VERGOGNA

Sorry, but I must share my rage. All the English-speaking world must know what a petty despot an otherwise completely unimportant and irrelevant minor Italian mayor named Gabriele Gallina is.

To make a long story short because I'm working, a priest was saying a live-streamed in Soncino, Lombardy. There are six people assisting. Another six people turn up out of the blue. They are grieving. Family has died. They want the consolation of the Mass. They're wearing masks. They maintain social-distancing. As you can hear from the echo, it's a big church.

Anyway, word gets around and the mayor--Gabriele Gallina, make him internationally famous--sends police over to disrupt the Mass. To disrupt the Mass. IN ITALY.  Full story at La Nuova Bussola. Just chuck it through Google translate.

I am no longer going to use any insult but "Gabriele Gallina" for the rest of the day. "Oh, he's such a Gabriele Gallina." "Some people defend Vidkun Quisling, but I think he was a total Gabriele Gallina." "Those people at Marquette who bragged that their graduates are helping out at Planned Parenthood--and I still have the screenshot--are absolutely Gabriele Gallinas. They are simply Gallina."

The Last Mass

Yesterday was the feast day of St. Joseph. I made traditional Italian zeppole di San Giuseppe before getting down to work. I began work early, for I had obtained permission to knock off at five to go to Mass. It would be the last public Traditional Latin Mass approved by the Archdiocese, for the Scottish bishops have now suspended all public Masses because of the coronavirus.

Fortunately for my state of mind, I had just finished writing an article about Trump's announcement of the use of the malaria remedy hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19.  I was feeling hopeful and even took Benedict Ambrose's announcement that the 17:20 train had been cancelled in stride. 

"Call a taxi," I said and arrayed myself in, more or less, the blue outfit I wore to Polish Pretend Son's 2018 wedding. Not the hat. It was too cold for a straw hat. Instead I wore my "Russian" bearskin (teddy bearskin, really) hat, the one that makes me five inches taller. And I also wore my late friend Angela's pearls. I'm so glad Angela was not sick in the time of coronavirus. 

I dabbed on rose perfume, put on my "outdoor" gloves and got into the taxicab before B.A. The driver, who had been at home with his wife all day, was garrulous. The taxicab smelled of bleach. Business is terrible, we were assured, which is why our driver had been at home, waiting to be called out instead of looking for fares that simply aren't there. He had just bought his taxicab, so this is a bit of a worry, but he was more grateful than worried, having bought the least expensive car he could. He told an amusing story against Uber: apparently a young lady was recently kicked out of an Uber car after she sneezed and had to take a proper cab after all. 

The fare was £25, which is a lot for poor Mr. and Mrs. B.A., but we enjoyed the seeing the sun set over the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art One and also, as B.A. pointed out, its Neon announcement that "Everything is going to be alright." Then we kept a metre's distance from our fellow TLM devotees as we exchanged remarks about the pandemic going into the church. 

Well, what can I say about Mass? It was the Feast of St. Joseph, our priest wore white and gold. There were three young-man servers as well as John the Middle-Aged M.C. Silent Stuart, who is always the thurifer, was thurifer to the bitter end. There were Euan and Sam. They came out of the sacristy, processed down the Epistle side of the church and then up the central aisle. Mark (the Other Mark) sang the choir parts, and at one point his wife Annabel (a brilliant soprano) added assistance. 

There were none of the missals (left to us in Fra Freddie's will) or a Whyte Sheete for St. Joseph's Day, so if we didn't have our missals (I think I left mine in Father's house chapel) we had to rely on our Latin. My Latin is generally good enough for the Gospel, if not the Epistle. There were between 35 (my count) and 38 (Mark's count) of us altogether. Only eight of us were women; we seemed to be mostly young men--and a hitherto unknown dog. The dog sat by the back doors and occasionally complained.

In his homily, Father struck a cheerful note, assuring us that he would continue to say Mass and that he would pray for us as always. We could be confident that we would still receive all the graces that we would have had, had we continued going to Mass. However, I still though longingly of the 18th century, when at least the laity could have sneaked out into the countryside and found Mass awaiting us in the heather. (Possibly some delightfully fanatical Polish priest will row up the Firth of Forth and there will again be Mass in the heather.) 

After Mass, we all prayed the "Prayer in Times of Epidemics" from a new Whyte Sheete Father asked us to take home.  Then Other Mark began to sing a hymn to St. Joseph, which he (and at least one other young man) read from his smartphone. The chorus, which eventually we all learned to sing, is as follows:

Dear St. Joseph, spouse of Mary

blest above all saints on high,

When the death shades round us gather, 

teach, O teach us how to die, 

teach, O teach us how to die.

Apropos, no? I felt a bit sad again and had to remind myself of splendid hydroxychloroquine, second cousin, surely, to the good old Gin & Tonic. Also, the way to die, if you can manage it, is probably cheerfully, giving as little trouble to those around you as you can: very C.S. Lewis/G.K. Chesterton/the Queen. Or so I said to B.A. as we walked towards the dreaded bus stop in the gloom.

Some outraged local readers may wonder why they didn't know there was a 18:15 TLM for St. Joseph at the church yesterday.  One answer is that I found out through Facebook from Other Mark, so if you don't use Facebook you were out of luck. I was so burdened with cares that when I was thinking of people who ought to know, I thought only of an Austrian physicist--possibly because I knew he could walk there and would not be tempted to take a germy bus.  UPDATE: Another answer is that it was on the FSSP website, which too few of us read.) 

I am now fanatically anti-bus and got on a double-decker one last night only because, like B.A., I couldn't bear the thought of another £25 taxicab ride. A man four rows down coughed shallowly into his coat at intervals. For awhile I thought it was the young Pole beside his wife/girlfriend three rows back and looked with horror at his reflection in the window as he greeted an equally Polish pal, shook his hand, and the pal immediately put his shaken hand on a bus pole. Teach, O teach us how to die. But it was the chap behind him, after all.

"Trzymaj się," the maligned Pole said to his friend when latter went downstairs to alight in Portobello. Take care.

"Trzymaj się!"

Take care, everyone. My gloves, as per my sister-in-law's instructions, are going back into a 9:1 water-bleach solution.  

Notre Dame de Paris

Watching Notre Dame de Paris burn down over my computer was not at all like watching the Twin Towers fall across library television screens on 9/11.

I was saddened rather than horrified. Nobody died in the Notre Dame conflagration whereas while the Twin Towers fell viewers thought over ten thousand people were in them.  9/11 was the Hindenburg disaster x 1000 + terrorists.

Of course, the Twin Towers themselves were just modernist monstrosities, even if symbolic of the growing wealth of nations, whereas Notre Dame de Paris is a, if not the, symbol of Western Civilisation itself.

I have been to Notre Dame de Paris twice: once in 1999--and I don't remember much about that--and once three years ago or so, when I went on the Chartres Pilgrimage. I lost the Scottish pilgrim group outside the great cathedral, and so I wiggled in through the doors to find them. Once I was in, I soon gave up and just knelt by a group of French Girl Guides. The stone was cold and grey, Mass was very long, and the homily and speeches a reproof to my ill-maintained Canadian high school French. I had arrived late at night,  had had very little sleep, and had made myself a terrible breakfast in my hotel room.

It turns out my group wasn't in the Cathedral at all. There were so many Chartres pilgrims that thousands of them had to hear the Mass outside. The Scots had been, instead, allocated space in Chartres Cathedral at the end of the pilgrimage. Naturally I now think that was a very fortunate mistake on my part. Although my abiding memory of Notre Dame was discomfort, at least I worshipped there when it was whole.

It astonishes me that Notre Dame de Paris has lasted this long. But it is also amazing that it survived 1944 and not 2015. Watching Notre Dame burn, I kept thinking "410: the Burning and Sacking of Rome."  (This was a mantra I invented as a teenager to remember my parents' license plate number; after the trauma of Grade 10 Math I became next-door to numerically illiterate.)

The Burning and Sacking of Rome was worse than Notre Dame burning down, as horrible things happened to the Romans, not just the buildings. However, it ushered in the era in which Western Civilisation came its closest to collapsing, and watching Notre Dame burn was like seeing the physical manifestation of cultural trends I read and write about all day.

However, Rod Dreher's ultimates thoughts on the topic are more hopeful and happy than mine, so off you go to American Conservative to read them. Meanwhile, the only foolproof way to preserve Western Civilisation, which is to say Christendom in its Sunday best, is not in fragile buildings but in ourselves and our children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, pupils and students.

