Biden's Age

There have been a spate of articles lately bringing up the subject of Biden's Age, and fears that he can't beat Trump in the general election. They make the point that we can't depend on a "deus ex machina" or a unicorn to beat Trump.  And then they trot a unicorn out of the barn, like this one: To Beat Trump, Democrats Need a Whitmer-Warnock Ticket (thebulwark.com). According to this, Joe Biden should just announce that he's not running in 2024, and kick Kamala Harris to the curb. And the Dems could run Whitmer with Warnock as her running mate, and with their youthful vigor and freshness, they would easily defeat Trump.  Never mind that neither of these people have shown any interest in running in 2024. Neither have they raised any funds to do so.

More Dirty Tricks Regarding Abortion by Ohio Republicans

Ohio Board Sued For Approving 'Politicized, Deceptive' Language In Abortion Measure

Reproductive rights advocates in Ohio are suing a state board for approving “politicized, deceptive” and incorrect language on a ballot measure asking voters to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. 

The board refused to put the “clear, simple 194-word text of the Amendment” on the ballot and insisted on doing a rewrite, but “the adopted language is longer (by word count) than the Amendment it purports to condense,” the lawsuit states.

The text approved by the board uses language straight from the anti-abortion movement’s playbook. As Ohio state Rep. Elliot Forhan (D), a member of the board who opposed the rewritten language, noted at a hearing, the amendment “uses the medically correct term, ‘fetus,’ but the proposed language substitutes the phrase ... ‘unborn child,’ which reflects a personal viewpoint.”

The approved text also leaves out crucial information about the proposed amendment, the lawsuit states.

“The Amendment would protect reproductive decisions, including five express categories of personal reproductive decisions: those to do with contraception, fertility treatment, continuing a pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion,” the plaintiffs wrote. “Yet the ballot language mentions only abortion, obscuring much of the Amendment’s scope.”

Pope Francis: gay persons are welcome in the church

In a meeting with Portuguese Jesuits earlier this month, Francis went much farther than "Who am I to judge?", stating plainly that gay people, including those who are not living celibate lives, should be welcome in the church.

Funerals, Wakes, and The Office of the Dead

The husband of a couple from our parish whom I knew well died this week. He will be buried on Saturday. He was 92. The Funeral Mass will be held at noon. Family will receive guests beginning at 11a.m until the Mass. I don't know if there was a private family wake. The brief public funeral structure is typical of older people. Often no one but family members are around anymore. Of course, the pandemic helped to solidify brief funerals.

However, he and his wife were both long time members of the choir so the parish will have the equivalent of a royal funeral music wise!  Sixteen choir members distributed over SATB with piano, flute and trumpet. The music program follows. You may recognize some of the titles.

Preludes

Be With Me Lord

This is Holy Ground

O Breathe On Me

Sacred Silence

I The Lord

Help Me Lord 

Gathering Hymn: On Eagle’s Wings

Psalm “Shepherd Me, O God”

Alleluia. Something Which is Known 

Preparation Hymn Eye Has Not Seen

Communion: I Have Loved You

Reflection: You Are Mine

Commendation: Songs of the Angels

 Missioning: Servant Song

Betty and I will not be attending because of the pandemic. I am not sure that the funeral will be livestream although our parish has the ability of doing so. It probably depends upon availability of camera person, wishes of family and funeral director, etc.

So, I searched YouTube for all the hymns. Click on this link.

FUNERAL MUSIC

Betty and I will hold our private wake here at home this evening.

We will add Evening Prayer from the Office of the Dead.  This is sung by a priest alone, but he uses the Saint Meinrad Psalms tones so we should be able sing along.  It takes about fifteen minutes. 

EVENING PRAYER

The Liturgy of the Hours:  According to the Roman Rite

Hymns:  Hymnal for the Hours by Fr. Samuel F. Weber, O.S.B.

Antiphons:  Gaudete Psalter: For the Liturgy of the Hours

Psalm Tones:  St. Meinrad Psalm Tones, Saint Meinrad Archabbey

Tomorrow morning we will sing Morning Prayer from the Office of the Dead. Again about fifteen minutes and wait to see if the Mass is livestreamed.

MORNING PRAYER

The Liturgy of the Hours:  According to the Roman Rite

Hymns:  Hymnal for the Hours by Fr. Samuel F. Weber, O.S.B.

Antiphons:  Gaudete Psalter: For the Liturgy of the Hours

Psalm Tones:  St. Meinrad Psalm Tones, Saint Meinrad Archabbey

The Office of the Dead can be said any day that there is not a feast or obligatory memorial.

I think Friday Evening and Saturday Morning are a good time for this since it covers the period which Christ spent in the tomb. There is both the sadness of his death and the looking forward to his Resurrection.

