The Anchoress

I’m not really comfortable calling this a post of “best of The Anchoress” posts, because it sounds so darn egotistical (It’s all about ME!) and also because I don’t even know if these are really “best” posts. But they are posts people have from time-to-time asked me to repost in full. I’ve only reposted two essays, ever, I think, ne about The Vagina Monologues and one about the Shiavo matter.

These are some earlier efforts from when I was getting about 250 hits a day. I figured I’d post them and if you like ‘em great. If you don’t like ‘em…at least I’ve given you something to read while I’m on vacation!

A Message to the Military.

America is wide awake and dreaming glorious dreams.

So, how did my retreat go?

That time I crashed and burned

The Bookworm’s Dilemma

When the press blocked my view of John Kerry.

On Ash Wednesday.

A month before my brother passed.

And then we lost him.

Baseball is proof that God loves us.

Dat ol’ woman hating Catholic church.

I understand there is an internet cafe available, so I may be popping in here to write a blurb or two! Don’t forget to check in once in a while while I’m gone! And God bless y’all!

I don’t know when I have read a snottier, snobbier, more relentlessly superficial, arrogant and bigoted piece of dreck than Tina Brown’s latest column in the Washington Post, Reverence Gone Up In Smoke.

Sigh…what a disappointment for Tina and her pals - amid all of that glorious color and pomp of a papal funeral and a conclave, the solemn beauty of the chant, the whole mystical and mysterious sense of Other - they’d become attracted, mildly so, but attracted, nevertheless, to the whole “religion thing”. They’d admired the surface of the Lake of Faith, but, sniff, they’re much, much too smart to actually partake of the water without the right sort of lifeguard, darling, you know, one who looks good and tells us we are all holy and lovely and fine and let’s us go on our merry way. A lifeguard who will perhaps even join us at all those luncheons and dinner parties, darling, all those too-too tony gatherings, all the witty repartee, all the sweet and haughty laughter we may indulge in as we ridicule those who do not understand or appreciate our lovely educations, our lovely clothing, our lovely hairstyles, our lovely - so very lovely - things.

There is a lot going on in Brown’s column - an admission that for the folks on the left the papal election meant nothing more than yet another political defeat. Just as they had deluded themselves on election day (a day on which Kerry’s own pollster predicted a loss by 3% points) to believe that a man who had never actually led the presidential race, who had offered neither real ideas or real military documentation, was definitely going to win the White House back for them, they had decided to believe that somehow the “winner” of the papal elections would be

“some youthful cardinal we hadn’t even heard of yet, some charismatic dark horse whom the joyful crowds, so many of them young, would immediately recognize as their own.”

Well…actually…NEWSFLASH, TINA…the man who emerged from the balcony was recognised, quite joyously, by the very youthful crowd in St. Peter’s Square, as “one of their own.” Those young adults, after boisterous cheering, began their first elated chant: Ben-e-dict-o, Ben-e-dict-o.

They get it, the young Catholics. And you and your friends, who seem not to understand what was truly taking place in the Sistine Chapel, or what the papacy means, or what - for that matter - Christianity means, do not. To you, it’s all a great big Church of NO that won’t let you just do what you want and pet you and say, “why, how clever and wonderful you are, dear, here, have a cookie! But not two! Mustn’t get fat now, because otherwise no one will ever love you or think you are a good person…be like the Italians! They are not fat!”

I am a little puzzled as to why, exactly, you and your friends feel this poisonous need to go rather overboard in your bigoted nose-wrinkling. I mean, yes, I DO understand to a point. You and your whole generation have had a difficult time moving from childhood of “gimmee what I want…” to the adulthood of “take what you need…”

How you must have truly hated to hear Cardinal Ratzinger, a day before he became Benedict XVI utter those terribly divisive words:

We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14)

No. You could not have liked hearing that, beholden as you are to the age in all of its furious fashion and conformity. So, I DO understand, to a point, why you need to do the “sniff and giggle, mock those unsophisticated Christians” thing. It’s hard to break those habits from high school.

But, you know, you do have your own church, so I don’t really know why you have to be so concerned about anyone else’s. You have what Flip Wilson used to call “The Church of What’s Happening NOW.” The Church of Me First. The Church of Cackling Condescension, The Church of Blithe Nobility: I wrote a check, darling, to each of the “right” causes. You don’t expect me to actually go down into that smelly soup kitchen and dish out hash to those people, do you?

Not all of your friends are like that of course. Some of them do fund raising for charities and the arts, and hospitals and museums, which is very nice - although very often the fund-raisers net very little after expenses, still it’s something. And some of your friends do make a point of only flying in private jets which are already heading their way, to - you know - conserve energy. And some of them step into limos only after they’ve pressed a buck into someone’s hand and congratulated them for keeping it real. Sometimes, they even make a “black power” fist after they do it, even if the bum they’ve treated to coffee is not black.

It’s part of the liturgy of your church, I believe. All those gestures. All that pretty ritual.

What I do think is so funny is that you spend so much time huffing and puffing about how the Christians are trying so hard to suppress, and to close down. And you do not see for a second that you, and all of your co-religionists are the leading proponents of silencing others (I don’t remember it being the religious folk who came after Larry Summers or Jada Pinkett Smith because they dared to speak at Harvard Temple in the vernacular of plain speech, rather than in the exalted language of political correctness. I don’t recall the religious folk attempting to get the medical records of actors or artists who dealt with addiction to pain killers, or more.)

Your church shouts down, throws pies, mocks, scorches the earth and openly wishes for the violent deaths of others.

It is not a church that walks into leper colonies, or soup kitchens to try to help (that’s what taxes and government are for!) It is not a church that prays for the good of others, unless they are the “right sort” of others, meaning, church-members, only.

There IS a church out there, that is cause for serious concerns about personal and spiritual liberty. But it is not the Christian one.

I read your column and I remember a prophecy I had read long ago. I don’t remember if it was a Fatima prophecy or Lourdes, or some other. Maybe it’s some silliness that I am confusing with personal revelation; it’s late and I am tired. But I remember what the prophecy said. It said that an event would take place “which will be seen by the entire world,” and that the event would have the effect of making everyone look into their own hearts, examine their consciences, so to speak, and that there would be many who return to the faith, and others who resist or simply choose to turn away.”

Perhaps the funeral of John Paul II (whom you did not love any more than you love Benedict, but who was so beloved by others he could not be forcefully opposed) was that event. Over a million people at prayer, on their knees on cobblestone, in Communion with the Lord Jesus. The attraction - the admittedly superficial attraction - of the beauty and pomp, and the deep mystery at its core. It was an event seen all over the world, as was the naming of the new pope.

People are choosing. Choose wisely, Tina. If you found yourself “attracted” to the Lake of Faith, no matter how superficially, consider dipping in a toe. Don’t be afraid of the water. It doesn’t burn.

Related: The Godless Party by Rod Dreher

Because I am now exactly 24 hours away from needing to be outta here and starting on our long-awaited vacation (it’s been three years since we went to Ireland, a trip chronicled here, by my 15 year old son, Buster) and I’ve never seen a man who needs a vacation more than my husband.

Buster is being difficult about it, btw. At 15, he feels he should not have to accompany his parents on a vacation, but since he is basically a sunny and bouyant sort of kid, he’s acquiescing. It helps that we’re traveling with several families, and there are other 15 year olds similarly trapped.

Anyway, time is short and there is a lot of good stuff out there, that needs linking to.

Lorie Byrd: She has a terrific, “oh-yeah?” sort of post up at Polipundit wherein she writes on Richard Clarke’s morning appearance on GMA. Her post is link-heavy and you’re going to want to go read the whole thing, but I’ll give you a li’l excerpt to whet the appetite:

The other thing that surprised me was that Richard Clarke told the story, at least part of it, of the chemicals that wer found in the possession of terrorists in Jordan last year. Clarke said that if they had not been caught that they would have killed thousands of people. I remember that story. I blogged about it. At the time, it was pretty much ignored by the American media. What Richard Clarke failed to mention today, and perhaps the reason the American media gave it scant attention last year, prior to the presidential election, was that the trucks carrying those chemical weapons were coming from Syria, where satellite evidence showed heavy truck caravan traffic travelling from Iraq just prior to the 2003 U.S. led invasion.

Frank Martin: One of my favorite writers. He is looking at Benedict XVI’s brother and imagining a bit of sibling tumult as the priest-brother of the new pope fumes:

Oh, Why should I visit him? Its not like everytime I sit down at Starbucks to enjoy a little caffe latte I wont get someone sitting across from me reading a newspaper with a headline about “Pope Benedict this and Pope Benedict that”. “Pope Benedict”, Feh. You know what we called him when he was a kid? We called him “Stinky”. Thats right “Pope Stinky”, that doesnt work so well does it! So you go ahead and call him Pope Benedict, He’ll always be “Pope Stinky” to me.

It’s very cute. You’ll like.

Tracey at Worship Naked has a very serious post based on a story from the BBC today about Burma’s use of chemical weapons on internally displaced tribal peoples. She is trying to get the story out there. She’s a good kid, that Tracey.

Keith Olberman: Back when I was live-blogging John Paul the Great’s last day, I actually complimented Keith Olberman because he seemed to me to be doing a pretty good job covering things. But this video from Jackson’s Junction contains one of the worst, most thoughtless seques, ever!

Julie, the Happy Catholic: Has a neat story about a little baby just confirmed as “Benedict” as he goes in to surgery for his kidneys. Don’t forget to offer a little prayer for Sam “Benedict.”

Jimmie, at Sundries Shack: is on one of those rolls bloggers sometimes get on, where they bang out one good thing after another; you may simply want to head over there and keep scrolling. He takes on Richard Cohen’s rather simplistic and intellectually dishonest, insert-standard-leftist-line- “this-pope-is-going-to-kill-people-because-he-won’t-hand-out-condoms” column here

Jeff, the Curt Jester. It’s visual. Just go look.

The cheapest and most effective way of preventing the spread of HIV is by having sex only inside of a monagamous marriage. The reasoning here is very simple. If you don’t have sex, you won’t get AIDS (absent the miniscule chance of getting it from a blood transfusion). Not having sex doesn’t cost anything. Abstinence is free. Cohen is wrong and, moreso, I suspect that he knows he’s wrong. But he does have a theology to push and he’s behind it as far as it’ll go.

The problem here, though, is that Cohen doesn’t actually understand what the Church is doing. They’re not advocating abstinence simply to slow the spread of AIDS or to control population. They’re in it for much larger stakes, the immortal souls of billions of people. Cohen doesn’t get that, which causes him to make statements like this:

well, now…you just go to Jimmie’s and read the rest. Also check out his posts here and here. Like I said, Jimmie’s rollin’.

Howie Kurtz: He’s taking a rather longish look at the blogs and their writings re Benedict XVI. If you scroll down you see he mocks the press for how badly they had allowed their personal desires to affect their “predictions” for papal frontrunners.

St. Blog’s Parish has been featured on the front page of the Delaware News Journal, and blogger Rae Stabosz (mother of 9!)
was quoted extensively. (She very kindly mentions your humble anchoress, too). Rae is a little miffed that the article mistakes some negative comments as coming from St. Blog’s when they came from Slate, but, you know…it’s the press. They lazy!

Sr. Lorraine: She is wondering if the press see that while JPII was in essence “Reagan’s Pope,” Benedict XVI is possibly W’s Pope. They certainly to write about the two of them interchangably. Read anything some folks in the press write about W and you can change the name to Benedict and it reads the same, “stubborn, ruthless, relentless…” except, you know, the W meme includes the “moron” part while even Benedict’s most vehement detractors will rather grudgingly concede his brilliance.

Pope Benedict, Ye Mawo Akwaaba! Africa responds to his election.

Hugh Hewitt: Has a groovy piece in The Daily Standard wherein he looks at the new pope, “In His Own Words.” What an amazing idea.

Michael Prescott: Never heard of him? You will. Good writer who details here is journey from Atheist to Theist.

Peggy Noonan: I like this piece very much, and so I am linking to it again here, although I had excepted from it here. It bears the repetition, it’s that good and insightful.

We are living in a time of supernatural occurrences. The old pope gives us his suffering as a parting gift, says his final goodbye on Easter Sunday; dies on the vigil of Feast of the Divine Mercy, the day that marks the messages received by the Polish nun, now a saint, who had written that a spark out of Poland would light the world and lead the way to the coming of Christ. The mourning period for the old pope ends on the day that celebrates St. Stanislas, hero of Poland, whose name John Paul had thought about taking when he became pope. We learned this week from a former secretary that John Paul I, the good man who was pope just a month, had told everyone the day he was chosen that he wanted to be called John Paul I. You can’t be called “the first” until there is a second, he was told. There will be a second soon, he replied.

But of course, read it all.

Patrick, the Paragraph Farmer: spells out succinctly why he likes B16.

Christian Carnival is up. So is the Catholic Carnival. They’re both good!

Michelle Malkin and LaShawn Barber: both link to democrats moving to the right of George W. Bush on illegal immigration. A thought: is it possible Bush has been rope-a-doping the democrats all this time, taking a stand forces them to move to the RIGHT OF HIM on the issue, if they want to critique him…thus FORCING them to finally DO SOMETHING about illegal immigration? Just a thought.

Maxed Out Mama, who does not suffer fools gladly, and for this we bless God, highlightes George Will’s excellent column on just how darn special everyone is, or should be (longstanding gripe of mine) and if they don’t know they’re special, why, they must need therapy. Charlotte Hays at the IWF has thoughts along similar lines.

Betsy Newmark: wonders just why it is that snippety secularist society types like Tina Brown feel they should have so much to say about the new pope. I wonder, too.

My brother Thom: He has a nickname for me, or maybe not a nickname so much as a life-motto that he uses to describe my writing: MAUL OR TEACH. Thank you, Thom. Today he was amused to read an explanation of the new pope’s crest from Catholic Commentary.

Cardinals have crests for their flags. Apparently, the crest of then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger contains the odd if not striking image of a bear carrying a pack upon its back. Pope Benedict XVI was inspired to choose this iconograpy because it represents, as the story goes, a saint who was on his way to Rome on horseback to deliver important documents. Along the dangerous path, the saint was attacked by a bear, who mauled and slayed the saint’s horse. The saint whereupon chastised the bear for killing his horse, and then commanded the bear to carry the documents to Rome in the horse’s stead. As a brilliant and key theological advisor during Vatican II in the 1960s, and as the right hand man of Pope John Paul II, then Cardinal Ratzinger was known as the kind of guy who delivers the documents–the Truth. We can’t help but wonder how much our new Holy Father relates to the undaunted and resourceful saint in the story–and, perhaps, how much he relates to the at-first violent, then subsequently penitent and burden-carrying bear.

For Thom, this illustrates to him that perhaps Benedict XVI is also of the “maul or teach” persuasion, like me.

Dear Thom: Nobody likes a smart ass! ;-P

Okay, I am going to be on a plane flying toward a boat in precisely 23 hours! I have got to get going and deliver the pooch to the sitter, pick up suits from cleaners, all that good stuff you have to do before you can relax and unwind. Yes, we’re cruising. We are going with several other families, and they already know that I am not much of a tourist-y sort of person, that - like Bertie Wooster - I find having to go out and look at the Taj Mahal a bit of a nuisance. And yet they invited us to join them, anyway!

I wish I could link to every good thing out there, but that’s not possible, so may I suggest that you check out my blog roll - they’re all good sites.

Surprise!

New Pope Benedict XVI was instrumental in revising Catholic Church teachings on death penalty

The 1992 Catechism said that governments had the right to inflict penalties in keeping with crimes, including the death penalty, “in cases of extreme gravity.” But it added that if non-lethal methods of punishment “suffice to defend human lives against aggressors and protect public order and the security of people, authorities should use these means, because they better conform to the concrete conditions of the common good and to the dignity of the human person.”

In response to another query, he said that polls showing that most Catholics in the United States favored the death penalty had no bearing on the Church’s opposition to it. “While it is important to know the thoughts of the faithful,” he explained, “doctrine is not made according to statistics, but according to objective criteria, taking into account progress made in the Church’s thought on the issue.”

During the pontificate of John Paul the Great, folks on the left who had serious issues re his defense of traditional doctrine would nevertheless use him to advance those issues on which they and he agreed.

I wonder if the folks in opposition to Benedict will do the same - if they will at least give him credit where it’s due when he is in agreement with them. From the current tone, it seems doubtful to me.

As I said elsewhere, I can’t wait for the new pope to begin to make himself seen and heard, so that we may all take his measure, without the filter and noise, noise, noise of the media.

***

Anchorising has a good, long, complete and thoughtful sort of roundup on all Things Benedict that you might want to check out.

***

Courtesy of my dear little brother, Thom, comes this extraordinarily useful and informative piece from Chiesa. It is VERY long, VERY detailed, and you won’t want to miss the bit about the agenda, at the bottom. Print it out - I’m going to do that myself, and take it along to read on the plane this Friday.

***

Benedict XVI made the very pragmatic remark that his would not be a “long” pontificate. Since he is 78 years old, that is not exactly a surprising revelation. But…his parents did live to be in their 90’s. Thom sent this to me with the remark, “In other words: ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be dead soon.’”

I’m sure that some DO think that way.

But then again…Karol Wojtyla’s parents died young, and he made it to 84!

Blogging will be very light from here on out. Leaving on our first vacation in three years, and there is still much to do. I will be trying to post when I can while on vacation…after all…what is avacation if I can’t have fun online? Supposedly, the ship has an internet cafe! Ahh, coffee and readin’ news on the net! Good times!

Jonah Goldberg makes an excellent point:

But my guess is that won’t be happening any time soon, and not just because Ratzinger’s the new pope. Some believe there is a radical left wing in the Catholic Church that seeks to unravel the teachings of John Paul II, but this is an exaggeration of the Western - particularly, the American - press. The notion that you could find any cardinal eager to change church policy on abortion, for example, is simply a fantasy concocted by liberal journalists. Excepting, perhaps, the issue of distributing condoms in Africa, it’s hard to think of a hot-button social issue that divides the church’s leadership a fraction as much as American editorial pages seem to suggest.

If a committee made up of Andrew Sullivan, Gary Wills, Andrew Greeley, Paul Begala and Nancy Pelosi were given the power to select a pope from the current College of Cardinals, we would still have a pope opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

Ding, ding, ding! Give that man a seegar!!!

I read this and find affirmation of what I have been thinking since yesterday, that the howls and putting on of sackcloth and ashes at the election of Joseph Ratzinger as new pope is a bit of a red herring. Yes, they don’t like Benedict XVI - they never did and never would.

But I think all this hoo-hah is less about Benedict than about the Catholic Church, itself. That darned, immovable Church which refuses to lay down and obey, or to tumble.

As long as the obstinate Church refuses to get on board with the times, the progressive agenda cannot go forward without examination and debate. That is unpleasant to people who simply don’t like hearing the word “NO” unless it is coming from their own lips.

I don’t believe the progressives really expected a pope who would be markedly different from John Paul the Great on matters of doctrine and morality. They couldn’t be that naive. They had to know that the next pope, whoever he was, would still not please them.

No, I think most of this is just a temper tantrum against the church-that-won’t-go-away. These folks are fuming because they saw that JPII stood against their agendas, and that they were quite, quite powerless against him because….well, because he was so BELOVED.

Ergo. Make Pope Benedict easy to hate. He (and the Church) will be much easier to move against if the pope is hated, rather than loved.

I can’t help it. I’m liking him more and more.

UPDATE: Media Research Center looks back on some of the things said about John Paul II over the years. Interesting reading. One excerpt:

A 1989 meeting between Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev and the Pope gave CBS and ABC an opportunity to take moral equivalence to absurd new heights. During the November 29, 1989 CBS Evening News, Dan Rather declared, “This week’s meeting of Pope John Paul and Gorbachev brings together two traditional enemies, both of whom have shown, time and again, that they can rise above the hatreds of history.” Rather went on to lay the most ridiculous metaphor before a national audience: “The meeting, said one priest in Rome, is like the lion lying down with the lamb. But in this case, he said, it’s hard to tell who’s the lion and who’s the lamb.” (It was almost as odd as Time essayist Lance Morrow’s intoxicated January 1, 1990 take on Mikhail Gorbachev as the “Communist Pope and the Soviet Martin Luther.”)

The comparisons to communism erupted again in 1991, when in early June, the Pope visited Poland for the fourth time. Instead of delivering an even-handed account of the new tensions in post-communist Poland, CBS reporter Bert Quint ended his June 1 Evening News report by suggesting the new society in some respects was inferior to the old: “But most of his fellow countrymen do not share John Paul’s concept of morality….Many here expect John Paul to use his authority to support Church efforts to ban abortion, perhaps the country’s principal means of birth control. And this, they say, could deprive them of a freedom of choice the communists never tried to take away from them.”

FINALLY: Pastorius at CUANAS (Let me spell out the meaning of the acronym: CHRISTIANS UNITED AGAINST the NEW ANTI-SEMITISM) who knows a bit about anti-semitism, defends Benedict against the spurious and silly charges of being a nazi.

UPDATE: Even my eyebrows went up to see that Peggy Noonan has written (in much finer prose than my scribblings) essentially the same thing I’ve said in this post, that “they” are doing all they can to make sure we do not LOVE this pope.

The choosing of Benedict XVI, a man who is serious, deep and brave, is a gift. He has many enemies. They imagine themselves courageous and oppressed. What they are is agitated, aggressive, and well-connected.

They want to make sure his papacy begins with a battle. They want to make sure no one gets a chance to love him. Which is too bad because even his foes admit he is thoughtful, eager for dialogue, sensitive, honest.

