Pastries for St. Agatha's Feast Day

St. Agatha, Pray for us!

St. Agatha holding her breasts on a plate
Zurbaran

A recipe and some commentary here and here on these pastries for St.Agatha's Feast Day, February 5th.  I was surprised to read that the latter doesn't mention searching at Veniero's for the St. Agatha cake but does mention finding them at De Robertis, which, alas, is no longer in business.  Next year, if I'm in NYC on February 5th, I'll have to stop by Veniero's.

Snow Christmas Hymns

I thought I knew all the Christmas carols and hymns there were to know--Hark The Herald Angels Sing, The First Noel, Good King Wenceslas, Joy to the World and so on and so forth.  Then, about 15 years ago,  I heard for the first time ever the beautiful Once in Royal David's City. From that point on, there have been every year carols that I've never heard before--Sussex Carol, Lo How A Rose E'er Blooming, Infant Holy, Infant Lowly to name a few.

Included in these unfamiliar carols or hymns were several what I'll call snow carols.  Invariably, one of these snow-themes would become wrapped up in another and I would take the verses from one carol and combine it with the refrain from another thereby mixing myself up as to just which snow carol I was singing. This past Christmas season, I finally sorted them out.  There are four: The Snow Lay On the Ground,  See Amid the Winter's Snow,  Gesu Bambino and  In the Bleak Midwinter.

"The snow lay on the ground, the stars shone bright, when Jesus Christ was born that holy night."  So begins the eponymously named carol's first verse.  "See amid the winter's snow, born to us on earth below," and in Gesu Bambino (English translation of the Italian lyric),  "When blossoms flower er'e mid the snow all on a winter's night." Jesus is born on a snowy night.  In Bethlehem  And not surprisingly, in Christina Rossetti's poem set to music,  the midwinter is bleak because "Snow had fallen snow on snow, snow on snow."  

Whence the snow and the birth of our Lord?   No surprise perhaps, but Irving Berlin's iconic 'White Christmas' of 1940 is not the source of Christmas as a snowy holiday.  Rather, Berlin's song evokes our almost 200 year old tradition of a white Christmas which dates to the Victorian era and to Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol  in particular written in 1843. Prince Albert who was of German descent is credited with having imported German customs and traditions as well.  As for snow in Bethlehem, it is possible and as for the birth of Christ falling on or about December 25th, there is good reason for it to be so.

But whether fact or fancy makes little difference. Much like the flowers that appeared when Our Lady dispatched the peasant Juan Diego to request from the bishop that a church be built on the slopes of Tepeyac, Jesus comes when least expected and completely out of season.  The snow carols lay before us in rhyme and verse the utter implausibility of it all--the "tender Lamb appears" in a world "hard as iron," a rose flowers in the bleak midwinter, a "manger poor" is actually a throne, a poor baby who "built the starry skies" is the Savior of the world. The Light of the world comes into the world at the darkest time of the year.  He comes under cover of cold and buried in the mystery of snow on snow so that, unless we actually search to see Him amidst the world's snow and darkness, we may ourselves become caught up in only the bright reflections of the starry night and not see clearly that "He Whom Mary bore was God the Son."

Nano Farms

It's always a little bit iffy when we pray at our Wednesday Novena for a just distribution of the earth's wealth.  The word 'distribution' leads one's thoughts possibly to 're-distribution' which leads one's thoughts possibly to think of the Church's often politicized social justice ministries that lead one's thoughts possibly to Socialist ideologies.  Are we asking for a just distribution of the earth's wealth or for a re-distribution of people's individual wealth? I admit to muttering that intention half-heartedly.

Here, however, is a ray of sunshine in a Catholic approach to poverty.  A priest has seen fit to cash in on, if you will, that faddish business of sustainable agriculture, eating local, farm to table and farm to fork and so on and on with Nano Farms USA.

Father Larry Goode is the pastor of St. Francis of Assisi parish in East Palo Alto, a small and historically low-income city in the San Francisco Bay area. Recently, Fr. Goode watched as big tech companies – Facebook, Google, and Microsoft – bought up most of the land surrounding his neighborhood, driving rent prices up and St. Francis' low-income families out.He started brainstorming with St. Patrick's seminary professor Father George Schultze and Ignatius Press founder Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio to come up with a way to create sustainable income for the poor in the area. That's how the idea of NanoFarms USA, a worker-owned farming cooperative, was born.
After receiving permission from Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone and St. Patrick's seminary rector Father Gladstone Stevens, Fr. Goode and St. Francis parishioners started using seminary grounds to plant produce, which they then started selling at local parishes and markets.

Not only do they sell the produce but they also sell miniature gardens, the Nano Farms, and then supply the labor to maintain them. Fr. Goode says, "NanoFarms is responding to the Holy Father’s constant call to the Church to care for the poor."  

Perhaps at the Wednesday Novena, instead of praying for a just distribution of the earth's wealth, we might rather pray for the distribution and growth of many Nano Farms.

Memorizing the Wallpaper - Piano Interlude

Classical pianist Josef Hofman wrote that when memorizing a piece of music you will, in addition to memorizing the music, memorize the wallpaper in the room and, . .. "the discoloration of the ivory on some key of the piano, the pictures on the walls. . . "   Hofmann goes on to say that if we then stumble through that piece in a performance we're likely to blame our memory.  But, he observes, memory is so exacting and precise that it's actually the "difference from our accustomed surroundings that upsets our too precise memory."   Practice is one thing, but performing, even with a well-memorized and prepared piece, is another.

For the amateur musician like myself, Hoffman's wallpaper became painfully real as I embarked on a personal initiative to improve my performance skills, or, indeed, to develop some. A year or so ago when I sat down at the Model D Steinway in the midst of a very friendly and informal gathering, I was the proverbial deer caught in the headlights.  The glare over my head had to be at least a dozen Kleig lights pointed directly at me.  The audience, similarly performance-inexperienced adult musicians,  had obviously turned into hungry wolves and cackling hyenas. The very keys of the offending instrument came rushing up at me, aggressive and threatening.  I looked down at them utterly intimidated.  I was sure I'd never seen a piano before.

What had happened to my nice little Kawai upright with the green wall behind it and the painting above it? Who had made me do this?  It was a simple Bach fugue which I had to start over at least twice after twice playing some ridiculous jumble of notes that had nothing to do with anything I had ever heard in my life.  My fingers literally fell all over themselves in hysteria.

