A Most Interesting Syllogism

MAJOR PREMISE:  YOU CAN'T BE CATHOLIC AND PRO-ABORTION

MINOR PREMISE:  YOU CAN'T BE A DEMOCRAT AND OPPOSE ABORTION

CONCLUSION:       YOU CAN'T BE CATHOLIC AND A DEMOCRAT

Heather Mac Donals: Reject the Deversity Mandate

Heather Mac Donald wrote what could be considered the most important piece of social commentary in a very long time today at City Journal.  It takes great courage today to write the Truth, and Heather Mac Donald never shrinks from that task.  Here is the entire piece:

President Donald Trump is facing a revolt from his base for having signed the bloated omnibus spending bill that torpedoes his “drain the swamp” pledges. But the president now has an opportunity to achieve a small measure of redemption: he should offer loud and unequivocal support to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is being hammered for reportedly having rejected identity politics in favor of meritocracy. 

Zinke is facing a storm of media criticism from liberals for allegedly saying that diversity is “not important,” though his office denies that he said this. The same sources that reported Zinke’s comments say that he followed up by stating that what he cared about was excellence—and that by hiring the best people, he would in fact put together the most diverse group anyone has ever had. This second statement is a cowardly concession (as is his denial of his initial diversity observation, assuming that he made that initial statement). Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal. 

Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades. The #MeToo movement has only intensified pressures on public and private organizations to hire based on sex and skin color. The result: wasted resources, the sidelining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t—because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

What’s fantastic about the Zinke story, which appears to be gaining momentum, is that the Interior Secretary is being condemned for allegedly saying that he discounts racial categories in hiring, and prefers “having the right person for the right job.” This position, uncontroversial for decades, was the essence of Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind, merit-based society. Treating people the same way regardless of their race or sex used to be considered the definition of fairness; now it is understood to be vicious and intolerable. Kristen Clarke, president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, writes of Zinke, “the racist views harbored by members of this administration and their failure to ensure diversity must be condemned.”

The most distinctive moment during the 2016 presidential campaign was Trump’s insistence that he did not have time for political correctness, in response to then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s feminist naggings. Here is a moment for the president to make good on that pledge by rejecting the relevance of race and gender to any job within his administration. As for Zinke, even if he didn’t reject diversity explicitly, he ought to do so now.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.

Film discussion: "The Price of Peace"

Recorded on March 22, 2018 

Leading up to the onset of World War II, western democracies like Britain and France viewed a policy of appeasement toward Germany as the path of wisdom and restraint. It seemed prudent to make concessions to aggressors if it meant avoiding a bloody war. When Nazi Germany rearmed the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and seized an area of Czechoslovakia, the British and French response came in the form of paper: the Munich Agreement, which conceded these territories to Germany under the condition they make no land grabs. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared to a cheering crowd that the agreement meant “peace for our time.” 

Concessions often bring about peace in the short term, defusing tensions for a while… but the aggressor’s initial demands are not forgotten and, in fact, they are often bolstered by newfound doubts about their enemies’ resolve. As such, a greater conflict ensues. This was the case in 1939 when Germany broke the still-new Munich Agreement and invaded Poland, starting World War II. 

The lesson of deterrence is one which is hard-learned time and time again. Hoover Institution Research Fellow Kiron Skinner and Claudia Rosett sit down for a discussion moderated by Mary Kissel about the film "The Price of Peace" and lessons that can be drawn from it.

Blacks in Power Don't Empower Blacks

Fr. Nix: Pro-Life Eucharistic Procession Sermon, March 24, 2018

http://padreperegrino.org/2018/03/24/plep/

Several hundred people joined us in Jacksonville, FL as we priests carried the Holy Eucharist before three abortion centers in the monstrance under a canopy.

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column, March 25, 2018

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column

March 25, 2018

   Ralph Waldo Emerson had moments more perceptive than his vague religiosity: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” He spoke not of consistency itself, but of a “foolish” consistency. As True God and True Man, Christ was perfectly consistent, but from the platform of a fallen world, that consistency could seem inconsistent.