Update: Here, also, is Michael Brendan Dougherty writing about the Repair Notre Dame fundraising campaign in 2017.

Cult Status

What struck me most, when reading about the Allison Mack story, was that she founded what was called a "female empowerment" group. 

So I wrote this. (Someone else provided the headline.) 

One of the most embarrassing aspect of being a woman, these days, is that so many women (myself included) want a big strong man to look up to, make us feel special, and solve all our problems.

This may not have been so embarrassing before 1968. In that respect, women were definitely allowed to be women. In previous centuries, you were considered a bit strange if your erotic imagination did not involve the Big Strong Man. Strange or an excellent candidate for religious life.  

(I've been rereading The Summerhouse Trilogy, so Margaret's resistance to marriage is very much on my mind.) 

It's rather an irony then, that Allison Mack, whose life revolved around her male guru, has a same-sex partner. She had boyfriends before, though. Ah me. I'm just not qualified to comment on that. 

But the "DOS" story is a cautionary tale about how women will throw other women under the bus to get what they want from the man in their life. It reminds me that there are two kinds of women: women who use their power to help other women (e.g. good mothers, physical or spiritual) and women who use their power to hurt other women. 

I don't really believe in female "empowerment" unless it involves barbells, martial arts, or weapons training. Women are powerful in many ways, and the important thing is that we not use our power badly, hurting ourselves or others through sheer stupidity or wickedness. 

Was it Ethel Boileau who wrote that a woman's sexuality was "a weapon that can break in her hand"? I think it was. Meanwhile, how Marxist to rabbit on about power. Still, it's unavoidable when considering a "female empowerment group" that was ultimately a power grab. 

Methods of Healing Sorrow 1

Italian class. Discovering again how beautiful the language is.  Noting that I usually remember the "irregular" stresses without having to think about it. Bouncing my sorrows off my Italian tutor, since he asks how I am. Telling nothing but the direct truth because it's easiest. Remembering being 18 and confronting the passato remoto for the first time.

Fighting Sorrow

Well, I should have known better. A week or so ago, Benedict Ambrose suggested that we watch a BBC comedy called "Fleabag." He didn't suggest I watch the first season, and when I viewed it on my own, late at night, I understood why. The nameless heroine--referred to by all as Fleabag--has a lot of sex. She's a species of English Carrie Bradshaw--only heartbreakingly sad. Sex is her way of fighting sorrow, and she's as compulsive as an internet addict.

But Season 2 isn't sex-drenched, and even Season 1 was enormously clever and well-acted. Viewers were introduced to a kindly but foul-mouthed young priest who was invited by Fleabag's stepmother-to-be to an engagement dinner. The priest is very happy to have been invited to the dinner, even though the air bristles with family tension, because he is so lonely.

PLOT SPOILER FOR THOSE WHO WATCH BBC COMEDIES

Fleabag is erotically attracted to the young priest, whereas he shrewdly perceives that what Fleabag needs, most of all, is a chaste male friend. Unfortunately, this chastity lasts only until the end of Episode 4 when he is discovered by Fleabag at 9:45 PM drunk in the vestry, looking for a hidden bottle. Because he is determined to find out Fleabag's secret sorrow, he persuades her to enter the confessional---and here I became very uncomfortable.  To make an excruciating--and jaw-droppingly sacrilegious--scene short, I'll just say that Fleabag delivers a heartbreaking monologue and the priest kisses her. There is a lot of panting and snorting before, mercifully, a painting falls off the wall, and the priest rushes off in sorrow. 

It was a while before I saw that part, though, as I was out of my seat, across the room, and yelling about cancelling the TV license a split-second after the priest pulled aside the curtain. Poor B.A. gave me a running commentary.  B.A. doesn't wade through the sludge of the clerical sexual abuse and coverup scandal every day. 

Here's the thing. For THIRTY YEARS ("If boys could have babies, there'd be a clinic in St. John's," sneered Canadian pro-aborts in the late 1980s) ordinary faithful Catholics have borne the brunt of the clerical sexual abuse scandal. Most damaged are the ordinary faithful Catholics who were themselves sexually abused or seduced: not just the tiny minority who were under eleven, but the boys aged 11-18, the young men, the young women, and helpless elderly in hospitals. But the rest of us haven't escaped entirely.

For thirty years non-Catholics and ex-Catholics have mocked the faithful, especially the entire brotherhood of priests, with the sexual sins of a handful of perverted criminals. And when Catholics, trying to get to grips with the problem, observe that the largest group of victims were teenage boys and young men and therefore homosexuality must have something do to with it, other Catholics start screaming about the women. Well, yes. We Catholics all know about the women. I know at least three women who have been molested by priests, and two women who had affairs with them. It's painful. 

And I haven't even mentioned the corrosive anti-catholicism that has been part and parcel of life in Great Britain for over four hundred years. It's still here because Catholicism is still against the state religion, which is now Sex. And that's painful, too. At cocktail parties--when I still went to cocktail parties--I went through verbal contortions not to have to name the newspaper I wrote for.  Never mind the fact that Great Britain is, on paper, so much against hatred for minority religious and so much for religious diversity. 

What do I do to escape the sorrow of wading through the swamp that is the decline and fall of Western Christendom? I sit down after supper with my husband and watch clever, funny television shows. And I honestly thought that I was watching a show in which Catholicism would be allowed to speak firm, kind words against the sexual libertinism that is making so many post-Christians so miserable. 

But no. Fleabag's writer--an enormously talented woman--did not allow that. That wasn't her intent. Her intent was to eroticise chaste Catholic celibacy, to eroticise the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation, and to show Mighty Aphrodite defeating even the mighty Catholic priesthood. 

Have a look on Twitter to see how much British television audiences liked that. They LOVED that. They terribly want Fleabag to have sex with that priest. Terribly. They think he is the perfect man for Fleabag, yada yada, and yet when women start suing British dioceses, they will tut-tut about Catholic priests seducing vulnerable women ("although at least it isn't boys").

It was a long time before I could sleep, so angry and disappointed was I. And this led me to reflect that I am angry and disappointed every day, and that when Hilary White had my job, she longed to write about marine biology. 

Clearly the BBC is no escape from sorrow. 

A Winter Walk

One of the nice things about living near Edinburgh is that it doesn't take us very long to get out into the countryside. There are all kinds of river walks and disused railway lines that have been turned into bicycle and walking trails.

Today B.A. and I went for a long country walk, ending up in the town of Dalkeith. Unfortunately, I spent the first two miles or so having a meltdown about double-taxation. We are hoping to pay off the mortgage early and invest for retirement with my salary, but so far my salary seems to be subject to the taxes of two countries, plus National Insurance contributions for them both.

My meltdown was caused by B.A.'s tax statement, which said that both he AND his employer had contributed to the National Insurance, the combined sum being larger than his taxes. As my North American employer, obviously, doesn't contribute to the British NI, how much NI am I going to have to pay?

It makes me frightened and angry and sure something must be wrong. Canada and the UK have a tax treaty, apparently to prevent people like me from being taxed twice. I got an (expensive) accountant to cope with the UK tax laws, and now I think I'll have to get a (guaranteed less expensive) tax firm in Canada to wrestle my money back from Revenue Canada.

Meanwhile B.A. swears up and down that the UK National Pension will not disappear when we are old and that being a pensioner is not the same thing as being on "benefits" (i.e. welfare). "We're paying into the system, and it's our money," he says.

B.A. clearly has never tried to draw on unemployment insurance, which I used to believe was "our money". I have, in Canada, and it was an utterly humiliating experience. I also worked in a Canadian welfare office, and I probably signed a confidentiality agreement*, so all I'll say about that is that you never, ever, ever, want to be dependent on The State for food, warmth, and a roof over your head.

Meanwhile, ending up in a nursing home can also be very unpleasant, not only because of neglect but also because of this.

Anyway, B.A. begged me to stop ruining our country walk with catastrophic thinking, so I turned off that part of my brain. Naturally I wish I hadn't stopped caring about money when I went to theology school, but regrets don't reduce taxes.

It was cold, but the countryside was nevertheless green and beautiful, for this is Scotland after all, and eventually I cheered up. We reached Dalkeith (chipped but charming to Canadian eyes) and looked around for somewhere to get bacon rolls. Greasy spoons being absent from the High Street, we investigated the in-store cafe of Morrisons, which is a national cut-price grocery chain. Result! Morrisons was serving breakfast items (like bacon rolls) until 3 PM.

