You Might Be In a Neo-con Parish If:

Our friends at the National Catholic Register have done it again with this one:

You Might Be In a Liberal Parish If…

...your family has to split up to find the tabernacle.

...the pastor wears an Izod shirt and introduces himself as "Steve."

...there's maraca's in the band.

...your pastor's last name starts with "Pf".

OR HOW ABOUT

..."Steve" quotes Hans Kung in his sermon.

...There's more Eucharistic ministers than parishioners receiving Communion.

...The sign of peace last twenty minutes and includes bear hugs.

...The scariest four letter words to your parish council aren't H.E.L.L but EWTN.

...the DRE is a female Episcopalian priest.

Absolutely classic. But what's really the prevailing alternative? How do you know you're in a "faithful," modern-day, EWTN-oriented American neoconservative Catholic parish? You know, truly devoted to the pontiff, to insulate your immortal soul from all this now-disappearing dissent? Each point is a little more detailed, but here are a few clues to look for at your church.

You might be at a neocon parish if:

...they play "traditional" music, that is, by the St. Louis Jesuits and David Hass, or "On Eagles Wings," but on the pipe organ accompanied by a violin. Sometimes even with bagpipes. How solemn, at least no guitars and drums, though!

...Every Sunday Mass includes a meditative post-Communion rendition in Latin, alternating between either Franck's "Panis Angelicus" or Schubert's "Ave Maria" ONLY. That is, with a synthesizer backdrop.

...the pastor is 35 years old, and really does look like he's wearing a black skirt while prancing around the parish center in his cassock.

...Father Connell, the young pastor, prays in Latin with a lisp.

...Father Connell's best friend, Gary, is a layman. But he's always at the church helping out, also wearing a cassock.

...The tabernacle is in the center of the sanctuary alright, behind the altar. But it's bronze and the size and shape of a mini-refrigerator.

...The incense Father uses smells like frankincense with a mothball preservant.

..."John Paul," not "Francis," is Pope.

...When Pope Francis is referenced, it's about "how much like" John Paul II he really is.

...No social justice committee here. Pro-life dominates.

...But we don't want to degrade younger women with the Pro-life message. So the pro-life committee mostly talks about how younger, potentially impregnating men just need to "man up" and "find jobs."

...Air-conditioning the church was so costly, that those new Mary and Joseph statues are both made of Styrofoam.

..."The Crusades" refers to Bush's War On Terror.

...The votive candle stands in the narthex are electric.

...The pastor is always saying how all 20 teenagers in the youth group constitutes a "huge faith revival."

...There's incredible preaching about True Mortal Sin. That is, believing anything "negative" that the secular media says about the Church.

...The DRE (Director of Religious Education) is an ex-Legion of Christ seminarian who scratches out all reference to Fr. Maciel, the true author of his photocopied handouts to the students.

...Father's vestments aren't the 1970's tie-dye ones at all. Rather, they look like they're made of actual fancy Italian restaurant tablecloth fabric.

Now the stereotypical liberal parish (as described) has been fast disappearing since the 1990s, along with the clapping and banjo-guided singing. But what's been replacing it is a bunch of sanctimonious, hyper-sentimentalist, clericalist drivel. Hyperbolizing the liberal parish as anything "typical," nowadays, only steers attention away from the new set of problems now in place.

Even some "liberal" parishes evolve:

Whoopee for Wal-Mart, the New Bastion for R.I. and MA Employment

According to the Providence Business News, the economically hard-hit regions of Rhode Island and nearby Bristol County, MA, are in for a treat. Wal Mart is again hiring:

It’s no wonder they’re excited about the jobs. Even though Massachusetts’ unemployment rate was at 6.6 percent in May, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fall River’s unemployment rate that month was 12.5 percent, according to the Massachusetts Office of Labor and Workforce Development. The Fall River store is one of four Sam’s Clubs and Wal-Mart stores in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts in hiring mode. All together, the four stores are hiring for more than 450 jobs. Sam’s is owned and operated by Wal-Mart Stores Inc...Wal-Mart is hiring for 85 newly created jobs at each of its two relocated stores in Massachusetts, one in Fall River and the other in Swansea...
The Fall River Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart stores are bright spots on the employment landscape in what’s been a long, “tough time” for the city, said Jay Pateakos, vice president of business development for the Fall River Area Chamber of Commerce & Industry.
“We appreciate the kinds of jobs the big-box stores are bringing. People need to be employed,” said Pateakos, pointing to Fall River’s double-digit unemployment rate, traditionally one of the highest in the state, the decline of manufacturing and some of the city’s devastating job losses, such as Quaker Fabric...