I got through the piece and everyone clapped, mostly out of grateful joy that my misery was over I'm quite sure. Meanwhile, my rational mind told me that it wasn't necessary to play so badly in front of people when I can actually play quite well albeit in the privacy of my living room.  So began the task of trying to figure out how to make an informal, friendly performance a doable if not even mildly rewarding experience.

I knew there were some gaps in my performance approach, some tendencies that I suspected would get me demerits in the musicianship department.  For example, I usually employed a kind of close-my-eyes-and-cross-my-fingers approach when sitting down to perform.  Then, once I got going, I'd usually be thinking about when I'd make the first mistake, when the next, how and if I would recover, when and where I would have a memory slip and how I'd feel leaving the piano in defeat.  I was vaguely aware that I was skating on the surface with the methods I used for memorization.  And I was keenly aware that I couldn't keep focused on the music.  My concentration was lacking.  After all, I was mostly thinking about mistakes.

But what else was I supposed to think about? What do people, seasoned performers, think about when performing? The music, maybe? But what about the music? How it sounds? The next note? Picture dreamy clouds when playing Debussy and stormy skies when playing Beethoven? Ridiculous. I had heard from my teacher of some quotes by Yo Yo Ma and Claudio Arrau, something to the effect of, actually, not thinking about the music but about conveying the music, orchestrating the performance, being involved with the music yet above or beyond it.

Jonathan Biss, though not writing about performance per se in his Beethoven's Shadow, talks about the "macro- and microcosmic aspects of music" and notes that "one of the great peculiarities of the performing musician's work is that it is simultaneously so spiritual and so mundane. . . ."  I don't fancy myself a Jonathan Biss (or a Schnabel, Fleisher or Serkin, the musicians he's discussing), but these words summed up an apparent contradiction I had noted which circles me back to Hofmann's wallpaper.  Performing is not practice nor is it sitting down to play in the privacy of one's living room nor is it sitting down to play by oneself just for the enjoyment and love of the music. Yet a performance relies on all these--a studied preparation and knowledge of the music, a desire to communicate the music to others and, perhaps above all, a love of the music.  All told, a peculiarity for sure.

Based on little more than an inchoate research methodology and a smattering of intuition thrown in for good measure, I began by reducing a performance to 1) some physical properties of the performance space and 2) the first few notes of the piece. Thus, if time and place permit, I now study the performance space, sit down at the piano and take note of the lighting, the piano bench, the pedals and anything else that's around the piano.  (In one space there was a humidifier that provided a faint backdrop of sound which would have probably driven me to distraction had I not identified it beforehand.)  If the audience is there I size them up as well, mostly wondering, of course, why they haven't all stayed home.

When the person before me in the program takes their bow, it's true that I'm still momentarily annoyed at them for finishing before I'm ready to play (whereas when they sat down to perform I was momentarily annoyed at them for being ahead of me thereby prolonging my misery), but I move toward the piano. Once seated, there's no choice but to do something.  First on my list, I look at the foreign keyboard and address it bass to treble aiming to make its very keys my friends.  I tell myelf they will like me.

I  take what seems an eternity to find the place on the keyboard corresponding to where my piece of music will begin and find that's a good time to picture the first notes of the piece and think about how they're going to sound once I get my hands to the keys. If I'm playing an opening chord, I say it silently by name.  I think about exactly how I should sit on the keys to get the sound that I've practiced. I try to remember that, having arms, I must use them, but that, having shoulders, they must not be up, that sound is produced by a downward motion on the keys not by cruising tentatively on top of them.  It does help to breathe now and again. I begin.

Have I seen an improvement?  Yes I have.  If nothing else, I have something to think about now besides nerves and the audience and mistakes.  I've contrived a humble beginning to establishing a foundation that consists of something other than doubt and anxiety.  I have a positive opening ritual to pre-empt the negative one. It's my version of the micro level of  playing (apologies to Rudolf Serkin and Jonathan Biss) and it will hopefully get me to the macro. The idea of a performance still looms but now seems doable.The lights aren't Kleigs, the piano isn't an attack dog, the audience is, if not friendly, at least remote, almost out of mind as I go down my checklist.   The wallpaper phenomenon is far less and the amateur performer soldiers on.

First Thing: Is Maureen Full of Mullarkey?

Still on the tail of the dust-up over the New York Archdiocese's  Making All Things New campaign, we have First Things and National Review persisting with articles about good, bad and ugly parishes in New York City.  I hesitate even to cite the articles but, here, here and here, it's only fair that one reads and decides for oneself.

In these articles, everything from clashing ideologies to art history to bureaucratic politics is invoked to report on what reads like ad hominem attacks on Our Saviour's newest pastor and his very bad horrible decision to remove artist Ken Woo's icons from the Church of Our Saviour.  As a former parishioner at Our Saviour, I too signed the petition to save the icons and I too lamented the loss of Fr. Rutler as pastor.   I also lamented the loss of the religious education program.  (Oh, you didn't know about that?  Funny that neither First Things or National Review has picked up on the termination of the program--eighty kids, numerous loyal families and some 20 volunteer catechists and volunteer director summarily told by the new pastor, Good-bye!)

Fr. Robbins, or the mere idea of him, has managed to get the very blood of some so-called traditionalist New York Catholics boiling.  It's true that at Our Saviour, the air has changed, but Fr. Robbins hasn't yet replaced the wafer with Wonder Bread nor has he brought in liturgical dancers or a rock band. The Mass continues to be a rather reverential one.

What comes through in these articles is an ideologue's vitriolic disdain for that which challenges his ideology.  In this case, the target is the likes of a Fr. Robbins who, with his co-conspirator Cardinal Dolan, himself by now a satyr with tail and horns, dares to oppose a Fr. Rutler, definitely a heavenly cherub who can, by the way,  more than adequately defend himself if need be. It's predictable now if not comical to hear how suspect and disagreeable are all those who do not present as sufficiently traditionalist and orthodox to the traditionalist Catholic New Yorker who requires that others of us pass muster, we lesser ones being those who surely collude and conspire to deprive traditionalists of their priests, their parishes, their masses.

Where's the Catholic joy?  Who would want to be a part of this orthodox crowd when they whine and stamp their feet so miserably because their sensitivities are upset. 

