Here are the Holy Father's Prayer Intentions for the month of October:

General Prayer Intention: That all those who are baptized may mature in their faith and manifest it through clear, coherent and courageous choices in life.

Missionary Prayer Intention: That the celebration of World Mission Day may everywhere increase the spirit of missionary animation and cooperation.

World Mission Day is Sunday October 22nd.

This is sort of an inside joke, but the formula which many people I know attribute to one C. Hamelly (if John Derbyshire's memory serves) was actually devised by Aristotle.

Man shows up at Dallas playground with "adult" pictures, receives a**-whipping.

We're using Craig's List both to buy and sell a car. It is working out quite, quite well, but doing both at the same time is a bit exhausting. Hopefully, it'll all be done by the weekend.

By the way, I'm selling a 1990 Camry. Anybody looking for a fixer-upper, drop me an email.

Here is a list of words that sound like the f-bomb when spoken by Matthew:

fork
frog
fix it
smoke

Needless to say, his extended family finds this hilarious.

Well, the Lu-family is in the middle of our first major family purchase. We're buying a station wagon to haul the family around in. It's a white 97 Volvo with the old-school third row of seating that faces the rear. We went up to Chicago to see it and leave a down payment on Saturday. On Monday morning, I'm going to swing by the bank and get our loan which we got approved for and then we're going to head back up north to pick up the new Loogy-Mobile!

It's not every day when I can hold my head up high and proclaim myself the number one Internet authority on a subject.

Here is the "proof": I am Google's number one search result for gem clear 190 proof.

I'm not even in the top 100 if you use Yahoo, so I guess we know which search engine I'll be using from now on.

To pick up an old thread, yes pregnancy might make you stupid, but having more and more children might make you a better mother.

Or at least it works for rats .

What about the poppy rats?

Hat-tip: Danielle Bean (who just had a new baby!)

I wrote a lengthy post on Monday about the Pope's Regensburg lecture that ignited way too much controversy, but I lost it. Aaaaargh. I'll sum up here.

The German Pope, speaking to a German audience of scholars and scientists, quoted the scholarly work of a renowned German scholar who had recently translated the work of Manuel II Paleologus, a Byzantine Emperor from 6 centuries ago. This emperor, when he wasn't fighting off usurping relatves, spent much of his rule defending his empire from Muslim Turks, so he had a particular hard spot in his heart for Mohammed. The Pope took pains to make clear that the emperor's words were not his own, the German original shows an even greater effort on the part of the Holy Father to separate himself from those actual remarks. The remark about Islam bringing things "evil and inhuman" was a tiny bit of the quote from Manuel. The Pope further quoted an eloquent passage from Manuel concerning reason and faith. This was the basis for using the quote.

Indeed, the Holy Father had this to say yesterday:

He further quoted Muslim scholars who seemed to be saying that God cannot be described as necessarily reasonable.

The mention of Islam was the launching pad for a discussion of reason and faith, during which Islam was not mentioned. If Benedict's lecture could be seen as slamming anybody, it would be not Islam, but rather:

1. liberal Protestant and Catholic theologians who wish to divorce Catholic faith from the hellenistic thought into which it was born and which had already been in dialogue with Judaism centuries before Christianity came about,

2. secular scholars and scientists who pretend that empirical research alone can get to the truth of who we are and why we exist,

3. believers of all stripes who use violence or any irrational means to promote their religion.

That said, given the fact that anything the Pope says to any audience gets worldwide amplification, he should have been more careful in his wording. It's true, that as the Holy Father said, "a careful reading" of the text shows he was not agreeing that Islam has only brought evil, but with the nature of the soundbyte information age, and the fact that he was speaking over the heads of most of the world, an explicit statement that he did not agree with the statements was appropriate to not cause offence to Muslims. "Careful" readers are few and far between among those with the largest megaphones.

This does not in any way make the Pope responsble for violence, rioting and murder. But as a representative of Catholics and Christians living in Muslim countries that are quick to violent oppression, he has a responsibility towards them. Again, this doesn't make the Pope responsible for the actions of those who need only an excuse to persecute Christians.

Finally, it was disappointing to see so many commentators and fellow Catholic bloggers agree with the Pope's remarks when they thought he really meant the Islam has only brought things inhuman and evil.

Happy Feast Day, Matthew Boniface!

Party at my parish after mass this evening!

Catholic Encyclopedia entry for St. Matthew.

From Fr. Stephanos, O.S.B. at Open Book at this thread (where yours truly makes an appearance):

I logged into my email from the worship office at the U of I Newman Center, where I worked as a sacristan. There was a message on a Church email list (the K-list, for those who know what that is) from, I believe, John Bambenek, stating that one tower had been hit and that another plane had gone missing. A follow-up email from somebody else reported that the towers had fallen. Struck with disbelief, I went downstairs to the Newman Hall lounge. The first person I saw simply said, "They're gone."