   Consider how reluctant he was to let his divinity be known. He spoke of it cryptically in the synagogue at Nazareth, but insinuated enough to enrage his neighbors. Then he went into hiding. When he healed the leprous and blind, he ordered them sternly to tell no one. When he cured the paralytic at the Siloam Pool, he slipped into the shadows of the Temple like a fugitive. And he sternly ordered Peter and James and John not to reveal what they had seen on the mountain.

   Was it inconsistent then that he made a spectacle of himself when he entered Jerusalem? It was a flagrant publicity stunt, encouraging the cheers of children who enjoyed a good show: with a theatrical entrance foolish enough for some to mock him with a crown of thorns, and shocking enough for others to cut his nerves with nails on a cross. If he was so reticent, why did he suddenly burst into the city in a way that seemed to some like a circus come to town, and to others like an anarchist about to blow everything up?

   God is not inconsistent to those who listen carefully: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). With a consistency more perfect than human consistency, because it is from outside time, the hour of which he spoke at the Wedding in Cana had come, and the only clock that could measure it was his Love. His human will dreaded that hour, but his divine will embraced it, and in that valiant act, the selfish pride that brought sin and death in the world was confused, confounded, and ultimately washed away in blood.

   Jesus said that if the children singing to him were silenced, “the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:4). Here in our neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, the great glass skyscrapers now rising all around may seem indifferent, but the energy and skill that are building them cry out in testimony to God who gave life and intelligence. Dante read over the gates of Hell: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate—“Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” By entering the gates of Jerusalem, Christ opened the gates of Heaven where hope is fulfilled. That is God’s perfect consistency. “Lift up your heads, O gates! And belifted up, O ancient doors! That the King of glory may come in” (Psalm 24:7).

Faithfully Yours in Christ,

Fr. George W. Rutler

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Fr. Nix: Rescue LEA

Status

Rescue Lea

2018-03-23 Father David Nix

My friend Fr. Robert received this message from Bishop Mamza of Nigeria:

“The 110 school girls abducted by Boko Haram here in Nigeria about one month ago were all returned except for five of them who died and one of them, Lea Sharibu who happens to be a Christian. They refused to release Lea because she refused to denounce Christianity for Islam. Please pray for her immediate release.”

If you are a layman or lay woman, please email us at prayersforsharibu@gmail.com to pledge fasting or Rosaries or Adoration time or Bible reading time for the rescue of this fearless Christian captive girl.  Miss Sharibu values the truth of the Gospel and the Church more than her own life. We want her rescued and re-united with her family .  We very much believe God will hear our prayers.

We want her returned by Easter and we will send this spiritual bouquet to her bishop on Easter Week.

Quo Vadis? Pat Archbold at The Remnant

From The Remnant today:

We will fight in our parishes, we will fight in our dioceses, we will fight every lupine shepherd in sheep's clothing, we will fight online, we will fight with our wallets, we must fight and never stop fighting. We don't fight in hopes of a truce or for some less-unholy middle ground.  We fight for all of it. 

Recently a question was put to me by a friend. That question, in its essentials is this, "What now?  What are our options, given the current trajectory? What are we, lay people and individual clergy who see what is happening, to do when the destroyers have all the power?  How do we persevere and preserve?  How can we?" 

Thinking to formulate a systematic policy-based response to stem the tide, I struggle with the idea that there might be no such thing, that there is no flanking maneuver or rope-a-dope strategy that can stop the invasion and pummeling most certainly coming our way. 

It is foolish to try and envision a path out of this disaster without first looking at the path that brought us here. I am not qualified to offer a treatise on the scourge of modernism over the last century and a half, nor do I think such knowledge is required to address the realities of the situation.  I take rather the view of the ordinary Englishman as the Nazi scourge scoured the last vestiges of freedom from the continent knowing that when that task was done, he too would face it, he and his. 

I was born in 1967 into a Church that had already surrendered to the enemy, I just didn't know it. After that surrender, it became the task of successive Pontiffs to cede ground in order to maintain something that still resembled that which they inherited.  The Popes that ceded the least territory to the enemy in order to "conserve" that which remained, were hailed as heroes on the global stage.  Those who put up little resistance and gave ground easily had to content themselves merely with sainthood.  But each in their turn gave precious ground to the enemy. 

