.
Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium
.
WARNING -EXTREMELY LONG POST -HOPEFULLY WORTH IT
From Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh :
So Rex [Mottram] was sent to Farm Street to Father Mowbray, a priest renowned for his triumphs with obdurate catechumens. After the third interview he came to tea with Lady Marchmain.
‘Well, how do you find my future son-in-law?’
‘He’s the most difficult convert I have ever met.’
‘Oh dear, I thought he was going to make it so easy.
’‘That’s exactly it. I can’t get anywhere near him. He doesn’t seem to have the least intellectual curiosity or natural piety. [...] ‘Lady Marchmain, he doesn’t correspond to any degree of paganism known to the missionaries.’
‘Julia,’ said Lady Marchmain, when the priest had gone, ‘are you sure that Rex isn’t doing this thing purely with the idea of pleasing us?
’‘I don’t think it enters his head,’ said Julia."
'He’s really sincere in his conversion?’
‘He’s absolutely determined to become a Catholic, mummy,’ and to herself she said: ‘In her long history the Church must have had some pretty queer converts. I don’t suppose all Clovis’s army were exactly Catholic-minded. One more won’t hurt.’
Next week the Jesuit came to tea again. It was the Easter holidays and Cordelia was there, too.
‘Lady Marchmain,’ he said. ‘You should have chosen one of the younger fathers for this task. I shall be dead long before Rex is a Catholic.’
‘Oh dear, I thought it was going so well.’
‘It was, in a sense. He was exceptionally docile, and he accepted everything I told him, remembered bits of it, asked no questions. I wasn’t happy about him. He seemed to have no sense of reality, but I knew he was coming under a steady Catholic influence, so I was willing to receive him. One has to take a chance sometimes with semi-imbeciles, for instance. You never know quite how much they have understood. As long as you know there’s someone to keep an eye on them, you do take the chance.’
‘How I wish Rex could hear this!’ said Cordelia.
‘But yesterday I got a regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed. Take yesterday. He seemed to be doing very well. He learned large bits of the catechism by heart, and the Lord’s Prayer, and the Hail Mary. Then I asked him as usual if there was anything troubling him, and he looked at me in a crafty way and said, “Look, Father, I don’t think you’re being straight with me. I want to join your Church and I’m going to join your Church, but you’re holding too much back.” I asked what he meant, and he said: “I’ve had a long talk with a Catholic - a very pious well-educated one and I’ve learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet pointing East because that’s the direction of heaven, and if you die in the night you can walk there. Now I’ll sleep with my feet pointing any way that suits Julia, but d’you expect a grown man to believe about walking to heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a Cardinal? And what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound note with someone’s name on it, they get sent to hell. I don’t say there mayn’t be a good reason for all this,” he said, “but you ought to tell me about it and not let me find out for myself.”’
‘What can the poor man have meant?’ said Lady Marchmain.
‘You see he’s a long way from the Church yet,’ said Father Mowbray. ‘But who can he have been talking to? Did he dream it all? Cordelia, what’s the matter?’
‘What a chump! Oh, mummy, what a glorious chump!’
‘Cordelia, it was you.’
‘Oh, mummy, who could have dreamed he’d swallow it? I told him such a lot besides. About the sacred monkeys in the Vatican - all kinds of things.’
‘Well, you’ve very considerably increased my work,’ said Father Mowbray.
‘Poor Rex,’ said Lady Marchmain. ‘You know, I think it makes him rather lovable. You must treat him like an idiot child, Father Mowbray.’
So the instruction was continued, and Father Mowbray at length consented to receive Rex a week before his wedding. [...]
Thus things stood three weeks before the wedding; the cards had gone out, presents were coming in fast, the bridesmaids were delighted with their dresses. Then came what Julia called ‘Bridey’s bombshell’. With characteristic ruthlessness he tossed his load of explosive without warning into what, till then, had been a happy family party. The library at Marchmain House was being devoted to wedding presents; Lady Marchmain, Julia, Cordelia, and Rex were busy unpacking and listing them. Brideshead came in and watched them for a moment.
‘Chinky vases from Aunt Betty,’ said Cordelia.
‘Old stuff. I remember them on the stairs at Buckborne.’
‘What’s all this?’ asked Brideshead.
‘Mr, Mrs, and Miss Pendle-Garthwaite, one early morning tea set. Goode’s, thirty shillings, jolly mean.’
‘You’d better pack all that stuff up again.’
‘Bridey, what do you mean?’
‘Only that the wedding’s off.’
