American Providentialism – “Since its birth, providentialism—the belief that God actively governs human events according to his design and purposes—has been in America’s DNA.” Would God Stop an Assassin’s Bullet? A Reflection on American Providentialism (Word on Fire)
The Synodality Survey – “The credibility of the synodal process, if it is to be a sounding board for a cross-section of Catholics, relies on sound methodology and transparent reporting, otherwise the faithful are justified in raising questions about its authenticity.” What Do Catholics Think about Synodality? (What We Need Now – Substack)
Pro-Abortion Zealotry – “A Harris-Walz presidency would be noteworthy not simply for the extremity of their abortion and gender policies, but also for the fanatical zealousness with which they pursue them.” What to Expect from a Harris-Walz Presidency (First Things)
Childless Cat Ladies – “Mocking ‘childless cat ladies’ is crude, tactless, and needlessly provocative. It’s not a good look for an aspiring politician. However, I am not running for vice-president and I feel at liberty to say that there is something to it.” Are JD Vance’s ‘childless cat ladies’ a real thing? (Mercator)
Never Ignore the Disabled – “FIRE Foundation of Denver’s mission champions students with disabilities in Catholic schools by providing educational resources, fundraising, and promoting a culture of belonging.” Entrusting Disabled Children to Jesus, Via Catholic Schools (National Catholic Register)
The Status of Rupnik’s Art – “The website Pray Tell recently published an article, temperate in spirit and labyrinthine in reasoning, defending the preservation of the art of Marko Rupnik…” Tearing Down the Rupnik Idol (The Catholic Thing)
Religion and Conservatism – “The former National Review staff writer Nate Hochman and the founder of American Compass Oren Cass have argued not only that current culture war skirmishes over race, gender, and parental rights are being contested as secular instead of religious conflicts but also that a new social conservatism that is Trumpian and secular is succeeding where the old religious conservatism failed.” Why Conservatives Need Religion (Modern Age)
In the Vein of T.S. Eliot – “James Matthew Wilson is the finest poet-philosopher of the modern age, and both his name and his verses should be familiar upon the lips of every literate reader of poetry.” The Finest Poet-Philosopher of the Modern Age (The European Conservative)
Embracing Social Leftism – “I think it’s impossible to interpret (‘reproductive rights’) as anything other than an affirmatively pro-choice statement, at least for those who have a modicum of respect for the virtue of intellectual honesty.” Trump’s Humiliation of Social Conservatives Is the Rational Response to Their Cowardice (National Review)
Getting Dirty – “Most families are not farm families, so most children will not benefit from the unique conditions living on a farm provides, but there are some practical suggestions for the average suburban family that can help. First, get kids outside and let them get dirty.” The Farm Effect: Why Playing in the Mud Is Good for Your Kids (Intellectual Takeout)
Information Glut – “When television replaced print media as the defining metaphor of American public life, the consequences were dramatic. Yet somehow, they went largely unnoticed.” No Politics Is Local Now (The Catholic Thing)
Veiling at Mass – “Young Catholic women are increasingly embracing the traditional practice of veiling during Mass, a trend highlighted in a The Free Press article this week.” Young Catholic women explore the revival of veiling at Mass (CatholicVote)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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“Young Catholic women are increasingly embracing the traditional practice of veiling during Mass, a trend highlighted in a The Free Press article this week.” I suspect this is just an example of “the meek shall inherit the earth.” What people seem to overlook is the implication that the meek will be the only ones left. Likewise, the only young women likely to go to Mass these days are the types more likely to wear veils.
Regarding veiling, there was also an article in secular Free Press web site. What disturbs me is the total lack of a dress code for so many at Mass. For both Men and Women we need to dress up and remember Our Savior, Jesus Christ, is present in the Eucharist. Maybe the limited number of women who understand this and wear a veil, will remind the rest of us what the Mass is about and Who is present in the alter in the form of Bread and Wine.
@ American Providentialism
Academic Kody Cooper writes an intriguing interpretation of recent events and thoughts about the Trump assassination attempt. A good article about the dire state of Am political cultural affairs. Was it providential? Perhaps. Trump portrayed as the pagan king who protects Christianity. The “junkyard bulldog”. Maybe so. Although the essay does have the tone of a Catholicized Manifest Destiny.
Cooper nevertheless raises the question [not that he holds to it] of the commonly held belief that ‘God is in charge’. Not to worry. The problem with that is laying back on our haunches expecting God to do what we should do.
