New Provincial of Capuchins in Britain

Is br Paul Coleman. He hath a blog. See that Eucharistic flash mob? That was him, that was.

 

Benedictine appointments

Abbot Hugh consecrated bishop of Aberdeen, Pluscarden elect new abbot.

St Cecile de Solesmes elect new abbess, 36. Half as old again as their first abbess was.

Fontgombault (a Solesmes monastery) elect new abbot; sorry about tedious trad site, only English-language mention I found. The sisters on the left of the photo are Polish Benedictine sisters, known as Loretanki from the shrine of Loreto (one “t”) at their mother house to the north-east of Warsaw. They do publishing and nursing, I think.

 

Bulldozer waltz [I mean steamroller.Steamroller waltz.]

Last May, the surface of my street was ripped up, and its venerable (well, not that venerable, there were only fields here till the fifties) cobbles revealed. The surface was laid in one go by the most remarkable machine (German, of course). I spent a long time goggling from the balcony that day, first admiring the Amazing Machine and then enchanted  by the  Dance of the Yellow Baby Bulldozers that went on for some time in celebration afterwards.  And I’ve finally managed to get the photos off my phone and onto the ‘puter.

 

Another complete fiction

Remember the confession survey fabrication?

Here’s another confession-related fabrication in the news.

Really, the only point of reading the papers is to set you off googling and flicking through the blogs to find out what actually happened.

And when you’ve wasted lots of time doing that, you need the Carolina Chocolate Drops to get you back to revising your months-overdue translation. Only you then spend fifteen minutes digging out ms paper to transcribe the tune …

I’ve put Ches Bond back up on the blogroll – he’s been back for ages, I don’t know what took me so long. He writes the kind of stuff I always intended to write, but am, erm, too extremely busy doing really important things to get round to

 

Are you a good person?

The problem with this video is all at the end with the idea that the principle of the atonement is Christ accepting punishment for us rather than offering satisfaction for us, that the means by which the Gospel is proclaimed is scripture rather than the Church, and that one should read scripture and then find a ‘church’. That said, the frankness of the teaching concerning man’s sinfulness and the indispensable mediation of Christ and necessity of faith in Him is refreshing.

 

Basil Loftus and Fr Mildew

Fr Michael Clifton, long time pastor of the faithful, former archivist of Southwark, learned historian, kindly teacher of schoolboys (including me, nearly 40 years ago) cricket coach, model railway enthusiast, and warm friend and mentor of younger clergy now feels that he must close his blog because he has been threatened with legal action by Monsignor Basil Loftus who writes a weekly column for the Catholic Times.

(Fr Finigan)

It’s been a long time since I regularly had my paws on the UK Catholic papers, but the name of Mgr Basil Loftus sticks in the mind as one of those who appeared in them promulgating DIY Catholicism in a dated style that leaves parody in fear of its life. Confirming half of my theory about psychological characteristics and theological preferences (that liberals are egoists and promulgators of clericalism, whereas trads are weird or neurotic), he’s threatened Fr Mildew with legal action for having called him a heretic in a comment the good father made on Fr Blake’s blog.

What is biting Mgr Loftus, that a simple blog comment – and surely one easily refuted with another comment – should so enrage him? Is he pathologically choleric? Fr Clifton was always edifyingly happy to be corrected and to correct what he’d written in response to comments and emails.

Has he not read 1 Corinthians?

I also wonder if he’s read the Catechism, or (following what looked like an extremely suspicious article on ad orientem in the SCO in the summer – personally I’d be very worried if my bus driver insisted on facing the passengers) Uwe Lang’s Turning to Face the Lord. Certainly the stuff of his Fr Finigan is quoting on the resurrection reads like tripe. If he wasn’t aware that what he wrote appears to be heresy, then surely he’s glad to have it pointed out? If he was aware of the fact that it reads as though it contradicts the Faith, and yet doesn’t mean what it appears to say, then why did he write it? And if he was aware that it appears to contradict the faith, and he meant it to, and he holds what it appears to say, well, I don’t see that he’s got a case, really.

Fr Finigan has a list of posts on this subject. He posted before Red Maria wrote hers.

 

One pot, four dishes

No, it’s not that Spanish thing with chick peas.

DISH ONE: a clear soup to be served with very thin noodles (home made, if you can be bothered).

