Beautiful, hot summer day watching Clark Street traffic and small birds. The private mass a liberating experience. Pope Leo on praying for an end to climate change.
You sit, you read, you wonder.
Late June day, 9 a.m., sit outside Colectivo, perfect hot day, air clean as a whistle, mild breeze. Sit and watch traffic on Clark Street, automotive and human. And the little birds, swallows I guess, on way to Capistrano, but should ask bird-watcher friend about that. They hop around at my feet. Then one sits on my table, so quiet am I. A few seconds and he’s off again. I stay where I am, no interest in flying.
Private mass liberating! But what about the hand-wave of peace? Self-taught, it seems. Was no edict from chancery that I know of, but I wouldn’t know about that anyhow. It could be a case of do-it-but-tell-no-one-we-told-you, per a long-standing Vatican practice I heard about in my Jesuit days. (See here for more about those years.)
It’s Mediator Dei time? Seems so, if not (and why not?), Benedict XVI on liturgy. The new mass, current version, flirts with contempt for delivery of Holy Communion? Get in line, come up to Father, look him in the eye, say amen. So accept the communion distributor, keep head down, eyes closed. I never found a distributor upset by that, rather a respectful placing on tongue of the not a few at weekday mass. We are grateful.
What about our holy father, whose leftist leanings are no surprise, as demonstrated with his major statement, FOR THE 10th WORLD DAY OF PRAYER — FOR THE CARE OF CREATION 2025, taking word for word the language of politicos, almost naively adopting the mindset of those who press the issue. He’s an expert on global climate change? Pius XI was a mountain-climber, an expert who wrote a book about it. But Leo speaks and implicitly endorses a policy as if there’s no argument ongoing, without so much as a nod to the debate of the matter?
Wandering off to matters political? There’s a history of that. As a 3rd-year Jesuit studying Latin and Greek classics, I rejected membership in a politically conservative operation once I smelled the rat of rugged individualism in their stand on free market. Where had I got that? From encyclicals.