A Week of Saints

St. Kateri Tekakwitha, St. Bonaventure, St. Camillus de Lellis but we began the week with the Bavarian Holy Roman Emperor St. Henry II of Bamberg whose saintly wife Cunegunde is buried with him in the Dom in Bamberg, Germany.  I decline to post my plain photos of Bamberg except for the one below. Besides Henry and Cunegunde's Riemenschneider sarcophagus in the Dom and all the other sights of this Bavarian city, the Age of Faith lingers in modern-day Bamberg if you walk around a bit.

A crucifix at the end of a quiet street leading back to the Bahnhof in Bamberg

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Dr. Nucatola

Is Dr. Nucatola a good doctor?  She looks presentable, very normal actually, and she speaks well, self-assured and articulate.  She must be fairly well trained in her field.

She's talking about salvaging and selling the livers, lungs and hearts of aborted babies as she chats glibly in a restaurant over a glass of wine and some salad.  She's a professional, looks to be a young woman.  What is the culture that raised up a Deborah Nucatola we might ask.

Pillar To Post On Transgenderism

If you read Paul McHugh here and Fr. Robert Barron here ,you go from a medical to a theological perspective on the subject of transgenderism, and there's not much ground left on which to build any kind of rationale for what the Bruce Jenners of the world have done to themselves. Unless, of course, one persists with the kind of thinking described in this article.  Finally, enter a philosopher, here, to discuss gender identity.

McHugh, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University which led the way in sex change operations, lays it out pretty clearly.  Sex change operations haven't been performed at Johns Hopkins since the 70s; no benefits have been shown and in fact the suicide rate and psychological problems increased among those who had undergone the operation.  Gender dysphoria, explains Dr. McHugh, is a psychological problem akin to anorexia nervosa   Using the Emperor-Has-No-Clothes approach, McHugh deftly explains the dishonesty and deception that leads anyone in our society (but most tragically young people who become persuaded to undergo transgender "treatments") to believe that changing their body will cure their dysphoria.  Dr. McHugh writes:  "Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they “identify.” In that lies their problematic future."

Enter Fr. Barron who refers us to Gnosticism, that heresy which says that matter is evil, that our physical bodies are an encumbrance, that a secret knowledge, gnosis, will set our souls free from the material world which imprisons us.  Fr. Barron points out the similarities to the transgender cry--I'm really a man (or woman) "trapped" inside a physical body which, if I change it, will set the man (or woman) inside me free.  Fr. Barron writes, .". . . the gnostic heresy has proven remarkably durable, reasserting itself across the centuries. Its most distinctive mark is precisely the denigration of matter and the tendency to set the spirit and the body in an antagonistic relationship. This is why many thinkers have identified the anthropology of René Descartes, which has radically influenced modern and contemporary attitudes, as neo-gnostic. Descartes famously drove a wedge between spirit and matter, or in his language, between the res cogitans (thinking thing) and the res extensa (thing extended in space)."

He concludes, "Until we realize that the lionization of Caitlyn Jenner amounts to an embracing of Gnosticism, we haven’t grasped the nettle of the issue."

As for what the Church teaches, we are to believe in neither Cartesian dualism nor Gnostic heresies but in the body and soul as inseparable parts of our humanity.  Extrapolating from what Dr. McHugh says, science, that is, the natural world, and the Church bring us to the same spot.  We are created male and female and any unrest some individual may feel with his or her physical body doesn't mean that God made a mistake.  It means that individual needs some help.

It seemed to me this quartet of articles on gender and sexuality complemented one another and enlightened in a helpful way.  These thoughts are a mere skating on the surface of the topic.

Forgiveness in South Carolina

The example of the good people of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina does make an impression. Their act of forgiveness is being hailed as a demonstration of  Christian virtue, a living out of their faith.  But glib praise for their actions is just talk if there's no understanding of the nature of forgiveness.  It's as easy to say I'm sorry and not mean it as it is to say I forgive you and not mean it.

Fr. Koterski, Jesuit priest and professor at Fordham University extemporized on the subject of forgiveness one evening several years ago at a lecture he was giving on another topic.  Fr. Koterski cautioned first off about forgiveness being offered prematurely.

Forgiveness is not a matter of excusing or dismissing a wrong and one shouldn't feel an obligation to forgive if there's no forgiveness in one's heart. Forgiveness comes from assessing and working through the wrong that was suffered, resulting finally in an interior transformation in the heart of the wronged party. There is relationship to Fr. Koterski's explanation of forgiveness. The wronged party needs to make a good faith attempt to repair the damage that was done even if it was the fault of the other party. The wronged party will seek to elicit 'something better' from the offender, appeal to the good in his soul.   The offender, too, should show a willingness to repair the relationship lest the wronged party simply be manipulated by an empty apology.

To date, Dylan Roof has shown no remorse.  While the victims' relatives may be fulfilling their half of the forgiveness relationship, without the murderer's contrition,  their forgiveness may be incomplete if not simply, well, not forgiveness.

Another caution in the Church's teaching of forgiveness, explained  here,  is not to confuse forgiveness with loving one's enemy.  The former relies on relationship.  The latter relies on our individual ability to see the face of Christ in those who harm us.

St. Maria Goretti, the 12 year old girl who was repeatedly stabbed by her attacker, Alessandro Serenelli, with whom she did have a relationship, uttered her forgiveness before her death saying, "Through love of Jesus, I forgive him with all my heart."   Alessandro is said to have replied that that was impossible.  Some six years into his prison sentence, however, Alessandro came up with his half of the bargain. He repented, asked forgiveness of Maria's mother and spent the rest of his life in a Capuchin monastery. He also testified at the beatification hearings for Maria's cause for sainthood.

Those relatives of the victims in South Carolina may well be saints or saints in the making.  St. Maria Goretti aside, however, their expressions of forgiveness less than a week after the murders seem premature.  Rather, I think what they're giving voice to is their Christian duty to love their enemy, to turn the other cheek. Maybe that's the first step in forgiveness.  Their message to the murderer is admirable and is certainly a worthy public expression of their private faith.  Perhaps Dylan Roof, like Alessandro Serenelli, will one day say I'm sorry and mean it making forgiveness in this callous crime complete.