Take:

A super-cheap bit of beef

Chicken carcase (the bit left once the breast and legs and wings are taken off) (this is the cheap and slim option: the tastier one is a half or whole hen)

Carrots, leek(s), parsnip(s), celeriac

Onion(s), cut in half and blackened (on a dry frying pan or on the middle bit of gas burners)

black pepper (whole), allspice (whole), bay leaf(/ves)

(and noodles, obviously)

Chuck the meat and spices into a pot with some cold water, simmer for an hour or so. Add the veg. Simmer more, until the veg are soft but not soggy.

Done. Freeze what liquid you will not use in the next couple of days.  Cook the noodles separately, and make sure to salt them well, or they will make the soup taste bland. Add chopped fresh parsely or dill if in season.

(dish 1A – soups made on this stock: e.g. chuck in a jar of tomato puree = tomato soup)

DISH TWO: vegetable salad

Take additionally

boiled potatoes

boiled eggs

tinned peas (drained)

pickled mushrooms (optional)

cucumbers in brine (drained)

apples

mayonnaise

Cube finely the apples, cucumbers, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and some, if you like, of the celeriac. Mix with the peas and (finely chopped) mushrooms and mayonnaise.

DISH THREE: Omnium Gatherum Cutlet

Take additionally:

Cheddar or some such

Eggs

Potatoes, cold pasta, anything else needing used up in the fridge (but nothing too watery)

Breadcrumbs

chop up the leek(s), grate the cheese, chop up anything else you want to put in, mix with egg to bind it together, add breadcrumbs if still too wet, coat in breadcrumbs, fry.

DISH FOUR: Pierogi

Take additionally:

Flour, water, onions

Take the meat from the soup, pick it off the bones of the chicken and pick off fat and skin. Put it through the mincer. Chop and fry the onion(s), mix it all up and season. Make up a flour and water dough that you can roll out easily (you can add egg, but don’t use much or the dough will be hard when cooked). Roll it out, cut out circles, roll them out thinner again, put a dollop of the meat mixture in the middle of each on, sealing it up in a semicircle (use water to make the edges stick better). Throw the pierogi into boiling water in batches (let them float to the top, and give them a minute or three there). Serve with butter or dripping, or fry before serving.

—

The only thing that gets thrown out are the bones and fat from the meat, and the celeriac, or part of it.

Smacznego!

 

The great Simcha Fisher has her own blog again.

On Not Home Schooling This Year:

On How To Watch Fillums with Rude Bits In Without Losing Your Immortal Soul:

Well, I don’t know about you, but I am fairly susceptible to the “It’s okay because I’m edgy” trap.  It’s not conscious, but I tend to feel that I’m sooo smart and ironic and a anyway a good mother and all, so it’s probably really okay for me to do . . . well, just about anything, as long as I have lots of babies and pray most days.

On There Being Things Worse Than Being Hot:

When we were house hunting, we promised the kids that the one we bought would have a hose spigot. Or, as I learned today, a spill cock. It’s called a spill cock.

I will now go back to calling it a hose spigot.

So, big liars that we are, we got a house without a hose spigot.

The kids have gone about five years without a hose, which means no fun ever, no how. But a promise is a promise, so finally (after calling a plumber for an estimate to do it the right way) (eleventy million dollars) I figured out that you can use gravity and pressure and what not to siphon water out of the bathtub, through a hose, down the back stairs, and into a pool.

 

Fr Hugh Thwaites, SJ: “War Memoirs of an Amateur”

I have been chopping and cooking pots of vegetables to this soundtrack today. Fr Hugh Thwaites (a holy Jesuit) talks about his war experiences, from discounts on tickets to the Paris opera to slave labour in the Burmese jungle.

Part 1

Part 2

A remarkable man. Not many people now speak as clearly and somehow normally as he does: I think the language and delivery do almost as much good as the content of the words.

(I downloaded these talks from this website, which has Fr Thwaites giving other talks and reading the gospels and some encyclicals. There’s other stuff as well.)

http://www.4shared.com/account/audio/RnCA6qej/FrThwaites_talk_HTWarMem1.html

 

Wergeld

I discovered a startling etymological fact the other day. Perhaps this is well-known but to me it came as rather a surprise. The words human and man have nothing to do with each other. The word human comes from the same root as the word humus and means ‘from the earth’. the word man comes from the proto-Germanic word *mannaz and ultimately, perhaps, from the same root as the Latin word mens meaning mind. Originally the word for woman in Anglo-Saxon was wifmann and the word for an adult male was wer from the same origin as the Latin vir. The use of the man for adult male as well as for homo has arisen from the loss of the word wer. I’d love to know when the word human started being used as a noun, does anyone know?