Patum Peperium

For What Do We Live?

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Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

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"But, Lizzy, you look as if you did not enjoy it.  You are not going to be missish, I hope, and pretend to be affronted at an idle report.  For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"

- Mr. Bennet, Pride & Prejudice, Volume 3, Chapter 15

Yes, for what do we live?  I certainly live to make sport for our neighbors.  Just ask Sir Basil.  Why last Friday evening he was getting plenty of sport in our home. It was our daughter's (RKFDIL for longtime readers) 10th birthday and he and the Countess plus even the Baron had come over to join in the festivities.

2 hours before the party had begun we hit our first sporting speed bump. RKFDIL decided the menu she had hand-selected was really one for adults and not her, a 10 year-old child. Could she just have pizza instead?  Understanding that this was one of those life moments a therapist worth its salt could make a good 60 grand off of in 20 years time, I chose to instruct gently rather ask her if she was actually trying to make me have a nervous breakdown or just doing her best impression of an attempt?  "No, you cannot have pizza instead of the menu you have selected, told me 3 times that this is what I definitely want and even helped to shop for.  It bad form to behave like this, especially 2 hours before your party. However you may have pizza tomorrow night if you still wish." 

Mr. P and I are not parents for weak children.  Nor are we friends for weak people.  Or well-dressed ones as Sir Basil is constantly reminded. 

Our new home is a commodious yet cosy one that easily and graciously accommodates a party with Sir Basil, our neighbors who are members of a circus family and the pit bull on its guest list. For his first drink or three, Sir Basil had been out on the deck lending Mr. P emotional assistance as Mr. P carved the line of pumpkins that had been patiently awaiting their lobotomies since their purchase a few days earlier. When the scent of pumpkin flesh became too strong for Sir Basil he beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen where I was in the middle of preparing the birthday feast.  The phone rang. I asked him to pick it up.  It was none other than the Blighted Cusack . Cusack, for those not up to date is back in his favorite state. No not unemployment but the state of New York. Yes, he has returned from his sojourn of Chablis making in South Africa. He is also unemployed.  If my wine was not decieving me I do think think I heard Sir Basil gently instruct that Cusack needn't have pitched his job at The New Criterion to learn how to make South African Chablis.  All he needed to do was purchase a liter of vodka, decant it into a ceramic mixing bowl, add 1 cup of cup of anti-freeze, toss in 4 Krugerrands, swirl until mixed through and set on shelf of dark cupboard to steep for 3 weeks. Then remove, decant into used wine bottles affixed with new labels you've downloaded from the internet, cork up and melt some sealing wax over it for the authentic look and voila, you've got South African chablis.  

After Basil finished his handing out his recipe, he handed the phone to me.  Cusack and I had a very long and very delightful chat.  So long in fact, it set dinner back by an hour, at least. Not that anyone cared.  Especially RKFDIL. She was thankful as she had no plans on eating that dinner. At. All. After marveling at Cusack's new found begging techniques and telling him to put them to the test again so he could purchase a plane ticket and pay us a visit, he rang off. I proceeded on with the cooking.

Basil, during this time had been snuffling like a truffle pig among the boxes of books (about a dozen or so) that still line one wall of our dining room.  We've run out of shelf space in the library and are at a loss of what to do with them. So we had asked Basil for his professional advice.  He came into the kitchen bearing a armload of truffles with raised eyebrows and demanded "How can your throw these away?"  The truffle that had really raised his ire was a book by Pope Pius X.  I stopped whisking the bechamel sauce, "Huh?" I asked. Thankfully Mr. P had just come in from Lobotomy Central to refresh the contents of his tumbler.  He looked at the book Sir basil was waving about and said, "Mrs. P put that in the wrong box.  We're not throwing it out."  Sir Basil's nerves were immediately restored and when Mr. P handed him another tissue restorer, well, he was even more restored.  The phone rang again. Sir Basil, in fine form, picked it up.

