bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Missing mass times.

    (Formatting will be uneven for the next few posts. I’m using a friend’s computer, and apparently Safari can’t handle Typepad’s formatting functions.)

    Over the weekend I used http://www.masstimes.org to find the nearest parish that offers Saturday morning Mass. I found one, quite close, and drove there at 8 AM Saturday. What I found interesting: The church has a sign out front that says, “Mass Times: 5 PM Saturday/10 AM Sunday.” That is, it advertises the Sunday services — but there’s no mention of the daily Mass offered there.

    Now why is that? There’s plenty of room on the sign. And the daily mass schedule is perhaps even more useful than the Sunday services on a church’s front sign, where the people who, you know, drive by regularly can see it. I’d wager that people who attend weekday masses tend more often to attend at a place and time that’s convenient to work into their schedule: it’s on the way to work and offers Mass during rush hour, or it’s near work and offers Mass at noon, or it’s near the children’s school and offers Mass at nine-thirty, or something like that. And the easiest way to know is to see the daily mass schedule posted on the sign outside the churches that you actually pass every day. Besides, not every parish does offer daily Mass, so it’s good to know which ones do.

    I just don’t know why they wouldn’t advertise it. The same argument goes for scheduled Confessions, by the way.

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  • More freedom of speech quandaries.

    The European parliament passed a resolution on "homophobia in Europe" last week.  The text can be found here at ILGA.org.

    The European parliament sez, among other things:

    whereas homophobia manifests itself in the private and public spheres in different forms such as hate speech and incitement to discrimination, ridicule, verbal, psychological and physical violence as well as persecution and murder, discrimination in violation of the principle of equality, and unjustified and unreasonable limitations of rights, which are often hidden behind reasons of public order, religious freedom and the right to conscientious objection…

    Did you catch that?  Homophobia, which is irrational, includes hate speech that is hidden behind… religious freedom.

    So the EU says that it

    Calls on Member States to ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are protected from homophobic hate speech…

    At the same time, bizarrely, it

    Urges Member States and the Commission … to ensure that freedom of demonstration – guaranteed by all human rights treaties – is respected in practice.

    But how can this be?  How can any group be protected from speech it doesn’t like, when freedom of demonstration is respected in practice?

    I have a sneaking suspicion — supported, I think, by an earlier whereas in the text that has to do with the banning of gay pride marches — that the Parliament is only thinking to ensure the freedom of people to demonstrate their support of positions that are acceptable to the European Parliament.

    This is not how it works, people.

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  • Singled out?

    Both of these come via Bettnet:

    1.  The New Hampshire legislature is discussing a bill that would require priests to report to the state if a penitent confesses child abuse during sacramental confession.   Hmm, the lawyer-client privilege and the doctor-patient privilege wouldn’t be affected.   Do you think the legislature just forgot?

    2.   The Colorado legislature is considering bills that would eliminate the statute of limitations in sexual abuse cases.  On its own, this may or may not be wise; but the point here is that these bills are limited to private institutions.  There’s no effect on the statute of limitations for abuse committed in public institutitions — such as public schools.

    Do you think the legislature just forgot?

    Quick quiz.  If a public school teacher sexually abuses a little boy in Colorado, how much time does the little boy have to report the abuse, after which he and his family may no longer file a claim?

    a.  Seven years after the little boy turns eighteen

    b.  Seven years after the abuse

    c.   Five years after the abuse

    d.   180 days after the abuse

    The answer is (d).  (Link is to a pdf)

    SESAME is an organization that raises awareness of sexual abuse by educators.  Here is their website.  They quote a few numbers that are alarming, to say the least.

    My point isn’t to minimize the problem of sexual abuse within private institutions, particularly the Church.  It’s a serious problem, a rot that goes all the way to the top in many dioceses (including "rings" of abusers, apparently, according to this post at Mere Comments).  Point number one is that the public, civil, legal response to institutional sexual abuse, if it is to succeed at protecting children and punishing perpetrators, can’t  be allowed to get away with sheltering the perverts who happen to work in large, popular institutions with powerful lobbyists.

