THIS essay by the Rev. James Jackson, FSSP, of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Littleton, Colorado, posted here in 2011, is worth revisiting in light of recent posts on the subject:
I was asked some time ago to give some guidance on tattoos, and though it took far too long to get to this, here is my advice on the subject.
In the Old Testament we read the following: “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh, for the dead: neither shall you make in yourselves any figures or marks. I am the Lord.” (Lev. 19.28)
With that being said, we Catholics are not fundamentalists (may it please God) and it would be wrong to condemn everyone everywhere who has a tattoo, or even many tattoos. It so happens that in some cultures, marks on the flesh are quite acceptable. Ethiopian Christians tattoo the cross on their foreheads and I understand this to be an ancient custom. I’m not advocating cultural relativism here, but there is a social element to this morality.In Western societies however, a tattoo would serve a very different function e.g., mere decoration. So when would the decoration be unacceptable? Here are a few guidelines:
Moreno was elected three times to the presidency of Ecuador, the last time in 1875. When Moreno consecrated that small nation to the Sacred Heart, he acted in keeping with the famous revelations of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a French nun of the 17th century who said that Christ appeared to her and instructed kings and nations, as well as individuals, to adore his heart and receive an outpouring of graces. Moreno sealed his fate as well. For with that event, it is believed, Freemasons resolved once and for all to assassinate him.
Devotees of the Sacred Heart traditionally go to Mass and receive Communion on the First Friday of the month. On the first Friday of August, 1875, after Mass, work on his inauguration address, and a final visit to the Blessed Sacrament, Moreno walked to the Presidential Palace. According to Marian Horvat’s account:
At the steps of the Presidential Palace he greeted several persons, including Faustino Rayo, who would shortly strike the first brutal machete blow. Rayo, who held a grudge against Moreno for dismissing him from a lucrative office because of his dishonest practices, had taken up leatherwork. He pretended, however, to be on friendly terms with the President, who had recently contracted him to make a saddle for his young son (his only living child), Gabriel García del Alcázar.
He climbed the side stairs to the porch with its thick colonial pillars. At that time there were no railings between the columns, as we see today. In fact, the scrolled black grills came from the famous Tuilleries Palace in Paris, torn down by the revolutionaries and ordered by Garcia Moreno himself for Ecuador’s Palace. They would only arrive and be installed, however, after his death.
He was approaching the Treasury Department’s entrance into the Palace. There, Rayo rushed forward and attacked him with a machete. The first blow struck his hat, which flew off his head and landed in the plaza below. Rayo delivered more blows, and his fellow conspirators took position and fired their guns. Their bullets only grazed him.
Afterward, the infamous cry of Rayo, “Die, tyrant!”
And the beautiful response of Garcia Moreno, staggering from the wounds, “Dios no muere!” “God does not die.” These were the last words of a line he had often repeated, “I am only a man who can be killed and replaced, but God does not die.”
There is a staggering absence of men in certain parts of the American workforce. This is something I have noticed and it is blowing my mind. Where men were once dominant, they are now all but missing. I went to my dentist the other day for an annual checkup. My dentist is a woman. Her entire staff of around twenty people from the receptionist on down to dental assistants and dental hygienists are all female.
My local bank is dominated by females. I have also been looking for a new place to live and virtually all of the real estate agents are women, as is building management.
My cousin runs a law firm. Once again, with the exception of people who have to do grunt work, her entire staff of over one hundred people is 98 percent female.
IT is not surprising that the ideal of the dual-income household has corresponded with a decline in overall wealth for the middle class and lower income families. The dual-income model is much easier to maintain at the higher levels, where nannies and paid services can be hired and income from investments cushion the loss of domestic order.
Aristotle remarked in The Poetics that man is the most imitative of all animals. Two-and-a-half millennia later, picking up where Aristotle left off, René Girard developed an entire “Fundamental Anthropology,” drawing on Greek tragedy and the four Gospels, which argues (among other essential propositions) that the thing that people are most prone to imitate is the delusory impression that other people enjoy a degree of pure being greater than their own, which, as with all “mediated objects,” they strive to appropriate. Old sayings express the same observation. Thus “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” That is, my neighbor is better off than I am, and I can’t bear it. Biblical morality, as Girard notes, enjoins imitation, as in the Tenth Commandment and for the good reason that imitation unchecked runs to covetousness and so gives rise to conflicts in the community. Biblical religion, especially Christianity, offers consolation for the ascetic gesture of opting out of the wicked deliciousness of coveting things. It encourages people to develop their internal, or spiritual, resources. All of traditional Western high culture has the same aim – through ritual, philosophy, literature, and the arts to cultivate the soul by cultivating the virtues.
What has all of this to do with tattooing and the current craze for it?
I live in a small rural town in Michigan where it seems as though every second or third woman from the age of 18 to 70 has adorned herself with a tattoo. I sometimes wonder whether nowadays there are even more women wearing tattoos than men. Today, however, took the cake. A high-functioning mentally-retarded man of about 40, who works in a local supermarket, has a new tattoo covering much of one forearm.
Responding to a major case of research misconduct, federal prosecutors have taken the rare step of filing charges against a scientist after he admitted falsifying data that led to millions in grants and hopes of a breakthrough in AIDS vaccine research.