It was  my mother.  How long they chatted I cannot say but they went as far back as King Harold and Sir Basil's relations that knew my relations back in the days when one of my grandmothers was a bedwarmer to an English (Catholic) King. Yes, as they say in Merry Ole England, I hail from the wrong side of the blanket. But from what I've seen of the right side of the blanket, the wrong side is preferable as you never forget how to make a living. Sir Basil is from the right side of the blanket and he does not have to make a living which to him is preferable.  He and my mother determined than while we knew each other back then, we didn't actually know each other. I wonder if she was disappointed?  I'll have to ask. Anyway, my mother is absolutely taken with Basil and plans to call whenever he is over. Which is tomorrow evening. This morning Mr. P gave me his menu for tomorrow evening.  He isn't quite sure what it will be in its final form but I am to secure a large breast of turkey and roast it for them. Dessert will involve cranberries.  Mr. P is in a Thanksgiving mood.

After all that is happened with us in these last few months - Mr. P's unexpected job loss, a major financial loss with the selling of our beloved home turned financial albatross and a fresh start in a new City and State that has not been destroyed by Democrat social and financial policies yet, so am I.

I must run.  I have a lunch date in the City with Mr. P. What fun!

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Coming Home To Rome

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Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

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From Holy Smoke :

The UK wing of the Traditional Anglican Communion – a group of rebel traditionalists who have left official Anglicanism – has voted to accept Pope Benedict XVI’s offer of a Personal Ordinariate. The TAC has only a few small communities in Britain, but the Pope will be pleased by this development.

Hat-tip to Fr Tim Finigan, who says on his blog: “I hear a lot of skeptical comments about the Holy Father’s offer of Personal Ordinariates, with the conventional wisdom being that it will not really attract many people. So it is good to hear news of twenty or so parish communities that will be interested. The TAC asked for the provision in the first place so it is to be expected that they would be first off the mark; but I think that there may well be plenty more to follow in due course.”

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Here are more details, from the Signum blog:

The Traditional Anglican Communion in the UK voted last Thursday (October 29) to request that they form part of the proposed Ordinariate in the UK.
During the Forward in Faith conference Archbishop Hepworth of the TAC had stated that the motion would be placed before the Synod of the Traditional Anglican Church in the UK (and other Synods of the TAC) that the Apostolic Constitution of Benedict XVI be accepted and that its immediate implementation be requested.

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The website of the TAC in the UK is now reporting that the following resolution was passed:

That this Assembly, representing the Traditional Anglican Communion in Great Britain, offers its joyful thanks to Pope Benedict XVI for his forthcoming Apostolic Constitution allowing the corporate reunion of Anglicans with the Holy See, and requests the Primate and College of Bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion to take the steps necessary to implement this Constitution.

That this Assembly is of the respectful opinion that Bishop Robert Mercer CR might be considered for the position of Ordinary in Great Britain.

This is not unexpected as the TAC was the group that had approached Rome and Archbishop Hepworth had publicly stated that the offer of the “ordinariates” exceeded their expectations.

The TAC in the UK numbers about twenty parishes (they also have one in France). Some of these parishes would be more accurately described as mass centres rather than parishes in the full sense of the word.

This is good news as it is the first indication that the Pope’s offer is being accepted.
I’m sure readers will be lining up in the comments section to point out that the TAC is an insignificant body in Great Britain, though its supporters worldwide run into the hundreds of thousands. Also, I’d be very surprised if a TAC bishop were to be made the Ordinary for England and Wales. But perhaps the group might be granted its own Ordinariate; until the Constitution is published we really don’t have enough information to speculate. Still, as I say, the Vatican will be pleased by this news.

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Very pleased I bet...

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Miss Know-Nothing 1850, Maureen Dowd

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Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

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Miss Know-Nothing as a Coyote Morning*.

FOUL BALL!
By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York
 
October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!
 
Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-catholicism. 
          
It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”
          
If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks [...]
 

• Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.

True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm -- the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives -- is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.

I do not mean to suggest that anti-catholicism is confined to the pages New York Times. Unfortunately, abundant examples can be found in many different venues. I will not even begin to try and list the many cases of anti-catholicism in the so-called entertainment media, as they are so prevalent they sometimes seem almost routine and obligatory. Elsewhere, last week, Representative Patrick Kennedy made some incredibly inaccurate and uncalled-for remarks concerning the Catholic bishops, as mentioned in this blog on Monday.   Also, the New York State Legislature has levied a special payroll tax to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fund its deficit. This legislation calls for the public schools to be reimbursed the cost of the tax; Catholic schools, and other private schools, will not receive the reimbursement, costing each of the schools thousands – in some cases tens of thousands – of dollars, money that the parents and schools can hardly afford. (Nor can the archdiocese, which already underwrites the schools by $30 million annually.) Is it not an issue of basic fairness for ALL school-children and their parents to be treated equally? 
 