Those few faithful that refused to flee and abandon the Church altogether were told by those they trusted that all the ground ceded to the enemy was of no value anyway, that is was actually an encumbrance better jettisoned to preserve those things that really mattered. Then those things that really mattered were artfully moved into the encumbrance category and jettisoned with the rest.  Better to do this, we were told, then to fight.  Fighting only made things worse, made the tiger clench its jaws even tighter.  Best not to wiggle and squirm, it just turns people off.  This was the "conservative" approach.  That we should only be concerned with the 5 year rolling average of truth and not focus on what was already lost. 

But with the current papacy things have changed, somewhat. Yes, more people are waking up to the fact that there is no land left between us and the tiger and it has us in its jaws.  Feeling the clench and the pain, there are those that are finally waking up to the reality of the threat posed.  There can be no doubt that this is a necessary and crucial step to mounting any serious resistance.  But old habits are hard to break.  I recently saw a prominent clergyman, once firmly committed to the "conservative" approach, but now valiantly resisting that which must be resisted, publicly pining for the Church of 2012.  If only we could return to that golden era, things could be grand again.  If only we could take a few steps back from the tiger, surely, we would be saved. But this is the same mindset of surrender that brought us to this precipice. 

So where does that leave us? What do we do? 

What we must first do is recognize that the enemy, modernism and its mitred minions, will never stop. They will never just take enough and stop.  They will never be satiated. They will relentlessly continue until there is nothing left of True Religion.  Digging trenches is not a strategy for victory, but merely a delaying tactic for inevitable defeat.  That means we cannot just fight this fight where the current lines are drawn, our aim has to be to take it back, all of it.  That means the aim must be the recovery of all Truth and return fully to traditional Catholicism in its liturgy and formulations of the Truth and every promulgated falsehood, whether direct or indirect, must be purged from the Church.  Yes, traditional Catholicism is the only answer.  Seeking any kind of middle ground leaves the enemy on the field.  That can never be tolerated.  There were those valiant men who told us this at the beginning of the onslaught, but all too many of us were not prepared to listen. 

We can make no pretense that our backs are not currently to the wall. And even though most of the Church at every level has fallen into the iron grip of the enemy, we can never despair, even if we are reduced to a most pitiable state, persecuted by our own even in concert with oppressive states, seeking sacraments in secret, or worse.  We have God's promise that the Church will survive.  And we further have the promise of His mother that the Church will be restored after this terrible way of the cross. 

But in the meantime, we fight. There is no fleeing to the hills in hopes that we will be left alone there to rebuild Christianity.  The enemy would never allow it.  We must fight them on everything.  

We shall fight against every unholy innovation of this dark and destructive Church, not just the new ones, but all those that have brought us to this state. 

We will fight in our parishes, we will fight in our dioceses, we will fight every lupine shepherd in sheep's clothing, we will fight online, we will fight with our wallets, we must fight and never stop fighting. We don't fight in hopes of a truce or for some less-unholy middle ground.  We fight for all of it.  And we can never stop fighting until that day God calls us home or He decides in His infinite wisdom that His body has suffered enough and provides for that break in the front that will send the enemy scurrying.  

It is not in our power to win any given battle or the war, it is ours only to fight for what is right. That is the strategy, fight and never stop fighting until the strategy emerges in God's good time.  And then fight some more until the enemy is defeated.  It is us or them.

An Unholy Alliance: the UN, Soros, and the Francis Papacy - Elizabeth Yore

Anthony Esolen: The Enemy Within (Providence College)

Anthony Esolen writing today at Crisis Magazine:

Last week at Providence College, a brave and devout Catholic student I got to know well last year during my own battles with the politically correct has had occasion to live out the words of Jesus: 

Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you (Mt. 5:11-12).
Here is what happened.

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/providence-college-bullies-faithful-students?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CrisisMagazine+%28Crisis+Magazine%29

VATICAN SCANDAL: Exploiting The Benedict Option

Fr. Jerry Pokorski: How Footnotes Will Save The Church

From The Catholic Thing today:

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/03/18/how-footnotes-will-save-the-church/

Footnotes are humble things and do their best work in relative obscurity. When footnotes are newsworthy and are talked about for months – such as Amoris Laetitia #351 – the evidence suggests the note has missed its calling. Prominent assertions belong in the text, themselves in need of clarifying footnotes... 

