BADD 2013 + Theology of the Body for Every Body

It’s BADD time again, May 1. Of course I forgot, again, even though I knew it was coming up. But look, over at New Evangelizers, I reviewed Theology of the Body for Everybody. Which hits on exactly this topic. The whole living-in-a-body experience we human persons get to enjoy. Go look.

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And now you’re back, and here is my annual BADD comment, 2013 Edition:

People don’t want to be treated like dirt.

Profound, I know. (Hence Leah Perrault’s whole book on the topic. See “book review” above.)

When you read around at crotchety disability-rights sites, there’s a lot of conversation about how to think about disability. Something that confuses bystanders is the insistence that it’s not about the medical condition.

Which puzzles, for several reasons. The first is the happy-sad problem. Given the choice between hearing and not-hearing, seeing and not-seeing, walking and not-walking, everything else equal, we go for the ability every time.

Now someone might say, “I’m so glad I had this stroke, because it caused me to learn so much about __{insert profound revelation here}__.” And what they mean is typically not, “I always wanted to know what it was like to slur my speech!”

Rather, the “I’m so glad” is usually code for, “I discovered there was this whole part of my life I’d been ignoring, and now I’ve grown in ways that matter far more than any physical ability, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” People say that, and they mean it. For good reason. But still, if they could have the spiritual growth and the ability to remember words on command, yeah, they’d take both. Nothing wrong with being able to talk. We know this, instinctively.

But here’s the other thing we know instinctively: Humans deserve to be treated with respect. And the disrespect of disablism falls into two big lumps:

1. Can’t be bothered to have you around. Too much work. So terribly haaaaaarrrd to put in a ramp. So coooooomplicated trying to have one Mass, anywhere in the diocese, ever, with an ASL interpreter. So very, very overwhelming, having to change the seating arrangement, or modify the assignment, or find one more volunteer to assist the kid who needs assistance.

The message is pretty clear: It’s not that we don’t love you. We just don’t love you enough to go through any inconvenience for you.

2. Your kind of suffering is not my kind of suffering. This is straight out of the eugenics playbook. It’s no surprise that the recent fashion for killing off disabled children before they see light of day is always couched in terms of “avoiding suffering”. Better to be dead than to be you.

The feeling may well be mutual, but that’s no solution. The solution is to quit being such a wimp. To quit dividing the Fates of Man into a two-part list, labeled Normal Problems and Pitiful Freaks. This isn’t 1930. Get over that nasty notion that you must be ranked among The Fit in order to deserve life and respect.

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And since BADD is the annual day for airing our pet peeves, I’ll share one with you: If you never really appreciated your kid-job-marriage-finger-toe-brain until it was gone . . . could you keep it to yourself? Or just let everyone know you have a gratitude-deficiency-disorder. I guess I could cultivate some compassion for that.

See all the BADD entries, which are by no means Catholic nor genteel, here.

Your Father is Just This Guy

In the past 48 hours I’ve been guilty, more than once, of uttering crude expressions of impatience concerning select clergy. Not publicly, and not out of ill-will, just a general, “Will this guy get with it for a change!”

Lots of us are guilty. We want all these guys we call “Father” — the one we grew up with, or without, and the ones in our Church — we want them to be wonderful. We want them to be holy, and kind, and wise, and good. And we want them to know what to do. To know how to fix things.

But they’re just these guys. They wear funny clothes. They have strange taste in music. They are too indulgent with that child, and too severe with the other one. They didn’t do Christmas / Thanksgiving / Birthdays / Math Homework / Yard Maintenance / The Easter Triduum just the way we think they should. They work too long, or retire too early, or both.

They stink at interior decorating. And most of them snore.

Also, when you get to be a parent of a certain age, you look back and do the math, and realize just how young your father was, way back when, when you as a child thought he was so old. When you thought he knew everything, because you were six? He was barely into adulthood. When you thought he knew nothing, because you were sixteen? He was still just cutting his teeth on the What Do I Do With This Teenager of Mine problem. And when he’s eighty, he’s being eighty for the first time in his life. He’s just improvising.

He’s guessing. That’s what fathers do.

I’ve lost my patience with the Francisco-Obsessing. He’s just this guy. He dresses funny. Guys dress funny. It’s what they do.