We got our bacon rolls, a pot of tea, and a mug of cappuccino for the low, low price of £7.60 ($13 Canadian), which might not strike you as a low, low price, but this is the UK. And the amusing thing, when we looked around, was the large number of couples also amiably munching on breakfast items and drinking from mugs. Many were old, but some were middle-aged, and it struck us that this could be the Saturday afternoon "dating" venue of choice for the married denizens of Dalkeith.

I didn't think it was a particularly tasty bacon roll, but I did enjoy the idea that married couples can contentedly eat out as cheaply as possible whereas dating people have to stick to sophisticated joints, so as not to look cheap, or indeed like the sort of boring people who will end up eating bacon rolls in Morrisons.

(Incidentally, the next-door-neighbours, who are long-term renters, are loudly singing pop songs again. It must be Saturday night.)

Anyway, as B.A. says, we have at least another 20 years of employment before us, so I should not worry about being taxed into poverty or sexually assaulted in a U.K. nursing home before I am inevitably euthanised.  Also I admit that getting the old-age pension from the government cannot really be like collecting Canadian unemployment insurance benefits because nobody chivvies the elderly to go back to work ASAP.

Bus fare home was £3.40 (£5.80 Canadian).

*Update: Worst memories from working in welfare office:

5. A  male cop supervising cheque day told me that one of our clients, a pleasant woman, used to be a "crack whore."

4. A man I knew was on trial for murder that day showed up at my window. (Manager: "So why do you need a break now?")

3. Realising that the shell of a woman at my window was the mother of a famous murder victim.

2. A formerly employed, formerly solvent woman, now very ill, saying over the phone, "But that was my nest-egg" after learning that as a dependent on the state she wasn't allowed to keep it.

1. A female cop screaming at a lunatic to "apologise to these ladies" for his bad language when we had the situation well at hand, thank you very much.

We dealt with homeless people, mentally ill people and actual crooks all the time, but the only client who upset me as much as those two cops was the killer. (He was acquitted--to the shock of almost all involved--minutes before he arrived at my window.)

Update 2. The killer suddenly died a year to the day of his acquittal, I have just discovered.

Postcard from Caligula's Court

Cuminia Marcia, scribe, to Iosephus her father, Secondus her brother and Anna the bookseller her mother, hail!

I pray that you are in good health night and day, and I offer great sacrifices that you may be preserved from the misfortunes that are befalling our hapless people. I think often of childhood when the virtues of our ancestors and the Republic were honoured by almost everyone, and the shamelessness I now observe at court was accounted as something unknown or never to be mentioned by the pious.

O, our Rome! It seems to me that the nightmares of madmen have infected all the people of the city, the senators in their purple as well as the tradesmen who in times past were as pure and homely as wheat bread newly baked and fresh water from the fountains.

Here you may now find parents of no mean origin who allow their young sons to go through the streets painted and bewigged and even to dance for men late at night in the lowest of the taverns.

Here too you may find also, even in the temples, young men taking each other as wife and presenting as their child to the gods an infant one or the other has begot, through devilish means, upon some poor woman hired to breed, like a cow brought to bull. So shameless are these men that as the child is  growing in his nameless mother's womb, they describe themselves as pregnant. A mother's love for her baby, and his for her, is set at naught today in Rome.      

But enough of this, for although it is my poor lot to record all this for my employer the illustrious historian, it is not my wish to think on it from the first vigil to the fourth.

If you are well, I am well.

The Professor and the Book

Even more updates at the end.

I was sorry to discover last night that Professor Stephen Lewis of the Franciscan University of Steubenville is no longer the Chair of the English Department, thanks to the scandal that erupted this week.

If you don't know the story, last spring Professor Lewis assigned the translation of a critically acclaimed French novel that was all the rage in French and then English literary circles to a class of five senior students. The author, Emmanuel Carrère, is an ex-Catholic atheist who--as many writers do--turned to the New Testament for inspiration and rewriting after getting some other novels under his belt.

"Under his belt" is apropos, for Carrère included in his novel a lot of pornographic salacious trash about holy people---including Our Lady. If you've ever read Saint Thomas Aquinas on blasphemy, you might recall that he thought the correct response to it was to have the writer executed by the state. I found this out when I was at grad school thinking hard about the Mohammed Cartoon Crisis, thirteen years ago.

Someone at Franciscan U tipped off Church Militant this week about the controversial course material, and Christine Niles had the unhappy task of reading and reproducing one of the worst passages, which I have carefully avoided reading. It is ironic that CM introduced to the general public what Professor Lewis introduced to five senior literature students, but let's not get into that. I'm just happy LSN didn't go that route. Meanwhile, CM did due diligence by asking FUS about the story, and here is what their PR man said:

"Franciscan University challenges students intellectually, helps form them professionally, and engages them spiritually. This includes arming our students with the knowledge and wisdom to confront the challenges of a coarse modern culture, which often runs contrary to Catholic teaching. Heresy, and sinful acts such as murder and adultery that go against Catholic teaching, are addressed at Franciscan to help to strengthen students’ faith and prepare them to engage with today’s culture. While this happens through the study of literature by authors such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare who portray many sinful acts, it can also happen when they grapple with significant challenges to Catholic faith by contemporary writers. Franciscan students learn through critical comparison to consider multiple sides of an issue or argument, led by professors who always promote Catholic spiritual and moral perspectives. Thus, our students graduate better prepared to solve problems and engage with integrity in a world that desperately needs to hear the truth. Where would we be, for example, if Catholics were unable or unwilling to engage with and push back against calumny such as The Da Vinci Code or against worse heresies and dangerous heterodoxies? Franciscan University promotes an authentic and vibrant Catholic faith—inside and outside the classroom—that helps students succeed spiritually, morally, and intellectually. We remain firm in providing the integration of faith and reason that will give them the best chance at lifelong success."

I've spent two days asking myself on-and-off if I buy that. My initial response, which I tweeted to Christine Niles, was that in "real life" nobody makes you read pornographic blasphemy. I added that I got two degrees in English Literature from a "world-class secular university" without having to read pornographic blasphemy. Only later did it occur to me that as a student I read very few novels written after 1950 and that I got my MA in 1997. For all I know secular university literature departments are awash in blasphemous pornography these days.

The biggest insult to Our Lady I came across as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto was a photograph of a statue of Our Lady with a banana balanced on its head. It was published on the front page of a tabloid-style student newspaper--probably The Gargoyle---and I was absolutely furious.

I was so angry, I scooped up as many copies of the newspaper as I could find when I was alone and threw them into the trash. When I told my father, a professor of English Literature, he mildly observed that this was both stealing and censorship.

"What about the Index?" I asked, thinking of the handy Church blacklist done away with by V2.

"The Index was wrong," quoth Dad, or words to that effect. (It was almost thirty years ago, people.)

My father, incidentally, never misses Sunday Mass and was the parent who dragged us kids off to Confession periodically.  Thus I was forced to think seriously for the first time about the best way to respond to blasphemy. Apparently throwing things in the trash or setting them on fire is not universally held to be the contemporary solution.

And that, readers, was over just a puerile black-and-white photograph of a statue with a banana on its head, not a disgusting novel by a fashionable French atheist.

To return to 2019, after the CM story broke Steubenville was inundated with angry messages by CM readers, including tuition-paying parents and donors, according to CM's next report. FUS responded within 24 hours with a massive apology and, within 48, by demoting Lewis as department chair--unless he resigned, of course.  That bit of the story I discovered on social media very late last night.

As I've said, I've been thinking about the scandal for two days, and I did some digging. There are so many questions. Who at Franciscan U. contacted CM over a book read last year by five students,  and why now, not then? Why did Lewis assign that particular anti-christian "new New Testament" novel, not another? Why did the Chair of the English Department assign the translation of a French book?  What is Lewis' specialty? Do Franciscan U grads actually get into PhD programs in English Lit? Should Franciscan U grads spend 5+ years of their lives in PhD programs in English Lit?

I found out that the dirty book is/was indeed considered very "important" and "brilliant" (etc.) by literary critics. I learned too that Lewis is the English-language translator of an important French Catholic philosopher, a phenomenologist named Jean-Luc Marion who was a student of Jacques Derrida of all people. I did not know Steubenville reached such academic heights: ortho-Catholic gossip characterizes Steubie as the Hufflepuff of the new, sound Catholic universities.

I also found out that while many of his colleagues were willing to go on record to CM and/or LSN to condemn the book Lewis assigned, they won't go on record to condemn him. And through social media I heard the same story several times from Steubie grads and people involved in American Catholic academia: Professor Lewis is a serious scholar and a good Catholic who would never introduce a dirty book to students to corrupt or amaze them (unlike Somebody Else).

