Participation game-changer

A few months ago, we installed two large video screens in our church.  The lyrics of every sung word are now projected on the screens.  As a result, people  participate better - it's really noticeable.

Song for the Visitation

Since the Divine Office online that I follow reminded me that today is the feast of the Visitation, it brought to mind a song that I knew from days gone by about the Visitation, called "The Visit".  Actually it is the only song or hymn that I know about it.  And it turns out that it is a fairly obscure one; it doesn't appear in the missalette or music editions.  There aren't many YouTube videos of it, but there is this one:

Francis Appoints New Cardinals UPDATED!

SOME INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS BY TOM REESE

Pope Francis is remaking the College of Cardinals—and setting the stage for the eventual election of his successor

Italy has been on a rollercoaster under the last three popes. John Paul reduced Italians to 16.5% of the college. Benedict brought them back up to 24%, and now Francis has put them back down to 17.4%, still higher than at the end of John Paul’s papacy.

Similarly, the Roman Curia has gone from 24% of the college at the end of John Paul’s papacy to 35% under Benedict and back to 24% under Francis.

Europe now makes up 42% of the college, down from 52% in the 2013 conclave. Despite these losses, Italy and the rest of Europe will still hold a major bloc of votes at the next conclave.

  Pope Francis announces 21 new cardinals, including key allies

CRUX – Pope Francis announced Sunday that he will create 21 new cardinals Aug. 27, including Bishop Robert W. McElroy of San Diego, long seen as one of his key allies in the United States.

Three of the new cardinals come from the Roman curia, meaning the Catholic Church’s central government: Arthur Roche, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments; Lazzaro You Heung sik, Prefect for the Congregation for Clergy; and Fernando Vergez Alzaga, who runs the Vatican city state.

The other prelates under the age of 80 are:

Archbishop Jean-Marc Aveline, of Marseille (France).

Archbishop Peter Okpaleke, of Ekwulobia (Nigeria).

Archbishop Leonardo Ulrich Steiner, of Manaus (Brazil).

Archbishop Filipe Neri António Sebastião of Rosário Ferrão, of Goa e Damão (India).

Bishop Robert Walter McElroy, of San Diego (U.S.A.).

Archbishop Virgilio Do Carmo Da Silva, of Dili (East Timor).

Bishop Oscar Cantoni, of Como (Italy).

Archbishop Anthony Poola, of Hyderabad (India).

Archbishop Paulo Cezar Costa,, of Brasília (Brazil).

Bishop Richard Kuuia Baawobr M. Afr, of Wa (Ghana).

Archbishop William Goh Seng Chye, of Singapore (Singapore).

Archbishop Adalberto Martínez Flores, of Asunción (Paraguay).

Archbishop Giorgio Marengo, Prefect of Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia).

Pope Francis names 16 new cardinal electors, including San Diego's Bishop McElroy

COVID: Delta Versions of Omicron

The twists and turns of the variants never seem to end

Dominant coronavirus mutant contains ghost of pandemic past 

The coronavirus mutant that is now dominant in the United States is a member of the omicron family but scientists say it spreads faster than its omicron predecessors, is adept at escaping immunity and might possibly cause more serious disease.

Why? Because it combines properties of both omicron and delta, the nation's dominant variant in the middle of last year.

Happy Feast of the Ascension

 Hail the day that sees him rise (Hymn with Lyrics) - YouTube

Cardinal Cupich on the Uvalde shooting

 My ordinary, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, issued the following brief statement yesterday in the wake of the Uvalde shooting.  I think it hits the right notes.

The Uvalde shooting: a practical idea?

Red flag laws may be a tool to prevent some mass shootings.

Cordileone and Pelosi

When I heard the news last year that former senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole had just died, my initial reaction was surprise: I had assumed he had already been dead for years.  Similarly, when I learned a few days ago that San Francisco Archbishop Cordileone has banned Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from receiving communion in his archdiocese,  my only surprise was in learning that he hadn't already done it years ago.

