At first glance, there’s nothing particularly special about the portrait.

It might have been of our parents or grandparents.

It’s somewhat stilted.

More than eighty years old, it quintessentially from a different time and culture.

To misquote Shakespeare’s Mercutio, “A plague on your houses.”

Speaking about the 45th president’s Himalayan-sized range of legal problems, the one-time vice-presidential candidate who later quit her gubernatorial post half-way through her term told a conservative commentator:

“I want to ask them: What the heck? Do you want us to be in civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen. We’re not going to keep putting up with this. I like that you suggested that we need to get angry. We do need to rise up and take our country back.”

My father died in 1998 at age 79; my mother was just months shy of her 103rd birthday when she died in 2021.

Their lives taught a simple lesson about why anti-abortion legislation is failing across the nation.

They had their own very personal versions of Philadelphia-born Irish Catholicism.

“Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker…”
Proverbs 14:31

“Open your mouth for the mute,
for the rights of all who are destitute.
Open your mouth, judge righteously,
defend the rights of the poor and needy.”
Proverbs 31:8-9

It’s settled!

By Divine (with a capital D) fiat (as in “fiat lux et facta est lux”)!

Alabama Jack’s conch fritters and crab cakes are the best. [We might have said “divine” but that would be hooky.]

How good are they?

It was a tragedy played-out in two acts.

Through decades.

Perhaps three or more generations.

Every counselor or priest who’s been “on the job long enough” has the story that will stay with them forever.

Here’s mine.

On January 6, 2021, braggadocios Californian Evan Neumann was captured on footage wearing a red [we’ll just say it’s a four-letter acronym with two As] hat, using a barricade as a battering ram and shouting at Capitol Police, “I am willing to die, are you?” When he was indicted on fourteen charges, including assaulting police officers, he fled – and begged for refugee status in Belarus.

[EDITORS’ NOTE:
To be honest and historically accurate,
we have quoted directly
from original sources.
As a result, we have used words
or phrases that would not be part
of our speech or writing today.
We trust you will understand
our editorial choice.]

“You can be sincere and still be stupid…
It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently…..”
Fydor Dostoevsky

The statistics tell the story.

By May 30, 2023 more than 1,033 of the January 6 Capital rioters and insurrectionists had been arrested and approximately 485 defendants have received federal prison sentences - up to 18 years for members of the Oath Keepers found guilty of seditious conspiracy; 277 defendants were sentenced to time in federal Gray Bar Hotels and roughly 113 to periods of home detention.

August 20 will soon come and quickly pass, its significance almost universally unrecognized.

For some, however, like December 7, 1941, it will remain “a date which will live in infamy.”

There are no “alternative facts.”

There’s

• Whoppers

• Mendacity

• Tall tales

• Prevarication

• Misrepresentation

Even (and this is “best of show,”)

• Cozenage

There is an important admonition missing in the rituals of the Ordination of Priests in our shared Catholic tradition:

“Trust the goodness of the People of God. God’s People – most of them - are good and – most of them - genuinely desire to love Him and all His Creation faithfully and well. They are growing. They are learning. They are a Pilgrimage People. Shepherd them. Listen to them. Serve and love them. And allow them to show you the Way.”

What

We speak

Becomes the house we live in.
Who will want to sleep in your bed

If the roof leaks

Right above

It?
Look what happens when the tongue

Cannot say to kindness,
“I will be your slave.”
The moon

Covers her face with both hands
And can’t bear

To look.
Hafiz

It’s like putting tooth paste back in the tube.

Just as there are certain words that, once you’ve heard them, you can never forget. (“Onomatopoeia” comes to mind.) there are life-moments so deeply imbedded in our neurological makeup that generations will carry them to their graves: President Kennedy’s assassination, 9-11, the murder of MLK, Barrack Obama’s speech on the night of his first presidential election, January 6.

Way to go, Pope Francis!

You’ve picked such great winners this time, we can hardly wait to see your next Fantasy Football line-up.

The instructions to A.B. McDonald (1871-1942), a veteran reporter for The Kansas City Star, were direct and simple: “Find out what made Atlanta crazy and how.”

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised
for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
It would be better to live under robber barons
than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep,
his cupidity may at some point be satiated;
but those who torment us for our own good
will torment us without end
for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C. S. Lewis

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil;
that put darkness for light, and light for darkness;
that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"
(Isa. 5:20.)

“The greatest way to love another person is to pray for them.”
Father Frank Meccia, MM

How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats
did it take to change a light panel?
We’ll have a sub-committee meeting
and get back to you with an estimate.”
Peter F. Hamilton

“Let’s form a committee tasked with exploring
why committees are so ineffective.
Then we’ll stand-back and watch it
argue and self-destruct.”
Ryan Lilly