Moreover:

Currently, Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart employ 11,000 people in Massachusetts and 2,400 in Rhode Island, said Scott.
The average wage is $13.86 an hour for regular full-time employees, with benefits, he added

But how many new hires are full-time versus part-time is not clear. Overwhelmingly, these stores hire employees part time. According to America magazine, the national Jesuit weekly:

Ms. Aubrey, 55, has been working for Walmart off and on for years. She earns $10.10 an hour and can barely afford her rent. “I am clearing less than $250 a week; I have been on food stamps since they cut my hours,” she complains. “They give you a measly 40 cent raise each year, then they increase health care costs or something else and take it all back.” According to Ms. Aubrey, only the department managers at her store are able to get full-time hours and “some of the old-time employees.”

She says, “The rest of us are part-timers. There’s a lot of single moms in my store and many of them, because of the part-time hours, get government assistance. There’s not only a lot of them on food stamps, there is a lot of them that qualify for Medicaid.”

Then there's this from The American Conservative blog:

Mark Krikorian and Stephen Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies recently said something that got me thinking about the curious phenomenon of the capitalist welfare state. They pointed out that although low-skilled immigrants receive a disproportionate amount of government benefits, the recipients are, for the most part, employed. In effect, employers are getting the taxpayer to subsidize wages: instead of Megalo-Mart paying workers enough to put a roof over their heads, it pays less and lets the public make up the difference. The company gets the labor and profit it wants while externalizing part of the cost of wages.

And there's a big slice of that 50 percent of households receiving government benefits: working ones. So much for the GOP's anti-idleness ideologues telling the chronically unemployed to get up and find jobs, because the Party has it where these prospective workers will still be on the dole. IDIOTS.

So much for all those gainful, full-time jobs coming to Fall River. Goes to show what kind of journalism the Providence Business News purveys.

First and Last in America

The other day, President Obama made this statement in reaction to the ongoing Trevon Martin saga:




While the not guilty verdict for George Zimmerman will stand, the president has more than a few salient points. Besides his own genuine experiences as described, with "a woman clutching her purse...," young African American males are, among other things, more likely to be incarcerated than matriculated in college or voc-tech, and the most impoverished and homicide-prone of all groups. There are certainly competing interpretations of this on the socio-political level, certainly when it comes to finding solutions.

But if one group is last in America, then which group is first? hint: the one that is among the least homicide-prone, absolutely the most educated, and brought up to routinely compete with and successfully beat their supposed oppressors. This manifests in their higher average incomes compared with their male peers. All of this while operating under a similar aura of oppression as the young, black male, courtesy of today's irrational, institutional feminism.

CASE IN POINT, this parody:

Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult

Here, I'm talking about the young, Millennial, Caucasian American female. Long prioritized by society, she's entitled to the best of both worlds from men and society, access to the full gamut of marketplace opportunity, and still a large swath of Victorian female privileges. They can openly blame the male species for their pelvic mishaps, and do so frequently.

Well, the true price tag has arrived, folks. Hold on to your armor, white knight baby-boomer daddies:

See it here:
And down here, too:

Helen Smith.

Author, "Men on Strike."

8 Reasons Straight Men Don't Want To Get Married

It seems that fewer and fewer people in general are getting married these days, and even fewer men seem interested. Men no longer see marriage as being as important as they did even 15 years ago. "According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997--from 28 percent to 37%. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent." Why?

1. You'll lose respect. A couple of generations ago, a man wasn't considered fully adult until he was married with kids. But today, fathers are figures of fun more than figures of respect: The schlubby guy with the flowered diaper bag at the mall, or one of the endless array of buffoonish TV dads in sitcoms and commercials. In today's culture, father never knows best. It's no better in the news media. As communications professor James Macnamara reports, "by volume, 69 percent of mass media reporting and commentary on men was unfavorable, compared with just 12 percent favorable and 19 percent neutral or balanced."

2. You'll lose out on sex. Married men have more sex than single men, on average - but much less than men who are cohabiting with their partners outside of marriage, especially as time goes on. Research even suggests that married women are more likely to gain weight than women who are cohabiting without marriage. A Men's Health article mentioned one study that followed 2,737 people for six years and found that cohabiters said they were happier and more confident than married couples and singles.