‘Bridey’
‘I thought I’d better make some inquiries about my prospective brother-in-law, as no one else seemed interested,’ said Brideshead. ‘I got the final answer tonight. He was married in Montreal in 1915 to a Miss Sarah Evangeline Cutler, who is still living there.’ ‘Rex, is this true?’
Rex stood with a jade dragon in his hand looking at it critically; then he set it carefully on its ebony stand and smiled openly and innocently at them all. ‘Sure it’s true,’ he said. ‘What about it? What are you all looking so het up about? She isn’t a thing to me. She never meant any good. I was only a kid, anyhow. The sort of mistake anyone might make. I got my divorce back in 1919. I didn’t even know where she was living till Bridey here told me. What’s all the rumpus?’
‘You might have told me,’ said Julia.
‘You never asked. Honest, I’ve not given her a thought in years.
His sincerity was so plain that they had to sit down and talk about it calmly.
‘Don’t you realize, you poor sweet oaf,’ said Julia, ‘that you can’t get married as a Catholic when you’ve another wife alive?’
‘But I haven’t. Didn’t I just tell you we were divorced six years ago.’
Oh dear, not since Father Mowbray with Rex Mottram has the instruction and re-instruction of the Catholic Faith gone as badly as it has with Rep. Nancy Pelosi. By September of 2008, 26 U.S. Catholic Bishops, as well as her own Bishop and Archbishop had publicaly rebuked then U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for her persistent misrepresentation of the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion. Unlike weaker people, Nancy did not repent of her ways. But like the truly hardened woman she is, Nancy doubled down, using her posish as a quasi- Head of State to request a private audience with the Pope in early 2009. Pope Benedict VXI granted one. From George Weigel:
Were They at the Same Meeting?
The Pope and the Speaker in Rome.
From the office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi:
It is with great joy that my husband, Paul, and I met with His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, today. In our conversation, I had the opportunity to praise the Church’s leadership in fighting poverty, hunger, and global warming, as well as the Holy Father’s dedication to religious freedom and his upcoming trip and message to Israel. I was proud to show His Holiness a photograph of my family’s papal visit in the 1950s, as well as a recent picture of our children and grandchildren.
From the press office of the Holy See:
Following the General Audience, the Holy Father briefly greeted Mrs. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, together with her entourage. His Holiness took the opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law and the Church’s consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception until natural death, which enjoin all Catholics, and especially legislators, jurists, and those responsible for the common good of society, to work in cooperation with all men and women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of protecting human life at all stages of development.
Were Benedict XVI and Nancy Pelosi in the same meeting, or even in the same city, this morning?
Charity requires that one concede the possibility that genuine piety was a part of Pelosi’s (rather boorish, and certainly irregular) insistence on being given a private moment with the pope during her current taxpayer-funded junket to Rome. But her office’s statement on today’s meeting makes it clear something else was afoot: that Pelosi, who shamelessly trumpets her “ardent” Catholicism while leading congressional Democrats in a continuing assault on what the Catholic Church regards as the inalienable human rights of the unborn, was trying to recruit Benedict XVI (“Joseph Ratzinger, D., Bavaria”?) to Team Nancy.
His Holiness wasn’t buying it.
He told Pelosi, politely but unmistakably, that her relentlessly pro-abortion politics put her in serious difficulties as a Catholic, which was his obligation as a pastor. He also underscored — for Pelosi, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Barbara Mikulski, Rose DeLauro, Kathleen Sebelius, and everyone else — that the Church’s opposition to the taking of innocent human life, at any stage of the human journey, is not some weird Catholic hocus-pocus; it’s a first principle of justice than can be known by reason. It is a “requirement of the natural moral law” — that is, the moral truths we can know by thinking about what is right and what is wrong — to defend the inviolability of innocent human life. You don’t have to believe in papal primacy to know that; you don’t have do believe in seven sacraments, or the episcopal structure of the Church, or the divinity of Christ, to know that. You don’t even have to believe in God to know that. You only have to be a morally serious human being, willing to work through a moral argument — which, of course, means being the kind of person who understands that moral truth cannot be reduced to questions of feminist political correctness or partisan political advantage.
As her performance on Meet the Press prior to last year’s Democratic national convention made painfully clear, Pelosi is deeply confused about what her church teaches on the morality of abortion, and why. She may have come to her bizarre views on her own; it’s far more likely that she has been un-catechized, so to speak, by Catholic intellectuals and clerics who find Catholic teaching on life issues an embarrassment among their high-minded friends and colleagues of the progressive persuasion. Whatever the source of her confusion, Pelosi has now been informed, and by a world-class intellectual who happens to be the universal pastor of the Catholic Church, that she is, in fact, confused, and that both her spiritual life and her public service are in jeopardy because of that.