That's what I would have written had I been assigned the story. I wasn't, so instead I made the following comment in the LSN combox when a commentator misread something in the LSN article:

Putting on my English Lit hat here to make a small but important point: the professor has an interest in "the erotic" not "erotica." Professor Lewis is the English translator of an important French Catholic philosopher, and in a philosophical and theological context "eros" is the inner impulse to reach outside oneself to something or someone else. It can be good, like falling deeply in love, or it can be bad, like succumbing to the lure of internet porn or high-stakes gambling. 

Did the professor ask his five senior students to examine critically a dirty (if fashionable, highly-acclaimed-by-literary-critics) novel? Yes. Is the professor a dirty person? His colleagues and Steubenville alumni rushing to defend him in social media say No. Did the professor make an error in judgement? His colleagues and Steubenville administration say Yes. Were his motives base? His colleagues and Steubenville administration say No. 

The most charitable but still intellectually honest assumption, given all this data, is that the professor simply wished to assist his students in confronting and effectively critiquing anti-Christian novels, so that as future Catholic scholars they could themselves combat the disgusting trends in contemporary literature. 

As Professor Hahn noted, however, there is a line that cannot be crossed. The novel's author treated our blessed Mother in a disgusting fashion, and no-one should ever be expected to read or discuss a work that contains pornographic trash about one's own mother, let alone the Mother of God.

I'm writing about the scandal here, too, because I'm sorry I got caught up in disgust and doubt when the CM piece first came out and tweeted without considering all the facts. Blasphemy (and porn, for that matter) whips past reason, straight to the passions. I think when Muslims say they love Mohammed more than their own mothers, I will pay more attention from now on.

My conclusions are that it is possible to hate the book and to believe that Professor Lewis made a mistake in judging it worthy of attention without needing also to believe that he had base motives in introducing the text to his five senior students. That is FUS's revised position, and I see no reason to doubt that.

As for forces of evil and secularism trying to turn FUS into the next CINO college, I am not qualified to comment or judge. But I do know something about poisonous academic politics, and if at the bottom of all this is an envious colleague trying to take down a more talented man, I hope Lewis is offered a tenure track position at Columbia with a massive increase in salary.
 
Update: By the way, sorry I've been late in okaying comments. I'm so busy these days, I forget to check.

Update 2 (Jan 13): It is becoming clearer that the book may not be dirty throughout although it has disgusting passages. As I should have done much earlier, I have been reading reader reviews. I was startled this morning to discover, via JDFlynn on Twitter, that the work was reviewed by First Things: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/12/dare-to-knock

Update 3 (Jan 13): It is also becoming clearer that the book and the author really are important enough not to be ignored by a literature department: see this New York Times Magazine piece. And this brings me to another point of interest: what is Franciscan University of Steubenville for?

Does FUS want to create a new generation of Catholic scholars, or does it want to avoid that and merely equip generations of American Catholic youngsters with the minimum education they need to be employable nurses, computer engineers, and other useful occupations?

I'm treading carefully here because a man's livelihood is on the line, but if FUS does not want to produce Catholic scholars who have read influential works (like, for example, Lolita) and therefore will be able to contribute to their fields of study, then maybe it is not the place for a serious scholar.

But that could lead to a problem. Unless we are all going to retreat from society, Catholics need intellectual leaders who will fight for Catholic philosophical positions in places of influence, and the Academy is quite obviously a place of influence, as millions of young people pass through it every year.

Update 4 (January 14): As more and more people chime in, I begin to see why FUS professors may be freaking out out over FUS professors. Nobody forced me to read Rabelais in the University of Toronto English Department, and when I left the University of Toronto, I didn't thing reading sexually explicit, anti-Catholic texts was a mark of sophistication, a necessary rite of human passage.

For more insight into the FUS story, better see this. I'm afraid it's a bit of an own-goal for the author because I was shocked. I had been wondering what other texts the FUS profs had been worried about, and now I know. There are good ways to present these texts, and there are bullying ways to present these texts. I was saddened by the girl crying over Aristophanes, not because she was such an innocent, but because losing one's innocence is  sad.

The Quiet of Good and the Glamour of Evil

I have been in bed with either the flu or food poisoning for two days. Too wretched for most of Monday to do anything but sleep or  stare at the horrible lampshade on the ceiling (which came with the flat) by evening I felt briefly well enough to watch something on Netflix.

Netflix is a morass of evil dressed up as entertainment, I concluded after B.A. and I watched Anthony Bourdain drag himself around the world to hang out with local chefs, curse and eat too much. In the end, Bourdain committed suicide offscreen, and it might have been the flu talking, but I concluded it was the show itself that was to blame. Apparently Bourdain was exhausted, so why didn't he just lock the door and sleep for three days? Or check himself into the hospital? But I suppose a production company can't sue a dead man.

Anyway, sick in bed but feeling somewhat (if temporarily) better, I scrolled through Netflix moaning, "Why isn't there anything Catholic?" At last I found Moonstruck, which is the Christmas go-to film for many of the women of my family. We can quote from it extensively ("Chrissy, bring me the KNIFE!"), but I hadn't see it for a while.

It started off well, and as B.A. was now home from work, I nudged him whenever a holy picture, pinned up in several Italian-owned Brooklyn shops, was in shot. I got quite teary eyed over that. The weak part of the film is, of course, the scene-chewing of Nicholas Cage ("HUH, sweetie?") and the evil part is Cage telling Cher (e.g. Loretta Castorini, surely a heroine for single/widowed women aged 37) that he doesn't care if she goes to hell as long as she gets into his bed.

Cage, as Ronnie Cammareri, makes an odd little speech including the idea that we aren't on the earth to love "the right people": "We are here to love the wrong people, to break our hearts, and die." That is a dangerous and stupid philosophy, and ridiculous in this context as Ronnie is clearly not at all the "wrong person" for Loretta for several reasons. She even knows his family, for heaven's sake, although, yes, it's inconvenient that she's engaged to his brother.*

The film ends well for the Castorini and Cammareri families. I, however, was suddenly and violently and disgustingly ill, so I stayed in bed another day and eventually binge-watched Sherlock.

The contemporary Sherlock is cleverly photographed, written, and acted, and if Sherlock is to be believed the best and most love-worthy women are high-class hookers and paid assassins. The sweet pathologist with her heart on her sleeve is a loser, and the respectable-looking landlady is a retired stripper. Yes, I see that it is good TV to overturn viewers' expectations, but the endless nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "everybody's bent" message is worst than wearisome, it's wicked.

I was frankly relieved to find myself having an instant message conversation with two theologate classmates, a priest and a married mum of four. The priest (who was eating supper) dropped out soon, but the mum kept on and thanked me for the work I do for LSN. This was quite heartening because it is actually very difficult to wade through the sludge every work day, scooping for the most harmful pieces of sludge, so I can say to the reading public, "Look, here's the sludge you really need to worry about."

And families really do need to worry about the sludge, as this column by Rod Dreher illustrates. The sludge is waiting to come into every house via the television or the computer or the radio or the child's homework assignment. Some Catholic families still have little stoups of holy water. The original idea was to ward off any demons who might leap onto you after you leave your holy Christian house and expel any demons who clung to you when you came back in. Whereas I do believe in real, take-possession-of-foolhardy-people demons, I think the average person is much more in danger of tracking, or inviting, really bad ideas into the house.

And the horror of the really bad ideas is that they cause mass suffering. Compared to the 19th century, for the western world, or to 1980, for everywhere outside the western world, we are all so materially rich, and yet there is so much unhappiness. White American men are committing suicide in droves, for example, apparently thanks to the sexual revolution. And yet insane numbers of girls have decided to have their breasts cut off and become white American men. What?!

All this evil and all this unhappiness is terribly exciting, but the truth is that happiness, like goodness, is rather quiet. The other day I had the good fortune to eat lunch with a traditional Catholic family. This is Scotland, so the fact that they live in an Arts-and-Craft neo-mediaeval cottage is not particularly notable, except that it added to a very timeless scene: a young mother and father and their many children of different sizes all gathered around a stone hearth, watching the flames after a good lunch. Apart from the fact that everyone was healthy and clean and the mother's and my skirts ended mid-calf, it could have been any year after the invention of the standard chimney (in northern Europe, 11th or 12th century, apparently).

There was a Disney cartoon playing in a different room, and the children drifted in and out, apparently torn between the video and interest in what the adults were doing, which was not very much: just talking, holding or feeding the baby, and looking at the fire. And I was struck by how very peaceful, happy and good this all was, and how very rich in all the important ways this family was.