The Catholic Church is not above criticism. We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational, and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be “rained out” for good.
 
I guess my own background in American history should caution me not to hold my breath.

Then again, yesterday was the Feast of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes. The rest is here.

* Back in my ad days I worked with a very seasoned copywriter.  One morning, pale in complexion, he strolled into my office's doorway where I was busy at my easel drawing that ads he and I were due to present to the client in an hour's time. Using the door jam to keep him upright, and with his eyes at half mast he said,

 "Mrs. P, it was another coyote morning."

"What's a coyote morning?"

"You don't know what a coyote morning is?"

"No."

"It's when you wake up and see what's laying on your arm and like a coyote caught in a trap you rather chew your arm off than wake her up."

h/t - Bovina Bloviator who added what must not go unnoticed:

"New York Times readers will not see the Archbishop's response, it was rejected for publication. His Grace should take solace, however, knowing that at least 98 percent of Times readers, when seeing his byline, would have skipped over it anyway."

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Helen Keller, Deaf, Dumb, And Blind To The Core

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Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

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“Our puny sentimentalism 

has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred 

only when it may be of some use 

to itself and to the world.”

Helen Keller

Dear Margaret Sanger,

What a glow of gratification was kindled in my heart when Polly read last week the wonderful news that you had founded the Planned Parenthood Association in India!

Not only have I continued to follow your work with loving admiration and expect ever greater results from your beneficence, I have also known of Nehru's statesmanlike interest in birth-control, and now I behold you and him and Lady Rama Rau working together -- a triple Hercules -- for the deliverance of a land long cursed with excess of population. I cannot imagine anything more blessed happening on earth. As you teach, mankind has through ignorance often destroyed the sweet joy of childhood. Now a tide of enlightenment, slow but sure, shall lift its healing waves from one end of the world to the other until every child has a chance to be well born, well fed and fairly started in life -- and that is woman's natural work as the creator of the human race. Affectionately I salute you, Margaret Sanger, as the prophet and the the woman Prometheus of humanity's highest physical and mental welfare.

Often Polly and I speak of the visits we used to have with you and the inspiration I drew from your brave words. You have travelled up and down and athwart the world since, but I never lose the warm thrill of your beautiful personality.

With Polly's and my love and wishes for a Christmas luminous with the service you are rendering to mankind, I am,

Devotedly your friend,

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Helen Keller

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Westport, Conn.,
December eighth, 1952.

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Elaborate ceremonies will take place October 19,2003 to celebrate the beatification of Mother Theresa. President Ronald Reagan presented the Medal of Freedom to Mother Theresa, 1979 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, June 20, 1985 during a ceremony at the White House. The President called Mother theresa, "a heroine of our times". At right is First Lady, Nancy Reagan. (UPI Photo/Vince Mannino)

Mother Theresa

From her Nobel Peace Prize Lecture:

"We are talking of peace. These are things that break peace, but I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing - direct murder by the mother herself. And we read in the Scripture, for God says very clearly: Even if a mother could forget her child - I will not forget you - I have carved you in the palm of my hand. We are carved in the palm of His hand, so close to Him that unborn child has been carved in the hand of God. And that is what strikes me most, the beginning of that sentence, that even if a mother could forget something impossible - but even if she could forget - I will not forget you. And today the greatest means - the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And we who are standing here - our parents wanted us. We would not be here if our parents would do that to us. Our children, we want them, we love them, but what of the millions. Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child - what is left for me to kill you and you kill me - there is nothing between. And this I appeal in India, I appeal everywhere: Let us bring the child back, and this year being the child's year: What have we done for the child? At the beginning of the year I told, I spoke everywhere and I said: Let us make this year that we make every single child born, and unborn, wanted. And today is the end of the year, have we really made the children wanted? I will give you something terrifying. We are fighting abortion by adoption, we have saved thousands of lives, we have sent words to all the clinics, to the hospitals, police stations - please don't destroy the child, we will take the child. So every hour of the day and night it is always somebody, we have quite a number of unwedded mothers - tell them come, we will take care of you, we will take the child from you, and we will get a home for the child. And we have a tremendous demand from families who have no children, that is the blessing of God for us. And also, we are doing another thing which is very beautiful - we are teaching our beggars, our leprosy patients, our slum dwellers, our people of the street, natural family planning.

