Reasonable, but Unreasoned

By the words of the Gospel, may our sins be blotted out.

It turns out that, as Deaconette has many times said here, blogging is not a ministry. Nor is the pre-eminent political issue of our time to be used as the sole litmus test of one’s Catholic voting identity. Nor should clerics “be publicly voicing overt and purely political opinions regarding individuals, parties, election results, the current news cycle, nor engaging in ad hominem attacks.” And with that quote, she draws your attention its source, a remarkable letter from Bishop Donald S. Hying of the Diocese of Oscar Meyer Madison, Wisconsin. You can read it in its entirety online. We know it’s one hundred and one percent correct because we’ve been frequently told of His Excellency’s extra-most-bestest-ness by the Sacred Person whom His Excellency is contradicting.

The typical method of sermon construction in the Catholic churches of North America, illustrated.

It is on that last of the Bishop’s points, i.e. ad hominem attacks, Your Deaconette wishes to expand. And at the risk of repeating herself, she has many times said here something else — that the curriculum for your basic rad-trad priest (and aren’t they all just so, so basic?) does not seem to include fundamental precepts of logic and formal argument. Bishop Hying didn’t clarify, either, and it makes your Deaconette wonder if the good bishop does indeed know the difference between an ad hominem and an insult. An insult, which is an instance when something unkind is said about another person, is of its nature an attack. To make a case for your point of view is to argue, and in so doing one commits the logical fallacy of argumentum ad hominem by making the case about a person, rather than that person’s ideas. Consequently, ad hominems are far more sly and subtle than a mere insult: they are insults used in place of evidence to support a deduced conclusion.

Consider an insult by the Puttering Proprietor of Pithy Porcelain which he often quoted when the subject of Mr. Obama arose. The 4P was fond of repeating that “every word he [Mr. Obama] says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” The author of that witticism was novelist Mary McGrory. By it, she was challenging the truth of playwright Lillian Hellman’s somewhat autofictional career as a memoirist when Hellman recounted her life among literary icons of the twentieth century, including Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett. More than that, McGrory was entertaining, with humorous hyperbole about the extent of Hellman’s mistruths, while a guest on The Dick Cavett Show television program.

Deaconette is certain the 4P knew of the hyperbolic nature of this insult. It is unkind to call someone an inveterate liar, even when it is demonstrably true of them. You’ll note, though, that while Ms. McGrory confined her remarks to things which Hellman wrote, the 4P expanded it to the entirety of Mr. Obama’s speech. Was he being only humorous? No, Deaconette contends he was expanding the insult into the territory of argumentum ad hominem: any statement by the then-President of the United States could be dismissed without consideration as untrue. Such an argument suggests that because a person has said or done something contemptuous or fallacious once, all other statements or actions by that person cannot be considered good, right or true.

That is wrong. Consider Martin Luther, whom many neo-Montanist Traddies would like us to believe is presently attending The 2021st Annual All-Perdition Lot Casting Competition and Baby Pig Roast at pit number three with an apple stuffed in his mouth, as punishment for not getting proper approval to use thumbtacks on the notice board. Was he wrong to thereafter pen the lines “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, ein gute Wehr und Waffen?” No. Even Catholics can find spiritual consolation in The Bulwark Never Failing.

Deaconette remembers a North Carolinian bishop who had two stock sermon-saving magic tricks he would pull out of his miter in case he had to (sometimes even unexpectedly) preach. One was titled “And then s/he died in my arms,” and the other was titled “And then Mother Teresa said to me.” Possibly the most unsafe place to lie down in the world was in a bed attended by the friendly embrace of Bishop Bill; countless multitudes died in his arms over the decades. His wide-ranging privileged hearing of the dying wisdom of a holy soul was the flip side of the ad hominem coin, called the appeal to authority. It attempted to imbue unremarkable platitudes just remembered as the deacon read the Gospel with the sanctity of one of life’s most holy moments. Likewise, his anecdotes of an unusually loquacious Mother Teresa of Calcutta — whom, to be fair, he did know somewhat well — were similarly encyclopedic, if banal, and were oddly untinged by her experiences of India and Croatia. At the time, Mother Teresa was considered an unassailably saintly living exemplar of Christian life; today we understand she’s a mere canonized Saint and thus, she wasn’t at all saintly.

So many Catholic homilies are rushed affairs with little intellectual merit. Shocking? Well, your Deaconette cannot tell you how many Sundays she has heard the words, “This morning as I was finishing my coffee,” immediately following the words “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.” She thinks it’s at least a month of Sundays. It therefore be-cloven-hooves us to be alert for poorly constructed and fallacious arguments, since we hear so many of them at Mass — and for our own spiritual edification, no less. In any given Sunday Mass homily from clergy ranging in goodness from devoted to debauched you’ll hear ad hominems, a circulus or three, red herrings, ad crumenams, hasty generalizations, false dichotomies, straw men, and slippery slopes. Learn what those are and your ears will prick up so often in the pews, you may be forgiven by heaven for playing Angry Birds instead of listening to the dressy dude at the pulpit. Learn what those are, please; they are your intellectual self-defense.