The US bishops are famously not united on how to deal with pro-abortion politicians.  I'm pretty sure that my boss, Cardinal Cupich, is not one to impose this canonical penalty; goodness knows, if he was so inclined, he could pick and choose from a number of potential targets in Chicago.  Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington DC, where Pelosi lives while Congress is in session, already has made it clear he will not ban pro-choice Democrats from the communion line.  And Pope Francis has indicated that he is not one to pull the trigger on enforcing that canon.

My own view, in brief: I think the connection between abortion advocacy and communion can be extremely complex.  But it doesn't seem possible to argue that Pelosi hasn't run afoul of what the church teaches.  I'm not upset that she's been banned.  To put it as plainly as possible: in my view, she's deserving of the measure.  But it's probably not one I would have imposed.  I would put it on her to do the right thing.  And I'd look for opportunities to invite her to a change of heart.  

As I understand it, Cordileone has claimed that is his purpose.  So far, it doesn't seem to be working.  

COVID: Cold vs. Flu Model

From the NYTimes:

 How Often Can You Be Infected With the Coronavirus?

The spread of the Omicron variant has given scientists an unsettling answer: repeatedly, sometimes within months.

A virus that shows no signs of disappearing, variants that are adept at dodging the body’s defenses, and waves of infections two, maybe three times a year — this may be the future of Covid-19, some scientists now fear.

$85.40

The title of this post is how much I paid to gas up yesterday. 

The vehicle I was driving is a Honda minivan.  According to Google, it has a 21 gallon tank.  The gas pump indicated the price per gallon was $5.25 for the lowest grade of gasoline.  This is a higher price than during the last few weeks: it had been hovering between $4.50-$4.90/gallon.  

By comparison, in May of 2019, prior to the Ukraine war and the pandemic, the price per gallon was $2.60.  So from then until now, the price of gasoline has more than doubled around here.

The top-selling vehicles in the US - the Ford F-Series, Dodge Ram, Chevy Silverado - have gas tanks which hold 23-26 gallons.  Surely there are many drivers now paying $100+ to fill up the tank.

My wife and I both work from home so we don't commute back and forth to/from work each day.  Everywhere we need to go from one week to the next is within a five minute drive from our doorstep.  Our other vehicle is a hybrid which averages 40 miles/gallon or better.  And we both have decent jobs.  So we can suck it up and pay more at the pump.  But.  For the retail workers, childcare workers, customer service workers and other lower-paid jobs with which people earn a living, the price of gas surely is a financial catastrophe.

The price of gasoline is not Joe Biden's fault.  But he and his party are perceived to be insensitive to this sort of thing: they'd much rather talk about green energy and electric vehicles, and they are perceived to be hostile to drillers, refiners and pipelines.  Republicans are guaranteed to use the price of gas to attack Democrats this fall; not to do so would be to commit political malpractice.

Love one another

This is my homily for yesterday, the 5th Sunday of Easter, Cycle C.  The readings for yesterday are here.

A Pandemic Birthday Party

 Betty and I celebrated my 80th birthday yesterday in pandemic style. 

We had over 450 "plant friends," including over 100 Roma tomatoes, over 90 Fourth of July, over 80 Rutger, 40 sweet 100's, 40 early girls, 35 super beefsteak, 30 California wonder peppers, 60 sweet banana peppers. Just yesterday, 19 sunflowers were the last of the pack to leave our basement grow lights.     

What a bonus to have such a circle of plant friends.  If 150 friends make a village, we have three villages worth of plant friends who plan to stay most of the summer, some of them even until the frost comes. 

Since according to the circle-of-friends theory Betty and I have together 7 hours or 420 minutes of "befriending time" to spend each day that means each of these plants can get about 1 minute a day, or 30 minutes a month. That is better than the twenty minutes per month they would get if they were in the outer 50 good friends circle as human friends. Saving all that time from close human friends and supportive friends has really widened our circle of good friends. 

Unfortunately, they are mainly fair-weather good friends, but they leave very delicious, canned products when they depart in the fall. We are still working through our canned tomatoes from last year and will be probably to the end of this year.  Of course, we spend a lot of time in the nursery with them in February, March and April. So. they are with us most of the year. O well, another year, another three villages of plant friends! Life goes on.

All plants and flowers bless the Lord! Praise and exalt God above all forever!

