A helpful motto for the spiritual life.

"If it doesn't look or smell like Shineola, don't apply it to your shoes."

Res ipsa loquitur.

Thanks to John Carriere for the find.

All at sea.

[Update: Important link added for context. Perhaps it will help you get my perspective. Maybe, maybe not. But still.]

I recognize that the blog has become painfully self-absorbed, and understand fully if you are sick and tired of it. I sympathize, really. I'd rather be posting about the Byzantine Empire myself. Or the latest Steve Stirling book.

Which I've finished, by the way, and is really well done. The flash-forward ending is a transitional classic, he says obliquely. Later, though.

Yeah, I'm sick and tired of me, and I have to imagine God is, too. Frankly, this has become my way of dealing with the worst case of spiritual chaos I've had since the revelations of the abuse crisis started hitting with wave-like repetition a few years back. Some days, I feel shoved halfway out the door. Today, it's three-quarters.

I think I have isolated the problem, and it involves certitudes. Not mine, obviously. I don't have much in the certainty department these days.

No, rather the problem is the certitude of those who genuinely love the Pope. That the Holy Spirit is clearly on the move. Deacon Greg Kandra posted this on his popular blog, without any framing commentary.

I guess this sort of thing is supposed to be good news now, in the sense of "there is no such thing as bad publicity." The Times is paying attention to us!

Note that the only person quoted is Seattle University's Jesuit president, happy that the more secularized locals think well of him now. Apparently, being one of the zeitgeist's collared batmen wasn't sufficient to win over the lefty locals. I guess his Stuart Smalley moment makes it all worthwhile.

No, I suppose the real reason the essay was posted was that it was, somehow, emblematic of the "Second Look at Catholicism" caused by the Pope.

Which would be fine if, in the essay, there was some evidence for it other than a Land O'Lakes apparatchik's self-esteem boost. Sadly, there is is not.

It is a remarkably nasty piece, so linking to it with silent approval left my jaw dropping. A bitter taste:

It’s long been known that most North American and European Catholics ignore church teachings on gays, contraception and abortion. These teachings range from absurd to unscientific to outright hateful. Without specifically changing the official line, Francis prompted millions of Catholics to give the church a second look when he criticized the hierarchy for being “obsessed” with those issues. Amen, said nearly 70 percent American Catholics who agreed with him in a Quinnipiac poll.

The anecdotal reaction is equally intriguing. “People come up to me all the time on the street or at a restaurant and say things like, ‘I just need to tell someone how much I like this pope of yours,’” said Father Stephen Sundborg, a Jesuit (like Francis) who is president of Seattle University, based in one of the most secular cities in the United States. “Suddenly, it seems O.K. to be a priest out there.”

All of this is by design. Francis is working two broad strategies. The first is aimed at lapsed Catholics, and those who are open to a spiritual life with an intellectual framework. Thus, he dismissed proselytizing as “solemn nonsense,” in a recent interview. “It makes no sense,” he said of the blunt harangues over whose God is better.

The Jesuits have always tried to get people to think for themselves, to arrive at belief through an arduous process. When bishops started telling parishioners that their gay and lesbian siblings were sinners, and that family planning was a grievous wrong, people stopped listening to them — for good reason.

This father of six thanks you for the gut punch. Which are my wife and I: absurd, unscientific or outright hateful? No, really--Get bent, you smug prick.

And, really--the Church had no intellectual framework in the bleak years Before Francis? Waiter, my essay has a Pseud in it--please take it back.

I'd point out the obvious, that Mr. Egan is obsessed with pelvic issues, but apparently this represents an Important Sign. And the home office has said ixnay on that strategy, so there you have it.

On one point, at least, the Era of Francis in America has one point of continuity with pre-Francis times: the desperate craving of American Catholics for validation from non-Catholics. Starting with Rev. Sundborg, but also, apparently, with more grounded members of the church, willing to post screeds like Egan's without a murmur of protest.

Proselytism may be solemn nonsense, but self-flagellation is in, baby.