    And point number two is that prosecution of even the most heinous crimes has to yield at some point to certain civil liberties.  There’s room in this country to discuss exactly what that point should be (cf. wiretaps and terrorism), but somewhere it has to yield.  In our churches, state reporting laws extend only as far as the confessional door, and that is as it should be.

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  • Good photos.

    An excellent collection of photographs from this year’s March for Life.

    Look how young the crowd is!  I agree, the high school kids have the best shirts.

    (Though I take issue with the one that says "Satan is a Nerd.")

    Via After Abortion.

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  • Unusual coincidence.

    Last evening, I was sitting on a kid-sized painted chair in the child-care center at the YMCA, waiting for Milo to get settled in before leaving him there to go watch Oscar’s swimming lesson.  I was reading a little booklet I’d gotten at church last week. 

    The booklet was about the "First Saturdays" devotion that Our Lady supposedly requested from the faithful when she appeared in 1917 at Fatima, Portugal to three children (Lucia Santos, Francisco Marto, and Jacinta Marco) and later during an apparition seen by Lucia alone.  The booklet also covered the Fatima apparition more generally.  (This article, published by the same group, appears to be a shorter version of the same booklet.)

    I picked it up because I’ve been thinking about starting to make the First Saturdays devotion, so I wanted to learn more and maybe to read something  that would get me psyched up a little bit.  I had just about finished a chapter that recounted the Fatima apparitions when I distinctly heard a woman’s voice calling out, "Fatima!" and then more urgently, "Fatima!"

    I looked up, startled, for the source of this voice… only to see the "kids gym" attendant calling out "Fatima!"  a third time.  Then a little Somali girl with pigtails and a big grin scampered across the floor and leaped into the arms of her daddy, come to pick her up.

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  • “Free speech obviously includes the right to express the most severe disrespect for anything at all.”

    That’s what Ann Althouse has to say in response to the French government, and I agree. 

    A lot of democracies just don’t seem to get the free-speech, free-press thing.  Take Canadians, for example.  Ask one and s/he usually insists that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the right to free expression.  It does, of course, except when it doesn’t.

    See, for example, this exchange (registration may be required; scroll down to the title Tongue Tied) in the Letters to the Editor section of the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly:

    I read with interest the article by Emily Bazelon ("What Would Zimbabwe Do?") in the November Atlantic. I was, however, taken aback by her comment in the last paragraph, where she refers to laws that "limit free speech in Canada." As a citizen of Canada, I am unaware that my free speech is limited, and I wonder whether Bazelon would care to elaborate. I would not like to continue to voice my opinions so openly if I am contravening legal statutes.

    Sharon Coulter Nichol
    Fairmont Hot Springs, B.C.

    Emily Bazelon replies:

    Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms treats as "fundamental" the rights to free speech and freedom of the press. But the charter makes these rights subject to "such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." In other words, Canadian free-speech rights have a built-in check. In some contexts the country’s courts have interpreted the charter to allow for more suppression of speech than American law permits. In 1990 Canada’s supreme court upheld a law barring hate speech. In 1992 the court adopted a relatively broad definition of obscenity, including material that exploits sex in a "degrading or dehumanizing" manner. And in 2002 a lower court outraged some civil libertarians by finding a man guilty of violating Saskatchewan’s Human Rights Code after he placed an advertisement in a local newspaper. The ad was for a bumper sticker. It cited (without quoting) biblical passages that condemn some homosexual acts and showed two male stick figures holding hands, standing in a circle with a slash through it.

    Some people would like this sort of speech suppression in their own countries, but I’m not one.

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  • Prayers of St. Francis.

    There’s this prayer called the Prayer of St. Francis.  It’s printed on the back of every holy card of St. Francis I’ve ever seen.  There are a couple of hymns that consist of its words set to music.  It goes like this:

    Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
    where there is hatred, let me sow love;
    where there is injury, pardon;
    where there is doubt, faith;
    where there is despair, hope;
    where there is darkness, light;
    and where there is sadness, joy.
    O Divine Master,
    grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
    to be understood, as to understand;
    to be loved, as to love;
    for it is in giving that we receive,
    it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
    and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
    Amen.