I know the Holy Father, and your bishop, and your parish priest, and your dad, they all do certain symbolic actions that send important messages. But you know how there’s all those NFP instructors who make that smarmy admonition that husbands should do the charting, as if the measure of a man’s worth could all be summed up in one glorious epitaph, “He Recorded Her Mucus Faithfully”?

A man is not a symbol. He’s a person. If he doesn’t chart, but he does do his best to earn a living, and help rear the children, and say nice things to you now and again, and maybe even change your oil, doesn’t that count for something? You can be the dad that tells bedtime stories, or the one who reads the Bible at breakfast, or the one who plays ball on Sunday afternoon, or the one who takes a kid along when he goes to the hardware store . . . and you don’t have to be all of them. Being one guy is enough.

Guys who cheat on their wives, or abandon their children, or refuse to support the family, or commit any number of gross abuses of their responsibility? They deserve the harsh words that come their way. Guys who don’t discipline their children, ever, or can’t be bothered to see they get a decent education, or don’t listen and take action when the kids come to them with problems? They need a serious talking to. They need to put on their Man Pants and step up to the plate.

But the guy who dresses funny and dines at all the wrong restaurants? Whatever. He’s not a better dad because he’s so dapper, or so frugal. He’s not a worse dad because he wants Thanksgiving served on heirloom china, or on paper plates.

And you can’t know what it all means, not really. If he surrounds himself with elegant things, he’ll be accused of being self-indulgent, or pompous, and also of being erudite and cultured. If he wears the same pair of jeans for fifteen years straight, he’ll be accused of being slovenly and lazy, and also a “man of the people” who “doesn’t get caught up in appearances”. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.

Maybe he’s just this guy.

Francisco’d better appoint good bishops. He’d better elevate good cardinals. He ought to direct the curia deftly, pay attention to necessary reforms, and teach clearly and accurately. He needs to cultivate his own spiritual life lest he fall into greater sins than the one he commits already (whatever they are, I have no idea what they might be), and in the hopes that he might yet grow further in wisdom and holiness.

Lord willing, he’ll do all this, and do it well.

And if he does, I pretty much don’t care where he lives. I don’t care what he eats. I don’t care about the car he drives, the shoes he wears, or the kind of music he listens to at night. Not so long as none of it’s immoral, and none of it prevents him from doing his real Dad Jobs.

And if he screws it up? He’s accountable for that, too. It’s a false piety to think that “Honor Your Father” means “Pretend Sin Is Not Sin”. Francisco has serious responsibilities. Heresy and dissent are rife within the Church. Corruption, crime, and immorality among the clergy and laity have got to be addressed. What is true and good — whether it comes in more formal or more humble trappings — needs to be encouraged and promoted. No amount of visiting prisoners or chatting with the help gets a pope excused from doing his (other) fatherly duties.

But any man who’s doing his Dad Jobs gets a free pass to dress as goofy as he wants, sit in his favorite comfy chair, and stock his beverage cooler with whatever the heck he wants. He’s a father. Call him to task on his Manly Responsibilities, if indeed he neglects them. You don’t have drink his Pabst Blue Ribbon, or his Glenfiddich, if turns your stomach. More for him. So be it.

Holy Thursday’s tomorrow. Pray for priests.

Monday Thoughts: The Good Life

1. Study Shows Catechesis Helps, But Not Quite Enough

Here’s a nice article from the National Catholic Register about the differences of opinion on Church doctrine and social issues among Catholic who attend Mass, and those who don’t. That’s not how they describe the article, but it is one thing the study demonstrates. The good news: Catholics who say they go to Mass every Sunday are also much more likely to say they agree with the Church on counter-cultural issues. The bad news: Depending on the hot-button topic, between 1/3 and 1/2 of Catholics attending Mass weekly dissent from Church teaching.

(In contrast, this isn’t, say, the good-natured non-Catholic spouse who comes to Mass as a kindness to the Catholic spouse. These adults who both claim to be Catholic, AND claim to attend Mass every Sunday.)

So. In the pews next to you on Sunday, think of the three people you shake hands with during the Sign of Peace. If yours is a typical parish described by this study, you can assume you’ve shaken hands with at least one person who does not in fact believe and accept the Catholic faith.

Thinking of traveling to the far corners of the earth to evangelize? Your parish pews are mission territory.

In choosing best friends, if you can find one whose besetting sins are utterly different from your own . . . golden. Just golden.

A Sunday well-spent is truly a foretaste of Heaven. More coming later. Partly in response to this post.

