defended.

Roman society was reformed by Christianity, but not by operation of law, but by operation of the faithful members of the "one Catholic, Holy and Apostolic Church".  We're in the death throws of  the Reformation, of which this is all part.  If that's right, it'll be a blessing in the end.

Footnotes:

1.  In fairness, a lot of the odd things that Trump does is because he very obviously has dementia, which nobody is doing anything about.  He's really not mentally stable enough to occupy the office he's in.

2.  Evangelicals of the far right are particularly focused on transgenderism and homosexulaity, but just completely ignore almost all of the remaining actual Christian tenants on sex.  Donald Trump, whom Evangelicals have really adopted, is a serial polygamist.  White House "faith advisor" is on her third husband.  Evangelical churches have pews fill up on Sundays with people who are living in what St. Paul very clearly condemned as states of mortal sin.

Related threads:

A Protestant Country. It's history, and what it means.

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Things in the air. Some observations with varying degrees of introspection.

Cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life. Therefore the servant of God ought always to be in good spirits.

St. Philip Neri.

I've recently had the opportunity, or rather no choice, but to observe some interesting personalities at work.

The first one I'll note I've known for a very long time, and over time I've watched this person sort of crawl into themselves.  

They're mad.

I'm not really sure at what.  But I'll make an observation below that may explain it.

This person had a really rough early life, but it picked up considerable in the person's teens.  Still, coming from a "blended" family, this person sort of got the short end of the stick on a major family deal, and was quietly resentful about it.

Now the non blood "step" is seeking to address it.  The person is middle aged, and the other person is in early old age, as am I.  The middle aged person is now outright refusing to accept the fix.

What the crap?

"They could have done that years ago. . .".

Dumbest excuse for being a difficult pain in the ass ever.

Same person has something much like this shorter term.  

I've also had the occasion to observe a really angry person.  The really angry person is obviously pretty intelligent, but also obviously very uneducated.  It's a bad combination.

A lot of fairly intelligent, but uneducated, people like to use words that they don't know the meaning of, so they use them incorrectly.  This person does that repeatedly.  If you know what the words actually mean, it's really very sad.

It's also a bit sad to see how this works when the bloom is off the rose of righteous, if misguided, indignation.  When lots of people have their pitchforks out, a person in this situation is sort of a leader.  But real people, with family, jobs, children, move on.  They have to.  New things develop, olds things go by the wayside.  

Watching somebody getting into a one sided yelling match while everyone else is just bored is sad, in an odd sort of way.  You can tell they know that themselves.  The spotlight moved on.

There's a lot of Twitter Twits raging about how pastors didn't preach on Charlie Kirk last week. As I've said before, why would they?  And if they did, in a truly Christian fashion, what would they have said.

Mind you, I'm a Catholic, not a member of a do it yourself protestant church that is heavily invested in the American Civil Religion.

Truth be known, Americans always have been.

If you did preach on Kirk, the preaching probably would be awkward for all.  You could simply make it:

We see today the horror of the Western world's perversion of our God given natures, and how that warps the mind and leaves it prey to evils of all kind.  Let us keep that in mind in our society, as we address such lies as transgenderism.

But that's only one such ill that warps our nature.  How did we get there?  Allowing for mass societal infanticide, which Kirk complained about?  Yes.  But also making our reproductive organs chemical cesspools designed to destroy nature from the onset, and ignoring the injunction against divorce, warping marriage into a  big party for "fulfillment"  Those of you in the pews contracepting, or living with third or fourth "spouses", you are as much to blame for the death as transgenderism is.

So too those who now identify their religion with any political party.  Our  home is in the next world, not this one, and the Republican Party or Democratic Party are not an apostolic synod.  If you are finding your politicians to be saints, you need to sit alone and pray for yourself.

Bear in mind also that our time will come like a thief in the night.   We cannot rely on a future to repent, as we may not have that future.  The sins we commit for any reason, including with our words, may find themselves still on our souls.  Let us resolve to be right with God today.

Probably everyone would be mad

Which gets me to this.

Charlie Kirk, I'll fully accept, was Christian.  He said some very Christian things, and some very non Christian things.  He was a provocateur, and that's a dangerous thing for a person's soul.

As for the other two people mentioned here, I don't know about one, but I do know about the other, that being the first one.  That person is a Christian but more or less a lazy American sort of Christian. They believe in God, have a grasp of Christ, and figure if you don't steal or shoot people, you are probably good with God and they don't want to know much more than that.

That describes most Americans, quite frankly.

That hasn't always been the case, however.

Those Christians who are all upset about Kirk not being mentioned from the pulpit are too heavily invested in the American Civil Religion.  When the next world arrives for them, and it will soon, and they're not recognized, saying "I left my church as there was no preaching about Kirk" won't make up for not feeding the poor, letting people die in droves in Gaza, and the like.  Presenting your "I'm a real read blooded (white) American card" isn't going to get you a free pass.

And, additionally, the pastors whom they want to preach on Kirk probably ought to instead preach instead on greed, divorce, shacking up, and other stuff that the American Civil Religion is pretty okay with.

And, also, here's something else.

I saw a Twitter Twit who was outraged as a transgendered person murdered his parents in Utah awhile back, and the news, he thought, had not paid any attention to it.

Well, I'm sure they did in Utah, but that's not a national news story.  Part of our contemporary problems in this country are that we treat local stories as if they're of global importance, while ignoring global stories because they don't pertain to us.

Christians, mostly Catholics, are being murdered in droves in Africa. That is important. Why don't we hear about that?

Well, they're black, African, and Catholic.  Ho hum. . . 

But there's more to this, Outraged Twitter Twits.  Charlie Kirk was murdered last week.  Most Americans no longer care one bit.