So even if any churchman solemnly proclaims a change in Church teaching to persuade you, for example, that divorce and remarriage or same-sex unions should be recognized as holy by the Church, he would have to distract attention from the footnotes of countless Church documents.  Even a major book burning would be useless in eliminating the footnotes (now that we have the Internet).

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column, March 18, 2018

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column

March 18, 2018

   There are those of us who remember how as schoolboys, the clever use of rhythmic dactyls in Virgil's metrical Latin verses made unforgettable the sound of horses galloping. And one of my schoolmates gained fleeting fame when our French teacher announced that, as our classmate was recovering from an appendectomy, the first words he whispered as he came out of the anesthesia were from a line in LaFontaine's fable about the Crow and the Fox: "Matître Corbeau sur un arbre perché..."

   Fables have always been entertaining ways to teach children to remember moral wisdom. LaFontaine in the late 17th century drew on stories of Aesop, a Greek slave in the fifth century before Christ. Many of those fables in the Aesopica were adopted along the way in Welsh (Chwedlau Odo—“Odo’s Tales”), Middle Low German, and even Middle Scots. Moral truths have no national borders or chronological barriers. Everyone in any place can learn a lesson from Aesop’s fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, in which the tortoise defies all odds and wins the race because the hare was so smug that it took a nap.

   The parables of our Lord are different from fables, for they are about people, while fables make animals talk. Fables enliven moral consciences while Christ’s parables make moral points but also direct attention to eternal realities. When our Lord says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like . . .” he describes a heavenly reality, and not a fantasy.

   Commissioned as an apostle of the Good News, Saint Paul wrote: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way as to take the prize. Everyone who competes in the games trains with strict discipline. They do it for a crown that is perishable, but we do it for a crown that is imperishable” (1 Corinthians 9:24-25). This race is not a fable about tortoises and hares. Those are illusions, but Paul’s race is an allusion. He is speaking of real people in Corinth, where the Isthmian Games took place before and after the Olympic Games, and whose winner received a crown of wild celery instead of the Olympic olive leaf. And celery leaves fade fast

.

   Lent is a microcosm of life in its entirety, with all its trials. When Saint Paul speaks of discipline, he employs a Greek word used for wrestling and any struggle for victory—agonia, from which we get agony. The Anti-Christ wants us to surrender the race and tries to persuade us that life is nothing but agony without a prize. His plot is to discourage, while Christ’s Holy Church is constantly encouraging, through the Sacraments and the heavenly cheerleaders called saints and angels. Saint John Vianney was convinced of a fact more fabulous than a fable: “Not all the saints started well, but all of them ended well.”

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The Remnant: Christopher Ferrara on The "Benedict Letter"

Chris Ferrara, writing yesterday on The Remnant, provides (maybe) the final analysis of the now infamous doctored "Benedict Letter."

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/3789-more-fake-news-from-the-vatican-the-pope-in-the-attic-and-the-end-of-the-line-for-neo-Catholicism

The unprecedented and untenable division of the Church into traditionalist, “conservative” and liberal branches, with Bergoglio now clumsily attempting to saw off the first two branches, signals an historical turning point at which it seems only divine intervention of the most dramatic sort will be able to restore the Church to the path of Tradition from which her human element so tragically deviated at the Council. 

That day of divine reckoning seems almost to be upon us. But whenever it comes, and in whatever circumstances it takes place, our abiding faith in the Church’s indefectibility allows us confidently to predict an ultimately decisive defeat of what Pope Pius X, the sainted foe of Modernism in all its guises, denounced as the “unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. OMNIA INSTAURARE IN CHRISTO.”

FR. Hunwicke on The Benedict Letter

15 March 2018
Don't miss ...  

... the story all over the internet about how PF's spin-doctors gave the waiting world a deliberately mutilated and falsified letter of Benedict XVI. Just don't miss it!