I read and thoroughly enjoyed The King’s Gambit by John McNichol. My Amazon review is up, and when I get around to it, I’ll post something longer here at the blog. As always on my Catholic-genre youth fiction reviews, let us remember to ask ourselves: Do my tastes run to Thomas Hardy, or Hardy Boys? I’m firmly in the latter camp. I like my adult beverages some combination of bitter, dry, and rarefied; I like my fiction just the opposite.

I can’t remember what else. Have a great week. Happy Conclave-Watching!

3.5 Time Outs: New Things

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who’s also doing a time-travel edition today.

3.5 Time Outs Tuesday — Click and be amazed.

Blogging Popes. That’s my topic for today. Not the kind you’re thinking of, though.

See, here’s what happened: Saturday night I was bored, tired, and itching for something to read. Something fun and relaxing and novel. Meaning, new-to-me. I usually grab one of my daughter’s library books for this purpose — just enough entertainment to get me through a non-digital Sunday, but not so much that I’ll be out of service, glued to a book, for 10,000 hours waiting for Br. Cadfael to tell me who did it. But I needed novelty.

So I went to Papal Encyclicals Online. I’m sure that’s what you do, too. But before you get too impressed, keep in mind that the three reasons this was a possible source of reading material were:

I’d never read most of them before. Strike one against my Catholic-nerd credentials.
They’re usually very short. This is why I’ve read the minor prophets, but *still* never gotten through all of Isaiah.
There was no chance I’d let the cat starve, or grouse at my children for interrupting me during an especially gripping scene.

And the thing is, they tend to cover that same juicy ground as your average Catholic blogger, only you get bonus credit for not being stuck to the computer all day while you work up your angry frenzy at the injustice in the world. Of course, no Star Trek screen shots for illustrations, but look, I was desperate for entertainment.

And the one I picked was Rerum Novarum. Which is basically a series of blog posts on economics. Perfect.

(Let me just say right now, JPII’s follow-up work is not blog-genre. Waaay more wordy. Waaay more. I haven’t finished it yet. But I’m half thinking, “What more is there to say? Leo.Encyclicalpress.com already covered the whole territory. But you know how it is, people need to explain the obvious. Or maybe people needed the obvious re-explained.)

Here’s a sample snippet of the Leonine goodness:

Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.

And this:

The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men.

Followed by this:

To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

See? I spent my weekend reading 64 Cath-Econ-blog posts, 19th century edition.

3.5

And although I could pretty much shut my eyes and point my finger anywhere in the document to find a good quotable quote, one of my underlined favorites is

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Well that’s all for today. Still accepting suggestions for additions to the sidebar, so tell me who to add. But do just one link per comment, because otherwise the robotic spam-dragon will consume the whole lot of them. Thanks!

Rant-o-rama: The Pornification of Everything

Brad Warthen posted a photo of the controversial Time Magazine cover over at his blog. I won’t here, though I suppose you’ve seen it. I’ll describe it in a minute.

Time poses as a respectable newsweekly, and so it’s supposed to be reporting about real issues. The topic at hand is delayed weaning, and we are supposed to be upset that a three-year-old might still be nursing. Difficult to get upset about that, unless you can somehow stage it as a sexual issue. Keep in mind that typically a three-year-old still needs help with bathing, toileting, and often may need diapers changed. Can a child be sexually abused as part of all that? Sure. Would there be any reason to suspect a dysfunctional or abusive relationship merely because a parent looked after a child’s hygiene? No.

I’m going to describe the photo, and what’s noteworthy is that there is nothing unusual about this. I can be pretty sure that if I draw the right readership, I’ll be told I’m an uptight prude for calling the mom’s outfit immodest. These are the clothes young women wear to serve in ministry at church, for example. It’s all so normal.

Mom:

Mom’s wearing ballet flats — nothing tiltating there. Which also make her as short at possible. Important in a minute.

Mom’s wearing tight jeans — technically, these are tights. Wonder of spandex, we can now have “pants” that fit like something which, a decade ago, went under a skirt to keep your legs warm in winter.

Mom’s wearing a camisole. Remember camisoles? They used to go under your clothes.

And that’s it.

We, as a culture, think this is normal. Girls dress this way at church. Well you know what? It’s not normal. It’s underwear. And when you pose someone in her underwear on the cover of a magazine . . . it’s that type of magazine.

