Steve Skojec

All I have to say is this - if Jesus comes riding into town on a T-Rex, you can pretty well bet the farm that the eschaton is at hand.

Things aren’t looking so great in California’s long-term forecast right now.

I think we’re finally starting to see what “the new springtime” really looks like. Under the watchful eyes of Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, the Ecclesia Dei commission is bringing the TLM - now being referred to as “The Gregorian Rite” (YES!!!) - into greater prominence.

We are given to understand that Rome wants the Extraordiary Form taught in seminaries and celebrated at all parishes, and he has indicated that the faithful must be exposed to it before they can derive benefit from its spiritual riches. Cardinal Hoyos even references it as “so noble, so beautiful – the deepest theologians’ way to express our faith.”

I’ve been writing about the developments at Inside Catholic, here and here.

Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion dictates that “All forces occur in pairs, and these two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction” (Or as is more commonly put, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”)

While this is all well and good for physics, applying such rationale to the spiritual realm would be dualistic to the point of gnosticism.

And yet, sometimes, it seems that it is precisely the case. Yesterday, my wife sent me an article from the Washington Post about the rising trend of “Pro-Life Drugstores“:

When DMC Pharmacy opens this summer on Route 50 in Chantilly, the shelves will be stocked with allergy remedies, pain relievers, antiseptic ointments and almost everything else sold in any drugstore. But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.

That’s because the drugstore, located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John’s and a Kmart, will be a “pro-life pharmacy” — meaning, among other things, that it will eschew all contraceptives.

The pharmacy is one of a small but growing number of drugstores around the country that have become the latest front in a conflict pitting patients’ rights against those of health-care workers who assert a “right of conscience” to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable.

“The United States was founded on the idea that people act on their conscience — that they have a sense of right and wrong and do what they think is right and moral,” said Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Society, a Chicago public-interest law firm that is defending a pharmacist who was fined and reprimanded for refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. “Every pharmacist has the right to do the same thing,” Brejcha said.

We’ve got a bit of a cottage industry here, incidentally. This drug store isn’t too far from our OBGYN, the equally pro-life Tepeyac Center. We also take our kids to McLean Pediatric Associates, who are the sort of awesome doctors that provide patients with the teaching of the Church (and the subsequent opinion of the Catholic staff physicians) on using certain vaccines, like Chicken Pox, which are derived from aborted fetal cell lines - BEFORE you get your kids vaccinated.

Good news, all around. But then, what about Newton?

Well, within a couple of hours of seeing the first article, a friend sent me a second. This one is about the opening of a “family friendly” sex shop in Brooklyn, N.Y.

I kid thee not:

The high-design Babeland shop, which sells itself as being “kid-friendly,” doesn’t exactly scream sex though.

Unlike the older sex shops, which are dark and dingy, the Babeland store has upbeat music, well-dressed saleswomen and infant changing tables — marketing itself as a fun place for couples to shop. It’s part of a growing trend that has been spreading from Louisville to Los Angeles in an attempt to take the sleaze out of this part of the sex industry.

“If you walk into a mainstream sex store, you’ll probably be greeted with explicit imagery and a sort of artificial sexuality, like a woman with blonde hair with her head thrown back, something that’s meant to titillate in the moment,” said Babelands’s owner Claire Cavanah.

This store, which officially opens its doors Sunday, is the fifth Babeland for Cavanah, who opened the first store in Seattle, Wash., with friend and business partner Rachel Venning in 1993. Since then, the two have opened shops in New York City and one in Los Angeles, which closed this year.

Even its unobtrusive window displays — looking out over the stroller packed streets in family-friendly Park Slope — is so low key some residents don’t even know it’s there.

When asked for her opinion on the store’s location, Lisa — who declined to give her last name— didn’t know the store’s name or what it sold, but deposited her young son on the front stoop so she could take a quick peek inside. She declared it “tastefully done” when she came back out.

How nice that it’s opening on a Sunday.

Because if they did, I would probably climb into one, go back to Saturday night, and kill the monster who did this with my bare hands before he could finish his work:

Police killed a 27-year-old man as he kicked, punched and stomped a toddler to death despite other people’s attempts to stop him on a dark, country road, authorities said.

[snip]

As they got closer, the couple saw the man brutally beating the toddler behind his truck and throwing the child on the ground, according to Singh. Two or three other cars stopped, an unusual number to be passing through the remote area surrounded by a dairy, a cow pasture, a cornfield and a farmhouse, he said.

“What we got from witnesses is he was punching, slapping, kicking, stomping, shaking,” Singh said. “They tried to intervene and get involved, but their efforts really didn’t have an effect. The suspect was engaged in what he was doing. He just pushed them off and went back to it.”

A sheriff’s helicopter responding to emergency calls from the area landed in a cow pasture at 10:19 p.m. carrying a Modesto police officer who shot the man to death after he refused an order to stop beating the child, Singh said.