Gainfully employed man + patient woman + healthy children + roof + hearth = happiness.

The children are homeschooled, by the way; the sludge I wade through for work and entertainment is kept well away from the beautiful A&C doors and windows. I really am not sure of how much of a chance other parents have of passing on such a quiet, happy and good life to their children without homeschooling and keeping the internet, trash-music and trash-TV out of their homes. However, I suppose everything I write these days has the potential of inspiring one more parent to say, "Enough. We're homeschooling from now on" or "Enough. We're not going to allow Netflix to turn our kids into zombies."

Naturally I was a little sad that my home doesn't have a fireplace, let alone any children, in it. My generation was told in a million ways that being a stay-at-home mother was the waste of a life and that homeschooling was a sure sign of "religious mania." Now, of course, I can think of no vocation for women more important than that of the homeschooling married mother--unless, of course, it is the prayers of cloistered nuns keeping the end of the world at bay.

*Since I haven't mentioned this for some time, I will repeat that the whole point of the story of Romeo and Juliet was that the only reason their marriage would have been inadmissible to their families was their fathers' dumb feud. They shared the same religious faith, the same culture, the same class, and even the same town. Shakespeare's point was not that there is "unity in diversity," but that personal feuds are harmful to society. My own philosophy of marriage is that if husband and wife share the same core values (which may not be shared ethnic and religious identities, but very often are), then they will probably be happy.

Always wanting more

I read this Atlantic piece with amusement. It concerns a study into a correlation between money and happiness, and the researcher became quite depressed as he realised that even the super-rich think they would be "perfectly" happy only if they had double or triple the amount of money they already have.

The researcher seems to have missed the forest for the trees, for what seems to make the super-rich he studies at least temporarily happier is winning high-states poker games or besting each other at charitable donations. Well, winning is always nice. I get quite excited when I win a free Lotto ticket or--yippee!--£25. That covers almost a quarter of our gambling budget for the year, and I mark it down in the Household Accounts as "Entertainment."

I think the secret of happiness is not to chase the emotion but to enjoy it fully whenever it comes. I am not actually sure what Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird of Happiness" is about, but if his point is that it flutters hither and thither and lands on your hand occasionally, then yeah. That makes sense.

While writing my annual Christmas piece for LSN, I was filled with gloom.

B.A. and I are going to have a perfectly nice Christmas, I hasten to say.  We're going to give a little Polish supper for Wigilia, and then we're going to Midnight Mass as usual. When we get home, I will roll up my Sacred Family Christmas Chelsea Bun and leave it to rise. On Christmas morning, I will bake the Sacred Family Christmas Chelsea Bun, and then B.A. and I will wash half of it down with coffee while opening our presents. Then we will find some sort of transport to Christmas III Mass, and after that we will go to the countryside, my Sacred Family Christmas Trifle wrapped in ice-cube filled dish towels, to stay with a friendly Catholic family for a few days. There will be a Christmas feast. It will be all very British Trad Catholic and jolly.

But this was the second Christmas we were planning to spend in Canada with family, and we can't. That is, we chose to follow B.A's oncologist's advice, to safeguard B.A.'s health. That doesn't sound as bad. Also, as Christmas-observing Christians all know, "Jesus"--not family-- "is the Reason for the Season."

Not all Christians observe Christmas, by the way. I am thinking primarily of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, of which I am fond because of our friend Calvinist Cath. The Wee Frees, as they are jocularly called, observe Sundays with great staunchness, vigour and trouble to themselves, but they don't celebrate any of the feasts of the Roman Calendar because they don't believe God asked anyone to do so. I think this lacks historical consciousness, but as this is an aside, I won't get into that.

Right. So although we are going to have a lovely Christmas, complete with two feasts (three if you count the Bun binge) and two Masses--possible three, if we go to Mass on the 26th, too, as the Poles think we are supposed to--I am still sad that we will not be in Canada with my family.  And I must say that is rather ironic to be a pro-life, pro-baby, pro-family crusader when I've never been pregnant, never had a baby, and see members of my family three times a year max.

The general idea of pro-family activism is that happiness comes not from money and career but from loving (I mean loving, not having sex with) people, accepting their love in return, and putting up with them in and out of season while striving to make it easier for them to put up with you. That is actually sound, in a sense, although it is important to concentrate on the family and friends you HAVE instead of the ones you don't. And a good chunk of that happiness might have developed from the sense of a duty done because loving does not always mean liking, especially if you come from a broken home.

Meanwhile, the Stoics would argue that happiness comes from developing satisfaction with whatever life brings. You can't control what life brings, but you can control your reactions to what life brings. If you are sad you don't have children, it is worth remembering that there are many people who have children but are utterly miserable all the same. Children are not a magic happiness wand.

And I really have no cause to complain about my lot. I have a kind husband who is in work, and his brain tumours have stopped growing and may be disintegrating. I have an interesting job which brings me into contact with many interesting people but still leaves me enough time for housework, language study, and culinary projects. We own (!) our own home. My parents and siblings and their children are all still alive and (D.V.) I will see them all in February.

That's enough.

Won't Be Home for Christmas but...

"Normally the patient sits in that seat," said the doctor, or words to that effect, to me.

Yes, Benedict Ambrose and I were back at the hospital. This time we were there to hear the results of his most recent scan, the one that followed six weeks of radiotherapy to stop the resurgent tumour which, to add insult to injury, had brought along two friends. 

Fortunately it was my "retreat day" from work, so I simply brought along Peter Kwasniewski's Tradition & Sanity with me to the waiting room. I was at Mass dark and early at 8 AM, and afterwards our priest loaned me Michael Davies' Liturgical Revolution Volume II, so B.A. read that. 

I always go the hospital with B.A. to hear medical pronouncements because too often he doesn't come home afterwards: it's back to the ward with him. The news is usually bad although, come to think of it, this is better than whichever doctor saying B.A. is fine when I know he is NOT fine.

When B.A.'s name was called, we gathered our coats and books and sped off to the consulting room, where I chose the seat closest to the oncologist's desk as it was pushed farther back. However, it turned out to be the wrong choice, and I had a sense that the doctor was faintly surprised that I was in the office at all, which shows that she does not appreciate the implications of the Catholic marriage bond--or she is unaware that B.A. spent months of his cancer adventure delirious, increasingly blind and unable to remember much or ask important questions.

The news was good. The "tumour buds", which had rapidly doubled in size after being detected, have stopped growing. This is a great mercy, for apparently the radiotherapy was so aggressive, the doctor would not have done it a second time.  One of the tumour buds looks like it is "necrotising," too--a word doctors use instead of dying. Die, tumour buds, die--but without taking my husband with you, thanks. 

We looked at the latest interesting high-tech x-rays of the inside of B.A.'s head, which are almost amusing because some show his tongue, teeth and jaw, too. B.A. says he doesn't identify with these images; they seem completely apart from him. On one x-ray/computer image was a dark horseshoe shape representing where the oncologists had radiated B.A.'s brain, as close to his brain stem as possible without actually touching it. 

B.A.'s tumours, by the way, are technically "benign" even though, left untreated, they would kill him. The problem is that they are basically on the worst, trickiest and most sensitive part of his brain. Normally this kind of brain tumour doesn't appear there. And normally this kind of brain tumour appears in five-year-olds. The probability of B.A. ever being in this situation was low, but here he is. 

Slightly off-setting this misfortune is the fact that his neurosurgeon is a paediatrics neurosurgeon and so was probably one of the few people in the world who could have done the operation he did without leaving B.A. badly damaged---although famously I think the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima had something to do with that, too. And although the subsequent radiotherapy robbed B.A. of the ability to hear music properly, that turned out to be only temporary. Thank God for that. 

After making an appointment for B.A. to come in for another scan in a few months, the doctor asked if we had any more questions. B.A. politely said "No," thus proving the importance of my being there. 

"Can he go to Canada in [four] weeks?" I asked. "For Christmas? It's an eight hour flight." 

Actually, it's more of a seven hour flight, but I was thinking of snowstorms and airplanes circling around Lester B. Pearson airport for ages, waiting for their turn to land.

The doctor looked perturbed.

"Have you booked your flights already?" she asked. 

"No," we said. "We were waiting until we spoke to you."

That had been a good thing to do. To make a long consultation short, she thought it a very bad idea for B.A. to be on a long flight although if we had insisted she would have given him some sort of steroid to help him through it.