A Tango Interlude

Sitting under the clock (or that black plaque on the wall)  is your writer who had earlier played two tangos on the piano in the corner while her tango friends danced beautifully.  Two professionals performed a bit later in the evening and here they are.

We also saw a tango milonga performed last night by a male/female couple though I don't see the video up yet.  Read about the tradition of men dancing with men in tango here or here.  Be sure to watch the video of the De Fazio brothers dancing a tango milonga.  I've copied it for you below.

Audrey

This past year as a catechist a mini theme of my young charges' classes was to review the saint of the day.  A favorite question was always,  Is there a saint with my name?

It's sometimes hard these days to find a saint namesake, especially for the girls.  Very few medieval parents thought to name their daughters Harper, Tiffany or Brooklyn.  To my surprise, however, when I opened my Big Book of Women Saints today, I discovered a St. Audrey.  

My oldest sister is Audrey.  I've always been puzzled as to how my parents came up with the name.  It seemed so formal, maybe British, not exactly old-fashioned, but obscure, nothing like my sister.  Aside from Audrey Hepburn and Audrey Meadows, who would be an Audrey?  

Audrey or variously Ethelreda, Ethldreda, Ethelthryth, Editrudis, was an East Anglian princess who wished to devote her life to God.  However, she was married off at a young age and was given  the Isle of Ely as a wedding present.  When the first husband died, Audrey was again married off by her royal parents for purposes of political alliances. Audrey chose  to live chastely with her new husband as she had with the previous and troubles and a miraculous escape ensued.  Audrey returned to her island and founded a monastery there of which she was the abbess.

Some accounts of the saintly Etheldreda-Audrey tell that she died of a tumor on the neck due to her early love of necklaces. I don't think my sister will have to worry about that, since I've never known her to wear even the most modest necklace. (On the other hand, neither did my sister ever receive an island as a present.)  It's not that we read about saints with our name as a horoscope to predict our future. It's more that we can let our imagination run free for a moment to wonder over the fact that we share something as fundamental as our name with a figure of virtue and holiness distant from us in time and historical setting by hundreds of years.

Audrey's body was found to be incorrupt after her death in 679 A.D.  Butler reflects on Audrey in this way:  "The soul cannot truly serve God while it is involved in the distractions and pleasures of the world.  Etheldreda knew this, and chose rather to be a servant of Christ her Lord than the mistress of an earthly court."

Pope Francis According to Brian Lehrer

As always, Fr. Rutler doesn't disappoint with his article in Crisis about the Pope's ecology encyclical. Fr. Rutler writes, " there is a double danger in using it [the encyclical] as an economic text or scientific thesis."  

Having just listened to Brian Lehrer discuss the encyclical with Professor Christiana Peppard at Fordham University it's clear that the mainstream media will misuse, misunderstand and bungle badly what the Pope has written.

Whatever one may think of him, Pope Francis is at least a Catholic with a fairly good chance of getting to heaven.  Brian Lehrer on the other hand is an East Coast intellectual with a radio program. His knowledge of the faith is such that his follow-up show on the encyclical will consist of a phone-in to learn if and what parishioners will have heard from the pulpit on Sunday regarding climate change.  For Lehrer, apparently, this will reveal a significant truth about the Church.

Given the Brian Lehrers of the world, it's up to us Catholics not to engage in the "double danger" Fr. Rutler writes about.  Jesus came to fulfill the Law regardless of which side wins Brian Lehrer's papal encyclical phone-in derby on next week's show.

London Grove Tomato

The London Grove Tomato 

It's not everyday I'd write about a tomato.  But this is a tomato that my late father developed, and, for some time now, I've been crusading to fix the London Grove Tomato's provenience properly in Chester County, Pennsylvania gardening history.  

The London Grove Tomato, until recently known mostly to patrons of the London Grove Plant Sale in Kennett Square, PA and others in those environs, has begun to appear on a few websites with a strikingly dissonant description.  For example, on the Happy Cat website,  the London Grove Tomato is described as  “A very old and rare Quaker Heirloom from friends of ours here in Chester County,” 

The London Grove Tomato appears on other websites with similar descriptions.  Amishland Heirloom Seeds says it’s also called the Rabbit’s Foot Tomato.  The newsletter of Buy Local Buy PA writes that the London Grove Tomato is said to have been in the “London Grove Quaker community for about 100 years.”  Wow.

My father, Leo Robert Daiuta, is generally acknowledged as the person who created this tomato and then began selling it at the London Grove Plant Sale in Kennett Square, PA, hence the eponymous name.  If the London Grove Tomato is 100 years old, my father must have been going on about 150 when he died this past August 2014 at the actual age of 92.

While my father is no longer here to answer questions about the tomato, I do have jotted down a little history of the tomato as he gave it to me back in 2008.  My account has been corroborated by others in the London Grove/Kennett area, though, absent their corroboration, I'd be quite confident that my accounting is about as accurate a one as you'll get.

My father was a first generation Italian who grew up in West Chester, PA and after marrying my mother, they moved to Kennett Square in 1947.  In the early 1950s both he and my mother, neither of them previously Quakers, joined the London Grove Monthly meeting in Kennett Square, PA hence my father's (and the tomato's) connection with the Quaker community in the area.

A Quaker provenience for the lovely London Grove Tomato is shaky.  At least part of the reason the London Grove Tomato exists at all is because my father, a zealous gardener, wanted to grow the “paste tomato” that he remembered his mother using and that his father or a neighboring uncle probably grew in a small back yard in West Chester.  If the London Grove Tomato is anything, it’s maybe Italian-Quaker though it's more definitely Italian-American, just like my father.

As for the age of the London Grove Tomato, I don’t think my father would put it at much more than 40 years old.  As he told it to me, in the mid 1970s, my father asked a cousin in Italy to bring him the seed for the Corno di Vaca tomato, a long, hollow tomato in the shape of a cow’s horn that the Italians used to make tomato paste.  The hollowness of the tomato was  a minus in my father’s mind and so he set out to come up with something more to his liking, deciding to cross the Corno di Vaca with a Rutgers.  

My father was an engineer by training and an incurable inventor by nature.  He sought to modify or re-create nearly everything that crossed his path.  The tomato may have been just one more of his projects to pass the time, but given the intentional care he gave to this project over a period of growing seasons, I suspect he had a particular result in mind.  That he saw his new creation as finito is evidenced at least in part by the fact that my mother staged several photo shoots of the tomato on our back patio!  Her photo shows the familiar cow horn shape with a shining, unblemished and smooth red skin.  Now that’s a tomato!

