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I just joined Substack Notes (with a short note on Michael Warren Davis's new Substack essay on ultramontanism): substack.com/profile/156643…

catholicworldreport.com/2023/05/18/the… "The curve of history is on our side and our day will come.” The curve of history:

"Outside of a handful of people, hardly anyone in Armenia or the rest of the Soviet Union knew of his heroics. "That’s because Soviet authorities hushed up the accident. 'Their ideological rationale was that a Soviet trolleybus could not fall in the water.'"

"Across Europe, the continent that nurtured Christianity for most of two millennia, churches, convents and chapels stand empty and increasingly derelict as faith and church attendance shriveled over the past half century." washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/…

Sr Christine Schenk: "We have 42% fewer priests than in 1965! But we have 50% more 'parish-connected Catholics!'" The awkward fact not mentioned is that few of these "parish-connected Catholics" show up - there's literally less than half as many people at Mass than in 1965.

A hard, unflinching look by Peter Hitchens at Julian Jackson's 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘖𝘯 𝘛𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘭: "Do not be defeated in war. Defeat corrupts the defeated, and it is far harder than we think to stand above the grim process. Pray that it never happens to you."

The reputation of the Church is in shambles already. The only way to rebuild it is radical transparency, not opaque damage control.

This is so depressing and dumb. What a horrible way to think about children and about music.

Lionel Shriver, insightful as always: "I have my own depressing theory. It’s credibly to our evolutionary advantage to be conformists. At any given time, your chances of survival are greater if you parrot exactly what other people around you are saying." spectator.co.uk/article/it-rar…

Very revealing that the media spotlight on sex abuse in the Catholic Church which burned so brightly during the pontificate of Benedict is now suddenly dimmed.

… Everything dies, baby, that's a fact But maybe everything that dies some day comes back Put your mantilla on (after you) fix your hair up pretty And meet me tonight at St. Maria Goretti …x.com/AP/status/1785…

“Whatever you are doing IRL, we will crush it and replace it with the black mirror” I’ll say this: it’s refreshingly honest

Dr. Paolo Ruffini: “you think if we remove Rupnik’s art from our website that we will be closer to victims?” Audience: “yes” Dr. Ruffini: “I think you’re wrong.”

The Vatican will tell parishes to remove certain Mass times from their bulletins but removing a credibly accused, once-excommunicated, expelled Jesuit’s art from the Vatican’s own website constitutes “throwing stones”?

The ideologues come to Haworth. "People who don’t feel comfortable inhabiting the past, or at least engaging with it on its own terms, are entitled to their opinion. But perhaps they shouldn’t be handed the keys to the museum." -- Madeline Grant

There are whole books on psychology that don't get anywhere near this paragraph from Dostoevsky

"So, as I have said for a while, pre-Vatican II, the rubrics micro-managed the clergy and let the laity alone for the most part. Post-V2, the landscape is reversed. The clergy can do whatever, er, these or similar words, sorry, and the laity are micromanaged." All too true.

My BBS (bossy boomer supervisor) called me into her office for reacting to a message in the team chat with a celebratory emoji because "we may only use thumb or heart otherwise the company is charged extra" I am going to walk into the sea