7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

In case you only visit here on Fridays, or this is your first time, do click back through the past few days. I’ve been posting almost every day (well…except yesterday…)

We are at the tail end of a marathon of piano lessons. Over the past eight days, he’ll have had his two regularly scheduled jazz lessons and four regular piano lessons. The reason is that his regular teacher is in grad school now, out of state, and has been back home for the break – so we’re trying to get as much in-person lesson time in as we can before we have to return to the adequate, but not optimal video lessons.

Phew. And at some point we need to get back to the pipe organ – hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

Other than that we are all about basketball, bagging groceries, one of us prepping to go to DC for the March for Life and two last semesters commencing: one last semester of high school, and one last semester of eighth grade – possibly, probably and hopefully the last semester of traditional school in these parts, period.

Please, God.

— 2 —

Last week, I noted the flood of new works entering the public domain in 2019. Well, here’s a list of a few medieval-related books in the group. Maybe you’ll find something interesting? 

—3–

Also medieval-related, and from the same site: A Medieval Man’s New Year’s Resolutions:

In the diary of Gregorio Dati, an Italian merchant born in the fourteenth century, we can see resolutions tied to this urge to face a new year as a better man in an entry dated January 1, 1404.

While modern people’s resolutions – at least those we voice aloud – tend to target our shortcomings around food and exercise, Dati’s resolutions aim at how he wishes to be a better Christian. He writes, “since my birth forty years ago, I have given little heed to God’s commandments,” and his three resolutions are aimed at rectifying this. First, Dati says,

I resolve from this day forward to refrain from going to the shop or conducting business on solemn Church holidays, or from permitting others to work for me or seek temporal gain on such days.

Next,

I resolve from this very day and in perpetuity to keep Friday as a day of total chastity – with Friday I include the following night – when I must abstain from the enjoyment of all carnal pleasures.

And finally,

I resolve this day to do a third thing while I am in health and able to, remembering that each day we need Almighty God to provide for us. Each day I wish to honour God by some giving of alms or by the recitation of prayers or some other pious act.

These are all things that Dati knows should already be a regular part of his life, but that he hasn’t had much success with. His everyday struggle to do what he should is a familiar one in a world in which we continue to make and break our own New Year’s resolutions.

 

–4––

Peter Hitchens has an excellent, balanced look at Francisco Franco in the pages of First Things. 

This was a promise he fulfilled: Death alone could remove him. A man who had been the contemporary of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill, and Roosevelt held doggedly on to power into the age of Gerald R. Ford and Leonid Brezhnev. When he went, everything he stood for turned to dust, like a mummy exposed to fresh air after thousands of years sealed beneath a pyramid. The Spanish Christian civilization that Solzhenitsyn admired had been preserved but not saved. It crumbled into a heap of dust and spiders’ webs immediately after the caudillo made his final journey from his stuffy palace to his gigantic, hubristic tomb at the Valley of the Fallen. If Franco had been the preserver of Christian Spain, it is interesting to go there now and see how completely it has disappeared. Every element of the 1960s, from sexual liberation to ­marijuana, swept across Spain and, above all, Madrid, not long after ­Franco’s last breath. If he had truly been the preserver of faith and restraint, would they not have survived him in better condition?

What should Christians do about politics? How do we defend what we love without making false alliances with cynical powers? Civil wars are generally disastrous for law, legitimacy, and religion. Elaborate formulas must be devised to forget or bury the recent past. In England, the restored King Charles II passed the marvelously named Act of Indemnity and Oblivion in 1660, in which the whole lawless period of Oliver Cromwell’s republic was legally forgotten. The U.S. must often wish it could come up with a similar formula to spread soft oblivion over the unending resentments of the defeated Confederacy. In Spain, they turned to the monarchy.

But that restoration, Christian in form if not in outcome, only underlined the origins of Franco’s “monarchy without royalty.” The caudillo had been careful to keep Spanish monarchists at a distance, or under his thumb. His rule was not Christian or lawful and could not possibly draw its authority from God, however much Franco might have liked it to. Its origins lay in violent rebellion against the legitimate government, always hard to square with scriptural views of authority. Franco’s state rested on a foundation of bayonets. The caudillo himself may have been inseparable from the relic of the incorruptible hand of Santa Teresa de Jesús, which accompanied him everywhere. But his government, in his own words to his tame parliament in 1961, was built on what he called “an armed plebiscite.” He explained that “a nation on a war footing is a final referendum, a vote that cannot be bought, a membership that is sealed with the offering of one’s life. So I believe that never in the history of Spain was a state more legitimate, more popular and most representative than that we began to forge almost a quarter of a century ago.” Surely, this strange formula, in which the shedding of blood is deemed superior to the casting of a peaceful ballot, shows how much Franco the Catholic was troubled by his lack of real legitimacy, and the impossibility of his obtaining it as long as he ruled.