As people enjoy the London Grove Tomato it occurs to me they might want to forego romantic images of industrious Quakers tilling the soils of Chester County, PA 100 years ago.  Rather, I would hope they’d picture the stalwart Romans of the early days of the Republic with their love of the plow and the earth and their pride in all that honest sweat and toil could produce from their land. This is after all a tomato of Italian origin, from an Italian-American whose "backyard" garden covered a half acre of land and yielded a harvest to feed our family for the entire year and then some. The original farm to fork kind of thing you might say. 

The newer generation of farmers, those at Happy Cat and Amishland as for-instances, might be said to farm as part of a whole philosophy of life defined by an ideology of food or a politics of gardening.  Their outlook might be said to draw from or encompass the slow food movement, the farm to table (or directly to the fork) push, the enjoinders to eat fresh and local and organic, to embrace tradition, to preserve the environment, to eschew the military-industrial complex while you're at it.  And, even in the 21st century, to get back to the earth, a place apparently not yet reached since the journey there began in the 1970s.  Still, one would think these philosopher-farmers would be interested in accuracy. When I sent a message to Happy Cat Farms saying that their description of the London Grove Tomato was off, I got a response that said:"Hello,Sorry but it is you who is wrong, but thanks for writing. Happy cat."  Alas, their dissonant description of a "Quaker" London Grove Tomato remains on their website.  

By now there are probably many variations on the original Corno di Vaca (which itself may have many different names) that the Italian immigrants of the late 19^th century brought over to the U.S.  In fact, in Staten Island, NY, I’ve seen an accidental cross between the Corno di Vaca and a cherry tomato.  While there may be other Italian Luther Burbanks out there the only one I know of is my father.  I’m very proud of his Italian heritage and I think of the semi-Italian London Grove tomato as a part of his legacy.  

May the London Grove Tomato live on! And may my father rest in peace.  And, Buon Gusto as you eat tomatoes this summer, especially should you sample the fine London Grove Tomato.

National Review's War On Women

Obviously behind in my reading, I just read "On A LARC" by Robert VerBruggen in the December 14, 2014 issue of National Review magazine (NR).  You can access all or part of the article here.  

My response in the form of a letter to the editor at NR follows, but there are basically two points so excessively irritating about the article.  One is the writer's, well, his male chauvinism though I hate that expression.  I'm not by any means a feminist, but VerBruggen shows himself to be brainwashed by 50 years of  feminist lies and so is one of those men who perhaps unwittingly, though conveniently, diminishes and takes advantage of the dignity of the woman as a human person.

The second excessively irritating thing about the article is its suggestion that conservatives need to nip a little here, tuck a little there, adjust their beliefs and views so they can get along with the Left.
This is the worst kind of cowardice.  If this is NR's stance, fine, but then it can't rightfully call itself "up to the minute conservative commentary."  

My comments:

All the points in  Robert Verbruggen's article "On a LARC" (December 31, 2014) follow logically one from the other if one accepts his premises, which he finally states halfway through his article.  He writes:  It's not as if we're going to ban birth control, eject women from the workplace, make abstinence until marriage. . . common, . . . .talk today's youth into marrying in their teens or early 20s, . . . . .

 

We're not?  How does he know?  Mr. Verbruggen writes that "many conservatives might prefer to bring back the marriage culture that America enjoyed decades ago,. . . . ."  That's a handy over-simplification Verbruggen makes to allow him to draw the mis-guided conclusions he goes on to promote in his article.  

 

Forget a return to the climate of the pre-60s revolution that Verbruggen implies some of us are looking for.   We seek an awareness of the human person that includes regarding sex, not as some animalistic urge to be indulged at will, but as an aspect of our humanity that yields the most benefits to society and to us as individuals when enjoyed within the bonds of marriage.  We seek a respect for and acknowledgment of the role that marriage plays in reducing poverty and providing the best environment for raising children.  We look to educate teenagers about the value of their sexuality, the benefits of chastity and abstinence, and to impress upon young adults, especially women, the perils of single motherhood both for themselves and their fatherless children.  We seek to re-educate men like Robert Verbruggen who've been bought and sold by the feminists as he writes "Giving women more control over their fertility is the most promising way to address this situation." 

 

No, Robert, women don't need more control over their fertility.  Men and women together will benefit when they control  and respect their sexuality which is the gift and responsibility of both sexes.  When it comes to sex, the commonly-held wisdom, and Mr. Verbruggen holds it in this article, is that rational adults and silly, hot-headed teenagers simply cannot control their sexual urges nor can they be held responsible for them.  Yet, despite this inability, Robert Verbruggen has come to the remarkable conclusion that women alone can shoulder the load for our society's uncontrollable sexual urges by having a health care professional  (I use the phrase advisedly)  shove a piece of plastic into their reproductive organs.  The women-folk won't mind. And don't complain about infections, cramps or other deleterious side effects either, gals.  How convenient that one group in society, women, can bear the burden of responsibility for everyone else, including men.  Mr. Verbruggen illustrates nicely the Real War on Women. 

 

More to Verbruggen's own point I suppose, is his notion that women and their IUDs will bring conservatives, pro-lifers and "religious people" to the bargaining table with the Left on controversies surrounding contraception and abortion. This is appeasement and carries with it the tacit implication that the Left is really right on these issues and that conservatives ought to change or at least massage their beliefs enough to be nice and just get along with everyone else, that they should be moderates.  

It's a large task, changing minds and hearts about foundational issues such as human sexuality, marriage, family and abortion when they've been obscured by the utilitarian, secular and politically expedient values Robert Verbruggen gives voice to in this article. It's a disappointment to read such an article in the pages of National Review.

" . . .Standing Their Ground:" Cpl Jonathan Yale and Lance Cpl. Jordan Haerter

A good article to read today, Veteran's Day, is  this speech from May of 2011 written up in The American Legion Magazine.  

The speech is about heroism, the American character and the final six seconds in the lives of two young marines, Cpl Jonathan Yale and Lance Cpl. Jordan Haerter. It's delivered by  Lt. General John Kelly who only four days before giving this speech lost one of  his sons, a Marine, in Afghanistan.