Investigators say former Iowa State University laboratory manager Dong-Pyou Han has confessed to spiking samples of rabbit blood with human antibodies to make an experimental HIV vaccine appear to have great promise. After years of work and millions in National Institutes of Health grants, another laboratory uncovered irregularities that suggested the results — once hailed as groundbreaking — were bogus.
I recently received a short video clip – just more than one minute – that has haunted me ever since I saw it more than a week ago. About a dozen men who were guarding a hospital in Aleppo in western Syria were captured by Sunni rebels, hogtied and executed in a barbaric way, all of which is visible in the clip. The men are young, but what struck me is their total composure in facing death by their Islamic captors, something that I cannot get out of my mind. What was the heinous crime for which they were killed? They were professed Christians, and they were living – or should I say dying? – proof of what awaits Syria if the Bashad al-Assad government falls.
IN two posts at Reclaiming Beauty (here and here), Kidist Paulos Asrat reflects upon changes at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. The hospital recently removed the image of St. Michael the Archangel from its logo. The image was inspired in part by an Italian statue of the saint which was found encrusted with dirt in a second hand shop on Queen street in the 19th century and has long stood restored in the hospital’s lobby.
Below is a modernist addition to the hospital funded by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, who has close ties with the Chinese government. The hospital’s insipid slogan is now “St. Michael’s, Inspired Care, Inspiring Science,” sure to offend no one in multicultural Canada.
A link to this video was sent to me from a Catholic friend who is aware of how my family has been broken apart by its members taking sides on the homosexual issue. I thought it was compelling to view and showed compassion to those struggling with same-sex attraction. It is amazing to think that there are homosexuals saying that they are living a happy, fulfilling celibate life through the saving grace of Jesus. Amen!
JOHN from Vermont sent this note along with a donation:
Thank you for The Thinking Housewife. I stumbled upon it a couple months ago and reading it has become a daily habit and joy ever since. Your reflections and thoughts help me to understand better our place in the world and healthy relations within the family and in society. I am agnostic and even a borderline atheist (I don’t say this with pride or even easily) although wondering about God and a transcending order in life preoccupies much of my conscious thought. (more…)
HERE is a glaring example of the irreverence of the Vatican II mass from St. Patrick's Church in Seattle. Notice the age of the congregation, the predominance of women and the sparse attendance. You have to pity some of these poor souls. Their minds have been worn down by schmaltz over the years. Perhaps they don't even notice it any more, like someone with bubble gum stuck to the bottom of his shoes, who finally says, "Heck, I'll just leave it there." See more examples of Novus Ordo sacrileges at Novus Ordo Watch.
AN excerpt from G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics,relevant to recent entries here about neighborhood and the ongoing theme of family life:
If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo. He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth. He pretends to shoot tigers. He almost rides on a camel. And in all this he is still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of this flight he is always ready with his own explanation. (more…)
In 1954, more than thirty tall, modern apartment buildings intended for “public housing” were opened near downtown St. Louis. They are “a shining addition to the city’s skyline” and people of different races and faiths will live there in peace and harmony. So said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (June 19, 1954). Sixteen years later, those buildings had been made into the site of out-of-control crime and vandalism. Six years after that, they were dynamited into dust. “Twenty-story tombstones” is how Lillian Boehme described such apartment buildings in her perceptive review of the premises, costs, and consequences of “urban renewal” schemes (American Opinion magazine, May 1971).
Martin Anderson offered an earlier indictment of the “urban renewal” craze in his 1964 book The Federal Bulldozer, in which he concluded that the “urban renewal” bandwagon should be halted.
After five murders took place in 1994 in a group of low-rise government-subsidized apartments in south St. Louis, that neighborhood’s alderman said, “I frankly see results of a federal housing policy that has gone out of its way to ruin neighborhoods.” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 15, 1995) Doubtless that could be said about who knows how many other city neighborhoods throughout the nation.
I want to share something extraordinary with you that happened to me the other night.
First, a little on my religious background. My father is an atheist Jew who was raised by observant Jewish parents, while my mother who was raised Catholic became an Episcopalian. Yet in recent years she has been moving back towards her Catholic faith due to her disillusionment with the now very liberal Protestant church. I however was not raised with religion in my life at all. We celebrated Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter in strictly secular ways. It was all Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny with some Christian information entering my young brain through my mother and the media.
THE General Assembly of the Presybterian Church (U.S.A.) endorsed same-sex “marriage” this week, voting to allow ministers to perform “any such marriage they believe the Holy Spirit calls them to perform.” The June 19th letter by Ruling Elder Heath Rada announcing the decision is a study in passive-aggressive rhetoric and arrogant, modernist blasphemy. According to Rada, a former Red Cross executive with a “a twinkle in the eye,” Christ died to make Presbyterians “reconcilers.”
“Please know that the same triune God in whom we place our hope, faith and trust in is still in control, and that the Assembly’s action today is the result of deep discernment to hear God’s voice and discern God’s will.”
The Presbyterians have a creepy cult of niceness. The spiritual life is dead within them. Niceness is an agreeable substitute. Super Nice people don’t say no to anyone who wants a wedding. In truth, this is not niceness, but self-love and cruelty. Liberals are cruel people with sugary-sweet smiles. In their niceness, they are masters of spiritual genocide.