We need to underscore this by Weigel:
She may have come to her bizarre views on her own; it’s far more likely that she has been un-catechized, so to speak, by Catholic intellectuals and clerics who find Catholic teaching on life issues an embarrassment among their high-minded friends and colleagues of the progressive persuasion. Whatever the source of her confusion, Pelosi has now been informed, and by a world-class intellectual who happens to be the universal pastor of the Catholic Church,
Now, let's revisit Brideshead for a truly delicious moment:
‘What can the poor man have meant?’ said Lady Marchmain.
‘You see he’s a long way from the Church yet,’ said Father Mowbray. ‘But who can he have been talking to? Did he dream it all? Cordelia, what’s the matter?’
‘What a chump! Oh, mummy, what a glorious chump!’
‘Cordelia, it was you.’
‘Oh, mummy, who could have dreamed he’d swallow it? I told him such a lot besides. About the sacred monkeys in the Vatican - all kinds of things.’
‘Well, you’ve very considerably increased my work,’ said Father Mowbray.
‘Poor Rex,’ said Lady Marchmain. ‘You know, I think it makes him rather lovable. You must treat him like an idiot child, Father Mowbray.’
Following Lady Marchmain's advice we shall treat the then Speaker as an idiot child. (our teeth shall last longer) The idiot child, I mean Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did not have the right reaction to this private audience. Instead of embracing her Faith and the teachings of her Church, she continued on rejecting it. Even flaunting her rejection. In March of 2010, she publicaly invoked St. Joseph's aid to help with the passage of the pro-abortion healthcare-for-all-or-jail bill on behalf of "30,000 American workers". Do we understand the biblical irony as well as utter ignorance involved with her asking for St. Joseph to procur abortions? From Matthew 2:13:
Now when they had gone, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up! Take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is going to search for the Child to destroy Him."
Jesus survived because St. Joseph listened to the Angel's warning. The Holy Family remained in Eygpt for 2 years. Meanwhile, back in Bethlehem, King Herod slaughtered all the male children in Bethlehem age 2 and under to make sure he got rid of this threat (Jesus) to his power. Since the 4th century the Catholic Church has observed the murder of these boys as The Feast of Holy Innocents. The Feasts of Holy Innocents is celebrated during the octave of Christmas as these tiny martyrs gave their lives for their Savior. No doubts during one of her numerous visits to the Vatican Nancy Pelosi probably strolled by the wall of St. Peter's which is believed to contain several of the bodies of the Holy Innocents brought to Rome under the supervision of Pope Sixtus V, 1585-1590.
The pro-abortion healthcare-for-all-or-jail bill was passed just a few days after Nancy's public prayer on a single party vote against the will of the American people. Not just American Catholics. The Catholic Bishops not only responded within hours of the signing of the bill, they responded perfectly. From Cardinal George of Chicago :
For nearly a century, the Catholic bishops of the United States have called for reform of our health care system so that all may have access to the care that recognizes and affirms their human dignity. Christian discipleship means, “working to ensure that all people have access to what makes them fully human and fosters their human dignity” (United States Catechism for Adults, page 454). Included among those elements is the provision of necessary and appropriate health care.
For too long, this question has gone unaddressed in our country. Often, while many had access to excellent medical treatment, millions of others including expectant mothers, struggling families or those with serious medical or physical problems were left unable to afford the care they needed. As Catholic bishops, we have expressed our support for efforts to address this national and societal shortcoming. We have spoken for the poorest and most defenseless among us. Many elements of the health care reform measure signed into law by the President address these concerns and so help to fulfill the duty that we have to each other for the common good. We are bishops, and therefore pastors and teachers. In that role, we applaud the effort to expand health care to all.
Nevertheless, for whatever good this law achieves or intends, we as Catholic bishops have opposed its passage because there is compelling evidence that it would expand the role of the federal government in funding and facilitating abortion and plans that cover abortion. The statute appropriates billions of dollars in new funding without explicitly prohibiting the use of these funds for abortion, and it provides federal subsidies for health plans covering elective abortions. Its failure to preserve the legal status quo that has regulated the government’s relation to abortion, as did the original bill adopted by the House of Representatives last November, could undermine what has been the law of our land for decades and threatens the consensus of the majority of Americans: that federal funds not be used for abortions or plans that cover abortions. Stranger still, the statute forces all those who choose federally subsidized plans that cover abortion to pay for other peoples’ abortions with their own funds. If this new law is intended to prevent people from being complicit in the abortions of others, it is at war with itself.