After describing both Yale's and Haerter's background, Lt. General Kelly lays out the picture as the two Marines take up their posts:

They then relieved two other Marines on watch and took up their post at the entry-control point of Joint Security Station Nasser, in the Sophia section of Ramadi, al Anbar, Iraq.A few minutes later, a large blue truck turned down the alleyway – perhaps 60 to 70 yards in length – and sped its way through the serpentine concrete Jersey walls. The truck stopped just short of where the two were posted and detonated, killing them both. Twenty-four brick masonry houses were damaged or destroyed. A mosque 100 yards away collapsed. The truck’s engine came to rest 200 yards away, knocking down most of a house down before it stopped. Our explosive experts reckoned the blast was caused by 2,000 pounds of explosive. Because these two young infantrymen didn’t have it in their DNA to run from danger, they saved 150 of their Iraqi and American brothers in arms.When I read the situation report a few hours after it happened, I called the regimental commander for details. Something about this struck me as different. We expect Marines, regardless of rank or MOS, to stand their ground and do their duty, and even die in the process, if that is what the mission takes. But this just seemed different. 

Lt. Gen Kelly goes on to explain that the only witnesses to the event were Iraqis, Iraqis who ran away.  One of them reported as follows:  “Sir, in the name of God, no sane man would have stood there and done what they did. They saved us all.”

A film of the incident was later recovered showing Cpl. Yale and Lance Cpl. Haerter as they fired at the oncoming truck. 

Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording, they never stepped back. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder-width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could. They had only one second left to live, and I think they knew.The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God. Six seconds.

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A "Cult of Well-Being"?

Are you following the Synod on the Family?  There was testimony from a Brazilian couple, Arturo and Hermelinda As Zambeline, at the Synod on October 9th.  They head up something called Our Lady's Team or the Equipe Notre-Dame Movement in Brazil.  They spoke about the role of sexuality in marriage, but they ended by calling on the bishops and priests to better educate the Catholic laity on contraception.  They said:

Holy Father, Synodal Fathers, ladies and gentlemen, if at least married couples found light and support with the clergy it would already be a great encouragement! Many times contradictory advice aggravates their confusion. We ask, the Magisterium to give the Fathers and faithful the great lines of a pastoral pedagogy, which helps to adopt and observe the principles agreed by Humanae Vitae.

Here is the text of their remarks.

In contrast to the Catholic view of marriage expressed in Arturo and Hermelinda's concern for "openness to life"  and the way in which marriage serves to "sanctify," here's another take on marriage from this human interest piece that was up on AOL the other day.  I read it against my better judgment and then spent way too much time wondering why I had bothered to read it, but it got a lot of comments. Families and marriages must be important to people.

To save you the possible misery of actually reading this piece, one Kama Shockey, a military wife, decided to move herself and her young daughter out of their remote location in southern California, where her often-deployed husband was posted, to go to Flagstaff, Arizona 400 miles away.  This was so she could be in a "thriving community" rather than be sad on post.  That I'm aware, this isn't such a highly unusual decision nor is it a particularly bad one. What struck me as weird was not the decision itself, but what this young wife and mother understood a family to be.

Kama talks about her family as if they're a casual affiliation of two adult people with separate lives running on different tracks. These two people are entitled to be happy, to "feel right."  These two adults happen to have a daughter who is also entitled to be happy.  Curiously, the daughter's path to happiness sounds an awful lot like her mother's path to happiness, despite what must be a significant age difference.   Kama fancies herself quite the post-modern, liberated and empowered woman, very wrapped up in her own feminine fulfillment.  She says:

I was teaching my daughter that no matter what her partner does in life, she can support him (or her) while also making her own goals, her own career, her own life a true priority. She will never be too old, too settled, too domestic to start over if what she's doing doesn't feel right. She was learning to define her own life, and realizing her mom isn't obligated to stay in a community of women whose only thing in common is the fact that their husbands were all gone at the same time.

Arturo and Hermelinda, our Brazilian Catholic couple testifying about marriage at the Synod on the Family, have been married for 41 years.  I hope Ben and Kama last even half that long, but I doubt it. Kama seems a bit too happy that Ben is sitting alone on his half of the matching furniture watching "bad DVDs" while she's doing what feels right. According to Kama, Ben knows this is all okay because he's a man.  Really. Hopefully, as a man, Ben will wake up soon enough to discover his unique role as provider, protector and male in the marriage.

I console myself with the possibility that Kama and Ben are not real people, that their tale is just a made-for-internet story.  But even if Kama and Ben aren't real, there are so many other married couples just like them who are: single women who labor under the illusion that they can raise a child alone, that their children don't need fathers; young couples who first have a baby, then move in together and then, maybe, marry "later;"  men whose manly roles in the family have been denigrated and shredded to the point of unrecognizable;  already-married couples whose commitment flags when they decide they're no longer "happy;" and those who view marriage not as mutual fulfillment with sacrifices but as individual fulfillment that's fun and easy.   Kama and Ben are, lamentably, poster children for the current state of marriage and the family.  They depict only too well what one of the Synod's cardinals has called the "momentary cult of well-being."  ( read  here and here).

I have to admire the likes of Arturo and Hermelinda as they and other couples testify at the Synod and articulate to the bishops and other assembled some of the specific ways in which Church teaching might help the laity to understand and talk to others about the truth of marriage and family so we might work to correct some of the distortions the culture imposes upon us.

How to Be A Nice Catholic When It Comes To Homosexuality

The Church's on-going Synod on the Family had a recent testimony about including homosexual couples in (Catholic) family celebrations.  The testimony was given by a husband and wife pair, the Pirolas, who offered up the view that friends of theirs were doing a noble thing by welcoming their (the friends')  homosexual son and his partner to the family Christmas celebration.  In the Pirolas' words,  “What a model of evangelization for parishes as they respond to similar situations in their neighbourhood! It is a practical example of what the Instrumentum laboris [essentially the working papers] says concerning the Church’s teaching role and its main mission to let the world know of God’s love.”

In other words, say the Pirolas, take the love that God has for each of us with all our various flaws and mirror that love to others who, just like us,  have their own flaws. We'll be living our faith and evangelizing to the world!  The gay son and his partner won't be offended!  Everyone can have Christmas together without a showdown!

