AS HAS been widely reported, Pope Francis has rejected some of the traditional pomp of the papacy, including the red papal stole, the papal limousine and scarlet shoes, such as those worn by other popes for the last two centuries. Francis chose his well-worn black shoes instead for his first public appearance before journalists.

Pope Francis has made no statement on these choices, and we cannot know why he has made them.

I would like to comment, however, on the widely-held view that these gestures are deferential to the poor. It is a modern conceit that the poor are offended by majesty. Pomp and ceremony are not primarily for the rich. They are for the poor. Kings don’t need silk garments. They have everything. But the poor, who have nothing, benefit from outward displays of grandeur and magnificence, unless they are envious, in which case luxury reveals their own failings. Anyone can see a royal crown or a pair of papal shoes in a photo. The sight of such things costs nothing. They feed the craving for perfection. They satisfy the natural delight in beauty, constantly stymied in the flat and unvaried world of modern poverty.

For a person who has never seen anything beyond T-shirts, sneakers and denim, a pair of scarlet slippers may be a revelation, an invitation to a higher, invisible reality.

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DANIEL S. writes:

It is too early to know exactly what sort of pope Francis will be, but we do know the papal conclave exercised good judgment. For as Ilana Mercer reminds us, Cardinal Timothy Dolan was not elected to the position:

Mercifully, the new pope is not the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Shortly after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected as the 266th pope, Cardinal Dolan demonstrated why my prayers had been answered. The American had been bypassed. (more…)

KATHERINE writes:

Here is an announcement about a speaker at Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina:

The Riley Institute presents Lt. General Dana Chipman, Judge Advocate General, U.S. Army, speaking on “Combat Boots and Benefits:  Equality in an Era of Change” on Wednesday, March 20, 7 p.m. at the Younts Center.  This talk will focus on how the military is on the front lines of social change as it begins to allow women in combat, equal benefits for gay Americans, religious exceptions to grooming, and also seeks an environment free from sexual harassment.  Free.

Oh my, this is so depressing.  The JAG no less!

I often re-read your kind e-mail of condolence after my husband died. In it you said that my alienation from this culture is a sign of health. I must be in great health, because, wow, do I feel alienated when I see an announcement such as this one!

As always, thanks for your great website.

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  CYNTHIA WACHENHEIM, the Manhattan lawyer who jumped to her death with her infant son strapped to her body this week, had a brilliant career. But motherhood appears to have caused her to unravel. While her case is extreme, there is something very typical about it. In my experience, women who have a first child late in life after a long career are often high-strung mothers. Wachenheim became a mother for the first time at 43. Compared to law school and a professional life, caring for an infant is primal and chaotic. It is not surprising that motherhood would be deeply stressful for a lawyer accustomed to a world of efficiency and rationality and who will likely have few children, a fact that renders every event in her one child's life extremely momentous. Wachenheim, who attempted to kill her child, is symbolic of a nation that is so suicidal it fails to prepare women for the most important job of all.

IN THE following passage sent by a reader, Gertrude Stein, the famously unreadable lesbian writer and art collector who had a few memorable lines, most notably, “There’s no there there,” discusses lesbianism with Ernest Hemingway, the famously readable writer and macho adventurer. What a strange pair. Stein was the godmother of Hemingway’s son.

“You know nothing about any of this, really, Hemingway,” she said. “You’ve met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy.”

“I see.” (more…)

ARCHBISHOP Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia has agreed to let an eleven-year-old girl, Caroline Pla, play football in a Catholic league, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer. The archbishop overruled a panel of experts who had advised against allowing girls to play, partly for safety and — most disturbing of all — legal reasons. The girl’s parents, friends, teammates and coach all hail the decision as a great advance for Caroline and for girls in general.

Pla can already participate in an array of athletic activities, from field hockey to basketball, softball and soccer. And yet we are supposed to believe it a serious injustice that she is excluded from this one sport. She may say in all innocence that she passionately loves football, but her eagerness to play is not ultimately about a love of football. That’s not possible. Only a girl who dislikes or who misunderstands football would want to play the sport. Football is inherently and inalterably masculine.  It can accommodate girls only by becoming an entirely different sport.

Pla — again, the innocent mouthpiece of a sports-obsessed, feminist mentality — explains why this is a good development for her. It has nothing to do with sports:

“I did learn a really important lesson in life,” she said. “If there’s something you don’t like, you can change it. In the end, it can turn out the way that you want.”

Caroline has learned to disregard athletic traditions; to overlook what others want (not many boys want girls to play football) in order to get what she wants, to cross dress as a boy and to value rough aggression.

For years Catholic schools and colleges have been encouraging feminist careerism and assertiveness in girls. Girls altar servers have replaced boys to a large extent. Catholic femininity has been eclipsed. Of course, not many girls want to play football. But that’s beside the point. Even if only a few play, girls in general will be further masculinized by this additional refusal by idiotically immature adults, such as Pla’s parents and coach, to reinforce sex differences.

The archbishop has shown extraordinary weakness. Or I should say, he has shown the very ordinary weakness of men in positions of authority today.

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DANIEL S. writes:

The paleo-conservative, Serbian Orthodox writer Srdja Trifkovic has written a piece for Chronicles expressing tentative optimism about the recently elected Pope Francis:

Many of us non-RC traditionalists all over the world had awaited the news from Rome with some trepidation. In the end it turned out to be rather good. Pope Francis, the first non-European Bishop of Rome since Gregory III (d. 741), is universally described as “modest” and “moderate”—which is much preferred to the dreaded “bold” or “courageous,” in the sense that those words are used by the global media. (more…)

IT’S ONE of the great ironies of modern life. The liberated woman is exhausted. She has very little erotic energy once she’s married and has children. The sexual revolution isn’t all that much fun after all.

