10/11/24

 Friday, October 11. 2024

1962 Second Vatican Council (21st ecumenical) was convened by Pope John XXIII

1986 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev open talks at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland

1991 Law Professor Anita Hill testified Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her    

2002 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to former US President Jimmy Carter 

In bed around 9 after dozing through a dubbed German comedy on AppleTV+ called Where's Wanda? and up at 4:40😊 with Lilly moving out of Geri's bedroom.  

Prednisone, day 150, 5 mg. day 1/28.  Prednisone at 5:00 followed by banana bread.  My left shoulder started being painful yesterday, tender to the touch, and it continues painful this morning.  I'm hoping this isn't a resurgence of the polymyalgia rheumatica.   Breakfast of borscht at 9:00.  Morning meds and 1300 mgs. of 8-Hour Tylenol at 11:00.  Back pain is pretty bad today.  AllBran w/ berries & prunes at 3:30.

Picked up Andy at Ogui's Garage at 8 this morning.  He has the 2008 Honda in for diagnostics and maybe engine repairs.

I gained enough energy around 3 p.m. to work on Ramona for 20 or 25 minutes, eyebrows, eyeballs, hair, and cheeks.  I glazed the roughe on her cheecks and it didn't come out as I had hoped but it's not awful,  The hue is a mix of transparent white and vermillion which is the major hue in the background red behind Ramona.

Mika Brzezinski was the host on Morning Joe this morning.  There are two Mikas: one on stage with Joe Scarborough and one on her own.  Before hooking up with Scarborough, she was an anchor on her own news program.  She is the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, and the sister of American diplomat and ambassador Mark Brzezinski.  She is a graduate of Williams College and a knowledgeable and respected TV journalist, but when is co-hosts with her husband Scarborough, she is reduced to near-nothingness.  She can barely complete one sentence without Scarborough interrupting and ofter disagreeing or correcting her.  Her subordinate role was regularly mocked on SNL with the extraordinary Kate McKinnon playing Mika and Alex Moffat playing Joe ("Mika has added two new exasperated groans to her repertoire.") Scarborough is the rudest host on network or cable TV.

Ezra Klein and Ta-Nahisi Coates.  I listened to an 80-minute conversation between these two men on Klein's podcast on the NYTimes.  The book was about Coates's recent book The Message, and more specifically about his 10-day visit to East Jerusalem and the West Bank about which he said " "I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel" and that the book "lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West."  As usual, I wasn't able to understand all the points asserted either by Klein or by Coates, but I understood enough of it to keep me listening to all 80 minutes of it.   Both men agreed that the situation in the occupied territories was immoral.  Both agreed that Israel is not a real democracy with millions of Palestinians subject to Israel's sovereignty but unable to vote or otherwise contribute to the processes of governance.  I think even Klien agreed that conditions in the occupied territories are comparable to South Africa's system of apartheid and the American South's system of Jim Crow domination.  The matters on which they disagreed seemed less important than those on which they agreed.  Neither seemed to see a way out of the immoral situation that exists today and Klein at least seemed to treat all talk of a "2 state solution" and a "1 state solution'" as delusional and a way of avoiding talking about how to deal with the situation that exists right now.

Two Year Ago Today: Forest Home Green Burial  Stopped at Forest Home Cemetery to buy my green burial plot and pay for the opening and closing of the site 'when the need arises' as the cemetery folks say.  The next step is making some arrangements with Schmidt and Bartelt Funeral Home for their services pre-burial. 

Frontline documentary: America's Great Divide: From Obama to Trump.  I started watching this tremendous documentary which brought back many, many memories: Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, the Tea Party, Joe Wilson of South Carolina ("You lie!"), and of course Donald Trump and 'birtherism.'

Vatican II was a fairly revolutionary gathering that ran from October 11, 1962 until December 8, 1965.  It started when I was in my final year of undergraduate school and ended when I was in Vietnam.  I was not much of a believer in my last year at Marquette, the year in which I was threatened with non-graduation because of my refusal to attend a mandatory religious retreat, nor in my time in Vietnam, where I think I never attended mass or had any contact with the Catholic chaplain.  The Church I grew up with was medieval, indeed feudal.  From my memoir:

In English feudalism after the Norman Conquest, all land was considered ultimately owned by the King.  The king distributed the land to vassals who promised always to render him loyalty, often to pay him money and other things of value, and usually to provide troops to him for his wars.  The top vassals, barons and earls, subdivided their tenures to subvassals who made similar promises of loyalty, rents, military service, or other ‘incidents of tenure’ in return for protection of their tenures by their immediate overlord.  From the king to the barons though layers of ‘subinfeudation’ down to the lowest freeholder there existed a system of reciprocal rights and duties between lords and vassals.

This kind of system is still in play in the Catholic Church.  The Pope has the role of King or more aptly Emperor, the ultimate owner of the Church’s dominions and principalities (in trust for God, of course.)  He has his imperial court or curia.  He divides the imperium into geographical and jurisdictional dioceses (much as the Late Roman Empire was divided into dioceses) in which the usual vassal is the local ‘ordinary’ or bishop, who owes fealty, obedience and a share of his revenues from the diocesan holdings to the Pope in return for the Pope’s loyalty and protection (witness the Pope’s cushy treatment of Bernard Cardinal Law after his resignation in disgrace from the Boston archdiocese.)  The diocese in turn is subdivided geographically and jurisdictionally into parishes controlled by pastors who owe fealty, obedience and a share of the revenues from their parochial holding to the bishop in return for the bishop’s loyalty and protection (witness, as but one example, the bishops’ disgraceful protection of criminal priests in America, Ireland, Austria, and elsewhere.)  It is all very feudal, based on personal power and loyalty relationships between lords and vassals.  It is not mere tradition that causes the bishops to kneel before the Pope and kiss his ring or that calls for new priests and deacons to lie prostrate before their bishop during the Litany of Saints in the ordination liturgy in which they vow obedience to him, or that has the Pope addressed as “Your Holiness.” cardinals as “Your Eminence,” archbishops as “Your Grace,” and bishops as “My Lord.”  These practices and many more have their roots in the imperial courts of the Roman Empire and in European feudalism.  The Church’s feudal power structure was very much in force in the Chicago in which the Clausen children grew up.  Our parish priests were accountable to our pastor, our pastor was accountable only to the archbishop who was accountable only to the Vatican.

That basic feudal organization and power structure was not changed by Vatican II.  The Pope is still King, the bishops are still the vassal nobility, and the parish priests and everyone else in the organization are the serfs.

The Church was the clergy; the role of the laity was to pray, pay and obey.  As Pope Pius X wrote in his 1906 encyclical  Vehementer Nos:

 

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.  So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end  of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.

What the Council did do was make the Church more marketable to a 20th-century religious market by moving away from liturgy performed in Latin to the use of vernacular, greater participation by the laity in the mass, having the mass's celebrant face the audience, etc.  The changes raised a lot of questions among the faithful (like, can a priest change raisin bread into the Body of Christ) and those questions persist to this day, vexing Pope Francis.

Reagan and Gorbachev's meeting was historic and fruitful.  It led to the signing of the START I nuclear treaty a year later.  Thirty-two years later, Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and credited Putin's denial of Russian interference in America's 2016 election more than he did the U.S; intelligence agencies.

Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill.  Joe Biden didn't exactly throw Ms. Hill under a bus, but he came close.  I blamce him for Clarence Thomas's seat on the Supreme Court for the last 33 years.

Has there ever been anyone who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize more than Jimmy Carter?