Now I know your daughter who dresses this way is sweet and pure and innocent, because I’ve met her or a girl just like her, and in addition she’s delightful, polite, intelligent, and devoted to her faith. I don’t question her motives. She’s just wearing what they sell. But still. She’s walking around in her underwear. And doesn’t know it, because everyone else is too. The empress has no outerwear.

So. On the cover of Time, we have a woman in her underwear. A young, beautiful woman. Her eyes and her posture say, “I dare you.” Or, perhaps, “Come and get it.” We’ll go with “I dare you.”

Now for her boy:

He’s three, but he’s a little taller than a typical three year-old.

He’s dressed like a little GI – camo pants, grey knit shirt, running shoes. Grown-up hair cut.

He’s standing on a chair, which though you know doesn’t make him taller, really, your eyes see that head way up by her shoulder, and your brain thinks “twelve years old.”

The clothing, the relative heights — this preschooler has been done up to look like a pre-teen boy. In an age when grown men do their best to look like pre-teen boys.

Recap: A woman in her underwear, with a child made up to look like a grown-up, doing what grown-up men do in their bedroom with their wives during intercourse. That’s child porn.

It’s not about breastfeeding.

Allow me to hurt your brain a little more. Make that boy pose like a GI caught with his pants down. Have mom kneel down, same outfit, same “I dare-you-eyes” as she reaches up with a baby-wipe to clean that bottom . . . child porn.

It’s not about breastfeeding.

It’s about the fact that our culture is sex-obsessed.

It’s about the fact that if you even mention modesty, you must be some kind of Victorian prude (I’m not so impressed with the Victorians, but apparently some people are). Even among Catholics, the hot thing is to declare modesty is context-dependent, and more about a state of mind, and anyway here’s a picture of someone, somewhere, dressing this way fifty years ago, so that makes it modest. Also, look at this piece of classic art. We all know artists were protected from impurity until 1957. And then it degenerates into the Burka argument, since neither Nazis nor pedophile priests can be brought into the discussion so easily.

Our culture hears the word “breast” and thinks “sex”, since sex is what everything is about, all the time. We worry about three-year-olds nursing, because we know that by five the girls will be dressed like little prostitutes — surely that boy must be getting warmed up for his kindergarten girlfriend.

I edited out the last paragraph because the SuperHusband said it exceeded even the bounds of Rant-o-Rama. For those who feel shortchanged, I point you to this excellent, charitable, and informative post on modesty over at Aggie Catholics. Where they are kind, and hip, and not at all ranty like your cranky hostess here.

Why Believe this Jesus-Pope-Church Stuff is Really Real?

Faced with so many Catholics, even the leaders of many Catholic institutions, openly rejecting the teaching of the Church, I had to ask myself last week: Why shouldn’t I go the same way? If Georgetown and Notre Dame are allowed to call themselves Catholic, why should I feel compelled to avoid their purported errors? If you can be Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden and not be excommunicated . . . maybe they are the ones who are right after all. Maybe the Catholic Faith is about our finding our own path, and each doing what he feels is right, and the Catechism is just so many suggestions, helpful to some, not required for all. Maybe.

Having entertained that thought experiment, what convinces me to persist in my catechism-slinging? Here’s my list:

1. Jesus was crucified. If Jesus just wants people to go their own way, do their own thing, why die on the cross? Those words: “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” The Jewish leaders who campaigned for the cruxifiction were, by Jesus’ own words, only doing what they thought they should. If that’s not a sin, why forgive?

And if truth and the will of God can be molded to fit our situation, and there’s really no need to worry about fine details and firm definitions, why sweat blood in Gethsemane? If the Father’s will is merely that we each do our own will, Jesus could have slipped off in the moonlight the way he’d done plenty of times before.

There’s a branch of dissenting Catholics who deny the crucifixion and resurrection, treating one or both events as mere myth. In which case, sure, a mythical God feels no pain, the blood and the anguish must be just as fictional. But I don’t think the Incarnation is nothing more than an especially glorious fireside tale, because of the next reason on my list.

2. The Martyrs died for their faith. An agonizing death for the sake of a little incense? I don’t think so. If the ancient faith were a mythical faith, Roman officials wouldn’t have written letters advising each other how to deal with those cantankerous Christians. A mad man can gather a few suicidal followers for a short time; no one persuades synagogue after to synagogue throughout the whole Roman empire to face death rather than recant a myth, generation after generation.