The Birthday Party Photo

The Baby Formula Shortage

 We got used to hearing about various shortages, such as toilet paper, during the pandemic.  However, now that we are emerging from the pandemic (sort of) there is a new shortage.  Atlantic Magazine has this article on the subject.

"Three factors are driving the U.S. baby-formula shortage: bacteria, a virus, and a trade policy...."

Jury Duty

 Conversation with my younger son yesterday: Me: "So how was your week?" Son: "I spent the whole week on a jury for a double murder."  Yikes. I had read about the trial in the news, but had no idea he was on the jury. Of course one isn't supposed to talk about it while the trial is ongoing.

Not fun, but he was lucky it only lasted a week and that it wasn't sequestered.  I have served on a jury once, luckily it wasn't murder, just a liquor store burglary.  At the time I was eight and a half months pregnant with younger son, so I kidded him that he had been on a jury twice. I was selected for a jury when we lived in Colorado, but they ended up settling out of court.  

My husband has served on a jury for a "possession with intent to sell" case. The person was acquitted.  The defense attorney called it the Grape Nut case, because the amount of drug found was about the size of a piece of Grape Nuts cereal.

I recently got a letter from the county clerk re: jury duty. There was a form giving some reasons to be excused. One of the reasons was being over seventy years of age. I debated a bit, but checked that off and sent it in.  Probably should have volunteered to serve.

From a Catholic to a Sectarian Pro-Life Movement?

 Interesting article in the Atlantic:

This is Really a Different Pro-life Movement

When the Supreme Court issued its landmark abortion-rights decision, Roe v. Wade, in 1973, the most intransigent opponents of the decision were not the legislatures of southern Bible Belt states such as Mississippi and Oklahoma....

The state legislatures that presented the strongest defiance to legalizing abortion were those of the heavily Catholic states of the Northeast. Barely 10 percent of Massachusetts legislators supported legalizing abortion in 1973, according to an archival American Civil Liberties Union document. Instead of permitting the procedure up to the point of viability (about 28 weeks at the time), as the Supreme Court mandated, the Massachusetts state legislature responded to Roe by passing a bill prohibiting abortion after the 20th week of pregnancy. Rhode Island’s statehouse presented even stronger opposition: It kept abortion clinics out of the state until 1975, when its anti-abortion law was overturned by a federal court.

This was not merely a geographic shift, trading one region for another, but a more fundamental transformation of the anti-abortion movement’s political ideology. In 1973 many of the most vocal opponents of abortion were northern Democrats who believed in an expanded social-welfare state and who wanted to reduce abortion rates through prenatal insurance and federally funded day care. In 2022, most anti-abortion politicians are conservative Republicans who are skeptical of such measures. What happened was a seismic religious and political shift in opposition to abortion that has not occurred in any other Western country.  

Before the mid-1970s, active opposition to abortion in the United States looked almost exactly like opposition to abortion in Britain, Western Europe, and Australia: It was concentrated mainly among Catholics. As late as 1980, 70 percent of the members of the nation’s largest anti-abortion organization, the National Right to Life Committee, were Catholic. As a result, the states that were most resistant to abortion legalization were, in most cases, the states with the highest concentration of Catholics, most of which were in the North and leaned Democratic.

This fit the pattern across the Western world: Countries with large numbers of devout Catholics restricted abortion, while those that were predominantly Protestant did not. Sweden—where Catholics made up less than 1 percent of the population—legalized some abortions as early as the 1930s; Ireland did not follow suit until 2018.

But in the United States, the anti-abortion movement did not remain predominantly Catholic. Southern evangelical Protestants, who had once hesitated to embrace the anti-abortion movement in the belief that it was a sectarian Catholic campaign, began enlisting in the cause in the late ’70s and ’80s. Motivated by a conviction that Roe v. Wade was a product of liberal social changes they opposed—including secularization, the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and a rights-conscious reading of the Constitution—they made opposition to the ruling a centerpiece of the new Christian right. When they captured control of the Republican Party in the late 20th century, they transformed the GOP from a northern-centered mainline Protestant party that was moderately friendly to abortion rights into a hotbed of southern populism that blended economic libertarianism with Bible Belt moral regulation.