"No, no, no," I said, thinking of a disastrous flight to Pisa last year, so we don't know what this steroid would do, or why exactly it is a bad idea for B.A. to fly---quite apart from the cost of medical insurance for a cancer patient travelling to Canada, which is apparently astronomical. 

Then B.A. remembered that we have already bought and paid for tickets to Poland in late January, but then the oncologist perked up and said that it was a good idea to start with a short flight.  Therefore, we are still going to Poland although I am a bit frightened about it. If anything like what happened after we flew to Pisa happens in Poland, we are taking the train to Berlin in July. And now the Berlin trip is now even more about seeing family than it was about museums. 

The oncologist advised us to go to the cancer patients' clubhouse for travelling insurance information for our European travels, so off we went to find it. We were met at the door by a kindly lady who showed us seats and offered tea and coffee and brought us cookies, a list of companies that insure cancer patients, and a schedule of cancer clubhouse activities. B.A. observed that it's my clubhouse, too, because I'm a Caregiver, to which I thought, "Dear God. I'm a Caregiver again." 

A Caregiver (or "Carer") is the United Kingdom expression for a person--sometimes paid by the state--who does most of the in-home caring for a sick or disabled person. I think the expression is meant to encompass the vast variety of people who may fill this role. As a concept, it has positive and negative implications. 

The positive aspect is that Caregivers are seen as a group of their own, and have their own clubs and advisers, who recognise how difficult being a Caregiver can be and that Caregivers need help and support. The negative aspect is that this reflects a breakdown in marriage and family. Once upon a time it was assumed that a wife took care of her sick husband, and vice versa, and parents took care of their disabled children, or children took care of their sick or disabled parents, and now it isn't. 

But the implications regarding Broken Britain aside, I am grateful for the identity label and the  resources available to Caregivers because, although obviously being the one with brain tumours is much worse, caring for a cancer patient can be frightfully annoying and difficult.  

The most annoying part is being treated by hospital staff as if you don't belong beside your sick person. Believe me, just offering the sick person's spouse/'partner'/Caregiver a glass of water is an unusual act of kindness. Possibly the nurses don't do it very often because they're embarrassed when the spouse/'partner'/Caregiver bursts into tears of gratitude. 

The most difficult parts are 1. second-guessing doctors and nurses--and I will never forget how starving  B.A. was fasted a day longer than necessary because a nurse made a mistake, and I thought she had made a mistake, but she didn't--and 2. not knowing what to do when something goes wrong. 

So although I am sad that we are not going to Canada for Christmas, I am glad that we are not going on a seven-hour flight. When we went to Italy in May 2017, we expected a relaxing holiday in which both of us would recover from the horrors of B.A.'s March diagnosis. The doctors had assured us that post-operative B.A. was fine. Fine to travel. Good to go. All was well. Nightmare over. Cheap flight to Pisa. Cheap train to Florence ... 

And then when B.A. got off the train, he fell and could not get up. Somehow I carried him and all our luggage to a seat, but after that, I did not know what to do or what was going on and, God love us, we both preferred to believe the doctors couldn't possibly have been wrong and he just had "low blood sugar". Neither of us knew, then, what delirium looked like. Hint: not just someone raving on their pillow about a lost love. Most of the time B.A. was delirious, he spoke with complete conviction in an ordinary tone of voice. He passed basic cognitive damage tests with flying colours. He wandered off to central Edinburgh because he fancied a doughnut.   

Well, anyway. No Toronto Christmas, but just remembering what happened in Florence (and then everything afterwards) has cheered me up a little. Better safe than that kind of sorry.

Update: I will say this again and again, but it is very shortsighted of the National Health Service not to recognise appropriately the role the sick person's primary caregiver plays in the healing of the patient. First of all, the caregiver has only ONE sick person in her care and so is an incredible resource. Second, the caregiver may be under so much stress, she is in danger of herself falling ill. If the caregiver falls ill, that can have a deleterious effect on the original patient. It will also add to the work of the NHS. Therefore, it is in everyone's interest to spend a half-minute a day acknowledging the primary caregiver, smiling at her or even offering her a glass of water.

Update 2: Given my readership, should acknowledge that our financial situation would be terrible if we were Americans or we lived in the United States without adequate health insurance. Speaking as a Canadian who lives in the UK and travels often to the Continent, I firmly believe in so-called "socialised medicine." There are a lot of things taxes shouldn't support, but cancer treatment is high on the list of things it should. 

Burying the Cake

Memoir can be a face-squinchingly embarrassing practice. One runs the risk of looking pathetic and banal. However, human beings are--let us face it--pathetic and banal compared to the animals, let along the angels, and yet God loves us. And sometimes there is beauty in the pathos--or at least a salutary lesson.

For example, yesterday I buried our wedding cake. In old-fashioned British-Canadian tradition, a bridal couple saves the top tier of their wedding cake for the child's baptism. This, traditionally, is fruitcake, and a proper fruitcake is edible for years, let alone nine or ten months after it is made. The Christmas cakes you will purchase in December may very well have been made last winter, and it is no big deal.

Since I was determined to follow whichever old-fashioned British-Canadian traditions would not shock our guests, I certainly kept the top of our wedding cake. Alas, we never had a child, so this cake has hung around in an old ice-cream container for almost a decade. My mother says we should have served it at our fifth anniversary, but I hadn't given up on the baby yet and, anyway, it was starting to dawn on me that nobody really wants to eat old fruitcake. The fruitcake had become a symbol, really, like when I didn't move out of the choir loft for years because my plan was to leave when the baby arrived. Leaving before the baby came meant giving up on the baby.

Now it's understandable that this is all very sad. The question is, Is it socially acceptable to write about?

I wonder because after I buried the wedding cake yesterday morning, there was a minor crisis when the movers took off with a bag of things I actually wanted to keep, and I burst into tears. As an Ikea bag of wooden hangers and a shoe rack is not really worth crying about, the issue was clearly the cake. The only things to do to get over it, I thought, was to have a good cry in the bathtub (as close to sound-proof as anywhere in the new flat) and then write about it.

However, it was now 11 AM and time for work, so instead of writing about it on my blog, I wrote about it for LifeSiteNews, adding some trenchant thoughts on the evils of IVF.  I fear the readers of LSN are going to think I'm a real moaner, given that my LSN blog pieces tend to be about such domestic catastrophes as "My husband has a brain tumour." But I also feared someone--a non-fan--would write it, "Being childless is your own fault for having got married so old, you stupid woman. Why don't you adopt? Oh, you can't afford it? Well, that's your own fault too, isn't it? Stop whining."

The non-fans of my imagination are really mean.

The slings and arrows of outrageous non-fans are risks I'm willing to run in order to say what I want to say in print. The question of fitness may concern the motive: unhealthy self-absorption ("Everyone must feel my pain!) or solidarity with other childless people? Or a warning to young married couples that if they leave child-having too late, they will never have children?

Personally, I thought that there was a certain grandeur in a middle-aged woman (any middle-aged woman) burying the cake she hoped to eat (or at least look at) at her first child's christening. It was certainly more respectful to the concept of motherhood than throwing it in the bin.

Update: So far one "Why didn't you adopt?" type comment and one "That was HER choice. I'm Catholic, I used AID [Artificial Insemination with Donor--I looked it up],  I don't regret it" Oh my. You do have to have a tough skin in this Op/Ed business.

Mirrors

Oh, for the days I blogged for others not for myself. Auntie Seraphic was a lot more cheerful and fun than Mrs McLean, we must admit. Probably more interesting, too. On Saturday evening I began reading a wonderful little book by the Venerable Fulton Sheen, and he said that the beginning of Inner Peace was not talking about yourself.

Let us meditate on that, but also on mirrors, for today I was thinking about the faces my mirrors have reflected. Not mine. My face I have taken with me to St. Benedict Over the Apple Tree, but alas the mirrors that have reflected more beautiful and younger faces I have had to leave behind.

Moving is one of the most stressful things you can do, but moving when you didn't want to move is even worse. Although my rational brain knows we didn't leave because of an invading army or natural disaster, my reptile brain doesn't seem to know that. Today I told myself it wasn't like the Highland Clearances until I realised that it was exactly like the Highland Clearnaces in that the wicked landlords had a legal right to shove the poor peasants off the land.

The poor Highlanders took what they could carry and watched the rest go up in flames. The poor McLeans are taking what will fit in their two-bedroom walk-up and slowly divesting themselves of everything else. Two pieces of furniture of which I am (despite becoming minimalist) still very fond are my 1930s vanity table and the ornate mirrored set of drawers on the landing, and neither of them will fit in S-BOAT, so I must say good-bye, not only to them but to the memories they evoke.