If I am coming across as out of sorts, it is simply because I am. In the face of mounting personal stresses, the sense that I am one of the Pope’s redheaded stepsons is a burden I never imagined I’d encounter. Not having any money coming in assuredly plays into my mental state these days, but I've been out of kilter since the first faboo interview. Seeing Catholics cite sneering contempt as--I don't know, the Spirit in motion?-- is something I can't begin to process.

More encounters with the Spirit? Stay tuned!

I feel profoundly out of step with other Catholics, so much so that I haven’t taken communion in three weeks. Frankly, it would feel like a lie, even if I was otherwise disposed to receive. It's not getting better.

Regarding the "older brother" argument.

John Allen spends some time here examining the so-called "older brother" reaction to the Pope's barbs.

Well, the thing is, the analogy doesn't fit, at least not as far as the father's reaction is chronicled in the parable:

And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has received him safe and sound.’ 28 But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, 29 but he answered his father, ‘Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your living with harlots, you killed for him the fatted calf!’ 31 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’

The thing is, the cumulative effect of the Pope's words on the so-called "older brothers" is not "Son, all I have is yours--celebrate with me over the return of your brother!"

Instead, it comes across as "Well, pal, the thing is, I don't even like you. Do you want to know why? Tough--I'm going to tell you anyway. I have the list right here. Number 1..."

So, yeah, if all analogies limp, this one is a double amputee.

Elegy for a dream.

Charlie LeDuff's beautiful and haunting Detroit: An American Autopsy is marketed as a journalist's-eye-view of the tragic plight Detroit has descended into over the past decade. Indeed, it is that--but most readers may be missing the lede if they blip over the adjective in the title.

Because the Pulitzer Prize-winning LeDuff's larger point is that Detroit is not unique: it has simply arrived at its current, nightmarish state earlier than the rest of the country. Gawk at the trainwreck all you like--but the odds are, you're riding on a parallel track.

As he told Stephen Colbert in his interview, "Detroit is what happens when the money runs out."

I like to joke, channeling Tina Fey, that "I can see Detroit from my house!" That's actually true--from the second story, I can see a billboard on the Detroit side of the notorious Eight Mile Road, Motown's northern border, separating it from the suburbs of Oakland and Macomb counties. I graduated from the University of Detroit-Mercy Law School, work in Detroit proper, and have for more than a decade. Many of my neighbors are working class blacks who have decamped from the city as the spiral has worsened.

And has it ever worsened--please note that the book came out before the City filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in history.

LeDuff's book is not a history of "how we got here." Rather, it is a chronicle of the city as it is, in its mortal hours, along with a sort of homecoming on the part of the author. LeDuff, who was raised on Joy Road in next-door Redford Township, engages in a personal and familial taking stock, with family dysfunction and tragedy mirroring that of the city itself.

It is a work that chronicles the acts of many villains: short-sighted, greedy politicians (including the recently sentenced corruption machine and former Mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick); short-sighted, greedy bureaucrats; short-sighted, greedy corporate executives; short-sighted, greedy newspaper management covering for the sins of said executives and politicos; short-sighted, greedy criminal thugs and short-sighted, greedy regular folks like LeDuff and his family members.

That last may be the most haunting of them all, because LeDuff spares no one in his analysis--not even himself. He indicts his generation for mocking what made their fathers successful:

What our generation failed to learn was the nobility of work. An honest day's labor. The worthiness of the man in the white socks who would pull out a picture of his grandkids from his wallet. For us, the factory would never do. And turning away from our birthright--our grandfather in the white socks--is the thing that ruined us....Instead of working, we figured we could be hustlers and salesmen and gamblers and partiers. Work was for suckers. If anybody had told us such a thing existed, we probably would have become New York bankers and stockbrokers. And I have no doubt we would have been good at it too. Work versus The Hustle. That was the internal conflict on Joy Road, USA.

It is a story with precious few (but genuine) heroes, and even fewer victories. The heroes are the honest folk: firemen in delapidated stations without toilet paper, police detectives who have to take the bus to homicide scenes, residents struggling to get blight removed, a brave mother who tries to find peace after the death of her daughter and, yes, even a freelance political consultant who cuts through the insanity to explain the realities on the ground.

 The victories in Detroit happen when the honest folk keep manning their stations and performing their duties despite the fact everything around them is crumbling. And because of that, occasionally justice is done. Very, very occasionally. But just staying at the station is usually the most you can hope for.

And if you think it can't happen anywhere else, I would simply ask you to consider the possibilities of a nation whose decks are awash with mounting debt, and whose social dysfunctions are not different in kind from those of the once-great Motor City. If it stays with you long after you have finished it, then you read it correctly.

Fun with the National Park Service as arm of the DNC.

Yes, the shutdown is a clarifying moment. Our compassionate chief executive is evicting the elderly from their homes, shuttering private businesses, trying to block access to scenery, along with a host of other petty, spiteful actions that give us the true measure of the small, brittle man in charge.

The latest is refusing to pay funded death benefits to military families.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Vicious little twerp, isn't he?

And our watchdog media is giving him ample cover. It's who they are,  and what they do--endless in-kind payments to one, and only one, political party, and relentless defense of the empty suit at the top.

Fortunately, there is an option to respond to some of it--civil disobedience. And here is a nice pictorial chronicle of civil disobedience in action.

Here's the thing: if you show that you're willing to eat a shit sandwich, then that's what you're going to get.

So stop eating.

A true company man in action!

I saw this before, but just to show you how the American episcopate is taking its cues, here's Archbishop Dolan, telling the world that Pope Benedict was soooo 2012.

So, I guess the 8 years of Papa B were the equivalent of tailpipe huffing? It seems so.

Set phasers for FUN, papal nerds.

I'll change the subject from my internal spiritual trainwreck to something more positive soon: a review of a book about contemporary Detroit.

Is this Catholicism?

Asks the very unnerved Elliot Bougis in this essay.

Yes, I have been linking a lot to him of late, but (1) he presents a lot of what I'm thinking, only much better, and (2) misery loves company.

What I'm learning about Catholicism is that how it is lived by those who genuinely love orthodoxy is rather at odds with how it is presented by the Church.

When push comes to shove:

• We will in effect defend as infallible, despite the clear limits of the charism, every statement that comes from the Pope's mouth. In some cases, we will argue that the statements are inerrant. On a par with Scripture. No, I've seen this--and felt gut-punched. Blessed Pius IX may have lost the battle at Vatican I, but the faithful have ensured that he won the war.
• Related: if we like the new Pope enough, we will always have been at war with Eastasia.
• Even (especially?) if that Pope preaches eloquently against the evils of clericalism. Pardon the relevant aside:

• In the name of charity, we berate those who honestly disagree with us.
• In the name of a big, welcoming Church, we shoot the wounded.
• We deride as Pharisees those who fail to agree with us on every particular.

But--please--dismiss my views as those of the jealous older brother, a hateful Pharisee who longs for a Church that the size of phone booth. With mirrors on the inside.

I'm getting used to it.

It has become increasingly obvious to me that my problem isn't so much the contents of the Pope's statements (though the content is sometimes deeply problematic), but rather how it is being defended by the Faithful. And that's the most disorienting and dismaying part of it all.

The other "Francis Effect."

The one I've been warning about--the re-energizing of the previously-chastened thugs of AmChurch:

This weekend our pastor wrote a column in which he compared people who identify as pro-life to his old friend Tim, a morbidly obese individual who washed down his bacon-cheeseburger and fries with diet coke in the hopes of losing weight. He went on to say that the agenda of pro-lifers is far too often anti-abortion, when it should be much broader and include gun control, environmental issues, the death penalty, yada, yada.  Abortion “cannot trump the vast myriad of other life issues”.  He cited the Pope’s interview as “long-overdue” support of this position.  Needless to say, those of us on the parish pro-life committee feel as if we’ve been punched in the gut.  

Very, very pastoral, her padre.

They're baaaaack...

Buckle up, brace yourselves, batten down the hatches, dig the hole for the survival bunker--as is your wont. Things are going to get uglier.

And where from here?

I've come to the conclusion that, regardless of the actual temporal length (and may God grant Pope Francis many healthy years), this is going to be a loooooong papacy.

1. The first problem is what my crisis buddy Elliot colorfully describes as "soft ultramontanism." To which I will add "by reflex."

This manifests itself in instant circle-the-wagons mentality against any criticism. Sorry, Mark, but this is emblematic. The fact that Scalfari didn't take notes is majoring in minors. No less an authority than the Vatican itself offers the interview for perusal on the official website.

That strikes me as a sotto voce endorsement of its accuracy. Not very sotto, in fact. More like a megaphone admission.

Also, it seems to me that criticism from such respectable non-fringe figures as Fr. Germain Grisez, fellow Jesuit James Schall and the very level-headed Carl Olson deserve a hearing. Ditto Robert Royal, who was clearly thrown by the first interview.

In other words, those who "get Francis" need to try to understand those of us who don't. And, yeah, I don't.

Frankly, the most evident fruit of the papacy thus far seems to be the willingness of orthodox Catholics to break out the cutlery and start stabbing whenever someone expresses unease over the Pope's actions and words.

2. The substantive criticisms are worthy of consideration.

Arguments like "the Pope is acting just like Jesus" or "you're just like the elder brother in the Prodigal Son!" aren't really arguments: they're declarations of the speaker's moral superiority, QEDs that are supposed to batter the benighted sinner on the other side into repentance. Quite simply, they won't do.

That said, I'll limit myself to two examples of problematic statements by the Pope from each interview. First, his quote about the Gregorian/Extraordinary Form Mass:

The Tridentine Mass was meant for those who could not make the transition from Latin to English [or other languages] after the Council.

Oh, no, I'm sorry--that was Roger Cardinal Mahony, not the Pope. Still, the despicable, Hell-ish Mahony is a big fan, I think we have to admit. Not that I blame the Pope for that. Bad people can like you, and there's nothing you can do about it. Manson and the Beatles.

No, what the Pope actually said was:

I think the decision of Pope Benedict [his decision of July 7, 2007, to allow a wider use of the Tridentine Mass] was prudent and motivated by the desire to help people who have this sensitivity. 

Honestly, Mahony's contrafactual take was the first thing that leapt to mind when I read the Pope's words on the "Vetus Ordo" (a telling formulation in itself). The dismissive mindsets are certainly kissing cousins. Throw in the Pope's repeated jabs at Pelagianism, Rosary bouquets, "restorationism" and the like, and it's clear he's not a good friend of the old Mass nor of traditionalists in general.

Yes, the Pope had a bad experience with jackhole traditionalists in the Argentine. I readily accept that that would legitimately poison fair-minded people against the proponents of and possible spiritual fruits of the old liturgy. It would me. Straining at gnats doesn't begin to describe it.

But here's the thing: we've been told--in yet another of the many declarations of moral superiority by his myriad defenders--that the Church is bigger than the concerns and experiences of American Catholics. True enough. But likewise: She is also bigger than the concerns and experiences of the even smaller population of Argentine Catholics. Even those experienced by the Archbishop Emeritus of Buenos Aires. The traditionalists I know and rub elbows with, that my children weekly attend co-op with, haven't disappeared human rights activists, nor cheered the work of a fascist state. They are struggling to pay bills and raise children in our increasingly dysfunctional economy and culture, driving long distances to pray, share and teach such things as art, Latin, and literature, and I imagine much the same obtains among traditionalist communities worldwide.

Frankly, the Pope's take on the Extraordinary Form discounts entirely the rich theological work of Benedict XVI explaining why the older rite is important, and should be widely celebrated. The break in the continuity is obvious on this point. And it is a source of legitimate concern.

