Dear Priests:

A Catholic at Mass might sometimes completely miss the moments of Consecration. Bells are helpful.

My baby in me jumped for joy. Sc. 4, Luke 1:44

One tends to use the language of persons one admires, so: “baby”.

How is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?' —from today’s Gospel

All are invited, but you must be appropriately dressed.

What we care most about we can do nothing about; so: prayer.

This is the synod that doesn’t end twitter.com/LeoTheLes…

Mary Pumpkins

For Jew and Christian, the First Great Commandment is greater than the Second Great Commandment.

Mortimer is Mortimer Adler.

Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors, or: Anti-Freud

I tell you this: there is not a thoughtless word that comes from men’s lips but they will have to account for it on the day of judgment. For out of your own mouth you will be acquitted; out of your own mouth you will be condemned. Matthew 12:36–37, quoted in Thomas Szasz, Anti-Freud

Who Cared Who's Gay?

Lionel Trilling wrote in response to something I had published about Forster a long time ago. It was an astonishing letter. He said that he realized E. M. Forster was homosexual only years after he had completed his book on Forster’s work. It wasn’t an issue in the society at the time he was writing. The atmosphere didn’t lead anyone to think along those lines, and Trilling himself was unaware. —{Cynthia Ozick](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2693/the-art-of-fiction-no-95-cynthia-ozick)

Anecdote, October 2023. Two friends of our returned from Europe feeling ill. They both self-tested positive for COVID. They went to their doctor, who told them: Don’t test.

Are bidets a problem or a solution?

I was told yesterday that there is a shortage of COBOL programmers.

No race was ever freed except by its own efforts, – no man saved except through himself. —John Jay Chapman

Since race is a superstition, read “identified group”.

Autumn Love

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