Besides their rather bold assertion concerning the "main mission" of the Church, the Pirolas have also unwittingly, or conveniently, homogenized the matter of God's love to solve the thorny problem of how the Catholic faithful should engage with matters of homosexuality. Their comment suggests that God's love is a simple matter, easy to understand, easy to communicate to others and easy to attain. The presumption in the Pirolas testimony is that God loves us no matter what --yes--but that he doesn't really expect us to conform to his ways.  Not exactly. For starters, one might recall that when Christ defended the adulterous woman against her detractors, he did also tell her to go and sin no more.  The Ten Commandments come to mind as well.

In rebuttal to the Pirolas sanguine conclusion about their friends' behavior,  Voice of the Family  (VOF) countered: “It is because we desire the eternal happiness of those we love that we need to support them to overcome temptation and to live chastely. This path is not easy, but nor is any cross that is the way of true mercy, love and new life.”  Voice of the Family mentions the damage done to all members of a family including young children when actions "normalise the disorder of homosexuality."

Voice of the Family rightly points out that the son's homosexual actions are a wrong according to the Church, a wrong in need of correction if a depth of love and caring are to be shown for the son.  VOF is right to note that there are those in a Catholic family who will see the acceptance of a homosexual partner at a family event as approval of that partnership and, by extension, see homosexual behavior as compatible with Church teaching, which it isn't.

I had hoped that one of the outcomes of the Synod would be guidance from our bishops and priests as to how faithful Catholics might engage the modern, secular culture on the matter of homosexuality. More specifically, I had hoped that the bishops would begin to fashion a way that the Catholic laity might deal honestly and openly with the matter of homosexuality in the family.  Like abortion, co-habitation, pre-marital sex and divorce, homosexuality is an issue in many families, Catholics no exception.

Though they set the stage nicely for laying out the dilemma of witnessing to Church teaching on homosexuality, neither the Pirolas or VOF provide much of an answer. The Pirolas demonstrate a healthy longing to spread Christian love, but they seem woefully unconcerned about simultaneously spreading a fractured if not false picture of the Church's teaching on homosexuality. In their zeal to spread the love, they have also fudged over the matter of witnessing to the truth. We are enjoined (in Matthew 18:12-17) to correct error as part of the loving care shown to others so that not even "one of these little ones should perish."

On the other hand, VOF telling the culture about the "disorders" of homosexuality will not only fall on deaf ears, it will fall on hostile, combative ears.  The very intent and focus of the activist homosexual community is to gain society's emotional and legal stamp-of-approval for homosexuality as a normal  and very "ordered" sexual behavior.  While VOF may understandably talk to fellow Catholics about the disorder of homosexuality, it will only sound like the punitive, authoritarian Church wanting to bring down fire and brimstone on evil homosexuals if  we talk to the secular culture in those terms.

How then to be loving and truthful, to point out error without arrogance. If, when discussing homosexuality,  the Church has as its primary focus to not offend the gay person in the family, to not offend the  secular culture and its mainstream media mouthpieces, then the Pirolas and the rest of us---I think of our own Cardinal Dolan here--might don our rose-colored glasses, host homosexual partners for Christmas, march in all manner of parades and even publicly yuk it up with the President of the United States whose aggressive policies threaten the religious freedom of Catholics.

If, however, the point is to get at the truth of human sexuality, including the purpose of being created male and female, while still able to engage the modern culture, we as Catholics will have to use a bit more ingenuity than even VOF who, though they speak the truth of the matter, speak it in language foreign to the secular culture we're trying to reach.

Catholic Parishes in NYC: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Michael Voris sounds off in this video about bad parish closings in the Archdiocese of New York and the bad Cardinal Dolan who's supposedly favoring bad liberal parishes to be kept open over good "traditional" parishes to be closed.  Michael makes it sound like a pretty bad and ugly scene in NYC.  He covers one potential parish closing that's created a certain amount of buzz among some of us, Church of the Holy Innocents in mid-town Manhattan, West side.  Here is an accounting by one blogger and another here.

I made a point of attending Candlemass at Holy Innocents a couple years ago, partly to attend a Candlemass service, but also to take in the restored Brumidi mural.  The Mass was beautiful, reverent and packed, but the church itself, exterior and interior,apart from the Brumidi mural, emodies the gritty, busy, dirty neighborhood where it's located.  Never a neighborhood where I'd choose to linger, I felt the same about the church sanctuary.

One visit for Candlemass doesn't mean much of course,and the church may just be in need of some tender, loving care.  It is the case that Holy Innocents is now under the direction of the good Fr. Rutler and it does appear that he was rather unceremoniously decamped to St. Michael's all the way west from Church of Our Saviour where he left behind a renewed spiritual life, aesthetic revitalizations along with many saddened parishioners.  All this accurately noted by Voris.

One of the things Michael Voris isn't accurate about and never fully explains is the Archdiocese-wide, Making All Things New initiative. Voris only mentions a "ten-year gallop" of closing parishes, a "massive contraction" in the diocese with a "hit list" where the litmus test for survival is how traditional the parish is, and if it's traditional, it goes on the chopping block. On one side is the good Holy Innocents, good Our Saviour and good St. Michael's among Voris's "thriving community" parishes list as opposed to the bad St. Francis of Assisi on 31st Street (gay-friendly) and the deplorable Church of St. Francis Xavier on 16th Street (gay-friendly).  Michael Voris's analysis spirals ever-downward with doom, gloom and dire warnings.  Michael, why so much nay-saying with most of it not fully explained?

There's no mystery about Making All Things New.  It was previewed for us back in 2010 by then-bishop Dolan and he made very clear what would be happening to some of the 400 parishes in the diocese. They would be merged with others creating clusters and some will be closed.  There's a wealth of information on the initiative on the archdiocese website and it's reported on frequently in parish bulletins and Catholic media. My local parish regularly informs of the meetings, reports and progress of the initiative and most everyone is quite aware of the new clusters being formed, including the saddened parishioners at Our Saviour who, yes, do feel deprived of their pastor and in some sense their church.