Both the vanity and the "hall table," as we imprecisely called the ornate, barley-twisted thing, remind me of wonderful dinner parties and weekends or full weeks with out-of-town guests. The hall table was one of the first things guests would see when they got to the top of the stone staircase. Men would put their hats and scarves on it, and the ones who cared checked their pomaded hair in the mirror. My mother and I, at 40-odd and 60-odd, once contemplated our ageing selves in it, and I saw my grandfather looking out from both of our faces, which was rather disconcerting.

The vanity table was useful for the ladies, usually pretty young ladies, staying in the best guest room. It was a rather feminine and dainty little room before the Deluge changed our lives, and now it has the porcelain wreckage of our destroyed bathroom strewn all over the now carpet-less floor. Sometimes, mid-dinner party, I would woozily reapply my lipstick behind the shut door, and hear the Bass (who has a heavy tread) tromp along the hall from the dining-room to whatever bottle awaited him in the sitting-room.

The Historical House is too well-kept to be a haunted house, and I hope and pray none of its occupants or guests are ever reduced to earth-bound spectres. However, it would be jolly if the noise of one of our dinner parties somehow soaked into the walls and oozed out again every once in awhile so that, were anyone standing at the bottom of the correct staircase at midnight, we would again be audible. Great bursts of guffaws and giggles would be optimal, but I would settle for the Bass's tromp-tromp-tromp to the sitting-room, which would scare the living daylights out of anyone at 10 PM at night in an empty manor house.

Another jolly haunting would be if the reflection of one (or all of) our pretty young guests popped out  from the vanity table mirror once in awhile. Some poor student would be innocently gluing on her fake eyelashes when all of a sudden there Polish Pretend Daughter's face would be beside the student's face in the mirror. If you don't want to be this student, try not to buy a vanity table from and Edinburgh Bethany Shop in the next few months, that's what I advise.

And now I shall write about the excellence of chickens.

 

The Year Since Operating Dangerously

It's the first anniversary of my husband's incredibly dangerous fifth brain surgery. Naturally Benedict Ambrose remembers nothing of that day, whereas it is tattooed to my own brain.

The events are jumbled up, however. I do recall B.A. happily "signing" his consent to the procedure that could kill him and was half-expected to paralyse him in some way: he kept on scribbling until I took away the pen. Then I had to sign to confirm that was my husband's signature.

Then there were the could-be death bed visits. Naturally our priest came with the Blessed Sacrament (and poor B.A. was terrified evil forces would stop him), and B.A.'s mother came down from Dundee, and the Men's Schola came by, and the young Franco-Polish couple staying with me---and I think six was the maximum number of guests I thought B.A. could receive.

This was all very last minute, by the way. B.A. had been in the convalescent home, for which we had had great (but completely unfounded) expectations. He fell in the night and was discovered at dawn and whisked to the hospital for x-rays. I could understand very little of what he said, and the young doctors almost nothing. No bones broken, but the tumour had grown, and so B.A. was returned to the relative paradise of the Neuroscience department.

The memory that makes me cry is B.A. telling his mother with all seriousness that he had been in Carstairs. Carstairs is Scotland's prison for the criminally insane.

Well, my father would tell me that it is best not to dwell on these things. And he should know because my mother had a stroke at 50 and then brain surgery. She completely recovered and is hale and hearty, goes for long holiday hikes in the Highlands, and volunteers at a rehab hospital that nobody would think was Carstairs.

I suppose the value of talking about this at all is to provide hope for other people whose loved ones have a stroke or a brain tumour. Of course, the fact that B.A. was not damaged by the operation was a miracle, but that's a story for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I am eternally grateful for all the prayers, cards, small presents and kind words of family, friends, and readers, let alone the sacrifices of both money and time of family members who flew to Scotland to be with us last year.

Update: Trying not to dwell, but the other miracle is that I have not gone insane between March 2017 and now.  That might be a source of hope for others, too. It is possible to care for your spouse through a brain tumour diagnosis, five operations, the malfunction of a fire retardant system, another brain tumour diagnosis, eviction from your beloved home of 9 years, flat-buying, and his radiotherapy  (while working full-time) and not go stark raving mad. In fact, I gave up anti-depressants months and months ago because WHO HAS TIME?

My principal advice here--besides not trusting a dangerously overstretched medical system alone with your loved one--is to save every penny you can possible save as soon as it dawns on you that you should have done this from your first paycheque.

Brigid Jones' Baby & A.A. Gill's Film

B.A. suggested it, and I crumbled at once and said we could subscribe to the super-basic version of Netflix. Then, after a companionable watching of "Suits", I watched Bridget Jones' Baby after B.A. went to bed.

Although it was a funny movie, it made me very sad, and I had a hard time getting to sleep afterwards. It was not just that Bridget looked so old, it was also that Mark Darcy looked so old. The ending of the film was mostly satisfying, but I got the sense that both Bridget and Mark had squandered so much of their lives. Also they looked terribly old, and if Renee Zellweger looks like that in her mid-to-late 40s, what must the rest of us over-40s look like?

I mean no disrespect to Ms Zellweger, by the way. I have no interest in resurrecting the what-did-she-do-to-her-face debate. And I wish to emphasise how old Colin Firth also looked. If he meant to play Mark Darcy as a man who was outwardly successful but was inside a howling void, he succeeded.

"It's so awful getting old," my grandmother told me, but it is also awful to watch others getting old. Well, such is the human condition, and we must be brave about it.

As I was feeling very wired from watching aged Bridget have a baby at 43, which I myself was not able to do--something else to be brave about--I picked up volume called  The Best of A.A. Gill.

A.A. Gill indirectly saved B.A.'s life by writing that he went to the doctor with a neck-ache that turned out to be cancer. After reading that, B.A. went to the doctor with a neck-ache that also turned out to be cancer, only the non-malignant kind that doesn't spread. But as I have written many times before, it is not wholly benign. Had B.A. not had his pains checked out, he would have died of hydrocephaly by now, probably in his sleep, and I would have woken up beside a corpse. Not a happy thought.

Anyway, besides indirectly saving B.A.'s life, A.A. Gill was a very clever and amusing writer, whose works I would recommend wholeheartedly, were it not for the fact that he wrote a p/r/on film. While reading his essay on the topic, I wasn't sure exactly what he was describing, and then I was sure, and I was neither impressed nor amused. It astonished me that someone who could write so passionately about the sufferings of refugees could be so indifferent to the acute degradation of the performers in his film.

Once again I am decidedly underwhelmed by contemporary British artefacts/pop culture, but at least there will an exhibit of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts at the British Library this winter so splendid that it will be worth our while to travel down to London to see it.

Benedict's Letters according to Bild

I spent the summer of 2006 in Germany, and it was pretty hard to ignore Bild because it carried a photograph of a topless woman on Page 1 almost every day. Apparently Bild moved the Page 1 girl to inside the newspaper in 2012, but unless I am very mistaken it's still just a rag full of gossip, football news, and soft porn. How surprised I was to discover that Bild broke the story of the Benedict-Brandmueller contretemps.

Speaking as a reporter at a media outlet that lobbed a real bombshell document at the world, I do not believe in other bombshell letters and documents unless they are actually linked to or reproduced below the lede. And furthermore I do not believe that someone who wanted to leak letters from Benedict would give them to Bild--unless Bild pays for such things, of course. But then why not publish the complete letters? 

Honestly, did no-one at The New York Times ask himself or herself these questions? Well, Brandmueller is still alive, so he can confirm or deny himself, I suppose. 

Meanwhile, I do not believe that Il Fatto Quotiadiano has part of the infamous 300-page dossier on a certain lobby group. I have read two articles by Il FQ on the topic of bombshell documents and dossiers, and they were all smoke and no fire. In fact, I got in touch with someone at Il FQ to ask politely if Il FQ would actually release the names they claimed to have seen, and the answer was "obviously not" because of "rules of civility."

Update: Okay, it looks as though Bild really does have the letters. I'd love to know how Bild got them. 

"Why We Fight"

When I was three and Nulli was two, my parents moved to England for a year. We lived near Cambridge University, and I enjoyed English life as thoroughly as an under-five could in those happy days of the milk ration, nursery school and playing with keys at church. I am sorry to say I did not meet any of the great figures of Cambridge life in the 1970s--or if I did, I don't remember.

