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An interesting article at The Free Press reports on the rising trend of veiling at Mass, especially among young women.

Here in Part I is a general observation that I haven’t heard from anyone (though I don’t doubt someone else has noticed); Part II will explain my personal reasons for covering. I haven’t written (or much talked) about why, in 2019, at the age of 59, I began wearing a covering on my head in church. Full disclosure: those reasons are also not the ones I have seen others give!

And I’d be interested in hearing from you about this general observation; do you think it’s valid? Does it make sense to you?

It is this: I think St. Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians is speaking to unmarried women.

In our era and place, we do not have a traditional, national, cultural, or religious costume, so we are totally unfamiliar with the idea that married women in all times and places not affected by modern individualism, but particularly Jewish women of St. Paul’s time, have always covered their hair.

Norwegian women, Pakistani women, Chinese women, Amish women — all women pretty much universally, and Jewish women for sure, covered and if traditional, still cover, their hair.

Consecrated religious women veil* — wear rather complete hair covering — for this reason: they wish to appear, since they are, espoused. They are not in search of a husband, for they already have one, Christ Himself, and their head covering reminds us of this truth.

So married women and consecrated virgins do not appear without their hair covered.

Therefore, St. Paul is speaking to unmarried women.

Because we Americans (and in the West generally) don’t think of things this way, we, men and women, assume St. Paul is speaking to every woman. So we either defensively explain why women don’t have to do this oddly first-century thing or have created a rather impressively spiritual theology about why women ought to do it.

I agree that St. Paul, when he says to wear a head covering "because of the angels," is certainly referencing the hierarchy of creation: “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.”

And it’s lovely to think of precious things being veiled, as Alice von Hildebrand said:

“Therefore, [because of her ability to carry new life,] the dignity of the female is that God, so to speak, has a direct contact with her body. This is why the woman should be veiled. Why is it that women are called upon to be veiled, which is not truly the same way of males? Why? Because whatever is sacred calls for veiling. The shamelessness of women today should make the devil rejoice and should make Christ cry, because there is no more consciousness of the fact that my body is a place where God is conceived.”

But with all due respect to dear Dr. von Hildebrand’s beautiful insights, maybe we are complicating things.

We should remember that St. Paul was practical and actually rather earthy. And he knew that woman is caught up in how she and above all, her hair, which as he says elsewhere, is her glory, looks. The healthy unmarried woman takes pride in her beauty and can’t help making the most of it. It’s human nature for her to do so and for healthy young men to notice.

The married women are already covered in near-universal custom, certainly in St. Paul’s time and place — at Mass and everywhere else. And who among us has not wished we had this practice, free as we are — it’s a lot to take care of your whole household and deal with bad hair days!

St. Paul is simply guarding against making church a place of, well, exploring attraction, being flirtatious, looking at others and being looked at, and not being focused on worship. All very normal activities! Those things aren’t bad — in fact, they are good in their own modest way, or how else would we find our mates? But they are not for church.

Because it is a spiritual event (with the angels present, taking the offering to the throne of God), the Mass needs to have some practical rules. Covering one’s head (and uncovering, for the man) is one of those rules.

Today, Mass is restrained and meeting-like for most. It may be difficult for critics and dismissers of this teaching, with their experience of the versus populum posture of the priest, so conducive to keeping an eye on the staid, child-deprived pew-sitters, to imagine the undoubtedly more boisterous, clamorous, and less “presided-over” pre-conciliar church. A church much more full of life, and comings and goings.

That’s it. I think that’s the reason.

St. Paul is not talking to married women at all, for he would not have encountered any married women who did not cover their heads. He assumes, in his letter, that they are already covered.

He is talking to unmarried women, urging them to be as if they are taken, for the sake of the invisible world bearing its cloud of witness. He wants everyone to minimize distraction. He’s lifting our minds to that heavenly realm and leaving us instruction on how to do so.

*I say veil occasionally as shorthand, but St. Paul says “cover the head” and I think it’s normal, sociologically speaking, for women to wear scarves, hats, or bonnets (but not tissues, as they did in the ‘50s sometimes, when they were rushing out the door without their hats!).

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Show notes:

Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, by Casey Means and Calley Means (affiliate link)

The U.S. Marriage Rate Rebounds to Its Pre-Pandemic Level (but is nowhere near its 1960 level)

Leading prayers for the culture of death, by Phil Lawler

Text of Cardinal Cupich’s invocation at the Democratic National Convention

Text of Archbishop Listecki’s Prayer at the Republican National Convention

Rationalism in Politics and other essays by Michael Oakeshott (affiliate link)

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Show notes

Trump has put social conservatives in a dilemma by Edward Feser

Tim Sheehy on the issues. As you will see, he is anti-abortion as I said (and very conservative on all the issues), making him an important choice for the Senate. He is correct in identifying his opponent as wildly, extremely pro-abortion. Sadly and inconsistently, Sheehy is also pro-IVF. IVF results in the deaths of many human lives for every live birth that occurs (and would be evil even if somehow, improbably, it could occur without this outcome).

“I stand in strong support of IVF as a path for Montana families to grow and thrive when they struggle to conceive naturally, like my brother and sister-in-law who battled infertility for three years, and eventually were blessed with my nephew through IVF. I will fight against any effort to restrict IVF treatments for women and families.”

As with LGBT issues, having family members involved in immoral practices risks compromising our willingness to stand for principle. According to the CDC, Approximately one in every 50 kids born in the United States today is conceived in a fertility clinic or lab. We need to anticipate this and decide ahead of time what we will say and how we will respond (and start now by being able to explain why it’s wrong so you’re ready when someone tells you they are considering it). It will happen — we need to be brave. All the babies in petri dishes in their icy prisons are counting on us to keep others from ending up there.

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Amjad Masad

WIRED: Meet the Extropians

Artificial Intelligence (Summary and Conclusions) by Thomas B. Fowler

God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet (affiliate link)

Leisure, the Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper (affiliate link)

Happiness and Contemplation by Josef Pieper (affiliate link)

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The Eucharistic Revival isn’t, as claimed, a grass-roots initiative, and fails to take into account a penetrating blow to the hearts of the faithful in the US and around the world, a blow inflicted by the very hierarchy that now claims to seek to impart love for the Eucharistic Lord.

Attendees of course worshiped and adored Our Eucharistic Lord during the events of the Revival. Their sincerity not in question. There was even some beautiful music! (There was also terrible music.) I don’t even doubt that the organizers of the Eucharistic Congress that followed desire greater understanding of the Real Presence of the Lord, body, blood, soul, and divinity, in the Blessed Sacrament.

Let me bring up two issues: hypocrisy and a failure to repent.

Hypocrisy: A strong word. I’ll just touch on it.

Father Richard Cipolla explains it here very well. He says,

“The root cause of lukewarmness and disbelief [in the Real Presence] is how the Mass is celebrated in most parishes, especially on Sundays. It is the refusal of both bishops and priests to acknowledge this that keeps the Church in this country in the vapid bondage in which it finds itself.”

I myself gave two examples just to demonstrate simply how mundane practices thwart Eucharistic revival.

I also wrote about the stunningly pagan-adjacent liturgy presided over by one of the top prelates in the US, Cardinal McElroy. Are we to believe the bishops when they say they love Our Eucharistic Lord?

Actually, it’s hard to believe that they aren’t blaming us when they speak of revival and organize huge events to push it. If only we, the faithful, knew Who we worship, as Bishop Barron says in his lavish contribution to the effort. Hypocrites, when pushed to the wall (in this case, made to see that they failed in their one job, to preserve the faith in Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist), tend to pass the buck.

Father Brian S. Lewis wearing a face mask symbolizing the Roman collar

I want to focus on the second reason I have a taste of bitterness when the subject of Eucharistic revival comes up: failure to repent of lockdown transgressions.

The Eucharistic revival the bishops say they want won’t happen until they admit what they did during the Covid lockdown.

They bowed to the state, which was engaged in the most grievous attack on its own citizens ever in our history. They bowed even though in most cases, had they refused to go along with spurious, illegal strictures, the state would have relented. They left any political or legal pushback to others — who did prevail.

St. Mary’s Basilica, Sydney, 2 August 2020

They allowed and required absurdities that harmed our sense of reality, things that everyone knew were theater and only served to heighten fear-mongering — which by the way, caused great harm to the mentally vulnerable, many of whom have still not recovered.

They cravenly used religious assent and willingness to obey as a weapon against the faithful, using that weapon solely on prudential matters of masking and in many cases, getting shots. But bishops never require obedience in matters that actually pertain to their sphere, such as reverent worship.

In many cases, they violated their duty to defend bodily integrity, a natural-law right expressed in Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii paragraph 70:

“Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason.”

Instead, some even handed over fathers of families, nurses, doctors, and military members to the fate of losing their livelihood by following their conscience in refusing shots they mistrusted and knew were tainted by aborted fetal tissue.

The bishops and clergy, with few exceptions, hid themselves away, refusing their people the Mass, including, unbelievably, on Easter Sunday, when virtually every church in the country was ordered to be closed.

Bishop Emil Wcela and Fr. Larry Duncklee, from their Facebook page, featuring streaming videos of them doing song-and-dance routines together during lockdown

As far as I know, only one prelate who committed all these sins and more, Cardinal Dolan, has so much as adverted to them subsequently in any sort of “examination of conscience”, and he only to say that he approved.

“A big part of me remains grateful that we did more than our part in obeying the severe restrictions leveled during the pandemic, and for the careful vigilance rendered by our public servants.”

He at least has a niggling thought:

“Yet, another part of me worries that future decades will not look back at us with the same admiration we now have for a St. Aloysius Gonzaga, St. Damien of Molokai, and those young ‘Martyrs of Shreveport’.