I went to one class at mid-day, and though we discussed the events, nobody really knew what was going on. The rest of the day I spent in or around the chapel. Fr. Stanley, the associate chaplain there at the time, had asked the Sacristans to be around in case students wandered in looking for people to pray with or a priest to talk to.

I talked to a few distraught students, not very many, and instead spent much of the time in the chapel or sacristy, alternately praying and reading a book for an upcoming paper. Later, we locked up the chapel and some of the sacristans converged to relax after a long and spiritually tough day.

It was then that I first saw any images of what happened. Throughout the day, I had heard snippets of info from friends: people jumping from the towers, maniacs in the Middle East dancing in celebration, etc, and so I was intensely curious to view some of these images myself.

It was jarring to see the second plane hitting the tower, but I found that I was not nearly as disturbed (or distraught, or pissed, or whatever adjective you wish to use) as many other people I talked to in the following few days. It kind of bothered me, and I really wanted to get to the bottom of why I felt this way. Was I that heartless?

The answer - to an extent - is yes. I did some self-examination of my disposition in the months following 9-11-01 and I realized that death has never much disturbed me. I've found that at funerals and other situations of grief, I tend to be moved and saddened more by the grief of others than by the actual events that transpired. Deep down, a part of me gets frustrated with people who get overly-emotional. It's not something of which I'm particularly proud, but I dealt with some pretty rotten stuff by myself when I was a kid, and I think some of this inner hardness of heart stems from that. I don't like it, but to be honest, it's there.

On the other hand, this was different. I *was* pissed. I was horrified by what I heard and angry at the injustice that had been perpetrated. I saw people all day - many of them friends whom I love dearly - who were wrecks, and more than anything THAT made me angry and frustrated. Why were they more "affected" than I?

Quoth the trauma experts:

Every time I think about that day, I'm grateful that I wasn't sitting in front of a television watching that second plane hit and watching the towers fall. Death is real and terrible. Evil is real and terrible and cannot be ignored or wished away. In that sense, the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were a wake-up call to our county. But that is all too metaphysical. The cold reality is that many of us watched mass-murder live on TV.

The real-time video coverage of the events of 9/11 did real psychological harm to citizens of our country. We should all pray that we never again experience something like that day. We should all desire to protect our families and our children from witnessing such evil. Yet the next time it happens (pray it does not), how many of you will let yourselves watch and be wounded? Or expose your children to it.

I count myself lucky, blessed, that I had all day to reflect and pray before being confronted with the images. I refer back to them as rarely as possible, not because I can make 9/11 go away and forget about it, not because terrorism is an over-hyped myth, but because it's masochistic to repeatedly and intentionally introduce such tragedy into life.

This is why I don't understand those who think a good way to commemorate the occasion is to replay the massacre in slow motion. It's like ripping open the wounds all over again. Yes, it may ensure that we "never forget," but it also ensures that we never forgive or heal.

Far better to remember those who perished, both on that day and from the ensuing wars, to give thanks for their lives and to recount the real heroism that took place amid the horror, to pray for their eternal rest, and to ask God to forgive their murderers and to forgive and convert those who conspired to kill them.

Mary, Mother of Sorrows, pray for us!

Here.

Unless you've been to a Harold's Chicken Shack, you cannot grasp what it means that one is coming to Campustown.

Let's put it this way: every one I've been to has bulletproof glass between the cashier and customer.

OK, here's the deal. Mama-Lu and I, upon the arrival of our first-born, struck a number of compromises. Fortunately, we're both Catholic, so there was no need to debate that matter. Sports, on the other hand...

I grew up on the north side of Chicago, about a mile away from Wrigley Field, so that was a no-brainer. Our boys will be raised Cubs fans. I don't give a rats rear about any other professional teams*, so no problems there.

College, on the other hand, presents a problem. We're both U of I alumni, but Jenny is a sort of "first-generation" transplantee from the world's greatest football town: Columbus. The compromise was suprisingly easy to strike: the Buckeyes will get the boys for football, but we will be an Illini basketball family. I think this will be a nice way to bring the boys up in the winningest tradition in each sport (and hopefully make up for the emotional scars that rooting for the Cubs will inflict upon them).

So yes, I am a Buckeye fan. And rooting for them this past week was surprisingly easy. It's been a long time - all my life - since I had a winning college football team to root for.

Stuff like this, though, gives me pause.

What the freak goes on over there? Is there something my wife and in-laws aren't telling me about Buckeye sub-culture?

* Once, a long time ago, I was a rabid Bull's fan. But when the first season you ever follow the sport, your team wins the first of six championships in eight years, unreal expectations are created. I might have hung in there, but the NBA has become an embarrasment. If they want to have a future, they need to stop drafting teenagers.