"And in Calcutta alone in six years - it is all in Calcutta - we have had 61,273 babies less from the families who would have had, but because they practise this natural way of abstaining, of self-control, out of love for each other. We teach them the temperature meter which is very beautiful, very simple, and our poor people understand. And you know what they have told me? Our family is healthy, our family is united, and we can have a baby whenever we want. So clear - those people in the street, those beggars - and I think that if our people can do like that how much more you and all the others who can know the ways and means without destroying the life that God has created in us.

"The poor people are very great people. They can teach us so many beautiful things. The other day one of them came to thank and said: You people who have vowed chastity you are the best people to teach us family planning. Because it is nothing more than self-control out of love for each other. And I think they said a beautiful sentence. And these are people who maybe have nothing to eat, maybe they have not a home where to live, but they are great people...

Inspiration - Bovina Bloviator

More on the dark side of Helen Keller here.

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The Lady Killer

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Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

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Following a car crash that claimed the life of his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, Kennedy wears a neck brace on his way to her funeral, Hyannis, Massachusetts, July 22, 1969. Kopechne died when the senator drove off a bridge connecting Martha's Vineyard and Chappaquiddick islands. Kennedy swam ashore but Kopechne was not able to leave the car. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In Death, some of the truth about Ted tried to out:

In a chapter of his autobiography, the late Senator Ted Kennedy confessed to having slept with over 1,000 women and spending more than $10 million in hush money to keep his womanizing ways a secret. If you crack open the book, however, you won't find a mention of this in there anywhere. That is because horrified family members and advisers cut it out before the book was published.

A close source also revealed to the National Enquirer that before he died of brain cancer at age 77 on August 25, Kennedy also revealed that he had planned to seduce Mary Jo Kopechne on the night she drowned. The source said:

"While dictating his memoirs into a tape recorder, Ted decided to tell the whole truth about his life - including his love life. He said that his first lover was an Irish nanny. She was about 19, and Ted was only 13.

When his mother found out, she sent the nanny back to Ireland. Rose made Ted pray on his knees for hours to ask forgiveness. But Ted recalled that even his sore knees couldn't wipe the smile off his face.

From that day on, he says he seduced as many women as he could, from maids and cooks at the family's Hyannis Port compound to college friends that his sisters brought home."

The source added that Kennedy even admitted to having planned to seduce Kopechne the night his car plunged off the road in Chappaquiddick.

"But his lawyers and friends begged him not to open that door. They said that even after his death, it would hurt his legacy and haunt the family.

He relented about Mary Jo, but went on to admit that he'd seduced the wives of some of his closest friends and even his brothers' girlfriends."

Ted had hoped his book would tell the truth about his life, but family members decided to hold off on including certain parts of the book out of respect to the family's reputation. Even though it was removed from the book, it seems the revelations leaked out regardless.

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Things Only A Kennedy Could Get Away With

And by not calling his bluff on Chappaquiddick, Americans became complicit in it.

By MARK STEYN

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's passing, America's TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there's a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

"Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life …"

That's the way to do it! An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

"Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse."

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it's kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second's notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you'll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain's comparatively very minor "Profumo scandal," the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen's Privy Council and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children's playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the "Kennedy curse," a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn't, he made all of us complicit in what he'd done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

His defenders would argue that he redeemed himself with his "progressive" agenda, up to and including health care "reform." It was an odd kind of "redemption": In a cooing paean to the senator on a cringe-makingly obsequious edition of NPR's "Diane Rehm Show," Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted's "favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick itself. He would ask people, 'Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?'"

Terrific! Who was that lady I saw you with last night?

Beats me!

Why did the Last Lion cross the road?

To sleep it off!

What do you call 200 Kennedy sycophants at the bottom of a Chappaquiddick pond? A great start, but bad news for NPR guest-bookers! "He was a guy's guy," chortled Edward Klein. Which is one way of putting it.

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterward, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator's passing marked "the end of civility in the U.S. Congress." Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost "civility" of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution."

Whoa! "Liberals" (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked "the end of civility" in American politics, that's a shoo-in.

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy's comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and, as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky and Co. do, that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot – that "fleeting wisp of glory," that "one brief shining moment" – must run forever, even if "How To Handle A Woman" gets dropped from the score. The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.