We share fully the admirable intention of President Obama expressed in his pending Executive Order, where he states, “it is necessary to establish an adequate enforcement mechanism to ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services.” However, the fact that an Executive Order is necessary to clarify the legislation points to deficiencies in the statute itself. We do not understand how an Executive Order, no matter how well intentioned, can substitute for statutory provisions.
The statute is also profoundly flawed because it has failed to include necessary language to provide essential conscience protections (both within and beyond the abortion context). As well, many immigrant workers and their families could be left worse off since they will not be allowed to purchase health coverage in the new exchanges to be created, even if they use their own money.
Many in Congress and the Administration, as well as individuals and groups in the Catholic community, have repeatedly insisted that there is no federal funding for abortion in this statute and that strong conscience protection has been assured. Analyses that are being published separately show this not to be the case, which is why we oppose it in its current form. We and many others will follow the government’s implementation of health care reform and will work to ensure that Congress and the Administration live up to the claims that have contributed to its passage. We believe, finally, that new legislation to address its deficiencies will almost certainly be required.
As bishops, we wish to recognize the principled actions of the pro-life Members of Congress from both parties, in the House and the Senate, who have worked courageously to create legislation that respects the principles outlined above. They have often been vilified and have worked against great odds.
As bishops of the Catholic Church, we speak in the name of the Church and for the Catholic faith itself. The Catholic faith is not a partisan agenda, and we take this opportunity to recommit ourselves to working for health care which truly and fully safeguards the life, dignity, conscience and health of all, from the child in the womb to those in their last days on earth.
Can;t be much clearer than that, can you? Nancy's response, the classic finger to the eye poke, came a few weeks later on May 6th :
.
"We believe that the health care initiative was respecting the dignity and worth of every person," Pelosi, a Catholic, told the Catholic Community Conference Thursday on Capitol Hill. "I thank so many of you who helped get that passed. Thank God for the nuns. Thank God for the nuns.”
Pelosi continued, “Thank God for the nuns -- and nuns, imagine, 15, 16 leaders of orders representing 59,000 orders -- and I didn’t realize it was Dominican, Benedictine and Franciscan, Notre Dame de L’Amour, Notre Dame School Sisters, every possible kind of name you can think of, there they were on the list. And they wrote to us saying, ‘We support this life-affirming legislation.’ We were so proud of them and they helped us do just that."
.
The reason this is a classic finger in the eye poke is because 60,000 nuns did not support what is now affectionately called Obamacare. 59 nuns cough ,cough representing 15 or 16 religous communities out of 793 religious communities broke ranks with the U.S. Catholic Bishops as well as violated the teachings of the Church by supporting Obamacare. To quickly run the numbers, it means out of 65,000 nuns in the U.S. .0008 percent of them supported Obamacare. Not exactly a majority.
Is it any wonder Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is now ex-Speaker of the House? Recall George Weigel's now prophetic words:
.
Whatever the source of her confusion, Pelosi has now been informed, and by a world-class intellectual who happens to be the universal pastor of the Catholic Church, that she is, in fact, confused, and that both her spiritual life and her public service are in jeopardy because of that.
.
After the blowout election of November '10 which installed a Republican majority and a pro-life Catholic Speaker to boot (poetic justice), the pro-life Speaker got his party to work on repealing Obamacare. They did. The repeal got shot down in the Senate. Then the House set to fixing the pro-abortion aspect of Obmacare just like Cardinal George predicted they would have to do. They wrote a bill. A modest yet good one. The Catholic Bishops encouraged its success:
WASHINGTON (April 6, 2011)— Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), has written to urge all members of the U.S. House of Representatives to support a bipartisan bill protecting conscience rights in health insurance. Introduced by Reps. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) and Dan Boren (D-OK), the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act of 2011 (HR 1179) “will help ensure that the new health care reform act is not misused to violate the religious freedom and rights of conscience of those who offer and purchase health insurance coverage in our nation,” Cardinal DiNardo wrote.
“Federal law, until now, has never prevented the issuers and purchasers of health coverage from negotiating a health plan that is consistent with their moral and religious convictions,” Cardinal DiNardo explained. “This could change, however, with implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) as now written.” He noted that the law “establishes a new list of ‘essential health benefits’ that will be mandatory for most health plans throughout the United States,” and also “requires all group and individual plans to cover general ‘preventive services,’ as well as additional preventive services specifically for women.”