Check out more pictures of Matthew and Charles dating from ~January to August here.

Somebody let me know if you have to login. You shouldn't have to.

Enjoy!

Behold. L’Osservatore Romano, the official unofficially official newspaper of the Vatican has created an on-line photo archive. The pics are watermarked, so they're not good for downloading (sorry, bloggers), but you can order prints.

Update: Ramesh points us to his own explanations of why it's reasonable to favor abortion restrictions without wanting to throw women in jail.

They are here, here and here (already cited below).

--

There's been an interesting back and forth over at Mirror of Justice that was sparked by this Jonathan Rauch review of Ramesh Ponnuru's Party of Death.

Rick Garnett starts here
Eduardo Penalver replies
Back to Garnett
Garnett also quotes a bit of Ponnuru's own refutation of the Rauch/Penalver critique (the piece he quotes can be foud here.)
More Penalver
One last bit from Garnett

The critique in Rauch's review that fails to impress Garnett but which finds support from Penalver is this:

This argument is being increasingly used against pro-lifers, especially since the release of Ponnuru's book. As pro-lifers succeed in making it more and more clear that abortion is an unjust killing, abortion supporters shift the debate and accuse them of not having the courage of their convictions. Rauch, indeed, does not express much disagreement with Ponnuru's arguments in Party of Death. If abortion is murder, then why not the death penalty for mothers who abort? Since pro-lifers don't generally support any criminal sanctions for these women, then they must not really believe that abortion is murder, or else there is some other inconsistency that makes pro-lifers wrong. Whatever the answer is, pro-lifers are wrong, wrong, wrong.

Penalver says:

Without asking what he thinks of the death of Terri Schiavo, I'll grant his premise that "we normally think of the killing of the very young and defenseless as a particularly egregious form of murder." However, the idea behind refusing to legally sanction the mother is not to render a lesser degree of justice; rather the idea is to take into consideration circumstances that alleviate the moral culpability of the mother (and even the doctor).

I am not a lawyer, so I leave this open to correction, but the law seems to have many provisions that absolve the accused of guilt if there are extenuating circumstances. Given that the cultural left has largely succeeded in its goal of making us believe that the fetus is a blob of tissue that isn't human yet, a real case can be made that those who procure and perform abortions lack awareness of their crime. Indeed, the judicial environment of abortion on demand itself has done the most damage to respect for unborn life in this culture. It's simply common sense to say that a woman whose conscience is formed in this culture cannot be held fully responsible for viewing the unborn as less than human and acting on that view. For decades we have been bombarded with the idea that the unborn child is a piece of property, and now we're supposed to throw people in prison for holding that view?

This is all made even more frustrating by the fact that Ponnuru (whose book, remember, started this discussion) specifically says abortion is not murder precisely because of these considerations.

And then there's this from Penalver:

First of all, pro-lifers do "tak[e] to the streets." Annually, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade (though you wouldn't know it by the non-coverage it gets from the mainstream media) and in hundreds if not thousands of local protests. They take to the streets in front of abortion clinics (at least they do where unjust laws do not forbid the practice) to personally witness and offer help to women considering abortion. But lets put those present-day examples aside.

Penalver says this is only a thought experiment, but just by bringing it up he shows either an ignorance or a disregard for the history of the pro-life movement. Some pro-lifers once felt that violence was indeed justified, some went for a more passive sit-in style approach and still others were "Operation Rescue" types who blocked doors and dismantled equipment. What happened to them? They were vilified by the cultural left, many went to prison, and irreparable harm was done to their reputations and families. Since Joe Scheidler only this year had his ludicrous conviction on mob-style racketeering charges overturned (the case isn't really concluded yet), we're still feeling the effects of this.

The end result of these efforts was to entrench abortion even more deeply in society because the NARALs, NOWs and Planned Parenthoods benefited from the PR of having an enemy - the violent Christian - to use as a scare-mongering tactic. Legislation was passed banning some abortion protests and creating bubble zones around abortion centers and more children died.

The pro-life community, proving that they are anything but fanatics, responded. They realized that peaceful protest and one-to-one help are more effective tools in this debate, and thus the sidewalk counseling approach grew more popular where they weren't hampered by law. Pro-lifers realized that offering real alternatives to abortion would help eliminate the need for abortion, and thus the crisis pregnancy center came to be. Politically, an incrementalist approach was taken up to go along with the abolitionist approach.

In sum, the pro-life community realized that the way to end legal abortion is to convince individual women and society at large that abortion is wrong, that it is a bad choice, and that the fetus is a human life deserving protection, while simultaneously passing reasonable common-sense restrictions that all people could tolerate.