©MARK STEYN 

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Only a Kennedy can get away with this:

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"I thought they 

[the Catholic Church] 

were pro-life."

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It never fails. A Kennedy speaks, drives, or legislates - women and Catholic Church harmed most. The Kennedys and the Catholic Church have the most dysfunctional relationship since the days of the Borgias.

 

"Lucretia Borgia Reigns In The Vatican In The Absence Of [Her Father] Pope Alexander VI" by Frank Cadogan Cowper, 1908-14.

Happy Halloween!

Will return next Tuesday.

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Respect Life, Not Patrick Kennedy

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Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

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CNS Reporter: "There’s a letter written by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to Congress saying that they believe all of the health care proposals right now – the one in the House and the ones in the Senate – they all fund abortion as it stands and unless there’s an amendment or a change to those bills that specifically prohibits it, they’re not going to support it. Do you agree with them or is there something – "
 
Rep. Patrick Kennedy: "I can’t understand for the life of me how the Catholic Church could be against the biggest social justice issue of our time where the very dignity of the human person is being respected by the fact that we’re caring and giving health care to the human person – that right now we have 50 million people who are uninsured. You mean to tell me the Catholic Church is going to be denying those people life saving health care? I thought they were pro-life. If the church is pro-life, then they ought to be for health care reform because it’s going to provide health care that are going to keep people alive. So this is an absolute red herring and I don’t think that it does anything but to fan the flames of dissent and discord and I don’t think it’s productive at all."

Pride of the Kennedy clan

Where do I begin

To tell the story of how great a con can be

The sweet con story that is older than the See (of Peter) 

The simple truth about a "Catholic" family 

Where do I start...

How about starting with the words of Patrick Kennedy's Bishop, Bishop Tobin of Rhode Island?

Yesterday, he [Bishop Tobin] was more direct, saying that Kennedy’s comments were “irresponsible and ignorant of the facts.’’

“But the congressman is correct in stating that he ‘can’t understand,’ ’’ Tobin said. “He got that part right.’’

The bishop explained the church’s stance, saying that while the church supports health care overhaul, “we are adamantly opposed to health care legislation that threatens the life of unborn children, requires taxpayers to pay for abortion, rations health care, or compromises the conscience of individuals.

“Congressman Kennedy continues to be a disappointment to the Catholic Church and to the citizens of the state of Rhode Island,’’ the bishop said. “I believe the congressman owes us an apology for his irresponsible comments. It is my fervent hope and prayer that he will find a way to provide morally responsible leadership for our state.’’

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Then there's what Archbishop Dolan of New York blogged:

Over this past weekend, several people mentioned to me Representative Patrick Kennedy’s blast at bishops for allegedly dividing the nation on the issue of healthcare; you can view the video here. His remarks were sad, uncalled-for, and inaccurate.

The Catholic community in the United States hardly needs to be lectured to about just healthcare. We’ve been energetically into it for centuries. And we bishops have been advocating for universal healthcare for a long, long time.
 
All we ask is that it be just that -- universal -- meaning that it includes the helpless baby in the womb, the immigrant, and grandma in a hospice, and that it protects a healthcare provider’s right to follow his/her own conscience.
 
This is what the President says he wants; this is what we bishops say we want.
 
Bishop Thomas Tobin, Representative Kennedy’s bishop, has a good point: Mr. Kennedy owes us an apology.

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Then there's what Patrick Kennedy's Catholic colleague is doing about what the President said he wants:

It looks like Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) isn’t happy with Democrat Rep. Bart Stupak’s efforts to make sure that taxpayer dollars do not pay for abortions in any new health care plan and, according to The Hill, “he may work with Republicans to torpedo healthcare reform unless he gets a vote to strip abortion-related provisions out of the House bill.”

From The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room:

During an interview on C-SPAN’s ‘Washington Journal’ show, Stupak (D-Mich.) said he is undeterred in trying to ensure that taxpayer dollars do not pay for abortions. Stupak, who opposes abortion rights, acknowledged that some in his party are upset with his public campaign to change the bill.

‘The Speaker is not happy with me,’ Stupak said.

Stupak has pulled together 40 like-minded Democrats who plan to block healthcare reform legislation from coming to a vote on the House floor if the bill includes federal subsidies for abortions. As The Hill reports, “Stupak wants a vote on the House floor to strike the language, and predicts he would have the votes to pass such an amendment.”