When telling my friends I was returning to Canada, one asked if I would come back, and I said "Yes"--which is probably the first time (and most definitely not the last) I made a rash promise probably impossible to keep. However, I did go back to England many times through books, starting with Winnie the Pooh, the Narnia series, The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings and a lot of other books written by men who went to Oxford or Cambridge or by their daughters.

Unsurprisingly, this gave me a very antiquated view of Britain and what British people were like. Obviously I didn't think the modern day Englishman was quite like Aragorn son of Arathorn, but I did assume that the average Englishman aspired to be so.

I have long since realised this is not the case, and having watched British television for almost nine years, I thought I had seen the depths of British cultural decline. However I haven't, for these posters shocked me as much as anyone:

NHS stand for National Health Service, and the product they are pushing in the first poster is the "morning after pill". The second poster advertises condoms.

The general public has found the first poster   offensive, but I think the second is even worse.  And, unfortunately, many people find the first poster offensive merely because it suggests you have to choose between dressing up and having a baby. Their argument is that you certainly can wear those shoes AND have a baby.

Frankly I think wearing such shoes is appalling to begin with, not only because they are a public declaration of sexual "power" but because of what they do to your feet and legs.  For the National Health Service to pretend that wearing shoes like that is desirable, let alone more important than motherhood--yes, even teen motherhood--is to have abdicated their own responsibility to the public.

But the second poster really upsets me for two reasons. The lesser reason is that it suggests to the English teenage boy that video games are crucial to his existence. As the obestiy problem skyrockets in the UK--an American friend of mine says all you have to do to get fat in the UK is breathe--it is outrageous that the National Health Service would hold up video games as superior to fatherhood (yes, even teen fatherhood).

The greater reason is the warning "Bware da baby trap". Bware da baby trap--in the country of Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Dickens,  Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, A.S. Byatt and Julian Barnes. Yes, of course it is also completely offensive to refer to readers' responsibilities to their potential children as "a trap". But it seems to me even more offensive to assume he enjoys being patronised in this fashion by an agency of the government.  

I've entitled this post "Why We Fight" in a rather tongue-in-cheek way, as I do most of my fighting on a North American battleground. The people doing the real fighting to retain cultural standards in Britain are English and Scottish parents who either send their children to the best schools they can afford or homeschool them.

Unfortunately, British traditionalists and conservatives have lost battle after battle in the public realm. This strikes me as untenable; it's not as if traditional parents will be left in peace to raise their children as they see best. However, I am not sure myself what to do about that.

Good-bye to the furniture...

Today the antique dealer's Polish boyfriend and his equally strong buddy came by the Historical House to take most of the nicest pieces of furniture we still have in the Historical Attic. I wasn't there for the epic removal down three flights of very old stairs, but B.A. said it went very smoothly.

I was there this morning, cleaning out drawers. Although I am becoming minimalist and there is no space for it, I am a little sad thinking about the loss of B.A.'s great-grandmother's old desk. It wasn't a grand desk--the very thin veneer was flaking off,  ]the original drawer knobs had long since disappeared, and it was too small for a full-time journalism job. But it was my first desk in Scotland, and I wrote an awful lot on it, and it was B.A.'s last piece of his family's furniture.

What else went? An oak chest of drawers with a mirror, a painted screen, the cane-backed chair that lived in the bathroom, two inlaid tables, a glass-topped coffee table, a pine chest of drawers. a Victorian kneehole desk that was really too low but fit in the guest room, an elm stool.

Mostly I feel badly that B.A. had to give up his furniture.  However, there is some comfort in the fact that he will get some money for it, and it will presumably go to homes, good or bad.  B.A. was adamant that the furniture was not going to end up in a skip.  When I tried to get rid of our good dining-room table a couple of weeks ago--it wouldn't go through the hall door of the new place---my kind friend helped me stuff it in the back of her car and drove to charity shop after charity shop in the rain.

I couldn't find a charity shop that would take it. My pal would have driven me to the dump, but I couldn't bare the thought of telling B.A. we had thrown "such a good table" in the landfill. So we took it back to the Historical House, and I put it in an outbuilding. Hopefully someone will be able to take it apart, and then we will be able to get it through the door.

Another reason why I don't like losing the furniture is that it makes me think of families on their way down, like James Joyce's family. However, as property owners we are presumably on our way up and really have lost only our Historical House-derived delusions of grandeur. When you are the sole tenants of a 17th/18th manor house, it is very easy to feel like you own it!

As always I am comforted by the thought of the garden. Although we don't have room for flocks of furniture, we do have room for two people---especially with a long garden rolling out below our windows.

The Freedom of Being Nobody

St. Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us.

The "Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises" of Saint Ignatius of Loyola helped me a lot when I was grappling with a very difficult decision years ago.

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created. 

From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.  

For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honour rather than dishonour, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created. 

The part that really challenged me was the idea of not desiring "honour rather than dishonour," since I was about to quit a PhD programme and therefore abandon my lifelong dream of becoming a university professor.  

Now, I would never recommend to anyone that they drop their PhD programme. Getting that far and then giving up--for whatever unhappy reason--can leave a very deep wound.  (I suppose if it is for a happy reason--like something so much better--then you'd be okay.) However, I eventually found a fulfilling life outside of academia, even discovering that the Great Conversation carries on outside the walls. 

In fact, the conversation inside the walls can become very restrictive, and I am reminded again of the time I positively savaged a book of feminist theology in a book review published in the Toronto Catholic Register. At that time, Canadian Catholics in academia did not rip apart the books of other Canadian Catholics in academia in print. Doing so is not very nice, and the Catholic Register was (and may still be) a nice paper, rather more interested in building up than tearing down, which was as it should be. Moreover, ripping into the works of potential future colleagues is not great for your future career. 

However, I was very passionate about theology, and I had a very low tolerance for the cotton candy quality of thought that came along with the 1970s-style pastoral branch, so I very much hated this book. I recall hating it so much, I threw it across a laundromat--which I may have said in my review. 

It did not occur to me to imagine how the authoress would feel when she read my review, as she inevitably did, and I have paid for my thoughtlessness since by reading reviews of my own work. (I no longer do this for I have suffered enough.)  

But not to put a fine point on it, she went nuts. She wrote to me at two email addresses, and she wrote to the editor-in-chief, and she telephoned him too. Telephoning a newspaper editor to scream is inelegant, but at least it leaves no traces. I never deleted the authoress's email and although I have written many stupid emails since the genre was invented, I have never written one quite like that. 

In short, the authoress was a learned, respected professor at a wonderful university who had the confidence and support of the bishops----"and who are YOU?"

"I'm nobody," said your humble correspondent to her screen and "--and that makes me free." 

I don't agree with St. Ignatius about the health and the riches, exactly. I'm not sure 16th century people had as much choice about these things as we westerners do now, and compared to 16th century people, we're all rich. However, I do think he is spot on about the honour/dishonour thing. If you do not care that much about what Very Important People think of you--caring more about, say, how you appear to the ladies of your mother's branch of the Catholic Women's League*--then you have more freedom to stand up for what you believe in, no matter how unfashionable it is.  

The outraged authoress did me three very good turns by freaking out, by the way.  

First, her tears (I think I was told she cried over the phone) were a wake-up call that words hurt even grown-up strangers with tenure. 

Second, although I myself have cried over bad reviews since then--even private ones from friends, shameful, shameful, shameful**---I have never pulled the "I am so GREAT, and you are so SMALL" stunt, and I hope God prevents me from ever doing it.  

Third, she alerted the editor-in-chief to the fact that there was something scream-worthy in that week's Register. He picked up a copy and had a read of my review. And that, mes enfants, is how I eventually got my own column and my first book published and thus the book republished in the USA and in Poland. 

I am very thankful that when my once-promising academic career fell sick and died, I had my writing career (!) to fall back on. But I am also grateful for the lesson that to be "nobody" is to be free and being "somebody" can lead to delusion.

*The ladies of the Catholic Women's League, I am quite sure, would draw a line well before  picketing outside a private house and telling a man's children that his father is a horrible person and loads of people hate him. I suspect the CWL eyebrow would have lifted right when Mr Bone told his parents that instead of getting a job after university, he was going to live on the public purse.

**When I had spent the requisite time with poets, story-writers and other scribblers in the 1990s, I began to notice that we seemed particularly vulnerable to certain sins, chief among them volcanic envy. I will never forget my reaction when I first discovered that a dear friend had had a book published by a mainstream publisher with a big advance and bee-oo-tee-ful binding: murderous rage. Up until that moment I thought I was proof against the snarling hatred certain poets I knew had for much more successful poets their age.  Ah ha ha ha ha--no.