Since funerals now take place with little public mourning, NewGathering and others may find these materials useful to do your own memorials either personally or in small groups just as Betty and I are doing for my friends.

Quick thought on the Republican debate Wednesday evening

Wednesday night, I did something I very rarely do: I turned on Fox News.  Eight Republican presidential contenders debated one another in Milwaukee.  Donald Trump, whose polling numbers reportedly are higher than the eight's combined, didn't attend.  Instead, the ex-prez did an interview with Tucker Carlson on X (formerly Twitter) which, according to one update I saw, had at least 75 million hits, or viewers, or however they measure such things.  So considering that most Democrats find Republicans on television to be unwatchable, and most of the GOP faithful apparently was watching their hero, I may have been the only one watching Fox.

I took it for the entire two hours.  And in a way, it was pretty interesting.  Because it turns out that, when Trump isn't in the room, the rest of the field was...normal.  Kind of.  Mostly.  

The insta-analysts presumably will tell us that DeSantis emerged unscathed, Pence had a pretty good night, and it became evident why Vivek Ramaswamy is climbing in some polls.  I thought Nikki Haley and maybe even Doug Burgum(!) acquitted themselves pretty well.

But here's the thing: with the notable exception of Ramaswamy, who has no government experience and shares Trump's penchants for rhetorical bomb-throwing and riding roughshod over political norms, most of the other candidates were within the guardrails we used to expect of a conventional conservative.    On the whole, they expressed fairly conventionally conservative views.  For example: they were asked whether Mike Pence did his Constitutional duty on January 6, 2021.  It was a little hard to tell in the moment, but I think all the candidates agreed, some more enthusiastically than others.  They all attacked the Biden administration, which is what one would expect of a conventional conservative candidate who is not distracted by culture war issues.  I believe all of them self-identified as pro-life, and within that consensus, there was a variety of opinions and approaches as to what the party's pro-life policy should be, with one or two suggesting a national abortion ban after 15 weeks.  They all came out in favor of stronger border controls, and against progressive education policies.  It wasn't exactly taking a time machine back to 2012, but the zaniness of the last 8-9 years was relatively muted.    

Even without Trump's presence, there were some populist instincts on display; for good or ill, Trump has reset the GOP's orbit in a more populist direction.  There was definitely a contingent that wants us to limit or cut off aid to Ukraine.  There was some pretty harsh rhetoric about border control.  And there were some negative invocations of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory.  

But taken as a whole, it gives one hope that somewhere, perhaps not even buried too deeply, the GOP can present itself as a fairly normal conservative political party.

But - we must remind ourselves that this crew is polling a cumulative 40% or something similar.  The GOP voters are still smitten with Trump.

Move aside, Carrington, here comes Miyake!

 You folks may remember my posting about the Carrington Event of 1859.  A solar flare caused a rare coronal mass ejection (CME) of great intensity.  The plasma interacted with the magnetic field of the earth, causing it to collapse to the point it acted like a generator.  The only extensive electrical infrastructure of the time, the telegraph, generated high voltages that fried the equipment in some cases,  powered the lines without batteries in other places.  If that happened today, it could fry our electrical grid, destroying hard to replace transformers, shutting down our modern civilization for months if not a year or two.  It could result in mass starvation.  Astronomer Richard Carrington made the connection between the strange events of 1859 and the observed solar storm.

But the good news is that we can spot the CME tthree days ahead of its arrival, shutting down systems to minimize damage (if the Republicans don't pooh-pooh it).  Light travels at 186,000 miles per second and gets here in eight minutes.  CME's travel at a sluggish 1,000,000 miles per hour so it takes 90 hours to get here.  We also have solar observation satellites.  So I was starting to relax about future Carrington Events until ........

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/miyake-event-worse-carrington-event/

Now there's Miyake events.  Japanese woman astronomer Fusa Miyake analyzed tree rings from a chopped down 1900 year-old Japanese tree.  She found that certain rings in that tree have higher Carbon-14 content, generated by doses of radiation  from space100X higher than a Carrington Event.  They tool place in the eighth and tenth centuries.  Subsequent studies using other methods show several events over the last 10,000 years at an average rate of once per millenium.  The good news is that it may be several smaller events over a year or two.  Still bad but not as devastating as a single 100X Carrington.  Such radiation in a single pulse would be fatal to plane travelers at high altitude.  The bad news is that they have no idea where these high energy particle pulses originate.  It could be the sun.  In that case, we might have enough warning to deal with it like a Carrington Event.  But if the origin is a neutron star or the galactic core, we'd have no way to know it was coming.  So it's a point of interest for further study.  Long power lines from big utilities are great but very vulnerable.  This is another advantage to local solar power and windmills.  With a little EMP hardening, they would probably survive a Carrington or even a Miyake.

Since it involves tree rings, the climate change deniers probably won't believe this one either.