That may be uncomfortable for those who are a member of the populist Sturmabteilung, but it's the truth.  Charlie Kirk isn't going to become their Horst Wessel as most Americans just don't care.  They're desensitized to killing, which is actually at a record low in any event, and by now most average Americans are sick of the right and the left and worried about groceries, while starting to watch the national opiate, football.  Sydney Sweeney's cleavage falling out of her jeans jacket will have longer legs than this.

We aren't going to have a civil war. There's not going to be a lot more violence.  And they'll be disappointed.

Speaking of crawling into one's self (you'll have to go back up to the top for the reference), I've seen that happening to somebody I know, whose husband I know better.

And frankly I sort of see this in a fair amount with younger Boomer and older Gen X women . . . women who bought the lie that careers will make them happy.

Frequently it plays out with the same script.  Well educated middle class women of this vintage married well educated men.  The men of the same generation were still part of the "you need to get a good job to support your family" culture, as we've seen before, but the women were part of the "a career will make you happy".  What seems to have happened to a lot of them is that work didn't make them happy, no surprise, and at some point many, but not all, dropped out of it.

Kids grew up and moved on, if they had kids at all.  Now they're getting to what would normally be retirement years and they feel cheated and lost.

The story for a lot of men isn't much different.  I see it with professional men all the time.  Earlier this week a lawyer in his 70s told me gleefully how he loves his job.  Oh horseshit.  There's just nothing left.  The thing is, however, for women who bought off on this, there's really nothing left.  Quite a few of them, however, are in pretty good economic situations due to a husband that worked for decades to support everyone, and who has kept on.

Anyhow, in this case, the spouse, probably of over 30 years, packed up and left basically with no warning.

She'd been seeing a counsellor, a profession that does so much damage to people it isn't funny. The counsellor had told her to work on herself, which is pretty close to instructing somebody to be a narcissist.  She moved out, moved away, and is camping with her adult daughters.  They're getting a "grey divorce".  

The husband, whom in my view should have retired some years ago.  There's some fault there.  A lot of times when I see some old male lawyer keeping on keeping on, I really wonder what his relationship is at home.

All in all, I suspect, he worked too much, she got lonely, and wondered why life hadn't turned out like Cosmopolitan promised it was supposed to.  

Well, it was never going to.

I'd also note that he was raised Catholic, while she was not, but he fits into the Catholic satellite category. That is, the lessons of the faith were just too inconvenient for him to apply.  He, and his siblings, remain cultural Catholics, basically, but not practicing ones.  It clearly tortures him as he knows better.  Probably not that much should have been expected out of her, however, as she was never Catholic.

And so you have a couple living the 1970s version of the American Dream, which turns out to be a pretty shallow dream at that.  Same with the folks mentioned above.

And the shallowness of that dream explains a lot about post Boomer generations abandoning it and returning to more foundational existential beliefs.

The State bar convention is going on.  I never go it in person.  I don't have the time, and I'm such an introvert that I don't want to go to the dinners and the like just on the random chance one of my lawyer friends might be there, but now you can attend some of it electronically.  I did that yesterday as I needed the CLE credits. 

I wish I hadn't.

The first CLE I attended I picked up as I needed the ethics credit.  It was an hour of "mindfulness" which is usually a bunch of bullshit suggestions on how to deal with stress that you really can't implement in the real world.  That's what it turned out to be, in part, but it descended into "this job really sucks" for an hour.  All of the panelists, including a judge and a justice, had to have counselling at some point in their careers for work stress.

I hope some students were in the audience to see that.  If even Wyoming Supreme Court justices say the practice is so bad they need psychological help to endure it, well that's pretty bad.

The last CLE of the day was the legislative panel.  Usually I think of that as being new laws that are coming down the pipeline, which it partially was, but the first part started off as a plea from a lawyer/legislator for lawyers to run for office, noting how in Wyoming that's declined enormously.  That turned into an outright dumping on the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which needs to be dumped on.  The last part of that session, however, dealt with the ongoing massive decline in civil practitioners putting in for judgeships.  They just aren't doing it.  They were urged to do it.

As noted, I wasn't there to ask a question, but if I had been, I'd have asked why should they, when Governor's have agendas and the current Governor is only really interested in appointing prosecutors.  It's extremely obvious.  The one before that would almost always pick a woman, if possible, and was very open about that.  If you are a male civil practitioner, just forget it.

Justice Kautz, who is now the current AG, noted how being a judge, and particularly a justice, was a great job for a law nerd.  The last panelist, a current Fed defender who was a private lawyer with a very wide practice, noted how he had put in many times and urged people to do so, even though it was disappointing if you did not make it.

It's disappointing for sure.

For me, hearing Justice Kautz talk was outright heartbreaking, as what he expressed made up the very reasons I wanted to be a judge and replied repeatedly, with no success.  I never even got an interview, even though at one point I was being urged by judges and members of the judicial nominating committee to apply.  I'm frankly bitter about it even while knowing that I should not be.  It's hard not to come to the conclusion that the system has become a bit of a fraud, frankly, particularly now that the committee has been rounded out to include non lawyers in it.  I've felt for some time that the Governor's office had an influence on who was picked, even though I have no inside knowledge on that sort of thing.  It's just a feeling, and not a good one.  When judges are picked which leave almost all the practitioners wondering what happened, it's not a good thing.

It leads to me listening to everything Justice Kautz said about the reasons he wanted to be a judge, and myself realizing I once felt those things, but I no longer do.

Back on the stress part of this, a lawyer I've known for a long time, but who is quite a bit younger than me, recently took a really neat vacation.  He came back to the office and announced he's leaving the law.  I was so surprised I called him.  He revealed that being on vacation had taught him he didn't have to live a miserable life.