Deaconette commends Bishop Hying, again, on his wise letter to his diocese. His urgency was clearly motivated by a Prevaricating, Prattling, Politically Presumptuous coffee mug salesman who’d been naughty for a very long time. But even in the good bishop’s letter, Deaconette spots numerous informal and formal errors in logic, and that’s a shame. Perhaps traditionalists will return rhetoric and composition to its honored place in seminary formation. Let’s not wait for that, though; the rest of us can demand an end to lazy sermonizing as if our souls depend urgently upon it. Perhaps they do.

Through the intercession of St Teresa of Calcutta, patron saint of unchallenged and unrepentant charlatans, may Almighty God grant the renewal of His gifts of Confirmation to you, that you may bind up the broken of His clergy, with a gag if necessary, in the Name of ✠ the Creator, and of the Redeemer, and of the Sanctifier. Amen. Please put away Angry Birds and stand for the creed.

Septic Fistula

From the final volume, minus indexes, of the Still Newer Catholic Encyclopaedia, as yet unpublished and likely to remain so due to declining demographic support for such a publishing enterprise:

Zuhlsdorf, His Reverence John Todd. The Unreconstructed Neoplatonic ideal of a failed priesthood. Converted from Lutheranism and shortly thereafter applied to priestly formation with, inter alia, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Dismissed from seminary studies by a series of formators due to serious psychological aberrances and antisocial behaviors and not, as he claimed, for being too conservative. He persisted in applying for priestly formation until he found a non-American sponsor without the pesky psych battery entry requirements, one also willing to overlook prior reports. Was ordained in 1991 by the late Pope “Saint” John Paul II of happy, or call it mixed if we’re honest, memory for the suburbican Roman Diocese of Velletri-Segni. Never took up a permanent priestly ministry to his home diocese. Served as a very minor official in a relatively abstruse and unimportant Roman dicastery, and then for reasons shrouded in mystery and graduate studies, did not. Upon returning from Rome to central Wisconsin, that hub of academic inquiry into patristics, he “worked on his degree” for a decade or so without achieving it, and established a blog which, in the words of his bishop, Mons. Vincent Apicella, “combines arguments of faith and morals with photos of birds, Chinese food, and aircraft seats, as well as boasting about a firearms license, [and] speaks for itself… I do not see what theological or scientific credibility he [Zuhlsdorf] can have.”

The blog was nevertheless widely read, especially by an outspoken pseudo-heretical subset of the American Catholic laity noted for their neo-Valentinianist beliefs in the primacy of worship of the Divine Being over the emulation of the Divine Nature. Significant achievements of his blogging career included harassment of Catholic academics at Hofstra University resulting in his ban from that campus; harassment of officials of the Leadership Conference of Catholic Women resulting in his ban from attending their annual gatherings as a journalist; harassment of papal commission appointee and veteran naval officer Prof. Phyllis Zagano q.v.; instructing his coterie on the necessary disposition to pray for the death of Pope Francis while simultaneously avoiding sin; and an extended personal and ugly vendetta against Rev. James Martin SJ,. q.v. Inspired several parody blogs, notably one “Father D’s What Does the Priest Really Do All Day” and “Deaconette C’s Blog.” Was eventually pressed in 2014 into special ministry for the Diocese of Madison to its angriest Catholic laity, the Tridentine Mass (sic) Society of Madison.

Such was his non-rôle when he was caught in early 2021 broadcasting via his Chinese food blog and other social media, n.b. falsely, that he had obtained the permission of the local ordinary, Mons. Donald Hying (D. Madisonensis, q.v.) to exorcise demons in connection with purported and non-existent fraud in the best-audited federal election ever conducted in the United States. In fact, Zuhlsdorf had been granted permission to recite prayers of exorcism in connection with the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which he characterized with pejorative epithets such as “The Wuhan Devil,” “COVID-1984,” and “plandemic,” doubtless also not what Mons. Hying had in mind in extending such faculties. Following a revolt on the seat of the United States government by supporters of the discredited election fraud conspiracy theory, Zuhlsdorf’s nefarious activities were brought to light by leading Catholic intellectuals whom he had relentlessly antagonized, including Martin, SJ, supra and Tony Arnett, q.v. After conducting a brief inquiry and holding an audience with the reprobate priest shortly thereafter, Mons. Hying announced an ostensibly mutual agreement whereby Zuhlsdorf “will relocate from the Diocese of Madison to pursue other opportunities,” but did not mention if any of those opportunities include long-term psychiatric care and/or medication.

Edited by Rev. F. McButterpants, S.J.

Deaconette suspended this blog in the hopes of allowing Bishop Hying time to rectify Father Zuhlsdorf’s ills in the Bishop’s then-new see of Madison. She didn’t expect it to take so long, but she congratulates him on his wise pastoral care. She considers Father Zuhlsdorf’s lengthy career as having come to its inevitable fruitless fig tree crossroads. Her work here is done, for the nonce at least. Let us be vigilant but hope that Father Z’s stone-cold, shriveled, little black soul may by recent events be prompted to blossom into something worthy of meeting its maker before the biological solution to his ministry prevails over his eternal rest.