The northern Michigan democrat’s threat to work with Republicans to halt healthcare reform appear tailored to forcing a vote to strip abortion-related provisions from the House bill. From The Hill:

Stupak said one way or the other, there will be a vote on the abortion language, either “though a rule, or on the floor, or on a motion to recommit.”

Why is this an issue?

Even though President Barack Obama pledged, “Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions,” The Foundry previously reported that Obamacare will force the American people to pay for abortions because there is no law to prevent it from happening. What’s more, a provision known as the Hyde amendment, which blocks federal dollars from being spent on Health and Human Services programs, doesn’t apply to the health care reform.

But don’t take our word for it. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a letter to Congress on October 8th writing: “No one should be required to pay for or participate in abortion. … No current bill meets this test.”

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How long does it last

Can a con be measured by the hours in a day

I  have no answers now but this much I can say

I know if Catholics follow the Kennedys

instead of The Church they'll go to Hell.

(yes Kennedy does rhyme with Hell)

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h/t  - Dewey In Detroit

My Life In France: Memoirs Of Julia Child

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Le Petit Grignotage

Christine

At 5:45 A.M. November 3, 1948, Julia Child--thirty-six years old and newly married--awoke to see lights twinkling in the early dawn from the shores of Le Havre, France. Disembarking from the SS America, she stepped onto that Gallic soil for the first time, and would be forever changed. Up until then, she had worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, where she had met her artistic husband Paul when both were posted in Ceylon, India in 1944. He fell in love with the gangly, 6'2", outgoing Californian, and they married in 1946. After two years in Washington, D.C., Paul was assigned to the United States Information Service office in Paris, and they two, being the adventure-loving sort, thought a few years in the City of Lights sounded just fine.

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Julia Child had no cooking skills to speak of. She could not tell you what a shallot was, or which type of wine to drink with beef. She could barely scramble an egg. Neither did she have any special fascination with food. She was raised on hearty American fare like potroast, beef stew, or leg of lamb, all cooked with sufficient, but not special, skill. That morning in Normandy would change all of this. Driving through the cold northern countryside, exhausted, famished, the two stopped in Rouen at a little restaurant: La Couronne, est. 1345--her first French meal--and it would prove a revelation.

It was warm inside, and the dining room was a comfortably old-fashioned brown-and-white space, neither humble nor luxurious. At the far end was an enormous fireplace with a rotary spit, on which something was cooking that sent out heavenly aromas. We were greeted by the maître d'hôtel, a slim middle-aged man with dark hair who carried himself with an air of gentle seriousness. Paul spoke to him, and the maître d' smiled and said something back in a familiar way, as if they were old friends. Then he led us to a nice table not far from the fireplace. The other customers were all French, and I noticed that they were treateed with exactly the same courtesy as we were. Nobody rolled their eyes at us or stuck their nose in the air. Actually, the staff seemed happy to see us. 

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As we sat down, I heard two businessman in gray suits at the next table asking questions of their waiter, an older, dignified man who gesticulated with a menu and answered them at length. "What are they talking about?" I whispered to Paul. "The waiter is telling them about the chicken they ordered," he whispered back. "How it was raised, how it will be cooked, what side dishes they can have with it, and which wines would go with it best." "Wine?" I said. "At lunch?" I had never drunk much wine other than some $1.19 California Burgundy, and certainly not in the middle of the day. In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner. "The trick is moderation," he said. Suddenly the dining room filled with wonderfully intermixing aromas that I sort of recognized but couldn't name. The first smell was something oniony--"shallots," Paul identified it, "being sautéed in fresh butter."...Then came a warm and winy fragrance from the kitchen, which was probably a delicious sauce being reduced on the stove. This was followed by a whiff of something astringent: the salad being tossed in a big ceramic bowl with lemon, wine vinegar, olive oil, and a few shakes of salt and pepper. My stomach gurgled with hunger. I couldn't help noticing that the waiters carried themselves with a quiet joy, as if their entire mission in life was to make their customers feel comfortable and well tended.... We began our lunch with a half-dozen oysters on the half-shell. I was used to bland oysters from Washington and Massuchusetts, which I had never cared much for. But this platter of portugaises had a sensational briny flavor and a smooth texture that was entirely new and surprising. The oysters were served with rounds of pain de seigle, a pale rye bread, with a spread of unsalted butter. Paul explained that, as with wine, the French have "crus" of butter, special regions that produce individually flavored butters. Beurre de Charentes is a full-bodied butter, usually recommended for pastry dough or general cooking; beurre d'Isigny is a fine, light table butter. It was that delicious Isigny that we spread on our rounds of rye.