This episode provides a hilarious, immensely funny insight into the minds of the cheap crooks who surround PF, and how far they are prepared to go to manufacture their Fake News. You couldn't .... as we say .... make it up! It epitomises the superbly corrupt and deliciously sleazy atmosphere of the Renaissance Court which sprawls at the luxurious top of the Santa Marta. 

Happily, the full text did emerge. GOTCHA! And it provides agreeable evidence that Ratzinger's old, deft, feline wit has not deserted the dear old man. Briefly summarised by me, his Letter says (and I've put into square brackets the section the spin-doctors didn't want you to see):

"Thank you for inviting me to write a page about the little books you sent me. I think they are splendid little books about my splendid successor. [Sadly, however, I haven't read them and I don't intend to do so. And I never comment on books I haven't read, so I won't be sending you a page.]" 

This pontificate simply gets better and better! Keep engaged and make sure you never miss a laugh!  

Posted by Fr John Hunwicke at 00:18

David Warren: Essays in Idleness (Silence)

Essays in Idleness
DAVID WARREN 

                                Talk about silence

We’ve had that Cardinal Sarah in town, speaking after Vespers in the Cathedral, and at St Augustine’s Seminary. It was hard to get in, even to the Cathedral — long waiting lists for the tickets — but I was able to pose as another man’s wife. (She had to drop out at the last minute.) Saint Michael’s, here in Greater Parkdale, isn’t very large. When a certain Cardinal Ratzinger came, some thirty-two years ago, the churchwardens had the good sense to rent a hockey arena. We underestimate the star power of these quiet, undemonstrative clerics. 

Indeed, considered as a business — and why not? — the Church Catholic has been making bad management decisions for decades now. They have, one might say, two products: “Traditional,” and “Lite.” The former is selling briskly, the latter is on the blocks. So where do they place their bets? (Guess.) 

Or to put this a little less vulgarly, but only a little, most people who want Catholicism at all, want it straight up. They actually long for reverence and holiness. They want the music and chant that even pagans will buy on commercial recordings, but which they won’t hear in church. They are not afraid of Latin, and may have noticed that in this age of “multiculturalism,” it is our one common language. Without it, we divide into small ethnic cells, which die in isolation. 

In my own humble but persistent opinion, we have endured more than half a century, of noisy things done to attract “the people,” which instead drove them away. When we do the opposite — make Catholicism more Catholic — the naves mysteriously fill again. I don’t understand the sales strategy. 

Humiliated in Rome, as certain other “traditionalist” prelates, yet popular elsewhere, men like Cardinal Sarah remain to inspire us. He spoke here in a soft monotone — English is about his fifth or sixth language — and received rapt attention. One might almost say he went out of his way to be boring. He repeated the thesis of his recent book, The Power of Silence, in sentences consistently meditative rather than rhetorical; with no aphoristic flourishes, or anything resembling an applause line. He said nothing that should not be obvious to a formed Catholic mind, yet with a cumulative, developing power. He compels an audience to listen prayerfully. 

Silence is a language that came before Latin, and remains at the heart of our Liturgy, whatever the language in which it is said or sung. We live today in the highly technical language of meaningless buzz, and from custom have become terrified of silence. It is a priest’s job to tell us: be brave. 

Are we to be defined by our technological gadgetry, or defined in silence? Are we to be empty or full? Most came expecting to hear that, and were not disappointed. Silence can’t be spoken with a loud voice. It is the still and small one, of which Sarah speaks. I doubt anyone, knowing of the speaker, came expecting a pep talk. 

I (and perhaps several others) could not help noticing what a good pope he would make: one who doesn’t speak unless he has something necessary to say; who is not trying to surprise us. One whose comfort is in the Sacraments and Doctrine, and not in novelties; a spokesman for Jesus Christ, and for no other cause. A man whose voice echoes twenty centuries. Even through the noise of the contemporary world, serious people are drawn to that. 

Published: March 14, 2018

Victor D Hanson; (NEW) A Thorough Explanation of California's Failing Ut...

Fr. Ray Blake on That Letter from Pope Emeritus

FR. Fr. Ray Blake today:

https://marymagdalen.blogspot.com/2018/03/that-letter-from-pope-emeritus.html

Viganò's presentation has shown the amateurish relativistic and untrustworthy nature of its Communications Secretariate. 