The anti-abortion movement’s political priorities changed as a result. A movement that in the early ’70s had attracted some political progressives who opposed the Vietnam War and capital punishment became associated in the ’80s and ’90s with evangelical-inspired conservative-Christian nationalism. Early activists wanted to create a comprehensive “culture of life,” but many of the evangelicals who joined the movement in the late 20th century wanted to save America from secularism and take back the nation for God.       

Preaching for Mother's Day

This is what my wife Therese preached yesterday, the 4th Sunday of Easter, Cycle C (and also Mother's Day).  The readings for yesterday are here.

Unity in abortion diversity

The United States is not a democracy.  We're a union.  And that has implications for how abortion would be legislated in a post-Roe world.

Parish Gardening Groups?

 As you may remember I do a lot of gardening. Last year I gave a post on the early part of the gardening process each year.

Gardening: Seedlings from Basement to Garage

Like music, gardening has potential for generating a network of small groups in the parish where a dozen or so people could network over some aspect or type of gardening., e.g., vegetable gardening, flower gardening, perennial gardening, etc. 

In this pandemic (post-pandemic, endemic?) age, gardening has the great advantage of being an activity that mostly takes place outdoors and is generally done by people who like to be outdoors. People can also network on-line, providing links to websites, YouTube, and even construct their own blogs.    

After not being in parishes for over two years, we will likely not be returning to regular parish attendance. More likely we will be occasionally coming to Mass between surges, or perhaps attending only during the summers if the virus takes up residence in the winter season. If we cannot come to the parish, why not have a small subsection of the parish come to us.

All the parishes that I frequent have outdoor areas that are very accessible and little used, so there will not be the usual competition for parish meeting space, especially since we don't want to meet indoors. Plus, there is a huge amount of free space in our outdoor parks.

Precedents

We have one local parish that actually has a green house, built by the pastor with his own money. The parish raises and sells its produce after Masses. 

My local parish had a small garden next to the food pantry which was lost when they expanded the food pantry. If our parish had a green house, then parish members could raise food for the food bank. Perhaps even invite food bank recipients to be a part of raising their own food. 

The more distant parish (where our Commonweal group met) had a garden for a number of years by the young people who had been inspired by a trip to an urban garden. As they aged and likely went away to college, the garden folded. 

Finally, the local parish like several parishes in the area has an annual boy scout sale of potted flowers on Mother's day. I also had the impression that they sold trays of vegetable and flower seedlings.

So, there is some local experience of parish gardening. 

Most of all we would like a very grassroots movement that involves parish members but does not require parish resources for its maintenance. 

We hope to be members of one or more groups (e.g. a vegetable group, a flower group, a shrub group) that we could network with mostly over the internet, occasion meeting them in an outdoor space, and inviting them one by one, or two by two, to visit us in our own garden. 

Before the pandemic we regularly gave extra produce to the parish food bank. I wonder how many other people do that? If there are a lot of people, perhaps I might put a sign in the food pantry with my phone and e-mail, offering to network with them.

Any suggestions? What might make this attractive to you even if you were a porch, or patio gardener? What might be some of the problems? 

The Leak

By now you've probably already heard about (and read about, and, if you are on Twitter, have been tweeted at about)  Politico's blockbuster scoop: a Supreme Court draft majority opinion, penned by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, overturning Roe v Wade.  An unknown leaker leaked, not only the vote (at least as it stands at the time of the leak), but the entire draft opinion, which Politico also published.  

Pursuing Easter Joy

I follow Deacon Steven Graydanus on Facebook. He posted this homily which discusses a subject I think is worth discussing, the pursuit of joy.  The whole thing is worth reading, but I will share some excerpts:

 "How do we pursue Christian joy, especially in this Easter season but also throughout the year?"

"Begin with the conviction that your joys as well as your sorrows matter to God, and that joy as well as sorrow is for this world, not just the world to come. When bad things happen, we often tell ourselves and one other that God has a plan, that God works for good in all things. We look for meaning in suffering, but never forget that there is great meaning in joy. Every good gift in this world speaks to us of God’s goodness and love."