It is possible the early Church was wrong, and Christianity is not true — plenty of men have shed their own bled in defense of a mistaken cause. But those who give their lives freely, for the martyrs were never coerced by the Romans — the Romans urged them to spare their own lives with a few simple gestures — those who give their lives freely do so because they believe they must. That the faith of the Church requires an absolute loyalty to Jesus Christ and no other. A Christian can, and should, respect the honest unbeliever; but respect is something different from agreement. In the early Church, “find your own path”, or in the Roman style, make Jesus just one more god in the pantheon, this it’s-all-good-enough Christianity was no Christianity at all.

3. I’m not ready to throw the saints under the bus. Were all these martyrs and saints who insisted on one Lord, one Faith, one Truth — were they kindly people sorely mistaken? Did the Holy Spirit’s promise to lead us into all truth tarry a while, and we didn’t get the real faith handed on until 1960-something? When we canonize someone, we don’t claim their every word was Gospel, their every action impeccable. Saints err. This saint didn’t reason into the Immaculate Conception, that saint had a bad temper, and there’s an alarming amount of disagreement about dress codes and attachment parenting. (I suppose the modern Church is very saintly that way.)

But every single saint, all of them, wrong about the same basic facts about the faith? Saint Thomas Aquinas as a jolly old fellow who gave it his best on theology, buy the man a beer and tell him that really there’s nothing particular to know about Jesus, but thank you for getting so many Dominicans off the streets and into the university? Saints Isaac Jogues and Kateri Tekawitha showing their remarkable pluck, and hey, there’s room in the celestial sweat lodge, relax and try some pantheism for a while, you look like you could do with a change — it’s all the same thing anyway — hey, what happened to your hands, buddy?

Nope. My brain just won’t go there. Because of my final reason.

4. I’m sane. I mean that in the most charitable way. (And the most limited way.) I spent two decades in school, learning “creativity” and “critical thinking”, which was education-code for “outlandish is good” and “If you can convince people, it must be true.” I had a harrowing moment in business school when I persuaded my accounting professor the wrong answer was in fact correct — the assignment was to argue the assigned position, so I did. It was wrong, and anyone with half a brain could see it. But I could argue well. I persuaded her. It was my first brush with the darkness of dishonesty. After that I quit going along so nicely with inane assignments. I graduated anyhow.

But I didn’t really learn how to reason — that is, to find the truth — until after I reverted. In returning to the Church, I was beseiged by arguments against the Catholic Faith not from the anything-goes crowd, but from sincere and fervent evangelical friends. The stakes were high: My own spouse was now a born-again evangelical (protestant) Christian. Try telling someone five years into a happy marriage that he’s gotta start using NFP, and by the way, our marriage isn’t valid and we need to get a priest to fix it. The man had good reasons to doubt the credibility of the Church before; now the ol’ Mother-n-Teacher is intruding into his bedroom and making his wife think crazy-wacky-papist-talk.

You can’t buy into “it’s all the same thing” when your good friends are giving you books telling you the Church is the Dominion of Satan. You have to answer the question. You have to examine the evidence, and decide one thing is true and another is false. No quantity of parables about blind men feeling the elephant can make Satan and Jesus into the head and tail of a big grey spirituality that squirts water out its trunk.

I could choose not to know the answer about God — to be agnostic about Christianity the way I am agnostic about evolution. (I don’t care enough about evolution to have an opinion on it, nor to bother forming one.) But whereas I could in good faith believe that knowledge of God is unimportant, I could not in good reason believe there is no single answer about God. Either evolution happened or didn’t, and if it did, it happened in either this way or that. Species didn’t evolve for those who want that to be their truth, and get plopped down as-written for those who prefer a younger and more predictable planet. Either Jesus is the Son of God, or he isn’t. Either He founded a Church, or he didn’t. Either the Pope is head of that Church, with the ability to teach authoritatively, or he isn’t.

A Catholic can in good faith be unable to answer these questions — to lack the mental capacity, or the free time, or even the knowledge these questions exist. But to know these questions abound, and in sound mind believe there are no absolute answers to them? No. As certainly as a child knows either the dog ate the cupcake or it didn’t, sane Catholics know that facts are facts, whether we know the facts or not. Good faith demands good reason.

Catholics Acting Catholic: It shouldn’t make the news — except that yes, it is news.

The US Bishop’s campaign for religious freedom, and the Vatican’s pending reform of the LCWR, have been met with skepticism by much of the mainstream media, and by a good chunk of the Catholic population as well. Why? Would we hear this same outcry against another religious group, however weird and wacky, that sought to assert its beliefs and practices?