–5 —

Yes, I am going to write about St. Denis. I just need a bit of mental space. It’s a topic that will quickly spin in all kinds of directions, and I want to keep it simple.

Well, here’s a link to some scholarly writing on a different topic: “What the People Want: Popular Support for Catholic Reform in the Veneto”

The abstract:

Through examination of the unusually rich sources produced by a late seventeenth-century bishop of Padua, the author argues that investigating voluntary devotional practices can demonstrate the spiritual priorities of early-modern laypeople. Seventeenth-century rural Paduan parishes experienced both an increase in interest in various devotions and a shift in their focus that reflect the priorities of Catholic
Reform. Parishioners eagerly participated in the catechism schools promoted by the Council of Trent (1545–63) and enthusiastically adopted
saints promoted by the post-Tridentine Church, demonstrated by their
pious bequests, dedication of altars, and membership in confraternities.
At the same time, traditional devotions also flourished. Although gauging lay interest in reforms in general is difficult and contentious, the author demonstrates that at least when it came to their voluntary practices, rural Paduans were engaged in Catholic Reform and supported a vibrant Catholic culture.

Obscure? Perhaps. Irrelevant? Not at all.

If you are even a bit of a regular reader, you know that I frequently nag you to read some history when you can. It’s an invaluable tonic for despair in the present situation, and it helps inoculate us against unrealistic senses of the past.

So you know how we’re always hearing about “reform” and how important it is, as a church to be open to reform and change? Well, duh. The church’s history is one of reform and response to changing conditions, so in order to understanding how to properly engage in a reform in the present day in a way that’s faithful and effective – it helps to look at the past. This look at a rather narrow slice of history – how reports of episcopal visitations reflect Paduan’s acceptance of post-Tridentine reforms – tells us a great deal about that. I admit that I skimmed through most of the quantitative data, but it’s aptly summarized in the text.

This activity and enthusiasm for participating in parish life is seen
across rural Padua, and both the prevalence and specifics of lay participation demonstrate the areas within the parochial sphere that captured the
hearts of rural laypeople. Rural laity evinced enthusiasm for devotions to
the Holy Sacrament, the rosary, and a variety of other devotions connected
to reform—particularly those of a Marian or Christocentric nature. They
were also eager to support the spread of catechism and the Catholic education of village children. At the same time, they maintained their interest
in time-honored traditions, continuing to support local devotions and their
parish church itself. Lay spirituality in rural parishes, the same kind of
places often bemoaned by reformers as “our Indies,” was vibrant, active,
and orthodox rather than repressed, lackluster, or tinged with heterodoxy.
Some of this was simply continuity from the pre-Reformation era, but as
the comparison between Ormaneto’s and Barbarigo’s records demonstrates, the seventeenth century saw not only a shift in devotions but also a
general flourishing of both reformed and traditional spiritual practices.

So maybe reform can happen?

Oh, and maybe it was possible for the laity to have an informed, vibrant faith before the Second Vatican Council? Perhaps?

–6–

I was very gratified to read Emily Nussbaum’s dissenting view on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  I’m right there with her. 

So I tried to open my heart to Season 2. People grow, people change—even critics, even shows. But the season begins with a tooth-rottingly twee trip to Paris, followed by a cloying trip to the Catskills, a setting far better served by “Dirty Dancing.” It veers from one inconsistent family plot to another, with a baffling focus on Joel, who screws around but finds no one who lives up to his ex. (Despite its feminist theme, “Mrs. Maisel” has more one-line bimbos than “Entourage.”) There’s loads of ethnic shtick, from chain-smoking Frenchies to an Italian family singing “Funiculì, Funiculà.” Things perk up whenever the focus shifts to the salty, bruised Susie, a scrapper from the Rockaways—but even her plots are marred by dese-and-dose mobsters.

 

–7–

All right. As I noted the other day, I’ve put up Michael’s How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist on Kindle. 

I’ve created a Lent page here.

The page of the articles I’ve published on Medium here. 

And don’t forget my story!

Oh, and look for me in Living Faith on Sunday. You’ll be able to find it here. 

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!