How many?

My eldest is learning about abortion and euthansia in RE. He has an understandable distaste for abortion, though a characteristic sympathy for women driven to it. He's an empathetic lad but abhors the death of the innocent.

"How many abortions do you think there were last year in the UK?" I ask.

"I don't know...a hundred?"

He was appalled by the figures.

Ourselves alone

So how will the demonstrators in Edinburgh feel if the good citizens of Cork, Warsaw, Luxembourg or *clutches pearls* Texas voice their distaste at abortion law in the UK?

Calling a spade a spade

Long provenance and greater claims to episcopal authority than an Anglican "bishop".

So. Heretic sect gets uptight because laywomen pretendy priests are not able to dress up as pretendy bishops.

Big deal.

Well, we can't say we weren't warned

Guido, in the context of the Rotheram Child Catchers quoting that old fraud GBS on why the State knows what's best for your children:

[Socialism] …intervenes between the children and the parents, claiming to support them, protect them, and educate them for its own ampler purposes. Socialism, in fact, is the State family. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it, just as the old water works of private enterprise, or the old gas company. They are incompatible with it. Socialism assails the rampant egotism of the family today… So far as English Socialism is concerned … I must confess that the assault has displayed a quite extraordinary instinct for taking cover, but that is a question of tactics rather than of essential antagonism.

Hard times

Difficult days in the last week.

My youngest has been diagnosed with a gut problem that will be lifelong, relapsing and remitting. DV he will have a normal lifespan, but it won't go away. It was a diagnosis we had feared.

He is currently on an enteral feeding programme which means he cannot eat any solid food for the next eight weeks. He cannot receive Holy Communion until after the New Year. He and we were very upset last week, tearful and down, drained.

He has been braver and more phlegmatic than I would have been as an adult. He is 11. His first feed took the best part of an hour to take - sickly and sweet.  He can now down 330mls of feed in 4 minutes. He has to take it six times a day - 2L in total.

Theodicy has been at the front of my mind, but it is useless to go down that road if one truly believes in the Incarnation.

A bit flat. Prayers required.

Prayer, prayer, prayer.....

Savile and the BBC: the Acid Test

 

I was infuriated to hear Richard Bacon - one of the BBC's most egregious purveyors of liberal bias and who was all over the clerical abuse scandal - struggling to defend the BBC over Savile. It went something along the lines of "You can't expect the Director General or senior management to know everything that goes on. The BBC is a large, complex organisation" This was rebuffed by a contributor to the Biased BBC  website:  “Say that again, but this time WEAR A MITRE – then see how it sounds!”

:

Just sayin'

I think I prefer our method.

A Message To Stonewall

Get your tanks off our lawn.

Oh, and a message to anyone else: BOYCOTT BARCLAYS.

Downton christening - Fellowes misses an opportunity

Downton Abbey is a regular Sunday night fixture for Mrs P and me. The plotline involving Catholicism and Tom/Branson was probably irresistible for the Old Amplefordian, Julian Fellowes. After a lot of casual anti-Catholicism (entirely believable given the era) including a great line from Rev Travis “I can’t see that bells and incense and the rest of that Pagan folderol is pleasing to God”, baby Sybil was baptised into the Holy Catholic Church in Ripon.

The attention to detail was (almost) inpeccable. The priest when summoned to have his photo taken with the decidedly uncomfortable Dowager Lady Grantham and Lord Grantham wore an English Benedcitine habit. I don't know if the Benedictines ever had a parish in Ripon - I think the nearest would be Easingwold or Knaresborough - but the idea was a good one, given the closeness of Ampleforth as 'Downton' is in the North Riding. So you could see where the OA, Fellowes, was coming from. One teensy, tiny detail was that Fr Dominic's hood had a small clasp more typical of a Downside monk than the button on an Ampleforth habit (I know, I know. Only a Catholic trainspotter would know that).

The trick Fellowes missed would have been to have shown the pre-conciliar Rite of Baptism

"Sybil quid petis ab Ecclésia Dei?""Fidem.""Fides quid tibi præstat?" "Vitam ætérnam."

- a chance to demythologise and perhaps evangelise. Certainly a chance to show what we are missing with a hermeneutic of rupture.