Unity among people

This is my homily for this past weekend, the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A.  The Sunday readings are here.

The Syro Phoenician Woman

If there is one story in the New Testament that I can't stand, its the one in today's Gospel, the account of the Syro Phoenician woman and the healing of her daughter. It is Matthew 15: 21-28. However it also appears in Mark, but not in Luke.  The incident has a happy ending, the woman received what she asked for, the healing of her daughter. And it marked a turning point in Jesus' ministry, that it represented the extension to non-Jews of salvation. Jesus said, "Your faith has saved you." However it puts words in Jesus' mouth that are anything but Christ-like. I have heard some very lame homiletic attempts to say that the actual translation of "dogs" here is "puppies". Our priest today even said it was lame, that dogs in Jesus' time and place weren't the pampered fluffy pets of today, they were mostly semi-feral and kind of lived on the peripheries.  But he really didn't resolve the issue, for me it's still hanging there with the ugly taste. So I draw my own conclusions; that the incident was not reported as it actually happened. Or that it didn't actually happen, or that we are missing crucial contextual details.  I am unwilling to believe that Jesus said the offensive words; if any of us had said a similar thing it would be a sin. So I've got nothing in the way of explanation. Maybe others will weigh in.

The resilient Trump ecosystem

After the break, you'll see a few diagrams.  I thought them up last night.  They're not very profound, but I think they help explain why Donald Trump is so resilient politically.

How is the "family of parishes" thing coming along?

Everyone knows about the shortage of clergy, and most locations have had to make adjustments.  In our archdiocese the way of dealing with the situation has been to form families of parishes, in which priests, and to some degree, resources are shared.  We had several years warning that the changes were going to be coming, and I think for the most part it has been handled well. 

A ray of hope...or is it a day late and a dollar short?

 I came across this bit of news in the New York Times this morning:  Conservative Case Emerges to Disqualify Trump for Role on Jan. 6 - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Since the NYT is behind a paywall if you don't have a subscription, I am also referencing this link: Does the Constitution Disqualify Donald Trump? (thebulwark.com)

This is the text of the paragraph of the constitution which is being discussed:

"No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. — Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, U.S. Constitution."

Diana Butler Bass on the Transfiguration

 

Since I’m a skeptic when it comes to biblical miracle stories - understanding them as metaphor more than factual, I found this reflection on the Transfiguration by Diana Butler Bass to be interesting and food for thought.  She begins by describing a somewhat terrifying flight experience, taking off in a severe thunderstorm, with the turbulence lasting 10 minutes before the plane broke through the clouds.

 

 https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-8b9?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

But who gets transfigured? And how? The miracle might not be what we learned in Sunday school……

 

Some Christians believe that today’s gospel story records a literal miracle of Moses and Elijah meeting Jesus on a mountain. I don’t know about miracles — we historians can be skeptical about evidence when it comes to miracles. But I do recognize it as something else. 

This episode sounds like thousands of stories from native religions or a transcript of a contemporary psychedelic therapy session. This gospel passage relates a mystical experience that was shared by Jesus and his closest followers. It includes all the requisite elements of such — prayer, the mountain, “dazzling” light, altered reality, hearing sacred voices. 

And clouds. The transcendent zenith of the passage isn’t the appearance of Moses and Elijah — the prophets are the prelude to the real point of the story.

The climax is in the clouds: 

While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” 

They were terrified as they entered the cloud

OHIO voting: secure or secret UPDATED AGAIN

This was the vote in the Diocese of Cleveland counties with the Catholic and Black populations:

County	NO VOTE	Catholics	Blacks
Cuyahoga	76%	28%	30%
Summit	66%	22%	15%
Lorain	63%	25%	9%
Lake	59%	35%	6%
Medina	54%	28%	2%
Geauga	52%	34%	1%
Wayne	42%	8%	2%
Ashland	37%	3%	2%

There is obviously a high correlation between the percentage of Blacks in a county and the percentage of NO votes.  Catholics appear to have been split. The counties which have a low percentage of Catholics approved the measure. Lake County and Geauga County which have the largest percentage of Catholics (but few Blacks) came in midway in the rankings.

Will Blacks who were very motivated by the challenge to their voting rights be motivated to support the abortion rights amendment in November? Democrats may have a greater issue in portraying the Republicans as wanting to impose their values on others than in the abortion right itself.                    

Has the church changed in its welcome of LGBTQ Catholics?

At the America website, Ty Wahlbrink, SJ, a graduate student at Fordham University, notes that 10 years have passed since Pope Francis uttered these famous words about a person's sexuality: "Who am I to judge?"

The Mills of Justice

The Grand Jury dropped the long-awaited Big One. Here is a nice summary from The Guardian. It isn't behind a paywall:  Donald Trump indictment: what are the charges and what happens next? | Donald Trump | The Guardian 

Here are some highlights: