5/4/2026

 Monday, May 4, 2026

D+179/105

1535 Five Carthusian monks were hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, London, for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England

1977 US Catholic bishops rescinded automatic excommunications for divorced and remarried Catholics (receiving communion but still outlawed it if the previous marriages were not annulled by Church tribunals)

1990 Latvia's parliament voted 138-0 (1 abstention) for Independence

2001 The Milwaukee Art Museum addition, the first Santiago Calatrava-designed structure in the United States, opened to the public

2021 Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador made a historic apology to the Mayan people for abuses against them in the five centuries since the Spanish conquest 

2023 WHO declared COVID-19 over as a global health emergency, but it remainsed a significant threat, with seven million known deaths and a real total likely 20 million

In bed at 9, awake at 4, moved to LZB, up at 6; 0430 112/63/53 120 206.0; 65/42/72/46, sunny with elevated concern for wildfire conditions..  

Morning meds at 8 a.m.,  and half dose of Bisoprolol at  6:40 a.m.  

We watched the documenary on the100th anniversary of The New Yorker last night.  It included a comment by art, theater, and cultural critic Hilton Als: Throughout the city there is beauty, if you pay attention and are really looking, to which I thought, how true, and for every city, every hamlet, every rural area.  It reminded me of our back yard, of all the trees all over the place, of the spring flowers now in bloom and the summer and fall flowers to come, of the elegant, interesting homes throughout the area.  Als is correct that we have to pay attention and really look about us, and throughout much of our lives, we are too busy with the daily affairs of life to do that.  The same is true of our vision of other people; there is hidden beauty in them too, but we rarely get to see it.

I took a ride up to Random Lake this afternoon, via I-43, Hy.57, Jay Road, Ozaukee Couty 3, Hilltop Road (a favorite view of Wisconsin countryside), Camp Awana Road, Hy. 144 back to Hy. 57 to back home.  The weather was sunny and uncommonly warm, in the low 70s, but it'll be 20° cooler tomorrow and the rest of the week.  I listened to chapter 5 of Portrait while driving through the countryside.

Oh, how I am carried back to my youth by Portrait of the Artist!  From Chapter 4:

Every morning he hallowed himself anew in the presence of some holy image or mystery. His day began with an heroic offering of its every moment of thought or action for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff and with an early mass. . . His daily life was laid out in devotional areas. By means of ejaculations and prayers he stored up ungrudgingly for the souls in purgatory centuries of days and quarantines and years; yet the spiritual triumph which he felt in achieving with ease so many fabulous ages of canonical penances did not wholly reward his zeal of prayer, since he could never know how much temporal punishment he had remitted by way of suffrage for the agonising souls . . . On each of the seven days of the week he further prayed that one of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost might descend upon his soul and drive out of it day by day the seven deadly sins which had defiled it in the past; and he prayed for each gift on its appointed day, confident that it would descend upon him, though it seemed strange to him at times that wisdom and understanding and knowledge were so distinct in their nature that each should be prayed for apart from the others. Yet he believed that at some future stage of his spiritual progress this difficulty would be removed when his sinful soul had been raised up from its weakness and enlightened by the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. He believed this all the more, and with trepidation, because of the divine gloom and silence wherein dwelt the unseen Paraclete, Whose symbols were a dove and a mighty wind, to sin against Whom was a sin beyond forgiveness, the eternal mysterious secret Being to Whom, as God, the priests offered up mass once a year, robed in the scarlet of the tongues of fire.

Those endless Catholic religion classes taught by the Sisters of Providence and the Irish Christian Brothers!  Those so-called Theology classes taught by the Jesuits, all based on St. Thomas Aquinas!  That off-putting terminology (Paraclete Parakeet), all that Latin (Tantum Ergo makes your hair grow!) All those lists (7 gifts of the Holy Ghosst, 7 deadly sins, sanctifying grace vs. actual grace, . .), the mysteries of Faith,   Nobody could beat this kind of stuff into your heads and consciousness like the Irish religious and they carried their dedication and tenacity to America, and to my parish on the south side of Chicago in the 1040s and 1950s.  And no one could write about it more tellingly than James Joyce.  I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry as I read and listened to the descriiptions above in Chapter 4.

I tend to be hard in my judgments about Catholic education, harder than I should be.  The 40s and 50s were not the 2020s.  I grew up at the end of the Pre-Vatican II Church, the Church of Pius XII, not the Church of John XXIII.  I was born at the end of the Great Depression, just before Pearl Harbor and World War II.  The Sisters of Providence who taught me dealt with classes of 40 to 50 studends, boys on one side of the room, girls on the other.  They had rather little formal education themselves and little preparation for teaching those huge classes other than what they themselves experienced in their own Catholic education.   It was a hard life and many didn't do very well.   I remember especially my teacher in 5th or 6th grade who couldn't deal with the stress(es) and had to be replaced early in the Fall semester.  There are many good memoirs in print about life in the convent, some of which I've read, like Karen Armstrong's Through the Narrow Gate: My Climb Out of  Darkness, and Removing the Habit of God: Sister Christine's Story by Susan Bassler Pickford.   They are powerful, touching stories of girls and young women struggling with their relationship with God.  When I joined St. Francis of Assisi parish in the 1990s and became active in parish and Church affairs, I found that the most admirable members of the parish (in addition to my friend Troy Major and Roland Wright) were a few religious sisters.  I regret losing my relationships with them when I left the parish after falling out with the provincial leadership of the Capuchins during the child sex abuse scandals.

On the othjer hand, in the 5th and concluding chapter, Joyce relates Stephen Dedalus's and his friends' arguments in college about Thomistic philosophy, Irish identity, the definition of Beauty, Art, and suchlike, much of it in Latin.  I have a hard time reading and/or listening to Joyce, and this chapter is particularly difficult for me.  Much of the dialogue is just words that float over my head.  I'll finish the book, probably tonight or tomorrow morning, but I'm not enjoying it except for the parts where he exposes the wretchedness of the Irish Catholic Church.