Yes! Thank you, Ms. Noonan for saying it so much better than I could!

Michael Ledeen, who was, I think, recently accused of both forging the Niger yellowcake documents and kidnapping the Lindburg baby, has an interesting and encouraging piece at NRO today, suggesting that history is at a tipping point for tyrannical governments.

It has long been assumed that a repressive regime could survive as long as it had the will to crush any opposition, and that clever tyrants could deflect hatred of their regime by conjuring up an external enemy. There is still a tendency, particularly among intellectuals, to assume that these principles apply to contemporary dictatorships like those in China, Iran, and North Korea. Yet recent events suggest that these three countries, which are united by common interests and which help one another with advanced military technology, from missiles to WMDs, are losing control despite their fierce determination to cling to power and eventually fight and win a great war against the West. All three have nearby examples of new democracies, and their peoples are asking, with increasing intensity, why they are not permitted to govern themselves.

Indeed. You’ll want to read the whole thing.

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred have a very noisy, vibrant and thoughtful blog which encourages debate and pointed commentary, and the hosts are extremely generous about pointing out when others make good points.

Quite a lot of good commentary on this post, in which Siggy takes the focus off of the Catholic Church and puts it back on Islam, and on the human condition.

But I would start here and then scroll up, because as always with this site, one post begets other posts which build on the debate and dialogue which ensues.

Enjoy!

A really nice story via Michelle Malkin.

Seems the folks at Bangor, Maine have made a profound commitment to troops returning home to America through their gates. At whatever hour, day or night, there are people there, ready to give them a hero’s welcome.

“Here they come. Everybody get ready,” said Joyce Goodwin, 71, her voice full of excitement, undiminished by the hundreds of times she has shown up to embrace the returning troops.

“You get a call at 3 a.m. about a flight in 30 minutes, and you think about staying in bed,” Zelz said. “Then you realize, no, I can’t do that. That wouldn’t be right.”

Really - I have excerpted too much. This is one you really want to go read!

Benedict XVI’s first homily as pope is a good opportunity for those who are certain the world is ending to take heart.

He specified some of the top priorities of his papacy: the promotion of the unity of Christians and a commitment to ecumenism, the continued dialogue with other religions and the fulfillment of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

“He wants to be collegial,” said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington. “He wants the advice of cardinals. That for me is one of the great things.”

Now that today has been, basically, all-Benedict-all-the-time, I thought I would end with a round up of links from Christian bloggers and non-Christian bloggers, although I will not link to kos or Democratic Underground. You know how to get there if you want to.

I’m feeling generous right now so let’s start of with Sock Monkey who is just fit to be tied and ready to bolt to the Anglicans. Jane is NOT happy, as she makes clear in her comments on the posting below, too, a post wherein I explore the idea that progressive Catholics might just split, and wonder whether they, or the press, have any willingness or capability to give the guy the benefit of a doubt. Janie says NO.

I’ll make a note of it.

Julie at Happy Catholic, on the other hand is, well, happy

That is one for the happy column.

Julie links to several other happy Catholics over by her way, and delivers this:

Amongst the joy of the Ratzinger fans and the depression of those not so disposed, were these gems:

FAILING HER ENTIRE SEX … PROUDLY

Kathy Shaidle, as possessor of the pair of XX chromosomes in the group, was anointed to speak on behalf of all Womankind, but failed her entire sex by not much caring whether women are ordained or not. She also gleefully declared that Benedict is hated by all the right people, so she was pleased as punch with his election. I very much enjoyed sharing our brief counter-insurgency together. :)Mark Shea commenting on their MSNBC appearance

Andrew Sullivan is SO unhappy I’m going to put him down as TWO.

Roman Catholic Blog is dancing around, as are Mark Shea, The Donegal Express and Amy Wellborn.

Doug at Bogus Gold is typically thoughtful, and Catholic Anglican, Sharon is also pleased.

Steve Norris who is not, I believe, Catholic, seems happy nonetheless.

Hugh Hewitt also non-Catholic, is typically wise and seems satisfied.

You know what? I’m tired. It’s been a really long day, and I’m heading to bed. I apologize for not linking to a zillion blogs as I had intended.

Tomorrow, I am busy preparing for a vacation (first one in three years! Yay!) and I PROMISE, I am going to change the subject, too!

And now, may I ask all believing readers, of whatever creed, whether they are happy or unhappy about the new pope, to offer up a prayer on behalf of Jeanette’s loved ones.

Be generous in prayer. God is never outdone in generosity!