3. You'll lose friends. "Those wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine." That's an old song, but it's true. When married, men's ties with friends from school and work tend to fade. Although both men and women lose friends after marriage, it tends to affect men's self-esteem more, perhaps because men tend to be less social in general. >

4. You'll lose space. We hear a lot about men retreating to their "man caves," but why do they retreat? Because they've lost the battle for the rest of the house. The Art of Manliness blog mourns "The Decline of Male Space," and notes that the development of suburban lifestyles, intended to bring the family together, resulted in the elimination of male spaces in the main part of the house, and the exile of men to attics, garages, basements - the least desirable part of the home. As a commenter to the post observes: "There was no sadder scene to a movie than in 'Juno' when married guy Jason Bateman realized that in his entire huge, house, he had only a large closet to keep all the stuff he loved in. That hit me like a punch in the face."

5. You could lose your kids, and your money. And they may not even be your kids. Lots of men I spoke with were keenly aware of the dangers of divorce, and worried that if they were married and it went sour, the woman might take everything, including the kids. Other men were concerned that they might wind up paying child support for kids who aren't even theirs - a very real possibility in many states. On my blog, I polled over 3200 men to ask how they would react to finding out that a child wasn't theirs after all. 32 percent said they would feel "anger and fury at the mother," 6 percent said they would feel "depression," 18 percent said "anger and depression," 2 percent said "none of the above," 32 percent said "angry at the system that forced them to pay," and only 2 percent "didn't care." One man commented that his ex-wife had taunted him with the knowledge that his 11-year old son wasn't actually his: "I was angry at the mother...I severed all ties to the boy. Some may see this as a failing. I see it as self-preservation, and to those that ask the question of whether or not the courts will make a non-biological parent pay child support, pay attention: YES THEY WILL! They see you as nothing more than a source of cash for the child. It seems that a person in these situations should be able to sue the real father for child support."

6. You'll lose in court. Men often complain that the family court legal system is stacked against them, and in fact it seems to be. Women gain custody and child support the majority of the time, as pointed out in this ABC News article: "Despite the increases in men seeking and receiving alimony, advocates warn against linking the trend to equality in the courtroom. Family court judges still tend to favor women, said Ned Holstein, the founder of Fathers & Families, a group advocating family court reform. "'Family court still gives custody overwhelmingly to mothers, child support overwhelmingly to mothers, and courts still give almony overwhelmingly to mothers and women,' he said. 'The family courts came into existence years ago in order to give things to mothers that mothers needed," he said. 'The times have changed and the courts have not.'"

7. You'll lose your freedom. At least, if you're charged with child support that you can't pay, you can be put in jail - and if you can't afford a lawyer, you don't have the right to have one appointed because, according to the Supreme Court, it's technically a civil matter, never mind the jail time. Fathers and Families found that it's the men who are jailed rather than women: "A new report concludes that between 95% and 98.5% of all incarcerations in Massachusetts sentenced from the Massachusetts Probate and Family Courts from 2001 through 2011 have been men. Moreover, this percentage may be increasing, with an average of 94.5% from 2001 to 2008, and 96.2% from 2009 through 2011. It is likely that most of these incarcerations are for incomplete payment of child support. Further analysis suggests that women who fail to pay all of their child support are incarcerated only one-eighth as often as men with similar violations."

8. Single life is better than ever. While the value of marriage to men has declined, the quality of single life has improved. Single men were once looked on with suspicion, passed over for promotion for important jobs, which usually valued "stable family men," and often subjected to social opprobrium. It was hard to have a love life that wasn't aimed at marriage, and premarital sex was risky and frowned upon. Now, no one looks askance at the single lifestyle, dating is easy, and employers probably prefer employees with no conflicting family responsibilities. Plus, video games, cable TV, and the Internet provide entertainment that didn't used to be available. Is this good for society? Probably not, as falling birth rates and increasing single-motherhood demonstrate. But people respond to incentives. If you want more men to marry, it needs to be a more attractive proposition.

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Get off your high horses, you Catholo-New Feminists. And most other self-described "feminists" as well. And Victorian traditionalists. Return to the living wage of the bygone era if you truly want your daughters to be well "taken care of," for starters. DISCLAIMER: I don't agree with every point that every author makes. I do not accept cohabitation.