Samuel and Eli and our priests and bishops...

I read the following passage today from I Samuel 3:8-18, and we discussed it in a Bible study for young adults:

'The LORD called Samuel again, for the third time. Getting up and going to Eli, he said, "Here I am. You called me." Then Eli understood that the LORD was calling the youth. So he said to Samuel, "Go to sleep, and if you are called, reply, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.'" When Samuel went to sleep in his place, the LORD came and revealed his presence, calling out as before, "Samuel, Samuel!" Samuel answered, "Speak, for your servant is listening."

'The LORD said to Samuel: "I am about to do something in Israel that will cause the ears of everyone who hears it to ring. On that day I will carry out in full against Eli everything I threatened against his family. I announce to him that I am condemning his family once and for all, because of this crime: though he knew his sons were blaspheming God, he did not reprove them. Therefore, I swear to the family of Eli that no sacrifice or offering will ever expiate its crime." Samuel then slept until morning, when he got up early and opened the doors of the temple of the LORD. He feared to tell Eli the vision, but Eli called to him, "Samuel, my son!" He replied, "Here I am."

'Then Eli asked, "What did he say to you? Hide nothing from me! May God do thus and so to you if you hide a single thing he told you."
So Samuel told him everything, and held nothing back. Eli answered, "He is the LORD. He will do what he judges best."'

Our purpose was to discuss vocation and how we discern God's call as we learn to listen to God's voice. Nonetheless, the passage illustrated the need to pray for our priests and bishops, who will one day be called to account, as Eli was, for how well they led their flocks to God and protected them from evil.

The current news is bad, and hyperbole is everywhere. If our bishops are persecuted because they are holy, then God will reward them. If our bishops committed mortal sins or failed to protect their flocks from priests they knew would commit mortal sins, then they need our prayers more than the chastisements of the press and civil actions from the victims. Causing scandal is a mortal sin. Leading astray God's "little ones" leads to damnation. Damnation is worse than any jury's verdict. Healing what has been broken will require prayer, fasting, and penance through love and sacrifice for those hurt.

I do wish the press knew more Church history. For centuries, bishops were largely selected by kings and were political appointees. The priests were often persecuted by less-than-holy bishops, so canon law developed to protect priests from false accusations by politically-oriented bishops. Likewise, the Church worked extremely hard, sometimes successfully, to keep its independence to discipline its priests outside the civil courts so to avoid persecution by anti-clerical prosecutors. Kings worked hard to distance their chosen bishops from papal authority. Therefore, it is very difficult legally to pin civil or criminal liability on a bishop, much less the Bishop of Rome, for the misdeeds of a priest.

As usual, Fr. Dwight Longenecker understands the big picture.

The Democrats and the Jews

Wes Pruden discusses the Obama administration's Israeli policy, which is better described as an anti-Israeli policy.

The President might have been too good a diplomat growing up. He does not seem to know what it is like to fight real enemies alone. Now that he has undermined Great Britain, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Australia, and India, it will be interesting to see if Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, and China send troops when we need them to defend the free world.

Pruden says: 'Accusations of anti-Semitism against the president are over-the-top, like the accusations of racism against anyone who sharply criticizes Mr. Obama, but it is certainly true that Mr. Obama has enjoyed the company of anti-Semites in the past — a "milieu," in the words of New Yorker magazine, "supposedly composed of incendiary preachers, black nationalists, fading Weathermen and . . . Palestinian intellectuals." (Milieus are fashionable on the Upper East Side and Chicago's South Side.) Mr. Obama has explained that while he did indeed submit his family to the moral guidance of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and he sat through 20 years of the preacher's Sunday-morning harangues about perfidious Jews and other evil white folks, he never heard the anti-Semitic rants, thus establishing a mark worthy of the Guinness Book of Records for sleeping through more than a thousand fiery sermons.'


I can tell you which countries have bled for us in the past, and which have soldiers who can make you feel safe in the worst parts of the world.