We could guess at any number of nefarious reasons for all this alarm at Catholics acting Catholic, but I propose one common thread: No one thinks Catholics really believe this stuff.

(For the record: Yes, we do.)

The American church has spent I’m not sure how many decades wallowing in a lukewarm faith — my entire life, at the very least. Do an exit poll after Mass this Sunday: How many parishioners really believe all that the Church holds to be true? In many quarters, the simple act of asserting that the Church holds some things to be true incites an outcry of protest about rights of conscience, and personal discernment, and accusations of judging other souls*.

And we’re still wallowing.

On one hand I get it: Patience. Pastoral Care. I appreciate all that. I’m certainly glad the CDF inquires thoroughly and charitably before taking action.

But what’s the reality we’re living with, here in the US and elsewhere? Do I have any confidence that my local Catholic hospital (where, incidentally, I first learned NFP) will stick to Catholic teaching in its medical care? No I don’t. I have no idea. I could ask around and get the lowdown, but until I check, I don’t know. Are my local Catholic schools really Catholic? I think they might be, because I’ve known a few good folks associated with them . . . but I don’t know. I don’t know. The brand name is no guarantee. You have to check every institution one by one. Some are excellent. Some are positively shining beacons of the Faith. But you really can’t know until you check for yourself.

My new pastor? Great guy. Fabulously Catholic sermons, right to the point — every reason to believe he’s spot-on in his faithfulness to Church teachings. (And a decent person besides. Wish he had more free time to hang around and have a beer or something.) But there was a tense time wondering — now who have we got? The fact that someone is an ordained priest, or professed religious sister or brother, or DRE, or catechist . . . is no guarantee they actually believe and teach what the Church believes and teaches. You have watch and see.

I don’t mean, here, that you have to watch and see in the normal sense of prudence and discernment about the weaknesses and failings of all men. We all sin. We all struggle with our faith. We all grow in our understanding and practice of our faith over time. What I mean is something more insidious: The Catholic faith as taught in, say, the Catechism, is not something everyone in the Church assumes is the standard.

And those who take the Catechism-optional approach are, in a sense, correct to do so. They are only guilty of believing what the Church practices. The practice of Catholic institutions not following Church teaching is so widespread that those religious orders who do stick with the magisterium make sure they mention the fact in their advertisements for vocations. It is so rare for a homily to explain Catholic teaching on contraception that if it should happen, Catholic bloggers talk about it for days.

This isn’t about pant suits or folk guitars**. The investigation into the LCWR isn’t about legitimate theological or practical disagreements on the innumerable topics about which Catholics are free to disagree. It isn’t about emphasis of ministry — there are topics that might never come up at the food bank, but that matter very much at the hospital, and vice versa. No one expects the ladies sorting boxes of pasta to explain to you the details of licit and illicit fertility treatments. (Also: Don’t necessarily ask your doctor to cook for you.)

This about the fact that a lot of Americans, including a lot of American Catholics, think the bishops are making this stuff up. That noise about birth control and sterilization? Well, that’s not really Catholic teaching, it’s just this optional extra, like saying the Rosary or wearing a hair shirt, that we can do if we feel called, but we don’t really have to, right? This business of Jesus and the Church being the only way, and myriad new age practices being in fact demonic? Oh come on. Yes, Catholicism is a Jesus-Brand spiritual path, but don’t we each have to find our own path? And anyway, who believes in Satan? So 12th Century.

That’s the faith Americans have been practicing. That’s what people really think the Church teaches. The average American has a better idea of what the Amish or the Muslims believe and practice than what comprises the Catholic faith. That is, at the very least they’d be willing to consider the possibility that the Amish have religious objections to birth control, or that Muslims think their faith is in fact the one true faith. Catholics? That birth control and catechism-stuff is just one extremist current in our multi-faceted approach to the spiritual life, right?

I read too much history to worry much. Heresy happens. Jesus wins. We each try to be faithful and do our best. It’s all pretty simple, other than the details. But for goodness sakes, let’s quit acting shocked at the outcry when we suddenly care about this stuff so publicly after so many years of stealth witness.

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Also while we’re at it: Politicians are creepy. Professional hazard. Quit acting like you think one side or the other is going to suddenly get all Catholic on you, just because of what they said at that speech. There’s a reason we’re told to be wise as serpents, eh?