But he does not act on this worry; he’s content to praise his own “scrupulous” attention to orders from the government, even in the face of the truth we (and he) now know, even knowing those warnings were silenced at the time.

“Bravo! I am glad we were attentive, and realize that we have a moral duty to listen to prudent medical cautions and protect our people… Our civil leaders — federal, state, and local — applauded our attention to the strict protocol.”

For shame.

The Catholic Church has, for practical purposes, abandoned the ancient paradigm of the three-fold Way of the spiritual (and indeed universal) life, the Way of Purgation, Illumination, and Unity — especially in its first stage of Purgation.

No. We want Illumination, and we want it now.

We want the illumination of transcendent knowledge of Eucharistic realities and we want unity with God in that knowledge. Those desirable states cannot be attained without purgation, however, and God’s grace.

It’s just a reality of the human heart, that we will remain wary in this state, unable to trust. Until the people are offered evidence that our hierarchy has gone on that path of Purgation — frank acknowledgement, repentance, and reparation — I believe even those not quite aware of the wrong done to them won’t be able to follow their exhortations — not when they withheld the very sacraments that they now say they want us to offer devotion. Not when they humiliated us when we begged for those sacraments (including baptism, anointing, and marriage), in their abject submission to unjust authority.

The Church in her faithful members may recover a new love for the Blessed Sacrament on their own, heartened by the few prelates and clergymen who remained steadfast, but until the ones who claim leadership discharge their conscience, accompaniment is impossible.

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Show notes:

The “Fact Sheet” “journalists” are likely to come across if they do a Google search for how to determine whether someone is male or female.

Tim Walz, “folksy Midwestern Dad” narrative supercut. His positions (doesn’t include his insistence that born-alive babies be left to die).

J.D. Vance supports access to abortion pill mifepristone

“I have said repeatedly on the record, that I think that that girl should be able to get an abortion if she and her family soon choose to do so,” Mr Vance said.

UPDATE: Wall Street Journal Opinion piece: Does Imane Khelif Belong in the Women’s Ring? No, but transgender ideology has sown confusion as to why. By Colin Wright.

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Show notes:

How NOT to respond to the blasphemy in Paris — Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture

Lights remain on at the Sacre-Coeur Basilica during city-wide blackout

Chariots of Fire

The Moral Life of the Child: The Ten Commandments — Leila Marie Lawler, Like Mother, Like Daughter

Karen Hall, The Sound of Silence: The Life and Cancelling of a Heroic Jesuit Priest (affiliate link)

Leila Marie Lawler: The Summa Domestica: Order and Wonder in Family Life

Show notes:

Is Kamala Harris the presumptive nominee?

How the Bet on an 81-Year-Old Joe Biden Turned into an Epic Miscalculation

Willa Cather, One of Ours (affiliate link)

We talk about the movies Boys on the Boat and Sully!

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IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY BECOMING PRO-CHOICE?

Troublingly, Republicans brush pro-life support aside and removed pro-life planks from the platform, replacing them with support for IVF and birth control — and recent convert to Catholicism J.D. Vance pivots towards unprincipled rhetoric on abortion. J.D. Vance: “I have said, repeatedly, that that girl [10-year-old Ohio girl having to leave the state for an abortion, according to a one-source story] should be able to get an abortion if she and her family so choose.”

Phil and I discuss the difference between acknowledging political realities that may require pragmatic adjustment and relinquishing principle entirely.

Immunity for Trump—or for everyone? Phil is named as a plaintiff in one of the precedents cited in the Trump immunity case dismissal.

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Archbishop Viganò excommunicated; other prelates get a pass

Rhetoric vs. reality in the Synod’s working document

Entirely excluded from the synod!

WSJ: How Biden’s Inner Circle Worked to Keep Signs of Aging Under Wraps

Marine Corps Band supplies walk-on music for Jill Biden - how fabulous

Diversity Was Supposed to Make Us Rich. Not So Much. “Since 2015, the approach has been tested in the fire of the marketplace and failed. Academics have tried to repeat McKinsey’s findings and failed, concluding that there is in fact no link between profitability and executive diversity. And the methodology of McKinsey’s early studies, which helped create the widespread belief that diversity is good for profits, is being questioned.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise. If companies could boost their profits as easily as McKinsey suggested—the most-diverse firms had a 39 percentage point higher chance of higher-than-average profit margins than the least-diverse—then surely companies would have rushed to promote more women and minority racial groups.

The Sound of Silence by Karen Hall

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Show notes:

Vatican prefect doubles down in defense of use of Rupnik’s art

Vatican ‘trial of the century’ defendant opens countersuit in London court

US bishops’ conference cuts justice-and-peace staff

Is It Time to Abolish the USCCB? by Leila Marie Lawler

New law requires all Louisiana public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (affiliate link)

The Door in the Wall: (Newbery Medal Winner) by Marguerite De Angeli (affiliate link)

The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays of a Traditional Catholic (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) by Joseph Shaw

Thank you for reading Happy Despite Them. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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