The Significance of March 25

It is the Feast of the Annunciation and much, much more.

Great post by Fr. Dwight Longenecker.

Above: The Annunciation by Bartomole Esteban Murillo.

"The Scent of Weakness"

Michael Yon writes about the recruiting of suicide bombers in cultures in which God might be great but not good and life is cheap:

'If those suicide bombers were expensive or hard to come by, the commander likely would have saved them for special missions of high specific significance. Yet the targets of the two attacks were small and tactical, of little specific significance. Why would a commander waste “smart ammo” on tactical targets? Perhaps the “price” of the ammo—whether through coercion or bribery—must be reasonable, and he can buy more.

'One intelligence report indicates that a certain Mullah paid cash and wheat seed to the father of Shafiqullah Rahman and Mohammed Hashim who detonated suicide car bombs on 11 November and 19 November 2009.

'Suicide attackers come in different “grades.” Some are illiterate, unsophisticated people, unsuited for complex targeting. A plotter could not expect to select an illiterate village boy from the hinterlands of Zabul Province to move to Florida, obtain a place to live and begin flight training to crash airplanes into buildings.

'Just days before 9/11, in Afghanistan, attackers passed themselves off as international journalists and managed to kill Ahmad Shah Massoud. A couple days later, on 9/11, hijackers attacked the United States. The killers were polyglots who combined savvy with international experience to wage complex attacks, such as was seen in Mumbai, India. Another sophisticated international suicide attack occurred in Afghanistan in December 2009, killing seven CIA agents.

'More locally, within a short distance of this keyboard, suicide attackers who are spent on random convoys or “common targets” probably tend to be simple folk. Many suicide attackers in Afghanistan are believed to be street children or young people from dirt-poor villages, for instance from Zabul Province. Most are thought to be young, uneducated and impoverished. These unfortunates are believed to be conditioned in madrassas in Pakistan, and in fact our intelligence people believe that there might be three madrassas in one particular town, where suicide bombers are conditioned and shipped straight into Kandahar Province.'

"In Defense of the Catholic Clergy (Or Do We Want Another Reign of Terror?)"

Sometimes clergy deserve criticism or even prison, but Edmund Burke noted that when they become a persecuted class, it is a sign that those who want to destroy traditional morality are trying to create a moral vacuum. Elizabeth Lev notes that rabid anti-clericalism is often a precursor to a reign of terror.

I must agree. Look at France in the 1790s, Mexico in the 1920s, and Spain in the 1930s.

Best of all, she quotes Edmund Burke extensively.

"Pro-Life Democrats, R.I.P."

Faster than I can say Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat gives me hope that he will show a backbone against the corporate folly of his party, and then I see that the great mammal was an image and that a jellyfish is actually swimming in the halls of Congress.

William McGurn writes on the caving of Bart Stupak and what it means for us.

Government by the zealous friends of Wile E. Coyote...

Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.


I don't feel as if it is 1859, but perhaps 1854.

UPDATE: I have written quite a bit on healthcare reform. What was passed was pure statism by people who believe in statism in the name of equality. Instead of creating catestrophic insurance for all and freeing insurers to allocate risks for the middle class, the bill requires insurers to insure the uninsurable. What would happen to AllState, State Farm, GEICO, and USAA if the federal government required them to insure drivers with "preexisting conditions" such as DUIs, reckless driving citations, and vehicular homicides?

"Christianity and Myth: Why There Is No Jewish 'Narnia'"

David P. Goldman, a.k.a. "Spengler", posts a nice piece on J.R.R. Tolkien at First Things.

"Now for the Slaughter"

Peggy Noonan this week.

If the intestinal blockage commonly known as the "healthcare bill" passes, it won't be over for years.