Paramedics tried to resuscitate the toddler, who was not breathing when they arrived. The boy was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

I am the father of a little boy this age. When I read this story, I think of his little face. This face:

I think of his little body, his unsteady run that often leads to a tumble, his frightened cry when he awakes in the night alone in his crib, the way he clings to me when he first wakes up or gives me kisses at random because he’s just so sweet. The mere thought of a man beating and throwing and killing a child like my son - not even out of diapers yet - causes my throat to close up, my stomach to churn, my ears to ring, and my breath to come in ragged gasps. I am not a violent man, but reading this sets some deep, primal switch in my brain to “destroy”. Dear God in heaven I want to unmake this poor, innocent child’s last night and give him a future of his own. How terrified he must have been.

This is one of those cases where the fact that they shot the perp doesn’t begin to feel like justice.

This ad, produced by Catholics Come Home, is making the rounds. I’d seen it before, but when a friend sent it to me again today, I noticed something - the priest incensing the altar appears to be set up for an ad orientem liturgy. His is not the only thurible in the piece. Near the end, the girl receiving communion does so kneeling, and on the tongue, at an altar rail:

While I suspect there is no liturgical agenda at work behind the use of such images, they were certainly not left to chance. The power of aesthetics, of reverence, of an experience of liturgy that is profound, makes for (as we like to say in the PR biz) “great TV”. The way this commercial is shot, never showing the debased Calvinist architecture many of us are stuck with in our parishes or the lines of t-shirt and shorts ruffians lining up in their pookah-shell necklaces to receive communion on the paw, is significant. They are trying to make the Church appealing by showing what is beautiful about the Church. And what they show is beautiful - it’s just not the common experience of many Catholics.

In discussing this with the friend who sent it to me, he joked, “It’s sort of false advertising…perhaps I should send a note to the webmaster…’Hey, Buddy, this isn’t the whole truth!’”

But it should be. And at some level, either Catholics Come Home or the filmmaker they hired to shoot this brilliant commercial gets it. And they know that what sells isn’t what we are now, but we used to be. Perhaps even what we are capable of becoming again.

At the end of a long thread at Inside Catholic, discussing an article by Dr. Thomas Woods Jr. entitled, “‘Some of us are owed an apology’: Traditionalists and the Latin Mass“, commenter Geoffery says:

As a non-Catholic born in 1970, I find all the Vatican II stuff (including the New Mass) literally scandalous. It makes me think, “If I could be convinced that this is the true Church, then I could be convinced of anything.”

If that doesn’t sum it up, I don’t know what does.

A peek into the thinking of Archbishop O’Brien’s dealings with the Legionaries:

One of a number of such apostolic movements in our Archdiocese has been Regnum Christi (the Reign or Kingdom of Christ), the lay branch of the Legion of Christ, founded in Mexico by the recently deceased Father Marcial Maciel. The movement is worldwide and has operated with the blessing of the Holy See. Its activities have not been without certain tension, however, at least in parts of the United States, including our Archdiocese.

During the five years prior to my arrival as Archbishop, Cardinal Keeler had shared correspondence and meetings with the leadership of the Legionaries of Christ on a number of occasions reflecting many of our pastors’ valid concerns: for instance, regarding a lack of pastoral transparency at times and a tendency to conduct parallel programs within our parishes without the knowledge of local pastors. In some cases undue pressure was placed on individuals to conform to the rule of Regnum Christi and in a context of secrecy. In addition, some youth programs tended to alienate parents from their children, and various clubs and activities for high-schoolers often presented the vocation to priesthood and consecrated life as an obligation rather than an informed choice. In short, a lack of necessary transparency.

The call to priesthood or consecrated life requires a discernment process that rightly should involve parents and other family members. This deeply personal, life-changing decision requires the love and support that can only come from family and close friends, and their caring involvement is crucial for anyone who feels he or she has been called by God to serve as a priest or a consecrated man or woman.

I have met a good number of Regnum Christi members who lead exemplary Catholic lives and see this movement as a God-send. But I also am well aware of the challenges that have led a number to leave the movement, some angrily insisting that Church authority must act to correct the excesses they claim have endured. Hence, the dialogue these last five and more years.

At a meeting last week between the Superior General of the Legion and our staff, it was agreed that he would appoint a liaison to oversee the activities of Regnum Christi and keep our Chancery and appropriate pastors fully informed. This includes programs and methods of vocation recruitment. (The text of the full letter agreed to can be found on our own website, www.archbalt.org.)

For some time I have wondered whether the flaws of the Legionary movement were endemic to the movement itself. By this final step, I hope to have been proved wrong.

The emphasis on that last line is mine. This is a question which everyone who encounters the dark side of this group begins to wonder. They see the good being done, the quality of people who are in love with “the movement” and they ask “How can this great perversion of Catholicism coexist with the goodness of these people and their work?”

The answer that I and many others have come to is that yes, the flaws are endemic to the movement itself. The fact that everything they do is so rooted in the person of the founder, who fell under disgrace and increasing allegations of sexual misconduct prior to his recent death, makes suspect all of his philosophies of governance and procedure.

In other words, rotten apples don’t fall far from the tree. If the Archbishop is proved wrong in this case, it will be, I’m afraid, because the pressure is on for the LC and RC members in Baltimore to be on their best behavior. They’ll be walking on eggshells, and I don’t know how their methodology for growing “the movement” can thrive under scrutiny. Time, I suppose, will tell.