Perfect Viewing for Veterans' Day.

I strongly recommend National Geographic's Arlington: Field of Honor. 

In the course of an hour, you get a behind-the-scenes look at the people who serve at the Cemetery and the careful rituals used to honor the deceased and the grieving on this most sacred plot of land.

You will come away with a strengthened appreciation for the National Cemetery and admiration for all those who make it what it is. Must viewing.

"Deportation Force!"

Sounds like a horrible Golan-Globus action movie from the 1980s.

But, nope--it's Donald Trump's "plan" for addressing our immigration crisis.

“You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely and you’re going to bring the country–and frankly, the people, because you have some excellent, wonderful people, some fantastic people that have been here for a long period of time,” Trump said. “Don’t forget, Mika, that you have millions of people that are waiting [in] line to come into this country, and they’re waiting to come in legally.”

Sure, it will be a massive expansion of government involving fresh legions of armed men, but it will be the classiest, top-notch, truly first-rate bunch of door-kickers around. 

You'll never see shinier, more quality jackboots.

Look, is the immigration system broken? Yep-per. Do we refuse to control our border? Definitely. Are the reasons for refusal cynical and self-serving for both the business and political interests responsible for the same? Ditto. Is it idiotic to regularize millions more people in the worst workforce participation rate in history? The choir continues to chant Amen.

But let's not pretend that Donald Trump has any serious interest in fixing this thing, either. He's a cynical blowhard who has latched onto an issue, and is taking a position 180 degrees from what he was whining about in 2012. 

Frankly, we're lucky he's cynical--because the idea of a "deportation force" doesn't bear thinking about. 

Jeb Bush is totes pro-life.

So much so that he's going to go nuclear on Marco Rubio for being too strict about abortion.

In an attempt to blunt Mr. Rubio’s appeal against a Democratic nominee, Mr. [Mike] Murphy [the head of "Right to Rise," Bush's Super-PAC] recently showed some Republicans a video portraying Mr. Rubio as too extreme on abortion. A longtime opponent of abortion rights, Mr. Rubio said in a debate in August that he had “never advocated” laws that would allow abortions, even in cases of rape or incest.

Mr. Murphy has privately said to several people that Right to Rise would be ready to devote up to $20 million to fighting Mr. Rubio, according to several people told of the conversations.

I was starting to feel a measure of sympathy for Jeb Bush, believing him basically a decent man out of his depth and hopelessly out of touch with the times.

Apparently, I misjudged the man, wrongfully assuming he had a functioning soul. Won't make that mistake twice. 

For the Christmas List...

Baronius Press has an interesting series--"Sermon in a Sentence"--and one of the volumes is devoted to the late, great Archbishop Fulton Sheen.

I'm posting it because it might be of interest to you, but it's definitely of interest to me. From the Introduction:

Hundreds of short quotations taken from the writings of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen have been organized and classified by the Christian virtues of which they speak, and then arranged to complement the Rosary, proceeding from the first Joyful Mystery (The Annunciation, with its anchor virtue of humility) to the fifth Glorious Mystery (The Crowning of Mary, with its anchor virtue of devotion and love of Mary). The Luminous Mysteries, introduced by Pope John Paul II as an optional addition to the Rosary, are also included. For those who choose to use these excerpts for meditation while reciting the Rosary, we have placed a type ornament after the first ten quotes of each decade, to mark the end of a decade. Additional quotations follow for use with a Rosary or for private devotions or meditation. A selection of quotations on other spiritual topics of interest follows, bringing to the reader a sample of Sheen’s reflections on such subjects as prayer, the Church, the Mass, and the Priesthood.

 A $14.95 hardcover, to boot. WANT.

 

Forty years gone.

Hard to believe, but today is the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the final voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald. 

I doubt I'll be able to top what I wrote about her ten years (!) ago, so I won't try. I'll just point you to that piece, one of the earlier posts I'm most proud of.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't point you to the truly excellent Detroit News commemoration page, which collects a number of fine links.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a moving essay from the brother of the Fitz's cook, Allen Kalmon. 

Finally, credit where it is due--one of the main reasons the Fitzgerald still haunts is the immortal ballad from Gordon Lightfoot.

May God rest their souls, and be with all the sailors on the Lakes. 
 

And then there were three.

Nearly four years ago, I wrote about the "White Hurricane of 1913," easily the most devastating storm in the recorded history of the Great Lakes. Twelve ships and 275 sailors perished in that monstrous event. As of when I wrote it, five ships had yet to be discovered.

In 2013, that number dwindled to four with the finding of the Henry B. Smith in Lake Superior.

According to today's Free Press, the number has dropped to three, with the remarkable find of the Hydrus by a determined crew of divers back in July. 