Closer to home, in my own neighborhood, St. Brigid's was scheduled for destruction back in 2001.   Its closure had nothing to do with being either Voris's good or bad, though maybe it was ugly in the sense that it was literally falling down.  Located all the way over on Avenue B, St. Brigid's is as close to being as far east as you can get without being in Brooklyn and it's demise would have held little interest for anyone except its faithful parishioners. As one of them commented:  “I kept thinking: If we lived on Park Avenue or Madison Avenue, they would not be treating us like this.”  I don't think Michael Voris would have cared much about St. Brigid's either.  There was no way to spice up a plain old parish closing due to a decaying physical plant with no money to restore it located in a neighborhood over-run with non-church going college students, youthful out-of-town transplants and curious tourists who probably don't even know the church exists.

However, St. Brigid's survives today (with the inclusion of St. Emeric's) and is now in my "cluster" for a rather simple reason--$20 million from an anonymous donor.

Maybe a like-minded guardian angel will emerge for the Church of the Holy Innocents. And while the guardian angel is at it, maybe he or she can save all the other parishes in financial difficulty in the diocese, not to mention tossing a billion or so to help out a decaying urban Northeast center, New York City itself.  It's the stuff of a good mystery story to believe, as Michael Voris suggests, that the diocese is cash-strapped because it colluded with the devil to create a diocese filled with gay parishes.  The Archdiocese of New York is closing schools and churches, dealing with homosexual parishes, fighting the liberal vs. traditional battle and generally having to "make all things new" in much the same way that many dioceses across the country are doing I would think.

Where is our guardian angel?  Sir or madam, please bring us several million dollars and several hundred thousand faithful Catholics who have lots of children, love traditional Catholicism and want to live in New York City and keep its parishes alive.

Millenials Are A Mess

I saw an article entitled Why The Millenials Are Doing So Poorly and figured I should find out just how badly my kids are doing.  The article features a photo of a kid in a dunce cap.

Just so we know who we're talking about, according to the Pew Research Center, Millenials are those born 1981 to the present.  The Baby Boomers are defined by the years 1946-1964 and the Gen X-ers  are those born between 1965 and 1980. (Millenials are sometimes split into Generation Y born between 1975 - 1992 and Generation Z born between 1993 and present.)  Finally, the Silent Generation is the 1928-1945 group.

The results of a Pew Research Center Study are at least part of the reason that Mark Bauerlein from Emory University, the author of the article, is in abject despair about this age group who he essentially trashes in this article.  I read the Pew Research article he refers to and I even took the Pew Research Quiz to find out how "millenial" I am and I couldn't agree less with Bauerlein.  He's writing on Minding The Campus, a website whose focus I share (or thought I did), but, frankly, an academic is an academic. Nobody is ever okay except them.

A quick Wikipedia check of Bauerlein reveals him to be a convert to Catholicism and a liberal or libertarian on social and political issues.  He wrote a book called The Dumbest Generation.  He sounds a lot like Michelle Obama on The Tonight Show talking about knuckleheads.

Bauerlein notes that Millenials tend to vote as Democrats, give Obama a fairly high approval rating, lean favorably toward activist government.  But on the "quickie"quiz, Millenials identify as politically conservative in roughly the same proportion as the other age groups.

Bauerlein writes that Millenials "judge politics by how it affects them, and we see that personal-only perspective in their social focus."  While it is the case that a high percentage of Millenials have some sort of "social networking profile," it is also the case that a lot of people must be on electronic devices a lot of the time;  I text as much as a Millenial, I play video games as much as  Millenial (oh dear), read a daily paper as much as a Millenial (rarely if ever) and watch TV as much as a Millenial (rarely if ever).

A defining characteristic of Millenials according to Pew Research studies is disaffiliation.  Millenials "are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics."  I find that to be anecdotally true among the Millenials I know including my own kids.  I don't think that's necessarily a bad trait.  Yes, it could reflect apathy or malaise but it may also reflect a healthy skepticism of the lines that have been drawn in the sand for the Millenials by their predecessors.

Millenials didn't come from nowhere.  They're  inheritors of a popular culture and a set of values that they didn't create or even help to evolve as did many of us Boomers, whose children the Millenials are.    Heaping criticism and disdain on them as Bauerlein does is mis-placed, uncharitable. Low marriage rates among Millenials, low levels of social trust, skepticism that God exists, where did it all come from? We have the opportunity to influence, mentor and educate this group. And the responsibility.  Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, must cross paths with hundreds of students a year.   As Catholics, if that applies, and it apparently does to Bauerlein, we're called to evangelize the culture.

Get out there and get to work, man, and stop crying in your beer with grumpy articles like this one.

Is Meriam Ibrahim A Modern-Day Perpetua or Felicity?

Meriam Yehya Ibrahim is the Sudanese woman sentenced to death in her native country of Sudan for having married a Christian.  Though Meriam professes Christianity, the government claims that because her father was Muslim, Meriam is a Muslim and therefore she's violated the (Muslim) faith by marrying a Christian.   The account of her husband, Daniel Wani, is, meanwhile, a bit confusing.  Apparently a Sudanese, he's variously described as being a U.S. citizen, a lawyer, living in the United States and here it states he's in a wheelchair and dependent on Meriam for everything.

Viewed from a Western, 21st century perspective, the story is hard to believe, bordering on the unimaginable especially when one considers that Meriam was sent to prison for her so-called crime of apostasy while 8 months pregnant, is in prison with her 20-month old son, is to be given 100 lashes and put to death by hanging.  Is it the 21st century or the 11th, 2014 or 1014?  Or is it perhaps 203 A.D.

The Future Victims of the Colosseum
Henryk Siemiradzki

That's the year Roman Emperor Septimius Severus ordered a group of Christians fed to wild beasts if they would not denounce their Christian faith.  Among them was Vivia Perpetua, then 22 with an infant son (Meriam is 27 with a young son), along with a slave, Felicity, who was pregnant when imprisoned and gave birth to a daughter in prison (as did Meriam).  Perpetua and Felicity, both young mothers, steadfastly professed their faith though gored and bloody. That they endured this most horrific of deaths in a Carthaginian amphitheater is a painful reminder of their astonishing courage and faith. Such martyrdom may or may not be in store for Meriam and I don't know that she's a Catholic, but regardless hers is a modern-day tale suggesting that the Christian persecution and heroism of darker times cannot be relegated to the ash heap of history.

The story of Perpetua and Felicity is easily accessible, but I read a particularly thoughtful account in a little book called Married Saints by John Fink.  You may find more here and perhaps here where you might also take a look at the author's book.