It’s all downhill from Damasus

While the Catholic blogosphere explodes with news of the Synod, I have tried not to think much about it. “It gets darker and darker,” a friend wrote on Facebook, “worse than the worst of the Dark Ages or the Renaissance.”

To keep my mind off the present, I read about the past. I have finally found a biography of St. Jerome that I like: Saint Jerome and His Times, by Jean Steinmann. The major critical biography by J.N.D. Kelly and the shorter but more recent work by Stefan Rebenich both suffer from the same problem: the authors despise St. Jerome. It’s like reading Ann Coulter’s biography of Hillary Clinton.

But Steinmann reveres the great doctor. He also does a marvelous job of setting the scene around Jerome, with all its drama and brilliant characters. Yesterday I chanced upon this manly bit about Jerome’s one-time employer, Pope Damasus:

The death of Pope Liberius in 366 saw the Christian community in Rome divided. The die-hards, who were in the minority, met in the basilica of St. Mary Trastevere, where seven priests and three deacons elected the deacon Ursinus Pope and consecrated him. Meantime, the majority of the clergy and the faithful were meeting in the basilica of St. Lawrence of Lucina, where they elected the deacon Damasus Bishop of Rome. When they heard of Ursinus’s election, the supporters of Damasus attacked the occupants of St. Mary’s. For three days Rome was torn by riots in which people were killed. Damasus won the day. He was consecrated, and the Prefect of Rome took his side, possibly as a result of Evagrios’s representations to the Emporer, and exiled Ursinus. When Ursinus’s supporters went on meeting and holding services in the Trastevere basilica, the Prefect had his priests arrested. Their congregation set them free. The followers of Damasus made up their minds to settle the question once and for all, and stormed the basilica of St. Mary again, and this time more than a hundred people were killed in the rioting.

A year later, Ursinus came back to Rome, and the trouble started all over again. The faithful of the two conflicting churches were involved in constant and sometimes bloody clashes, and the pagan Pretextatus, the new Prefect of Rome, disdainfully commented that this was a curious way of showing charity. The feud put the Church to shame.

Oh, for the good old days, when prelates killed each other with actual knives and clubs! In my imagination I see our wimpy modern cardinals at the Synod’s opening Mass, exchanging the sign of peace with fingers crossed behind their backs. Their backstabbing is so metaphorical! Silly redhats, proud of their “cutting” remarks. How have we fallen so far?

You can learn a lot about a man by locating his “downhill point”: where does he think the slide began? Everything in the Church started going downhill—at what point? Do you put it at Francis? Vatican II? Trent? One historian I know says everything has gone downhill since the Council of Florence in 1439.

Maybe the “downhill point” was the election of Pope Damasus in 366. Or maybe the Robber Council of Ephesus in 449, where bishops voted on doctrine with spears in their backs. Somehow, we’ve just never recovered that spirit.

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#1 of 365 funny things

Journaling, blogging, and writing frequent letters all bring a particular advantage.  Yes, you create a record of big events to refresh your memory later, but that’s not what I have in mind.  And yes, you create a narrative that can pull your own life together and get you through hard times, but that’s not what I mean either.

What I actually have in mind is this:  the pressure to write regularly makes you pay more attention to what is happening in front of you, because you need to notice whether it’s worth writing about.  When I have written letters regularly, newsworthy things struck me more often; when I wrote a humorous blog, funny things struck me more forcefully; when I posted family items often, photo opportunities occurred to me more readily.

This year, I think I need to laugh more.  Funny things happen all the time–hey, I have six kids!–but I think it will be a good discipline to try and post, here, on the blog, one funny thing each day of the year.

Now this is January 1st, so I guess today’s funny thing could be my New Year’s resolutions.  In fact, it’s kind of funny that I think I’ll actually post every day.  But the official Funny Thing of Today comes from my youngest daughter, Tina.

Indirectly, it comes from me.  Giving in to a curiosity about what my face looks like, I recently shaved off my beard.  The youngest did not run away crying, which was the effect last time I tried the experiment, but after staring at me for a while my just-turned-three-year-old asked, meditatively, “Why do you have a man-face?”  She has asked me that every time I have shaved since.  I think of my man-face as something I have to put on before a tough meeting, but apparently I wear it around the home.

Today, running her fingers over my smooth face, Tina said somberly, “I hope you get more hair on your face.”

So, the vote is in from the three-year-old population.  Any other preferences out there?

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What’s that smell?

The first in a projected line of papally themed perfumes, this Catholic niche market idea never gained momentum.

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Casey in the Classroom

matthew served the point up which no one had seen before but once served once served it was not his but ours and we batted it back to the net for tim to slam down while we cheered and watched so ran the plan but tim slipped and tessa leapt to keep the point in the air while we all took positions then the teacher through our midst came to hammer home the point over the net with his hand like a giant and his face like a thunder cloud and in the wake of his resounding whack we stood with mouths like mackeral to see the point on the ground still on our side of the net and not over the net at all.

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The Completely Self-Referential Personality Test

The Mrs. and I have been reading and talking about the Myers-Briggs personality typing theory.  As I took one of the many tests supposed to tell you your type, I realized that my reactions to the test itself were indicative of my personality type.  So I put together my own amazingly nuanced, sensitive, convenient, and completely self-referential personality test.  Choose whether each of the following statements is (Y) or is not (N) what you would say right now:

(1) To be completely honest, personality tests make me nervous because I’m afraid of failing the test.

(2) I can already tell that this quiz is a bunch of bunk.

(3) It bothers me that I can only answer “Yes” or “No”.

(4) Now that I am finished with this quiz, I’d like to share my results on Facebook.

Ready to score the quiz?  Here’s the key:

(1) Y=F, N=T    (2) Y=J, N=P    (3) Y=N, N=S    (4) Y=E, N=I

So what is your type?  Compare your results with the more elaborate test and let me know in the comments box how they compare!

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