There is certainly need for reform there if the Vatican is to be trusted. 

"Let you yes be yes and your no be no", is something forgotten in the Vatican.

Iditarod, 2018: Ulsom of Norway First to Nome

http://theweek.com/speedreads/760882/norways-joar-leifseth-ulsom-wins-2018-iditarod-trail-sled-dog-race

http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2018/Joar-Ulsom-of-Norway-has-won-the-world-s-most-famous-sled-dog-race-after-a-grueling-dash-across-Alaska-s-rough-terrain/id-45f827d72291402fb6c71afa1b076b92

Get over it! Offer it up!

The following opinion piece is from the Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2018:

Knock It Off’ and ‘Shake It Off’: The Case for Dad-Style Parenting
Tough love offers more than expedience. It can offer emotional nourishment too.

By Abigail Shrier
March 12, 2018 7:34 p.m. ET

117 COMMENTS  

When my 7-year-old twin boys were first learning to play piano, I would check in with them regularly to see if they were still enjoying it. Finally, their teacher—a Russian woman who was evidently unfamiliar with fashionable theories of child rearing—told me that if I wanted my kids to learn an instrument, I needed to cut it out.  

“Some weeks they won’t like it,” she said. “So what? Stop asking.”  

Experts have long debated child-rearing methods. What’s best for the children? What’s best for the parents? Now the vogue is to refer to parenting “styles,” adding a patina of theory to what was once a matter of instinct. “Authoritarian parenting” describes those who believe “because I said so” is the best reason a parent can give. “Authoritative” describes those parents who offer children actual reasons. And “permissive” describes those who provide a Hobbesian childhood in the State of Nature, when children were raised like Mowgli, by wolves. 

Long before the official classification of parenting styles, two ancient approaches prevailed. I’ll call them “dad-style” and “mom-style,” but either parent could perform them equally well. Together, they aimed at a balance, which is important for boys and girls alike. 

Dad-style parenting consisted in, roughly, “knock it off” for bad behavior and “shake it off” for bad feelings, while mom-style relied on nurturing, accommodation and, above all, discussion. The masculine method generally tracked the authoritarian school, but it never formed any self-conscious philosophy. That was its beauty. At best, dad-style parenting promised total and reassuring consistency. Dad’s physical presence provided comfort and discipline like a home-cooked meal, straight from the source.  

When a dad-style parent said “knock it off,” it was the child’s job to figure out the precise behaviors from which to desist, accepting that definitive knowledge of what or why might never come. The pestering touch of persons and things, drumming of fingers and clicking of tongues, ululating and whining—each on its own might not be grounds for punishment, but together they could drive an adult to madness all the same.  

Discipline socialized children. They became tolerable to those who didn’t already love them. 

As Orthodox Jews, my husband and I frequently host other families for Sabbath meals at our home. I often spend Thursday night and many hours on Friday preparing several-course meals only to have a parent turn up and confess that junior had something else in mind. Could I possibly whip up a dish more to his liking?  

I get it. In the age of psychology, we mom-style parents are hyperattuned to our children’s needs. We treat their thoughts and intentions like satellite signals. With enough effort and the right equipment, we think, we ought to be able to unscramble every whine, answer every plea. It’s a hard habit to quit. 

But there is a time and place for “knock it off,” though I can’t remember the last time I heard a parent use that expression. What I hear these days from moms and dads alike is so much pleading and explanation. “Please stop doing that, honey, it’s annoying.” Then comes the negotiation. “All right, three more tongue clicks, and that’s it. No, I said, three. OK, four.” 

Here’s the rub: Kids need dad-style too. “Shake it off” conveyed a dad-style certainty that children could survive minor injuries. Not every scratch called for a stretcher. Children should learn to overcome, not exaggerate, their pain. If an injury is unserious, a child should rise to the occasion and play on. 