It's working. The conventional wisdom is more and more in favor of restricting abortion rights and even the Supreme Court is becoming more reasonable. The best evidence that it is working comes from the reaction to Party of Death. Almost nobody has battled Ponnuru on the merits of his arguments. Instead, there have been three main critiques:

1. The Jon Stewart critique: change the subject. instead of discussing abortion during Ponnuru's Daily Show appearance, Jon Stewart railed against the war in Iraq, implying that unjust killing should be opposed everywhere. He practically granted Ponnuru's premise while ignoring the conclusions.

2. The Tom Ashbrook critique: judge a book by its cover. On his On Point radio show, Tom Ashbrooke attacked…. the title of the book - for 45 minutes, Ashbrook would not let the title go. At one point, Ponnuru called him on his refusal to engage the arguments in the book. Ashbrook's response was to suggest (without irony) that the title of the book is akin to an incitement to genocide.

3. The Rauch/Penalver critique: pine for fundamentalism. Penalver and Rauch say that Ponnuru - and pro-lifers by extension - can't *really* believe that abortion is unjustified killing without favoring criminal sanctions for women who procure them. The only credible pro-lifer is a clinic-bomber.

Penalver's posts also contain some odd views of politics. He says:

Neither the Supreme Court, nor the filibuster seem to exist in Penalver's world.

Finally, here's Penalver's take on what pro-lifers should be doing, if they really think abortion is an unjust killing:

Is there a clearer case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't"? Kill an abortionist, you get thrown in prison, hurt your cause and more children die (not to mention that eternal consequences). Don't kill an abortionist, and you're branded as weak in the knees and a Catholic lawyer implies that you are a hypocrite. And surely, nothing would advance the pro-life cause as much as a civil war. Who exactly should the pro-life militias attack? NARAL headquarters? California? Should Congress spend time passing laws that are doomed to be stricken down?

So... we should be rioting in the streets, shutting down Congress. For what? To end up on the 6 o'clock news and send the DNC's fundraising skyrocketing while condemning the unborn to further dehumanization and death. We should also be punishing Republicans for being too slow on abortion by… electing Democrats! Who will then give us more Breyers and Ginsbergs. The only strategies pro-lifers can legitimately employ are those that are destined to lose.

What's disturbing about the Penalver/Rauch argument is that pro-lifers are portrayed as incapable of compassion for women. Penalver and Rauch's critique ultimately is that pro-lifers don't view Eric Rudolph as a hero. That might seem harsh, but reading Rauh and Penalver, you get the feeling that Ponnuru's position makes them uncomfortable because it makes so much sense. It's very convenient to argue that pro-lifers have to want to throw post-abortive women in jail. This aim of employing the argument is to turn the sensible pro-life position into John Derbyshire's right to life cult. It attempts to cut off a full and truly beautiful vision of the dignity of human life and stunt it, permitting only that which can be mischaracterized as repressive. One expects this kind of argument in the New York Times. To find it lauded at "A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory" is reprehensible.

...can you find discussion like this that yield statements like this:

I've told a few people about this, watch it for yourselves.

Bill White is volunteering Champaign-Urbana to host a conference for St. Blog's cyber-parishioners sometime in 2007. Head on over to his place to put your $.02 in on dates.

Here is the start of what will undoubtedly very soon be a glorious and wonderful homepage!

Andre Agassi concluded his career with a four-set loss on Sunday.

The Fynal Cut has his emotional parting words.

Deadspin has a picture of fellow American James Blake's tribute to Andre: he wore Agassi's old pink get-up from the mullet days (though if you check out the original, fuller-length picture here, you'll see that he wimped out on sporting the pink biker shorts).

Speaking of Blake, he's pretty much The American to Root For now. He's ranked 9th in the world, fifth in this year's Open, and he played a memorable match against Andre in this same even last year. Actually, Blake's role wasn't so memorable, as he choked, but it was Agassi's last truly great match, and Blake has been on the rise since.

The freakish string of injuries that has doomed yet another Chicago Cubs season came to new shuddering heights Saturday, as...

Michael Barrett underwent surery for an intrascrotal hematoma. I tried to google it, but I was too terrified to look at the results. "Hematoma" means bleeding. And, well, the bleeding was, er, intrascrotal.

To the point that it required SURGERY.

Mama-Lu says (with wide eyes and a grimaced mouth): "I don't even have on of those and it hurts to hear!"

The Pope's general prayer intention for September is: That those who use the means of social communication may always do so consciously and responsibly.

His missionary prayer intention is: For the People of God in mission lands: may they realize their right and duty to keep up-to-date with developments in the faith and the Church.

RC has moved us over to a new server and upgraded our version of Movable Type. For the past few months, I've been unable to edit my sidebars, so look for new links over on the right!