First things first…God is ALWAYS in charge. So as Kody W. Cooper ponders the $100 question, ‘Would God Stop an Assassin’s Bullet?’…the answer is yes. Why because He is God, and He can do whatever is His Will to do so. It’s like the saying, ‘that was luck!’. Luck is chance…and we know God is in charge which means there is no ‘chance or ‘luck’ involved. So, I believe to write such an article as “Would God Stop an Assassin’s Bullet? A Reflection on American Providentialism” is purely for the halls of the academic. God is good all the time, and all the time…God is good!
Bear in mind, the question might also be, “Would God cause a bomb to be kicked under a heavy table?” It is a very serious mistake to think that, even to the extent that it is proper to interpret the seemingly chance events of history to some kind of divine intervention, those who live are especially pleasing to God and a blessing to those around them, whereas those who die are displeasing to God and would have been a curse to those around them. That is, in the end, just another version of the health and wealth gospel, which is itself one of those “other gospels” about which St. Paul felt so strongly in Galatians 1:8.
Hang on Kalógeros and take a deep breath. Faith in Christ’s infinite good, his infinite power doesn’t equate refusing to do our part to bear the cross, to take risk in defense of the faith.
Kalógeros, you can consider it this way. Yes. God’s in charge. God had decided to destroy every last Israelite including Aaron for worshiping the golden calf. He promised Moses he would spare him and make of him a greater people. Moses took the risk and intervened. He dared to convince God to spare the Israelites. However, an Israelite named Kalógeros intervened saying, No Moses. God is in charge. God overhears and responds to Moses. Sorry Moses, Kalógeros is right. I’m in charge not you. Only Moses survived everyone else hurled down to hell, a voice could be heard faintly repeating God is in charge, God is in charge. My parable for the day.
Although mantillas may have persisted in Hispanic communities, other American women did not, not, not wear veils to Sunday Mass before Vatican II! We wore hats. (Hats? Remember them? Those objects women–and men–normally put on their head outside their homes in times past.) If traditionalist young women want to veil for Mass, fine. But can we please stop claiming a false history for the practice? For the record, when I attend the TLM I wear a hat. The last time I went, I was the only woman in the crowded church to do so.
The primacy of wearing veils is “false history”? The Virgin Mary didn’t wear a hat. Hats became an alternative for covering the heads of the more stylish (read: “modern”) church-going woman.
I was referring to the practice of women before Vatican II. Photographs of Masses from the earlier 20th C will prove my point: women in the congregation are wearing hats, not veils. Women in the Western world started wearing hats in the 17th C. Is that “modern”? Are Catholic women required to “dress like the Blessed Virgin”? Wear long flowing robes as well as veils? I heard of someone doing that. She wore gowns and veils matched to the liturgical seasons to Mass. In fact, according to the rules Pius XII set for modesty, almost all American Catholic women would be out of compliance.
It depends on what you mean by a “veil.” If you are referring to women wearing a piece of cloth rather than a hat, then you may have a point. But if you are only referring to lace veils such as mantillas and “chapel veils,” the Virgin Mary would not have worn one of those, as they did not exist then. The head covering she was likeliest to wear would have been a very long, broad piece of plain cloth that was part of her everyday clothing. So if women truly want to be traditional by covering their heads as Mary would have, that’s what they should be wearing. Not lace veils.
As far as I know, no one has done a comprehensive study of veiling and head covering for women yet, so I can only go by what I have seen and read. Lace veils developed in the lace-making areas of Europe. Going strictly from memory, lace veils start appearing in paintings during the early Renaissance. They are very lovely, but they were not universally worn throughout Europe and the Middle East. Various types of scarves were common, judging from paintings, and those continue to be the most common type of head covering worn by women in the Eastern churches. Hats start appearing wherever hat-wearing was common among women. The thought that women chose head coverings that would imitate the Virgin Mary is a lovely pious tradition, but if that was ever the intent, they have been making the wrong selections for many centuries.
So most of what is being presented as “traditional” in terms of veils for women is probably of relatively recent origin and based on local or regional traditions transmitted through families. Any “rule” would be transitory. The only consistent direction is for women to cover their heads in church. I wear a plain solid silk scarf, and on occasion, a lace veil. We don’t need to get stuck on women having to wear a particular style, a particular material, or on making up “rules” about what various colors or lengths of veils mean.
