Freedom of Information and the Internet from A Catholic Citizen in America.

A Catholic Citizen in America has an excellent post, with an historical overview, about the necessity for freedom of information.

I might differ from him over a few points, but it is well worth reading.

Cowardice in the Face of the Enemy

As a very small, insignificant, oldish, impotently angry, would-be-good Catholic, I am terrified by the madness which has engulfed the world I once thought I knew. In this I know that I am not alone.

Rage and satire can be powerful weapons against a rational enemy who is equipped to subject his own acts and opinions to reasonable scrutiny. However, we are now faced by an irrational enemy against whom such weapons are virtually powerless.

What should we, or more to the point, I, do?

Not, certainly not, accept defeat as I have been tempted to do and, like a petrified rabbit, wait to be devoured. That is sheer animal cowardice, and I confess freely to having often been guilty of it.

The enemy are big, powerful, and morally stupid. We Catholic bloggers have one advantage over them: thanks to the Holy Spirit, if we follow His promptings and His Church, we have the Truth, and we must not cease from proclaiming it in the face of ridicule, indifference, state oppression, the treason of our own clergy, or sheer world-weariness.

Chesterton, too, lived in a moral madhouse. Cleverly, wittily, eloquently, he never surrendered his weapons to the enemy.

I, we, with but a shadow of his talents, weary and stale as we may often feel, must also never give up.

As the slogan went in my childhood, "Don't you know there's a war on?"

This is no time to surrender and hang up our keyboards.

Bash on regardless!

From 'Linen on the Hedgerow': Make my day, punk!

Richard's robust riposte to blasphemers, aborters, and other scourges can and should be read here.

It's magnificent.

No, I have not......

lapsed, turned liberal, or lost my way, but like any amateur polemicist or satirist, I am speechless or wordless when faced by the grotesque idiocy of contemporary reality.

As full of anger and contempt as ever, I am trying to avoid leading others into such uncharity as constantly makes prayer and sleep difficult.

Smirk, too, is speechless, but perhaps for other reasons.

I shall be posting here, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps later, but in the meanwhile I have started a new blog Dziennik Morsa - Diary of a Walrus, which is utterly uncontroversial, probably very boring, and about the enormous fun and health benefits of cold-water swimming. Currently in English, I hope to make it bilingual, in Polish too.

Start training - with a very cold bath and ice cubes in the water!

Winter Swimming - A Topical Tonic and a Regenerative and Convivial Ascetic Practice

Gregg, at A Brief Encounter comments on today being the grimmest day of the year.

I can recommend a fine remedy for winter depression, a tonic popular in the countries round the Baltic Sea.

Thirty of us did it yesterday at Stegna, a resort not far from Gdańsk. After Mass, of course. I didn't take the photographs which sadly don't show us actually swimming.

The air temperature was -3 Celsius and the sea +1 Celsius. With high wind and waves, (unfortunately no snow to roll in on the beach, because the high tide and storm had washed it all away), and the prospect of fish soup and tea with added vodka after the swim, winter swimming  really makes you feel you could kill a lion bare-handed or eat a brontosauros - raw.

Try it once, and you'll want to do it every day.

Polish singer Doda held gulity of insulting religious feelings - Jest wyrok sądu: Doda winna obrazy uczuć religijnych

You can read about it here. I can't find an account of the judgment in English.

Must-Read from Shadowlands on Saint Joseph

Powerful post about the power of Saint Joseph against demons from Shadowlands at Fire of Their Love.

Cribbed from Mundabor

Now there was a man:



"NOW THEREFORE, I, RONALD REAGAN, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim and declare the unalienable Personhood of every American, from the moment of conception until natural death, and I do proclaim, ordain, and declare that I will take care that the Constitution and laws of the United States are faithfully executed for the protection of America's unborn children. Upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God. I also proclaim Sunday, January 17, 1988, as a national Sanctity of Human Life Day. I call upon the citizens of this blessed land to gather on that day in their homes and places of worship to give thanks for the gift of life they enjoy and to reaffirm their commitment to the dignity of every human being and sanctity of every human life".
Ronald Reagan
Presidential Proclamation of "National Sanctity of Human Life Day", January 14, 1988

Cribbed from Mundabor

Kolęda - annual visit by the Priest

Driving home from school today, I heard an ominous clattering from beneath my car, and called in at the neighbouring workshop. They said they could do nothing today, as Kolęda starts at 3 p.m. and they were closing early. Kolęda usually goes on until about 8 or 9 o'clock. I had forgotten all about it.

Kolęda (Colenda) means Christmas carol in Polish, but it also refers to the annual visit to all Catholic homes (here 100%) in every parish in Poland by the Priest, in cassock and biretta, and two servers, the blessing of the house, and the saying of prayers. It lasts from 5 to 10 minutes, but depending on the weather and the garrulity of the Priest or the parishoners, it could arrive at your house at any time.

So I had to clean and tidy my house (Poles are very house-proud), have a table covered with a white cloth ready in my living-room. On the table there must be two candles, lit, a Crucifix, and a bowl of Holy Water with asperger (a brush). The whole thing will be very formal, even though the Priest teaches at my school, and the servers are my pupils.

The front door is left unlocked. When there is a sound of singing outside, the candles are lit. The Priest and servers will burst in KGB-style, singing a carol, and will greet you formally. The priest will say "Niech będzie pochwalony Jezus Chrystus" (in English "May Jesus Christ be glorified"). 

The reply is, "Na wieki wieków, Amen.", in English "Forever and ever, Amen."