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Rouen is famous for its duck dishes, but after consulting the waiter Paul had decided to order sole meunière. It arrived whole: a large, flat Dover sole that was perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce with a sprinkling of chopped parsley on top. The waiter carefully placed the platter in front of us, stepped back, and said: "Bon appétit!" I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume. Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth, took a bite, and chewed slowly. The flesh of the sole was delicate, with a light but distinct taste of the ocean that blended marvelously with the browned butter. I chewed slowly and swallowed. It was a morsel of perfection.... I experienced fish, and a dining experience, of a higher order than I'd ever had before.

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Along with our meal, we happily downed a whole bottle of Pouilly-Fumé, a wonderfully crisp white wine from the Loire Valley. Another revelation! Then came salade verte laced with a lightly acidic vinaigrette. And I tasted my first real baguette--a crisp brown crust giving way to a slightly chewy, rather loosely textured pale-yellow interior, with a faint reminder of wheat and yeast in the odor and taste. Yum! We followed our meal with a leisurely dessert of fromage blanc, and ended with a strong, dark café filtre. The waiter placed before us a cup topped with a metal canister, which contained coffee grounds and boiling water. With some urging by us impatient drinkers, the water eventually filtered down into the cup below. It was fun, and it provided a distinct dark brew. ... Paul and I floated out the door into the brilliant sunshine and cool air. Our first lunch together in France had been absolute perfection. It was the most exciting meal of my life.

The rest of her memoirs explain her awkward but joyful initiation into Parisian life, her acquaintance with the local fishmongers, butchers, cheesesellers, and vegetable stalls, where she acquired her food education "on the streets." She recounts her days studying at Le Cordon Bleu under her friend and mentor Chef Max Bugnard, how she started an informal cooking school, L'École des Trois Gourmandes, with the friends who would end up collaborating with her on her famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

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Although French cookbooks abound these days, Julia Child's work was truly unique for its time, groundbreaking, introducing authentic French recipes--some for the first time ever, including beurre blanc à la Mère Michel--in accessible English. She was the first to figure out a workable recipe for baking authentic French baguettes in a home oven, complete with quarry tiles and a stone heated red-hot to be dropped into a pan of cold water at the bottom of the oven to produce the puffs of steam so necessary to form that light, crisp outer crust. Mastering was a labor of love, years in the making, every recipe (in the hundreds) personally tried and tasted twice, thrice, sometimes a dozen times until perfected. Her newfound fame led to the cooking show, which made her a household name--and the rest is history. When one recalls the fact that, up until the middle of her life, she hadn't the least inkling she could cook nor had she ever tasted a single French dish, her later accomplishments are rather remarkable. Her memoirs are a sheer delight, and well worth the read to anyone with a love of France, fine wine, or food.

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In her honor, I set forth a quintessential French recipe that is--quite literally--simple as pie:

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Quiche au Fromage

For 4 to 6 Servings

1 cup grated Swiss cheese [more if you like it especially cheesy]

8-inch partially cooked pastry shell placed on buttered baking sheet [I make the dough from scratch, although those in a hurry can use pre-made filo dough]

1 1/4 cups whole milk [you can use 2% milk, but you must bake it about 10 minutes longer to ensure the quiche sets; on no account use skim milk, unless you want a slushy (not to mention bland) mess when you attempt to slice the quiche]

3 large eggs

1/2 tsp salt Pinch of pepper and nutmeg

2 TB butter

(Preheat oven to 375 degrees.)

Spread 3/4 of the cheese in the bottom of the shell. Beat milk, eggs, and seasonings in a bowl to blend. Just before baking, pour in the liquid to fill the shell to within 1/8 inch of the top. [Do not overfill, as the mixture rises when baking.] Sprinkle on the remaining cheese and the butter, cut into dots. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Can be served hot out of the oven, or cold. Personally, I prefer it hot, with a glass of crisp white wine and a simple salade verte.

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Bon appétit!

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