Since the Great Storm of 1913, the 436-foot steamship Hydrus had been lost. It sank, most likely on Nov. 9 of that year, during a storm so ferocious it has been called the “White Hurricane.” The sky unleashed a blizzard over the Great Lakes, hitting Lake Huron  hardest with wind gusts up to 90 m.p.h. and waves to 35 feet. The Great Storm, even today, is the worst recorded on the lakes. Not even the weather that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald 40 years ago this week compares to the 1913 disaster. There were a dozen major shipwrecks from Nov. 7 through 10, and eight of them were on Lake Huron. More than 250 people perished. The Hydrus had been headed south toward the St. Clair River, iron ore in its belly. The ship lost everyone on board, a crew of 22, including five found frozen to death in a lifeboat that washed up in Canada.

Since that time, every ship believed to have gone down in U.S. waters in Lake Huron was discovered except the Hydrus. Veteran shipwreck hunter David Trotter, a 74-year-old former Ford financial man who lives in Canton, has had it on his wanted list for 30 years. Along the way, he has found scores of other ships and even a few airplanes as he scours Lake Huron’s bottom every year with his crew. It was Trotter who, in 1985, found another of the 1913 casualties, the John A. McGean, which was heading north in Lake Huron with a load of coal when it went down.

On the day they dove the Hydrus, he and his crew set out on his 32-foot dive boat, the Obsession Two, bringing along a Free Press crew. Trotter remains tight-lipped about the locations of some of his finds, so all that can be revealed here is that Trotter’s boat ran 32 miles out on the lake to the spot where the Hydrus lay waiting. He plans to share the location only after he is done investigating the wreck.

A great story with great pictures. Read the whole thing.

Catholicism's Aqua Regia.

Aqua regia ("the king's water") is a mixture of acids which dissolves gold. It does one heck of a job:

A useful short history of the king's water can be found here.

Since 1965, Catholicism has had its own version of aqua regia, and the Church has been guzzling it. It's called ecumenism, but it has gone well beyond rational discussion to a positive hysteria--ecumania, if you will. And it appears to have made ecumaniacs of the USCCB, what with their recommendation for expanded intercommunion.

Sounds positively ecumaniacal, in fact. A better dissolver of Catholic teaching you will not find.

Look, my handful of devoted readers and those close to me know I'm a convert from mainline Protestantism. I wasn't practicing much before I converted. Honestly, if a Religion Detector Monitor had existed and I'd been hooked up to it, it probably would have read "Deist with a healthy measure of appreciation for Christendom and the Bible."

I like to think that I've spent the last sixteen years becoming a somewhat useful disciple of Christ in His Catholic Church. Lord knows, I've had my spiritual bumps on the way, and my worldview has shifted from 1999--in some ways, radically.

And my beloved wife and I have had some less than smooth sailing. We dropped her income when we had our second. And then our third came along--three kids in three calendar years plus 10 days. We've been crammed seven of us into 880 square feet with no basement or garage--that back in 2010. My car is older than all our kids. We've had other financial turbulence I'd rather not discuss.

Still, discipleship costs. I can accept that.  

And then I read that we really need to share the Eucharist with the titular Evangelical Lutherans (as opposed to, say, the evangelical Lutherans in the Missouri Synod--from whom the late Fr. Neuhaus sprang). Despite the fact that, you know, they don't believe in all that Catholic crap.

Huh.  But, apparently, that's not enough to deny the source and summit of the Christian life, the sacrament of Catholic unity, to members of an ecclesial community which is drifting further away from us in oh-so-many-ways.

The ELCA says that abortion is often a "morally responsible choice." And while it claims to frown on abortions after "fetal viability," baby-killing Doctor George Tiller was a member in good standing of the ELCA, as the church website solemnly notes. [And don't even try to jump into my face suggesting I'm happy with Tiller's murder. WRONG.] Yeah--can't wait to gather around the alt--er, table and sing Kumbaya.

But, we must march ahead. Forward, forward--always forward, eh, yes? No.

I mean, really--communion with the ELCA immerses Catholic witness in a vat of aqua regia, turning her gold into powder. On what basis do we require anyone to hold to the Catholic faith--much less to be properly disposed--before approaching the altar?

If you have a daughter undergoing first communion prep, why does she have to go to confession before receiving when the Lutherans do not? 

Or, more topically: Lutherans remarried after divorce: come on down for this moving ecumenical moment! 

Catholics--not so fast!

I'm sure the accusation of phariseeism, older brotherism, the chirpy "it's an evangelization opportunity/eating with sinners!"--all the usual airhead darts--are being nocked to the bowstring by the usual suspects. Allow me to retort:

More seriously, at least my rule (the Eucharist for properly-disposed Catholics) has the force of Tradition, reason and consistency behind it. As a convert undergoing the conversion process, I was escorted out at the end of what was known as the Mass of the Catechumens. And it made perfect sense to me. I approached the Eucharist by careful steps--as a disciple--secure in the confidence I was doing the right thing. Non sum dignus, but I'll get there.

More the fool me: I should have waited until the ecumenical dialogue with my former church had sufficiently progressed--that way, the Eucharist would have come to me instead. "Oh, good for the Catholics to grow up like that and share."

If you need any further proof that the Catholic Church's confidence in her own teachings has largely dissolved in the acid bath of ecumenical fervor, look no further than this "breakthrough."