I learned this lesson the way you do, the first time I prepared one of my kids for surgery. For six years of his life, unknown to us, an aggressive growth had snowballed in my son’s inner ear, dissolving bone structures in its path and burrowing toward his skull. Major operations were necessary to remove the growth, eardrum and ear bones, and to fashion a new eardrum from a piece of temporal muscle. A year later, my son needed another surgery to insert a prosthetic device that would restore his hearing. I never doubted the necessity of the surgeries. And yet, just before they took him into the operating room, after he’d drunk the “happy juice” and I was instructed to say goodbye, I had the impulse to throw myself on the cot like a human shield 

I didn’t do it. I did what we all do in such situations. I borrowed strength from a role I’d seen others play. I faked a godlike certainty that everything was going to be fine because the possibility it wasn’t was too frightening to bear. For the sake of the little boy barely visible under all those sheets, I pretended I had confidence. I told him he was more than tough enough for a six-hour surgery, and then another. My pretending made it true. He believed me.  

The dad-style approach offers more than expedience. Tough love can offer emotional nourishment too. And kids learn to soldier into the world with what a cynic might describe as naiveté. Others call it courage.

Ms. Shrier is a writer living in Los Angeles.

The Remnant: Hilary White: Et Tu, Benedict?

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/3786-et-tu-benedict-some-final-thoughts-on-joseph-ratzinger

Who is the real Joseph Ratzinger?
I have had long-time Vatican watchers say to me, more than once, “Maybe it’s really just that he wasn’t who we thought he was.” I suspect there is a lot more to this than most people might imagine. I think we made the mistake of believing the press. We were delighted that the bitterly anti-Catholic media hated and feared him. We failed to recall that they know nothing at all about Catholicism. 

What the papers never told us was that as a young priest and theologian Joseph Ratzinger was known as a “progressive,” as the term was understood in 1962. This reputation was cemented during his work as the peritus, the theological advisor, of one of the Council’s most influential of the bishops of the progressive camp, Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne. Frings’ claim to fame in that great drama was a speech criticising the CDF – and its prefect Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani – for the “conservatism” in the “schema,” the documents prepared by the CDF for guiding the bishops’ discussions.

Iditarod, 2018: End is Near

                                                 (click on the map to find White Mountain)

Here's the leaderboard:

http://iditarod.com/race/current-standings/

And...here's the rest of the story:

https://www.adn.com/section/outdoors-adventure/iditarod/?utm_source=Iditarod2018&utm_campaign=8a43c6b56a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_03_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2960a3f429-8a43c6b56a-247599661

Iditarod, 2018: Norwegian musher, Ulsom Ahead at Koyuk

https://www.adn.com/outdoors-adventure/iditarod/2018/03/12/iditarod-update-norwegian-musher-ulsom-is-first-to-koyuk-after-petit-stalls/?utm_source=Iditarod2018&utm_campaign=053e9b0600-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_03_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2960a3f429-053e9b0600-247599661

 

                                             (click to enlarge map and find Koyuk)

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Iditarod 2018: Leader in Unalakleet

(Click to enlarge map to find Unalakleet)

Iditarod

RACE UPDATE: Greeted with a hug, Nic Petit arrives first to Unalakleet

https://www.adn.com/outdoors-adventure/iditarod/2018/03/11/race-update-greeted-with-a-hug-nic-petit-arrives-first-to-unalakleet/

While Iditarod mushers Nic Petit, Joar Leifseth Ulsom and defending champion Mitch Seavey remained the three in the lead, Nordman said anything could happen.

"It's definitely not over," he said. "It's been a really exciting race."

If he had to guess, he said, he would expect the first musher into Nome at about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday — slower than the 2013 Iditarod, the last time the race followed the southern route and much slower than the 2017 Iditarod, when Mitch Seavey set a new record.

Iditarod

Fr. Nix's Sermon, Laetare Sunday, 2018

Podcasts, Sermons, Talks

Mary’s Trust in Crisis

Audio 2018-03-11 Father David Nix

Mary is the Heavenly Jerusalem even on earth at the cross, so we’ll consider the virtue that helps frees us from Satan’s bonds even before heaven. This sermon was given on Laetare Sunday, 2018. (I’ll be away from the parish next week so there will be no podcast next week. In two weeks you’ll hopefully have both a new sermon and Heresy Class 3.)

http://padreperegrino.org/2018/03/11/laetaremaria/