    As always, there are alternate versions floating around, too.  I particularly like the middle part of the prayer.  How many of us petition the Almighty for consolation, understanding, and love?  Ought we not petition Him as well for the capacity, opportunity, and will to console, to understand, to love?  How often do we do that? 

    As nice as it is, that prayer doesn’t appear to have been written by St. Francis at all.  Here’s a Wikipedia article on its origins.  Incidentally, if it had been written by St. Francis, we’d probably be aware of it; the Catholic Encyclopedia says, "The literary materials for the history of St. Francis are more than usually copious and authentic. There are indeed few if any medieval lives more thoroughly documented."

    Here’s something that really was written by St. Francis, in 1224 (and was first mentioned in print only four years later, in a biography of him by Thomas of Celano).

    Laudes Creaturum ("Praise of the Creatures")

    Most High, all-powerful, all-good Lord,
    All praise is Yours, all glory, honor and blessings.
    To you alone, Most High, do they belong;
    no mortal lips are worthy to pronounce Your Name.

    We praise You, Lord, for all Your creatures,
    especially for Brother Sun,
    who is the day through whom You give us light.
    And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,
    of You Most High, he bears your likeness.

    We praise You, Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars,
    in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and fair.

    We praise You, Lord, for Brothers Wind and Air,
    fair and stormy, all weather’s moods,
    by which You cherish all that You have made.

    We praise You, Lord, for Sister Water,
    so useful, humble, precious and pure.

    We praise You, Lord, for Brother Fire,
    through whom You light the night.
    He is beautiful, playful, robust, and strong.

    We praise You, Lord, for Sister Earth,
    who sustains us
    with her fruits, colored flowers, and herbs.

    We praise You, Lord, for those who pardon,
    for love of You bear sickness and trial.
    Blessed are those who endure in peace,
    by You Most High, they will be crowned.

    We praise You, Lord, for Sister Death,
    from whom no-one living can escape.
    Woe to those who die in their sins!
    Blessed are those that She finds doing Your Will.
    No second death can do them harm.

    We praise and bless You, Lord, and give You thanks,
    and serve You in all humility.

    Stylistically, it’s rather different from the other, isn’t it?  Not nearly as tidy.  But… it has a better claim to the title Prayer of St. Francis (although it is not the only one he wrote).

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  • Scrupulosity, good works, etc.

    Jimmy Akin answers a reader’s question about scrupulosity and in the process, I think, clarifies some stuff about the importance of good works.

    Good works, therefore, are not of themselves necessary to remain in a state of grace. They may help you stay in a state of grace by building good habits that steer you away from sin, but a lack of good works IS  NOT A MORTAL SIN. If you are a baptized baby and you die before you are capable of doing good works, you don’t have any, but that doesn’t keep you out of heaven. Similarly, if you’re an adult convert and you get baptized and then run over by a bus so that you don’t have a chance to do good works, you don’t get kept out of heaven.

    The key to going to heaven is our reception of and remaining in God’s grace. It’s his grace that gets us to heaven.

    Good works are a natural outgrowth of his grace working in our hearts, and he rewards us for cooperating with his grace in doing good works, but the thing that would keep us out of heaven is mortal sin, not having an insufficient number of good works.

    Scrupulosity is "a disordered fear that one is sinning or is in danger of going to hell."  Ultimately, it marks a lack of trust in God’s mercy, but I think scrupulosity tends to be involuntary — like obsessive-compulsive disorder, which Jimmy alludes to in his post.

    It’s the sort of problem that might actually be helped by therapy — except that you had better choose your therapists carefully, lest they try to rid you of your "guilt complex" by eliminating every honest impulse toward repentance.  The point is balance and perspective:  Neither scrupulosity, nor presumption.

