Happy Feast Of The Ascension...

Well, yes, I do realise that technically it isn't celebrated until Sunday in England & Wales, but as the Extraordinary Form calendar celebrates the feast today, I'm sitting in the Small Hall in Blackfen waiting for our Missa Cantata.

Much as I would prefer their Lordships to restore the Holydays, part of me recognises that such a restoration might put a bit of a crimp on the celebration of Mass in the Extraordinary Form on those days - it would become much harder to find clerics able to celebrate a Solemn High Mass, for example.

In the meantime, I must confess to a certain mischievous glee associated with today's feast. The Anglican Shrine in Walsingham has chapels for each of the decades of the Rosary. I was puzzled by the apparent emptiness of the Chapel of the Second Glorious Mystery, until I remembered that it was the Ascension of Our Lord, and happened to look up...

Twitch of the mantilla to His Hermeneuticalness for the photo...

Another Little Plug...

On Monday I explained that I'd been trawling through some stats and gave a bit of a plug to some new blogs I'd stumbled across, as well as a few others which send traffic in my direction.

Fr. Redman put up a brief comment suggesting that I might care to add his "little" blog to the roll - he writes The Latin Mass in Clifton Diocese along with fellow-contributors Caroline Shaw and Fr. Bede Rowe (who also writes his own blog, A Chaplain Abroad.) I published the comment, but decided, on reflection, that a little further advertising might be in order...

Fr. Redman's blog is excellent, and he has posted some beautiful pictures of behind-the-scenes stuff in sacristies and so on. Caroline appears to do the nuts-and-bolts advertising of Mass times... (I think Fr. Rowe saves his stuff for his own blog!)

The Media Still Spinning...

One of the reasons given by the mainstream media for failing to cover the horrifying story of Kermit Gosnell was that this was only of local interest, and it was being amply covered in Philadelphia itself.

Somehow or other the story of three women freed after being held in captivity for ten years in Cleveland, Ohio is not just of local interest. Maybe Ohio is just more of an international hub than Philadelphia.

Mark Lambert has written a very perceptive post on the media's choice of what counts as newsworthy.

Going back to Gosnell's trial - the jury is still deliberating. It will be interesting to see whether the case gets any more coverage once a verdict is reached. So far, other than the Telegraph blogs (Damian Thompson and Tim Stanley) and one article in the Telegraph USA news section, the only other UK piece I've found via Google has been in the Guardian... the latter, interestingly, actually blames pro-life activists for forcing women to have late abortions. If better sex education, contraception and abortion were more widely available, Jill Filipovic argues, then Gosnell and his ilk would never be necessary...

I mean, it is obvious, isn't it? After all, look at what has happened here in the UK. The sex education available since before I was a teenager (becoming more and more explicit at earlier and earlier stages as far as I can see) with free contraceptives available in school and abortion advice given by school nurses has led to a massive decrease in the number of abortions. If demand decreases any more, Marie Stopes will go out of business..!

A Few Additions...

Checking through my blog stats is something I do very rarely these days - my posting has become so erratic that my readership has plummeted, and  it's depressing. However, every now and then I trawl through to see the blogs from which people are visiting.

If I ignore visits via Google and shameless self-promotion on Twitter and Facebook,  most of my traffic comes through blogs by priests - His Hermeneuticalness, the inimitable Fr. Z, Fr. Ray Blake, Fr. Michael Brown, Fr. Simon Henry, Fr. Seán Finnegan and Fr. Bede Rowe make up the lion's share, mostly through their use of the movable blogrolls (except for Fr. Z) which promotes blogs according to how recently updated they've been. The most frequently referring non-clerical blogs are by Kate Edwards, Charlie J, Bruvver Eccles, and Ttony, again via their blogrolls rather than direct mentions.

These regular blogs are already on my own blogroll. When I trawl through my stats, what I'm really looking for are blogs or sites that I don't recognise - and then I click through to see if anything interesting pops up...

So, in no particular order, I'd like to highlight the latest additions to my blogroll...

Mary's Little Garden by Amy Johnson. She is a recent convert to Catholicism, and also writes a blog on religious vocations - for women as far as I can see - called Sursum Corda.

Nesciens is a blog dedicated to chant and other church music by Ben Whitworth. One of Ben's other blogs, Catholic Orkney, is already on my roll, but this new one has very different material on it.

Catholic Coffee appears to be a very new blog - there are only two posts on it so far, both pictures. There also doesn't appear to be an RSS feed enabled, which is frustrating. I wondered if it was a new version of Coffee Catholic - a blog I used to follow but which appears to have been taken over by a most unsuitable site showing tattoos... and THAT, my friends, is why I always plead with people not to delete blogs when they're finished - just disable comments and leave it to lie dormant.

Fr. Brendan McGrath writes on all things Catholic from the Great and Glorious Diocese of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It looks as though he's been blogging for a while, but I hadn't spotted him until now.

And finally, Sally Thomas writes Castle in the Sea - though, as a wife, mother, home-educator, poet, free-lance essayist, laundress, dog-walker, glasses-wearer, dinner-burner, porch-sitter and confession-goer, I'm not quite sure how she manages to fit it all in and keep her blog going too. Having said that, I'm not quite sure how she's managed to get from her blog to mine, because I can't find any direct link. There is a mystery to ponder!

Statues Of Our Lady...

There has been some discussion (and controversy) about a new statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in America. It got me thinking about images of Mary, particularly those based on apparitions.

It struck me that Our Lady always seems to appear in a manner which is not "strange" to the person watching. So, Our Lady was described as a young girl by St. Bernadette - a description better reflected in the mosaic in the Rosary Basilica than by the traditional statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. Our Lady of Guadalupe looks more Mexican. Our Lady of China appears to be... well... Chinese.












I think that we can develop an attachment to a particular image of Our Lady (or group of images) based on what is most familiar to us, and anything which does not fit in with this can appear to be distasteful or even repugnant. I used to hate the mosaic of Our Lady of Lourdes in the Rosary Basilica because the proportions seemed all "wrong" somehow, giving her a creepy expression. One day I was struck by the realisation that the face was indeed all wrong - for a grown woman, that is - but actually spot on for a 12 year-old girl. Now I have become rather attached to the mosaic image.

The statue which has caused the upset is Our Lady of Good Help in Wisconsin...

Not my favourite statue... but I can see where it is coming from - the apparition of Our Lady of Good Help to Adele Brise in Wisconsin in 1859...

Having said that, I think that there is a much worse example - the statue of Our Lady currently in Ely Cathedral...