Two constitutional issues would be extensively litigated: (1) the procedural sausage of reconciling the conflicting House and Senate bills without a single Republican vote and certifying proper passage to the President; and (2) the federal mandate for the purchase of health insurance. While it is logical that a state could mandate car insurance for those who use public roads and license their vehicles through the state, it is much harder to say that the commerce clause allows the federal government to mandate life insurance coverage for people who happen to live in the USA.

Isn't this a form of "head tax"? Head taxes, sometimes called "poll taxes," are what unencumbered central governments do to the helpless: assess people an annual fee for being alive. Margaret Thatcher's government was dumb enough to pass a head tax, and it resulted in two decades of impotence for the Tory Party.

Memory Lane and the March of Time

I have been contacted by several old friends in recent weeks, once by email and then telephone, but largely on Facebook. We all once had our conflicts, and I cannot say I was not sometimes the jerk. Nonetheless, the conflicts evaporate and only the camaraderie and love live on. I have nothing but charity for them all.

So in their honor I post a photo of Philmont Scout Ranch's most famous landmark: The Tooth of Time. It guided travelers on the Santa Fe Trail in the 19th century. It guides me now. Nothing lasts except for grace and love and things which spring forth from God's hands. The Tooth of Time somehow tells me we will meet again.

Pfc. Joseph F. Nelles

I cannot find a photo or an obituary of this young man. I am reading Walter Lord's Day of Infamy to my daughter.

Pfc. Nelles was the chaplain's assistant, and the attack on Hickam Field began shortly after Mass on December 7, 1941. Wishing to safeguard the Blessed Sacrament, he had reentered the base chapel when it took a direct hit and disintegrated. He vanished.

Many years ago, a college classmate died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of twenty. We were devastated but comforted when our college chaplain noted what a beautiful person she was and told us: "It's not the duration. It's the donation."

If the Blessed Sacrament truly holds the Real Presence of Jesus himself, Pfc. Nelles could not have died for a better cause.

Requiescat in pace.

Military chaplains in the line of fire

The Crescat is a blog of a North Carolina woman who loves the Church. The photo is Captain Carl Subler, Catholic priest.

Hat tip: The Anchoress.

Have you heard of Fr. Aloysius Schmitt? He died when the U.S.S. Oklahoma capsized at Pearl Harbor.

Are we to control our appetites?

We are to live with an uncontrolled, uncalibrated, and unhindered appetite for the God which crowds out any appetite for anything else.

The Anchoress explains and quotes The Magnificat.

Franciscan friars visit Bob Jones University

Led by an alumnus, Fr. Dwight Longenecker.

Somehow I believe Saint Francis de Sales was tagging along.

The humility of parish work day

I volunteered yesterday. I have not done so before, partly because I'd rather not go to the trouble, and partly because it is obvious I'm not skilled with my hands.

The task list at the sign-up included "rake and weed cemetery," so I signed up. I brought my daughter and some tools. The cemetery is a 19th-century plot for the farming family that long ago tilled the soil on which our parish is built. It is surrounded by a stone wall. Two large oak trees grow in it, one right through one of the graves. One could rest a lot worse than to lie next to the entrance of a Catholic parish. We did our best to honor them, and we prayed for them. Requiescat in pace.

We then went inside and scrubbed chairs in the classrooms. I teach in that room often but seldom think about the cleanliness of the room, the tables, and the chairs or of the little acts of kindness that go into cleaning them. We scraped gum too. If it is old, it comes right off. If is new, it's terrible.

We worked in the sanctuary too. I vacuumed up and down several rows and two aisles. It was like mowing a terraced yard with lots of nooks and crannies. Three dedicated people crawled under the pews and scraped... more gum. Our priest asked me what I thought might happen in Purgatory to those who stick gum under a church pew. I replied that I did not know but that Dante would be able to imagine an appropriate penance.

I am now thinking about designing a little sign for our pews: "Before you place gum under the pew, remember that Purgatory exists to cleanse us from all unholiness before we stand before our Maker and the Heavenly Host."