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  • Tribunal.

    Amy Welborn has a good post that starts with the Pope’s speech to the Roman Rota (which serves as an "appeals court" in marriage cases) and winds up with a quote from a man whose Tribunal experience led him to the same conclusion I have come to re: the high annulment rates in North America:

    …my Tribunal experience has been a real eye-opener, especially in light of the contraceptive and divorce mentality I encounter in most people, including Catholics. In fact, these mentalities are so pervasive within North American society that after four days on the Tribunal I found myself declaring as many marriages invalid as the next judge … and wondering to myself whether any marriage attempted today in North America is valid.

    In short, as a Traditional Catholic canonist, I can safely say that since the sexual devolution of the sixties, the rise in marriage annulments has not been because of the Second Vatican Council and a more liberal application of canon law, but because of a selfish and unrealistic understanding of what marriage entails by your average person entering into it.

    That’s what I think.  We have too damned many annulments granted in the U.S.  It’s not because annulments are too easy; it’s because weddings are too easy.  As Amy says:  "stop witnessing the marriage of every baptized Catholic who walks into the rectory and asks for one."

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  • 7 myths about the Challenger explosion.

    "It didn’t explode, the crew didn’t die instantly, and it wasn’t inevitable."  Are your twenty-year-old memories accurate?

    One of the best articles on the subject was written by Edward Tufte, author and designer of several beautiful and elegant texts on the visual display of quantitative information.  The same material appears in this book.

    His story:  Engineers indeed tried to convince managers not to launch the shuttle on such a cold day.  But they attempted to make their points with some very poorly-designed charts and graphs.  Had they used better ones (Tufte provides an example of what might have been), the decision to launch not only would have seemed ill-advised, but would have been shown to be foolhardy.  (To my knowledge the article is not available online, but a sample of the most damning material — the graphs the engineers made to show to the decision-makers, together with Tufte’s reorganization of the exact same information — appears in a book review here.)

    Communication is important.  Very important.  Often we think of communication as a text-based endeavor.  We can evaluate text:  this is bad writing, that is good writing, this one is concise and clear, that one is windy and obscure.  The same accusations can be leveled at quantitative information — charts, graphs, diagrams, maps.  And yes, lives depend on them, sometimes.

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  • Marcher.

    Over at Orthonormal Basis, thoughts from one who took part in the San Francisco March for Life.  Worth reading.

    (h/t DarwinCatholic.)

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  • Home, again.

    Light blogging over the last few weeks has been for a good reason:   Saturday we moved into our new house, just three months after the "big digger" showed up.  Leslie, the GC (general contractor), tells us that the certificate of occupancy was granted one year to the day after she mailed the brochure we’d requested.  So:  that’s how long it takes to build a modular house in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

    Friends came over to help us move all the big pieces.  "This is interesting," one said as he carried boxes down the steps of one house, out the door, across both yards, and into the house next door.  "Never helped with a move like this one."  We left a lot of odds and ends, as well as… detritus… of various sorts, in the old house to deal with over the course of a couple of weeks.  It’s got to be cleaned from top to bottom, and much of it has to be repainted, so it won’t set back the sale very long to go through the junk a little more slowly. 

    The first day, we discovered a few bugs.  The shower in the master bathroom ran and ran and never got warm.  Was the water heater not set right?  I had to go to the basement and read the owner’s manual to find out!  (Yes, 120 deg F.)  Must be the mixing valve.  Call Leslie!  After dinner, a puddle appeared under the dishwasher.  Hmm.  Call Leslie!  Then we discovered that when you turn off the light from the top of the basement stairs, all the lights in the basement go out as well.  Call Leslie!

    We’re still eating dinner on a wobbly card table, and I spent $500 today at Wal-Mart and IKEA getting things like toilet brushes and laundry baskets and chairs and spare sheets for the guest room (Mark’s parents come up to visit this week to help frame  walls and sew curtains and that sort of thing).  But it’s starting to feel pretty good.

    Pics to follow when I figure out which box has my camera.

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