I am personally interested in when (and where) the term “chapel veil” originated because that is also being called “traditional” with the general sense that it has been used since time immemorial, yet I have never seen a reference to it before the past 100 years or so. But that is due to my general interest in how terms develop, not anything in particular about chapel veils
My mother wore mantillas in the 1950s and 60s. But yes, you are correct that many women wore hats to Mass also.
Peter Kwasniewski at OnePeter5 on the theology of the veil.
https://onepeterfive.com/theology-women-veils/#:~:text=One
Re Childless Cat Ladies: No intelligent person should take sociology seriously, even though it now dominates contemporary academics. It gets in the way of taking innate values seriously. And for a politician to indulge social caricatures is always dumb even when attempts are made to be clear with distinctions because the distinctions will never be reported.
We read: “No intelligent person should take sociology seriously, even though it now dominates contemporary academics. It gets in the way of taking innate values seriously.”
Yes, but….Much of past sociology, especially, falsely attempts to transplant the methods of the natural sciences into understanding human society (“social science”). Most recently the theology (!) of “paradigm shifts” (lifted from Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” 1962).
But sociology also seeks to understand the actual workings of “values” or influences which are NOT “innate values” (meaning the inborn and universal natural law). Why does tribalism reassert itself in new forms in presumably modernizing urban Africa? Why are the states of modern India organized primarily around language groups? And why did Muslim Pakistan split? How many forms of “communalism” (not communism) are we dealing with? Why are the Eurocentric premises of rationalistic (agnostic) sociology not working smoothly across the post-colonial world?
The premise that so-called primordial societies evolve (Darwinism writ large) into rationalistic, secular, industrial nation states (Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons)….Back in the 1970s (when yours truly was a graduate student at a secular university), the competing school of thought–oversimplifying, that what we now call “identity politics” can persist or even sharpen at all levels–featured such scholars as Samuel Huntington (today, his “collision of civilizations”), Karl Deutsch, Reinhard Bendix, Eisenstadt, La Polambara, Pye and D. Rustow.
The task for Catholic academicia and the Church–fully attentive to the Catholic Social Teaching (CST) grounded in natural law and the moral virtue of prudence, etc—is to master all of this stuff, together. AND, then, at some point or at the same time, to faithfully and artfully (!) witness and message the particular event and fact (!) of the singular Incarnation at the center of all human history—which was/is the exploratory theme of the Second Vatican Council: aggiornamento grounded in ressourcement.
And, therefore, to avoid blathering that China is a great example of CST (Cardinal Sorondo); or that sexual morality must now be revolutionized according to new “sociological-scientific foundation” (Cardinal Hollerich); or, pseudo-scientific references to ecclesial/theological “paradigm shifts” (Cardinal Parolin); or, airbrushing contemporary history in too much of an historicist direction (“time is greater than space.”)
SUMMARY: Too bad about the 1967 Land O’ Lakes Declaration of university adolescence! Or, ambiguous references to a “pluralism” of more-or-less equivalent religions.
@ Veiling at Mass
Aside from theology and the thoughts of the Apostle, I first realized how beautiful the veil is as it appeared in Spain, there the mantilla especially the floral. Furthermore, it speaks to modesty and reverence for God. You would never see a young woman in shorts wearing a veil. If what seems unnecessary evokes a sense of awareness of the spiritual it is not unnecessary.
I recall wearing either a mantilla or a “chapel veil” to Mass before Vatican II, and this was in a midwestern parish which was primarily populated by people of Irish, German, or Polish heritage. Most of us weren’t wearing hats.
The young woman illustrating that article is wearing the equivalent of hijab, with not one hair showing. But her head-covering would not act as blinders or interfere with her looking at others in church, as Dr. Kwasniewski claims veils would. (I wonder what he thinks of Mother Seton’s nuns in bonnets?)
In her book, Paul Among the People, Sarah Ruden makes the interesting observation that by directing all women to wear veils while worshiping, he’s extending a privilege of “respectability” to slaves and other low-status women to show equality in the community.
My mother had some beautiful mantillas which I inherited and wore until they fell apart.
I can buy replacements now online but not quite the same quality. I did find a lovely vintage mantilla at the Goodwill for 59 cents recently. Perhaps someone else’s mother passed away and it was donated.
I wear a veil to Mass and whenever entering a church. It helps me remember I’m in a sacred place and in the presence of Our Lord.
Sorry. I posted twice.
I’m remembering Mass back to the 40s in a small rural parish in Louisiana and in the 50s-60s in a very ethnic Midwestern city. For visits to churches or daily school Masses, we did wear little doilies or scarves–or even kleenexes–on our heads. That’s why I specified Sunday Mass garb.