The second example is the notorious "Catholic God" statement in the second interview:

And I believe in God, not in a Catholic God, there is no Catholic God, there is God and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.

Hoo, boy. First of all, substitute "Christian" for "Catholic," and you start to cringe, right? You'd better.

Honestly, I think it is only because we have an ecumenism-of-self-flagellation, one that regards any hint of "triumphalism" as the sin against the Holy Spirit, that more people didn't cringe at the actual formulation. If you are Catholic, you believe in the God revealed in and through the Catholic Church, one that has defined numerous formulae about God, Christ and the Holy Spirit, pondered and filtered by numerous saints and a protective magisterium, about how to understand the Triune God, going so far as to defend them at the cost of martyrdom. If you don't accept that, you are not Catholic. Full stop. As Elliot pointed out in a discussion on Facebook, the Pope's formulation wades into some dangerous riptides, providing ammunition for an argument against the Church herself.

3. The final analysis from my perspective:

For the love of God and His Saints, no more stream of consciousness interviews. EVER.

There are many things I appreciate about this Pope--preaching Christ, reaching out of the bubble to touch people, especially going into impoverished areas, pointing out the corrosive evil of unemployment (even if it's far from the worst of evils--yeesh) and its ripple effects on the family and even family formation, the choice of a simple lifestyle (though Benedict was far from opulent, contrary to the popular false meme), his prayer life, his joyousness and ability to connect with people. All to the good.

But his undisciplined, erratic streak keeps me from embracing and trusting him. I'm getting older, and I need a steady hand at the wheel. Apart from the substance in the interviews, the problems are many: the unnecessary jabs at decent Catholics, and the failure to recognize the harm that it causes. The offhand dismissals of his predecessors' work. The empowering of the stripped-altar left. The promises of big change, and the horizontal emphasis unnerves me greatly. He's in the same position now as Pope Paul VI after the leak of the Majority Report endorsing birth control in 1967: expectations--feverish ones--are rising, and the backlash will be brutal when/if he disappoints. I wonder if he fully understands the nature of the expectations (declarations of humility aside) and the demands that will follow. Riding the tiger is easy--compared to the dismount.

For my part, he's the Pope. I'll pray for him and offer filial respect. But I'm going to gird myself and my loved ones with Tradition, and I'm not remotely going to try to defend every stray sentence that comes out of his mouth or pen. Down that path lay madness, and in my case, despair. The Papacy is not one long run-on infallible monologue, and can't be defended as such. At least, it shouldn't.

If that approach leaves me as easy insult-bait, the target of Gospel proof-texting, snarky assaults and the like--whatever. There are worse fates.

Like the loss of faith.

A mixed message.

The high wire was 150 feet in the air, trembling as the turbulent air buffeted it, first from one direction, then from another. Below, there was no net.

The veteran trapeze artist climbed with confidence, a large wicker basket secured to his back. His ascent was purposeful and quick, reaching the platform in less than three minutes, the spotlight following him smoothly as he rose. With him went the encouragement and praise of the enthusiastic MC, barking adulation as the artist neared the platform.

"This is one of the high points of the night, ladies and gentlemen: in center ring we present to you the Amazing Rollo, unicyclist and juggler extraordinaire--working, as always, without a net! You've never seen anything like this, folks!

And I'd like to take the time to remind you that, as with every show, a generous portion of the proceeds go to the ASPCA to fund the good work they do with animals every single day! Let's hear a round of applause for both Rollo and the Society!"

When he reached the top, Rollo doffed the basket, placing it on the platform. With practiced ease, he loosened the straps, then reached over to grab the unicycle lashed to the side of the platform. He mounted the unicycle on the wire, then reached into the basket and removed four golden retriever puppies. Clutching the puppies, he did a backflip onto the unicycle and pedaled backwards to the middle of the wire.

"You can really tell how much Rollo loves those puppies, folks: see how glossy their coats are?"