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  AT Galliawatch, Tiberge writes about an anti-immigration campaign by the organization Bloc Identitaire in France. It features the above poster. The English translation is: "Smile, you have been replaced."The group states: From advertisements to television fare, from the standardization of products to the standardization of tastes, from the erasing of borders to the disloyal creation of job competition for workers from all over the world, everything is being organized so that a new population replaces our own deeply-rooted people.

AT the website Rorate Caeli, Marcelo González, an Argentinian journalist at Panorama Católico Internacional, gives his view of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who has been elected pope:

HOW rare and refreshing it is to see men in charge, exercising their rightful public authority. Feminism has not conquered all. Whatever may be said about the liberalism within it, the Catholic Church remains steadfastly masculine at the top, as is seen in this image of the papal conclave. No other major institution in the West forthrightly prohibits women from leadership.

How endlessly stupid it is for people to say such exclusiveness is anti-woman. Such charges are an affront to men. They are expressions of hatred toward men because they presume male indifference and even contempt for women. They are based on wicked and hateful assumptions. Such claims are at odds with reality and the inexpressible interdependence of men and women. God made two sexes to elevate us, to bring us closer to the heights. Only a weak and insecure woman —  a woman who is oblivious to her own strengths — takes offense at the sight of an all-male gathering.

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A READER recently sent the following quote  from Father, the Family Protector by James Stenson. Except for his statement, “After God, Mom comes first,” which undercuts a father’s authority, Stenson makes important observations about the love and respect a man should show his wife:

[A] mother’s authority in the home, her ability to teach and lead, depends enormously on the her husband’s obvious respect and support for her. So a good father is above all a loving husband. He is a man who leads his children to love and honor their mother, his beloved wife. Where the children are concerned, he insists that they respect and serve her, exactly as he does. Every healthy family sets rules in place, some standards to direct the children’s attitudes and comportment. But the number one rule among smart, effective fathers is this: After God, Mom comes first.  (more…)

THE Home Renaissance Foundation is an interesting think tank in London that promotes domesticity with a cool, modernist style. Here is the organization’s latest video, part of its “Homemakers Project.” It’s a wonderful thing to see Western academics actually speaking up for housewives as they do here.

There are many worthwhile links on the organization’s website. However, the foundation’s call for the “professionalization” of homemaking is misguided. Only by valuing efficiency above all else can homemaking be considered a profession. Efficiency is not the highest goal of the domestic sphere. Homemaking, like the priesthood, is a vocation, not a profession. Domesticity deserves to be taken seriously and that seems to be the foundation’s main emphasis, but calling for professionalization of homemaking is wrong.

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DANIEL S. writes:

The establishment liberal media never seems to miss a beat when it comes to attacking the Catholic Church as anti-woman and is forever insinuating that the Church is responsible for “institutional” discrimination against women simply for refusing, for traditional doctrinal reasons, women priests. These same feminists and liberals that are full of ressentiment toward the Church on the other hand will defend the the Muslim hijab and support the continued Muslim immigration into Western nations, despite religiously-endorsed violence against women by Muslim men (and women!). (more…)

  LESLIE BELL, a psychotherapist writing in The Atlantic, tells young women who are worried about devoting themselves too much to men in their twenties that they should go ahead and have serious relationships --- and pursue demanding careers too. This is the feminist solution: Be all things at once. In practice, this model boils down for most women to shortchanging private life and marriage. Bell writes: I would never advocate that women return to the stereotype of the single woman pining for romance. But I do believe that young women who are taking risks in so many other important areas of life should also pursue experiences that may, on their face, seem to be at odds with independence and progress. The successful woman who is in a relationship is not the same as the pining woman. She's the one who is acknowledging the full range of her desires. Men are useful for fulfilling women's "full range of desires." Self is all. In a similar vein, Erin Callan, the former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers, writing in The New York Times, wishes she had balanced her career and personal life better. She is now childless and on her second marriage. She doesn't come to the conclusion that she shouldn't have had a high-powered career at all -- and she certainly doesn't conclude that she deprived a man of an important position or that she deprived others of the children she never…

WHEN Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves, what did he mean? The modern interpretation is that we should love others more than ourselves. At The Orthosphere, Kristor writes:

[W]e are to love the good and hate the bad in other people just as we love the good and hate the bad in ourselves. In order to do that—in order to move closer to goodness and further from wickedness in ourselves, and in our society, and in the creation at large—we must discriminate between good and bad, and choose goodness. That we forgive the wickedness of our enemies does not automatically make them friends; and if they cannot let go of their deadly hatred of us, then in order to control the risk to us of their hatred, we must perforce destroy them with it. In that case, we cannot survive to forgive them except by defending ourselves, and working their destruction, however that may grieve us.

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FRED OWENS writes:

My left-wing buddy, Alan Archibald, is blogging away like hell fire, but you are not able to keep up with him — not that anyone is keeping score.

I’m thinking there are other things going on in your life that are more important than the blog. This is good. And protecting your privacy is a key part of your message.

But I’m hoping that some kind of message of assurance from you would be welcome to your devoted readers, of which I am one.

Thank you for all your work.

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