“For months,” Cardinal DiNardo wrote, “Planned Parenthood and other groups have been urging that mandated ‘preventive services for women’ include all drugs and devices approved by the FDA for contraception—including those that can prevent the implantation and survival of a newly conceived human being, and hence are seen as abortifacient by the Catholic Church and many others.”
“Mandated inclusion of contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs in health plans poses an obvious potential conflict with rights of conscience,” Cardinal DiNardo wrote. “Such conflicts would also arise if HHS mandates inclusion of some fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization, treatments using material from deliberately killed unborn children, or other procedures specifically rejected by the teachings of some religions.”
PPACA “arbitrarily and inexplicably does not protect the many religious denominations – including those providing the backbone of the nonprofit health care system in this country – whose moral teaching rejects specific procedures,” Cardinal DiNardo said. “If religious and other stakeholders are driven out of the health insurance marketplace by this aspect of PPACA, legislation whose purpose was to expand health coverage could have the opposite effect.”
The Respect for Rights of Conscience Act “is modest and well-crafted legislation…it only prevents PPACA itself from being misused to deny Americans’ existing freedom to seek health care coverage that meets their medical needs and respects their deepest convictions,” he wrote. “I am sure that most members of Congress voting for PPACA did not intend that it should deny or take away this freedom. Therefore I hope and expect that Representatives who supported PPACA as well as those who opposed it will join in co-sponsoring the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act and in helping to ensure its enactment.”
Thankfully the Bishops were listened too. The bill passed in the House (only) this past October, 251 – 172. Before the bill passed Nancy a reporter asked of her opinion of it:
.
At a press conference on Capitol Hill today, a reporter asked Pelosi, “Can you comment on the abortion [bill] the GOP is bringing to the House floor tonight?”
Pelosi said: “Under this [abortion] bill, when the Republicans vote for this bill today, they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor and health care providers do not have to intervene, if this bill is passed. It’s just appalling. It falls right into their -- all, it’s a health issue.”
Last week, the Washington Post gave Nancy the chance to revise and extend her remarks. She grabbed the chance, no doubt believing she gave it the old carpe diem. But that old black magic fell short. Nancy didn't carpe diem. Nancy penned her requiem. A requiem for an obdurate sinner :
.
Pelosi recently was criticized for the way she characterized a bill to amend Republican-proposed conscience exemptions for health-care reform that allow providers to refuse to perform abortions. Pelosi called the measure, which passed last month with some help from Democrats, “savage,’’ and said, “When the Republicans vote for this bill today, they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor and health-care providers do not have to intervene, if this bill is passed. It’s just appalling.”
In retrospect, does she think that assessment went too far? Not at all, she said: “They would” let women die on the floor, she said. “They would! Again, whatever their intention is, this is the effect.’’
Catholic health-care providers in particular have long said they’d have to go out of business without the conscience protections that Pelosi says amount to letting hospitals “say to a woman, ‘I’m sorry you could die’ if you don’t get an abortion.” Those who dispute that characterization “may not like the language,’’ she said, “but the truth is what I said. I’m a devout Catholic and I honor my faith and love it . . . but they have this conscience thing’’ that she insists put women at physical risk, although Catholic providers strongly disagree.
Returning to Brideshead, ten years after Rex Mottram's brilliantly failed attempt t joining the Catholic Church, his second divorced wife, Julia, (nee Flight) admitted this Rex and the wisdom of Catholic priests to her newly aquired lover, Charler Ryder,
.
‘You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modem and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.
Nancy Pelosi, a tiny bit of a woman, pretending she is whole. And Catholic.
.
“One has to take a chance sometimes with semi-imbeciles, for instance.” – Father Mowbray
Just wondering, but at what level of imbecile does “oh the hell with it” kick in? Catholic scholars... ? Anyone...?
“Whatever the source of her confusion”
Gilbert & Sullivan were consulted.
Mikado
from: Tit-Willow
On a tree by a river a little tom-tit
Sang "Willow, tit-willow, tit-willow!"
And I said to him, "Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing 'Willow, tit-willow, tit-willow?'"
"Is it weakness of intellect, birdie?" I cried,
"Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?"
Posted by: George Pal | November 29, 2011 at 02:34 PM
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Posted by: Mrs. P | November 29, 2011 at 02:35 PM