*The Church does not judge souls. FYI.

**Full disclosure: I like pants suits. And folk guitar. Also long skirts and Gregorian chant. I like everybody.

7 Quick Takes: BunnyLand

7 Quick Takes Post-It Notes — Nine out of ten bunnies surveyed agree: You should look at the other quick takes.

I know the SuperHusband loves me, because he built BunnyLand. (As if the bookshelves hadn’t clinched it.)

#3, suitably nicknamed “The Bun” since before ever we met her, wanted bunnies. #1 has a dog, and #2 her cat, and #3 longed for bunnies. Sweet, soft, fuzzy little bunnies.

As an Easter surprise we worked out a timeshare arrangement with our bunny-owning friends: We could have guardianship of Bun-Bun and Jennie-Bun as long as we liked, and still be confident of bunny-sitting and bunny-sabbaticals as needed. The perfect solution, especially after we calculated that there was more venison in the freezer than we could eat in a year, so acquiring a breeding pair of bunnies was not strictly neccessary.

And though #3 does all the daily bunny-feeding and watering, we discovered the two most ardent bunny-lovers (I am loathe to admit this) are the two most curmudgeonly, un-cuddly residents of the castle — Mr. Boy and I.

The porch was fine for temporary lodgings, but for a longterm stay, the bunnies needed room to roam and a place to relieve themselves at will. After several false starts, we prevailed upon the SuperHusband to create BunnyLand, a sheltered, predator-resistant enclave under the apple tree. It’s big and leafy, and the bunnies have space to hop around in giant zig-zags, and hide under the virginia creeper, and loll in the dirt pile left from setting a post for the bunny-gate.

In the morning I can sit out in the garden with a cup of coffee and a missal, and watch bunnies until I remember to pray, and then watch more after. And usually in-between. Somewhere about the psalm I end up taking a bunny-watching break. Maybe not the best thing for my prayer life, I admit.

Last Friday evening we were sitting out in the garden watching the bunnies, and Mr. Boy hopped the fence. He desperately, desperately wants to pet the bunnies, and sometimes they let him. Other times, no. “You need to sit quietly and peacefully, and let the bunnies come to you,” I told him.

So he held up his hands, two fingers in the air: Peace signs.

I can’t remember the exact sequence, but this being the four of us, late in the evening . . . soon two children and I were making some comment about the sixty-something ladies at Mass who finish their handshakes during the Sign of Peace, and for good measure bless the remainder of the parish with peace-signed hands.

SuperHusband had failed to ever notice this practice, mark of the Business-Casual Parish. We filled him in on what he’d been missing in his devoted attention to the Agnus Dei*. And then chuckled.

But you know what? I know it’s popular among a certain kind of neo-Cath blogger to mock the aging hippies with their groovy worship habits, and I’m here to tell you this: Lay Off.

Have you ever spent a day with these ladies?

Do you not know that they held your parish together when all the rest of our culture was trying every possible social experiment in the name of ~~freedom~~ unbridled license? Do you not know that they who wield the folk guitar and bless children shamelessly during Holy Communion, they are the ones feeding the poor at St. Vincent de Paul, and making meals for the funeral supper, while you sit at home reading imprimatured titles from Ignatius Press?

Do you not know how much they love your children? The hours they spend — the decades they have spent — teaching religious ed, with no more support than a love of Jesus and a desire to share that love with whomever He sends them?

Do you not understand that whatever their shortcomings, they have prayed into this Church — at the cost of night after night, year after year, of tears for a wayward generation they did not know how to teach, but tried their best anyway — you and I? Who now sit at our computers, bickering and griping over what this law means and how this rubric applies?

Lay off the old ladies. They belong to St. Therese. If you have no sense in you at all, at the very least you know not to mess with the Little Flower. You mind your manners, and she’ll get them straightened out.

By all means make good arguments for good art and good liturgy. But gently, if you can manage it. I stink at gentle. You have my sympathy. And too often, my company.

I can’t wait until the next time Allie Hathaway’s in town, and we can show her the bunnies. Please pray for her and all her family.

But I give you permission to make funny faces when the choir sings those heartfelt but, shall we say . . . not my favorite? . . . Okay nevermind. We’re not supposed to make funny faces at Mass. The Little Flower thanks you for just offering it up.

*Yes, I always end up in confession mentioning my inability to pay attention during Mass. I’m working on it.

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