We go into the living room, kneel, and pray, and then the Priest blesses the house. I give an offering in an envelope, and they leave.

I must then write in chalk over my front door, "K+M+B+ to signify that the Three Kings have visited me. I do not clean the message off until the next Kolęda.

Beautiful. Kocham cię Polsko (I love you, Poland).

I hope the house is tidy enough.

Belated Hat-Tip to The Heresy Hunter

The Heresy Hunter wrote, as his very fine and salutary New Year message:

On the eve of the new year, figured that some comments from St. Francis de Sales would be worthwhile to ruminate upon:


The declared enemies of God and His Church, heretics and schismatics, must be criticized as much as possible, as long as truth is not denied. It is a work of charity to shout: "Here is the wolf!" when it enters the flock or anywhere else.


Cogitation upon the words of Blaise Pascal would be a supplemental mental exercise (nabbed from Acts of the Apostasy):


...I beseech you to consider that, just in proportion as Christian truths are worthy of love and respect, the contrary errors must deserve hatred and contempt... two things also about errors - an impiety, that makes them horrible, and an impertinence that renders them ridiculous. For these reasons, while the saints have ever cherished towards the truth the twofold sentiment of love and fear... they have, at the same time, entertained towards error the twofold feeling of hatred and contempt, and their zeal has been at once employed to repel, by force of reasoning, the malice of the wicked, and to chastise, by the aid of ridicule, their extravagance and folly.
 
You can read it in full - here - http://heresy-hunter.blogspot.com/2011/12/happy-clappy-new-year.html

Somebody's boring me, and I think it's me.

"Somebody's boring me, and I think it's me."


Dylan Thomas's famous aside, after a particularly long and dreary monologue while on a walk with friends, echoes accusingly as I look at the stuff I have written here.


To anyone who still reads this blog, my apologies. If I bore myself, what must your suffering be?


From today, I shall try to be positive. That may mean very few entries, or none at all. We shall see.

Wielka Orkiestra Świątecznej Pomocy - The Great Orchestra of Festive Aid

The Wielka Orkiestra Świątecznej Pomocy is a Polish charitable organisation which puts on free, open-air, public concerts and rock gigs on one Sunday every January in towns all over Poland, to raise money for babies with health problems and for their mothers.

It is very popular, raises millions, and is a very, very good thing.

This year, as usual, the Walruses (Morsy), who are groups of winter swimmers,  collected money on Baltic beaches from people who had come to watch them swim.

The group I belong to raised in one hour over 1,400 złoty - about 3 weeks earnings for an average worker.

Here are some members collecting from happy donors - before the swim. The red heart stickers are what you get for contributing.

Obviously, after extracting money, and in the presence of the local press, you can't escape swimming. For the record, the water temperature was +2.8 Celsius, and the air +1 Celsius. Disappointingly warm - we stayed in the water for about 15 minutes.

.

Epiphany, Polish and Russian

Epiphany - Trzech Króli - is a public holiday here in Poland, and only Churches, petrol stations, and the emergency services are open, unless the staff are also proprietors. 

So it's Mass, and then meeting round food and a friendly bottle.

In Russia, Epiphany is on 19th of January, when a cross-shaped hole is cut in the ice of a river or lake, the water is blessed by Priests, and the faithful queue on the ice in their bathing costumes to cross themselves, completely immerse themselves three times in the water (about 1 degree Celsius), and, I guess, meet round food and a friendly bottle.  

Sadly, this year there is no snow or ice in Northern Poland, but a group of us will be swimming in the Baltic on Sunday, with a beach barbecue afterwards.

We're hoping for a decent helping of sub-zero temperatures, snow, and ice by then.

These stopped me in my tracks

Ephesians 4:1-7,11-13


I, the prisoner in the Lord, implore you to lead a life worthy of your vocation. Bear with one another charitably, in complete selflessness, gentleness and patience. Do all you can to preserve the unity of the Spirit by the peace that binds you together. There is one Body, one Spirit, just as you were all called into one and the same hope when you were called. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is Father of all, over all, through all and within all.


Each one of us, however, has been given his own share of grace, given as Christ allotted it. To some, his gift was that they should be apostles; to some, prophets; to some, evangelists; to some, pastors and teachers; so that the saints together make a unity in the work of service, building up the body of Christ. In this way we are all to come to unity in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God, until we become the perfect Man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.





Matthew 23:8-12


Jesus said to his disciples, ‘You must not allow yourselves to be called Rabbi, since you have only one master, and you are all brothers. You must call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor must you allow yourselves to be called teachers, for you have only one Teacher, the Christ. The greatest among you must be your servant. Anyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and anyone who humbles himself will exalted.’

Welcomers and Glad-handers Keep Off

From Richard at Linen on the Hedgerow , a fine post about those busy folk who welcome people to Mass.

I think I like them even less than he does. They intrude unneccesarily, since:

1. I know that Jesus, as the Host (pun intended) welcomes me. I do not need any glad-handing from anyone.

 2. The Mass is about God, not about being chummy. I go to Mass to meet God, not people.


3. I play flute, saxophone and violin. I have mildly arthritic fingers which I will not subject to maltreatment from some beaming knuckle-cruncher who wants to demonstrate his manly grip.


4. Said knuckle-cruncher has probably not washed his hands after going to the lavatory, reaming wax out of his ears, or whatever.


If I seem rather nasty, please remember that not so long ago in England, though not in the U.S.A., my attitude would have been considered perfectly normal.