Distinctly Catholic

Our friends at Vox Nova have a fine takedown of the American Papist who wonders why more of us on the left have not joined him in applauding a group that stages videotaped encounters with the staff at Planned Parenthood clinics in an effort to "expose" them and their nefarious deeds.
I am no fan of Planned Parenthood. But, these juvenile, staged, videotaped encounters, like the earlier efforts to take on and take down ACORN, are not worthy of comment. They entirely miss the fact that the people they are "exposing" are, perhaps, not as morally indignant as the Papist wants them to be because they are trying to figure out what the hell is going on. If someone goes in with a problem, really any problem, a counselor should not attack them. It takes a while to answer basic questions: Is this person making this up? Is this person mentally unbalanced? Is this a hoax? How desperate is this person? The sense of bewilderment is not the same as a sense of moral laxity.

Normally, it would not occur to me to read, let alone recommend, a book of moral theology. Better to put pins in your eyes than read through another dry analysis of the moral law. Besides, morals have always bored me. It has never seemed that difficult to figure what is bad and what is not, and my Wildean inability to resist temptation keeps me frequently enough at the confessional that I am always reminded that the remedy for evil-doing is, in the end, the mercy of God.

Yesterday, Sarah Palin criticized the Obama administration's handling of the crisis in Egypt by recalling the famous television ad Hillary Clinton ran during the 2008 primaries about the phone ringing at 3 a.m. in the White House. The point of the ad was that then-candidate Obama was untested, and might not be able to handle a foreign crisis. I never liked the ad. No matter who picks up that phone at 3 a.m., you know that the caller would be the National Security Advisor. The incumbent in that post, Tom Donilon, would be as likely to hold that job had Clinton won in 2008. And, no matter who picks up the phone, the first question they ask is the same: What do you recommend? And the first command they give would be the same: Assemble the team.

The new translation of the Mass in English is at the publishers. Controversy continues to surround the translation. Noted liturgist Father Anthony Ruff, O.S.B., recently announced he was canceling speaking engagements about the new translation because he could not, in good conscience, praise the new work. At a liturgical conference in San Francisco, participants were very worried about both the process by which the new translation was achieved and its final form. Still, it appears that come the First Sunday of Advent, we will all be using this new translation.

I am not a liturgist nor a Latinist, so I have no special expertise on the subject. The two smartest priests I know are divided on the subject, one thinks the new translation preferable to the old, the other calls it a disaster. Simply as a Mass-goer, I confess I find some of our current translations a tad pedestrian but I also find some of the new translations clunky.

Archbishop Gregory Michael Aymond of New Orleans has announced that the Archdiocese is publishing the sacramental records of slaves and free blacks online in commemoration of Black History Month. This is a good thing in itself, making these important historical records more easily available to researchers. But, it is also a "distinctly Catholic" thing to do. Our tradition is not merely a set of documents. Our tradition attests to the spiritual lives of real people, our forebears, who carried on the tradition they received and handed it on to their children. Unlike the "sola Scripture" crowd, we are not Catholics because we happened to have been born in a place where there are Bibles lying about. We are Catholic Christians because we have been baptized into a community of faith, rooted in Revelation because we are rooted in the tradition that carried that Revelation forth to our own time.