... While Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the dean of the College of Cardinals, began the liturgy, the crowd stayed silent. Most of the mass was in Latin and punctuated with hymns and Gregorian chants. A light breeze ruffled an open gospel placed on the coffin. ...
More.
I was expecting a juicy exposé of 2019 Catholic convert J. D. Vance's radicalism in Paul Elie's "J. D. Vance's Radical Religion" for The New Yorker, here, but all you get is disappointment and dark insinuation.
If you are hoping to find out if Vance fasts for Lent, makes pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, or goes to daily Latin Mass, you won't.
It's mostly an essay specializing in ideological assumptions and guilt by association, written from the sneering point of view of the illiberal ethos which can't believe there is still a religion in America which is thoroughly pro-life in its commitment to the unborn and the elderly, and committed to the sanctity of marriage between men and women.
For example, Paul Elie insinuates that Vance is a "conservative Catholic" just like Supreme Court justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, but never tells us exactly how. Therefore we should be afraid of a coming "top-down ordering of society . . . enshrined through regime change" if Vance advances to the executive branch and cooperates with this Supreme Court cabal.
We're not told what kind of Catholics are justices Roberts and Gorsuch, either, not to mention Sotomayor, or how the other four form a conspiracy against the American nation.
For Paul Elie, what it seems to come down to is that Vance is too buddy buddy with people like Patrick Deneen, whom he asserts to be anti-democratic without evidence:
In 2023, Vance took part in a discussion at the Catholic University of America with the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, an advocate of “post-liberalism,” which, he explains in his books “Why Liberalism Failed” and “Regime Change,” is the view that liberalism has become an “invasive progressive tyranny” and so must be replaced by “a conservatism that conserves.” Vance greeted Deneen with a bear hug; during the discussion, Politico reported, Vance “identified himself as a member of the ‘postliberal right’ and said that he views his role in Congress as ‘explicitly anti-regime.’ ” ...
For Deneen, post-liberalism involves elevating “leaders who are part of the elite but see themselves as ‘class traitors’ ready to act as ‘stewards and caretakers of the common good’ ”—and to enact their views on abortion, marriage and divorce, euthanasia, the free exercise of religion, and other issues without the constraints of legal precedent or the democratic process. Evidently, Vance fits the bill. After learning of Trump’s choice of running mate, Deneen, in a statement, called Vance “a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.”
I'm not a fan of the Catholic integralists, nor of the broad influence of Catholicism at the expense of the nation's historic conservative Protestant character either, but I'm not particularly afraid of them, just as I am not afraid of the Christian nationalists.
Mostly they are amusingly grandiose.
These groups represent a reaction to illiberalism, which is what this is really all about. The radicals are the so-called liberals who like to read Paul Elie and subscribe to The New Yorker, who want to suppress speech and suppress religion and its influence and suppress everything about this country's past. This country is about freedom, and freedom is really messy, which is why ideologues of the left and right have so, so much to say against it.
Freedom really ticks them off.
I'm thoroughly confident that these idealists can blather on all they want and that the American people are still not going to submit to their religious tests for citizenship on the one hand, let alone to their pope on the other.
The country is just too damn LGBT for that.
Maybe because they go to Mass HARDLY AT ALL, Latin or otherwise, lol?
A survey from a year ago put weekly pre-pandemic Mass attendance as low as 13%. Gallup in 2018 put the figure much higher, at 39%, vs. 45% weekly church attendance for Protestants.
PEW has the story, "Two-thirds of U.S. Catholics unaware of pope’s new restrictions on traditional Latin Mass", here:
Catholics who attend Mass weekly are both more likely to be aware of the new restrictions and more inclined to oppose them than Catholics who attend less frequently, the survey finds.
Duh.
The old symbolism of the priest facing the altar with the congregation, emphasizing the unity of priest and congregants, is completely lost on these people:
In 2007, [Pope] Benedict removed a rule requiring a local bishop’s permission to celebrate the old Latin Mass. Francis not only reinstated that rule but added other restrictions.
In dioceses where groups celebrate the old rite, also known as the Tridentine Mass, bishops must also work to determine that the celebrants “do not deny the validity and the legitimacy” of the Second Vatican Council, which helped shape many church reforms. Among those changes were the popularization of Mass in the vernacular, making worship more accessible to regular Catholics.
In a letter accompanying his decision, Francis said he was “saddened” that the use of the old Latin Mass often doubles as a rejection of the Second Vatican Council, under the argument that its reforms “betrayed” the church’s true traditions. But Francis said that to doubt the council is to “doubt the Holy Spirit himself.”
“The great issue for the Catholic Church has always been the question of change,” said David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture. The old Latin Mass had become “a wedge issue, to divide, to elevate one part of the church as superior to other parts of the church,” Gibson said. “And that is intolerable.”
In the Latin Mass, the priest often faces away from the congregation. The rite also includes the use of particular — often elaborate — vestments.
More.
Meanwhile the Biden administration, which has deliberately ceded control of the US southern border with Mexico where tens of thousands of illegals now routinely cross seeking "asylum", has put its foot down and publicly warned Cubans fleeing communist tyranny that they are not welcome in the United States, resurrecting the intransigence of the late Clinton administration made infamous in the affair of Elian Gonzalez, who was forcibly repatriated to Cuba.
Cuban refugees do not make reliable Democrat voters.
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