[Link above to a nice discussion of Dante's Purgatorio and other literature and to the work of art above.]

Saint Patrick of Ireland

There is plenty to celebrate. He was simply one of the most important Christians of the last two millennia.


[Image from Saint Patrick's in Belfast.]

Faith v. rigidity

Fr. Dwight Longenecker notes that sometimes we get so caught up in defining our faith that we forget how to live it.

After my first summer of teaching, the headmaster pulled me aside and told me I needed to finish my M.A. thesis before I could get a raise in pay. He could tell I was overwhelmed with the project and gave me the best advice he could give on the subject: "The only way to learn to write a master's thesis is to write a master's thesis."

It is the civilian version of my father's story of how he retreated from the Yalu River in the face of 400,000 Chinese in the winter of 1950: "One foot in front of the other."

Sometimes the only certainty is that God is in charge and we are not.

The major league version of Crash Davis...

I am a casual but lifelong baseball fan with a long memory, but I don't remember the name of Matt Stairs, who is playing with his twelfth major league team.

"The Road to the Nut House"

Does any sane person have a chance to be President of the United States?

Peggy Noonan reports:

'Not only do staffers turn on candidates in this book, but candidates turn on staffers. At times you get the impression people were wearing wires. But the overwhelming fact the book communicates is that our candidates for president are emotionally volatile, extreme personalities. They spend a lot of time being enraged. They don’t trust those around them. They desperately want power and want to be celebrated, but they don’t know what they want to do with power beyond wield it, and they seem incapable of reflection about why they need to be admired. Most seriously, they show little interest in, or even awareness of, the central crises of their time.'

There is nothing abnormal about America having a large share of narcissists. What is scary is that there appears to be little room at the top for people who are not narcissists. (Allen Tate spent a lifetime warning us about narcissism becoming normal in modern life, and he does not get much credit for it.)

Gridlock, sometimes called "checks and balances," is good. We hope that our nation is run by the "best and the brightest," but it is just as likely to be run by the nuts we see in Doctor Strangelove.

[Above- Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley.]

Can the world survive population control?

The Economist has a story about the decline in numbers of young women due to selective abortions and infanticide.

'China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.'

What is China going to do when it has 30 million more young men than young women? The result will be violent, whatever it is. 30 million young men won't just sit down and play video games when they find that all the girls are taken but their buddies' aunts.

[Above- Pietro de Cortona's The Rape of the Sabine Women.]

"What a Disaster Looks Like"

Peggy Noonan hopes Obamacare will die before it kills us.

The Infant of Prague

Father Dwight Longenecker, graduate of Bob Jones University and Catholic priest, encounters the Infant of Prague in Prague, Oklahoma. (My wife commented in the comments.)

What a country! What a Church!

I found the photo here.

Milton Friedman and Chile

Nice piece by Bret Stephens.

I hope my cousin in Buenos Aires comments.

"The Tragic Truth of War"

"What We Dare Not Say: Killing the Enemy Brings Victory." Victor Davis Hanson notes the irony of President Barack Obama talking to the press about how the war on jihadis is really a criminal matter, yet in Afghanistan he is getting aggressive:

'Contemporary conventional wisdom tries to persuade us that there is no such thing as a finite number of the enemy. Instead, killing them supposedly only incites others to step up from the shadows to take their places. Violence begets violence. It is counterproductive, and creates an endless succession of the enemy. Or so we are told.

'We may wish that were true. But military history suggests it is not quite accurate. In fact, there was a finite number of SS diehards and kamikaze suicide bombers even in fanatical Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. When they were attrited, not only were their acts of terror curtailed, but it turned out that far fewer than expected wanted to follow the dead to martyrdom.'

If the President stays out of the way, the military leaders who adapted in Iraq and won victory despite the consensus of our civilian leadership that all was lost, might also win in Afghanistan.

"British POW who broke into Auschwitz and survived..."

The stories of WWII continue to astound me.

Hat tip to Instapundit.