Apologies for my especially sharp comments on this issue. I was deeply upset seeing the new Taliban “modesty” rules that require Afghan women to entirely cover their faces and keep silent outside the home. Even ultra-Traditionalist men may protest that they aren’t Taliban but as far as I’m concerned, a desire to control women is in play here, too.
The state of evangelization in the Catholic Church in 2024: What women should/should not wear on their heads during Holy Mass. Yikes! What we should be pondering instead are remedies to the hour’s long wait in every parish church to get into the confessional to receive absolution for our sins.
Maybe the subject isn’t interesting to you, but to me as a woman, questions about what to wear on my head when in church are interesting. Historical topics about what was done at various times also interest me but I recognize that they don’t interest everyone else.
Also, not every topic needs to be of critical importance to be discussed. I have read enough lengthy discussions here about obscure or specialized topics that didn’t seem to deserve that much energy that I let them slide without comment.
Sandra Miesel above – interesting comment re Sarah Ruden book. I like it.
No, we didn’t wear veils in the pre-VII Church, not in my lifetime and place anyway.
Define ethnic, please. (Everybody’s ethnic.)
What you say is interesting because read along with other comments, it reinforces what I have read about and heard so far. Women wore different types of head coverings, with scarves, hats or lace veils as the major options. There doesn’t seem to be a time when lace veils were the only head covering, except perhaps in particular areas? My aunts wore scarves, kerchiefs tied behind their heads or hats, for instance. Other women remember wearing lace veils.
The Midwestern city I lived in during the 1950s and 60s was 75% Catholic had at least half a dozen “national parishes” serving ethnicities from Irish and German to Slovak, Slovene, Polish, and Greek. Many of my schoolmates had immigrant grandmothers at home and had had to take after-school classes in their ancestral culture.
The Midwestern city I lived in 1950-60s was 75% Catholic and had at least a dozen “national parishes” for different ethnic groups, from Irish and German to Slovak, Slovene, Polish, and Greek. Many of my schoolmates had immigrant grandmothers in the home and had taken after school classes in their Old Country cultural traditions.
While Pro-Abortion Zealotry clearly has its footings and persistence, the reality would seem to be it does not reflect the sense of right responsibility and religion subsumed in the society corresponding with its established aims and reasoning. Why is that. And could it be that a function of this impenetrability, partly ties in with surveying methods and targets that are too low-level and low-keyed.
On the one hand, the pro-abortion activists ever and ever shout the more loudly than everyone else and make it attach to virtually everything.
On the other hand, the entrenchment sector lives and abides very, very, very, very quietly in the midst of all sorts of accommodations.
I wonder how far along these convictions expressed in the July 13 2013 CWR article In Their Own Words, have developed or spread in the past decade. Perhaps as far and wide enough to have caused the overturn of Roe. Try taking a pulse again.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2013/07/31/in-their-own-words/
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/pro-abortion-voices-keep-winning-because-theyre-the-ones-shouting-louder/
Pro-life was held to be “too narrow” and “self-involved” and a “solution” was offered in “life spectrum”. I believe “life spectrum” in the way it has been posed, is a counterfeit; and the “self-involved” is a detraction very low grade.
The true position natural and Christian, is pro-life. It arises from a right reason in respect of the particular problem, the crimes of abortion, the orderly development of Obs & Gyne and the protection of pregnancy and society, at that level alone: but also from fidelity in faith for those who have it.
It is not “narrow”, it is an expression of one aspect of natural law. And the natural law does not encumber it by reference to “other questions”. What the natural law allows is the same right reasoning applied to other facets within the broader dimensions of questions of life.
This needs addressing in order to make the apostolate real and simultaneously respect human reason, both, wherever the abortion question is connected. In addition, to meet the integrity due to any engagement of any challenging issue with or without abortion in the different spheres and meaningfully tackle the “self-involvement” going on in there.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2012/10/31/dr-james-hitchcock-pious-public-silence-is-dereliction-of-duty/
Meanwhile ….. remember I talked about it? ….. just down the hall ….. this time we can be reminded how things repeat and repeat:
‘ One consists of pressuring individual religious believers to cooperate with public policies inimical to faith. The other prong is pressure targeted at religious groups and institutions to adapt their programs to the promotion of values hostile to the sponsors’ moral convictions. ‘
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2015/05/28/the-two-prongs-of-the-burgeoning-persecution/