A Sound of Sheer Silence

Dr. Natalia Imperatori-Lee [ postscript: Dr. Imperatori-Lee was elected to the board of the Catholic Theological Society of America.  Congrats, Professor! ] said something in her panel discussion with Andrew Sullivan and Fr. Jim Martin that has been stuck in my head and won't let go--in a Church that believes in the Incarnation and the Sacraments, there can be no distinction between style and substance, because style is a kind of substance.  It matters how things look and how they come across, because in how they look and how they come across, they communicate truths every bit as real as any explicit doctrinal formulation. Consider an example. These two photos were taken at the Sacra Liturgia conference last week in New York City.  The guy seated on the throne with the long red cape (a cappa magna , or "big cape") in the top photo is Cardinal Burke; the guy in the middle of the bottom photo in the red gloves is Archbishop Cordileone (indeed, the Sa...

I stumbled upon a old post by Rachel Held Evans entitled "13 Things that Make Me a Lousy Evangelical."   It is a nice mix of theological and cultural issues where she departs from standard conservative Christian talking points.  Along the same lines, here are my 13 things that make me a bad Catholic, at least for certain values of "Catholic." 1.  I find saying the Rosary to be extremely tedious, so I almost never do it. 2.  I've read all of Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body lectures.  I think there are mostly incomprehensible, and the parts that are understandable are cartoonishly misogynistic. 3.  I think priests and bishops who wear the old-fashioned clerical garb, like Cardinal Burke in this picture, look ridiculous.  Plus, and I want to say this delicately, I think Liberace would find an outfit like this to be somewhat over the top. 4.  I think Medjugorje is basically a scam.  I have serious doubts about Fatima and maybe...

I will disclose my biases up front--I am an unabashed fanboy of Pope Francis.  He has done and said everything I could have reasonably hoped for in the new pope, from his rejection of the over-the-top material trappings of the Papacy to his low-key demeanor to his efforts to reach out to other religions and disaffected groups.  I love all of it.

People of my generation (as in + or - 15 years) are unique in the history of Catholicism, in that we have no experience of the Latin Mass as the central point of contact with the Catholic faith.  My only contact with the Latin Mass is through the stories of my parents, whose opinions on it are mixed, to say the least.  My father more or less takes the position that the loss of the Latin Mass took everything that was special about Catholicism and flushed it away, while my mother more or less would say "good riddance."

My parish, St. Dominic's in San Francisco, performed Bruckner's Requiem Mass in D Minor for All Souls Day last week.  I wasn't at all familiar with the piece, but it was beautiful, and beautifully done by the outstanding choir.