As disappointment took hold, I comforted myself that the MIM had at least chosen to create a Vatican City exhibit.  They could have omitted it entirely, and that probably could be seen as a reasonable decision given the size of its population.  So I turned my attention to the artifacts and written portion of the display.  Here is what I saw: 

Sometimes I have trouble letting go of insults, particularly involving my beloved Church.  OK, pretty much all of the time.   So as I walked through the rest of the museum with a chip on my shoulder, I couldn’t resist snapping this photo:

Zoinks!

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 80 (USCCB Sunday Mass Readings) (Audio)

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time—February 19, 2012 (Scripture Speaks)

February 17 – Seven Founders of the Servite Order
February 22 – Chair of St. Peter (American Catholic.org)

Big Families Are Sign of Optimism, Says Pontiff (Zenit)

Every Single Bishop Has Condemned the Obama/HHS Mandate! (181)

Archbishop Chaput: HHS Mandate Dangerous and Insulting (American Catholic)

HHS and Soft Totalitarianism George Weigel on (First Things)

Liberal Jews Speak Against HHS Mandate (First Things)

Lies, Damned Lies and 98 Percent of Catholic Women (Happy Catholic)

Meet your health care overlords (American Thinker)

What contraception has wrought Father Raymond J. De Souza on (CERC) who links to Business Insider’s Time To Admit It: The Church Has Always Been Right On Birth Control

Because the Bible Doesn’t Tell Me So (First Things)

If Pres. Obama can tell the Church what to cover, he can tell the Press what to cover (WDTPRS?)

Nancy Pelosi deserves to be taken seriously. Very seriously. (Canon Law Blog) via Sec. Sebelius already barred from Holy Communion under can. 915 on (WDTPRS?)

The Secret World of Arrietty a movie review from (Decent Films.com)

Department of Home-Lunch Security (National Review Online) quotes the Carolina Journal:

RAEFORD — A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

Make your plans for the 3rd Annual Nun Run on March 10th.

The New Translation of the Beer Billboard

Red with a martyr's blood

On my way to Mass this Sunday, my eyes’ attention was seized by one of those unbearably bright digital billboard signs that change colors and messages every 5 seconds, this one now advertising candy and flowers at a local grocery store under the following headline:

VALENTINES DAY IS COMING!

I have long since been de-sensitized to the anarchy now prevailing at the ends of printed English words, where once there could be found clear distinctions between plural nouns, singular possessives, and plural possessives.  I confess that wishes of “Happy New Years!” make me a little depressed, but only because they heighten my anxieties about how quickly time is passing.  It has been a while since I annoyed my friends the Smiths, who have a hand-painted wooden sign hanging by their front door that proclaims “WELCOME TO THE SMITH’S,” with impertinent questions about which one of them exactly owns the house and is arrogant enough to call himself “the Smith”. 

I have become completely accustomed to coexisting with a sizeable segment of the population for whom the addition of a final –s to common and proper nouns alike is not so much a semantic bearer of precise meaning as it is a kind of hissing sound.  It makes no difference to me whether my kids’ school is observing “Grandparent’s Day” or “Grandparents’ Day”, because the grandparents all live out of state and couldn’t be there in any number. 

But I realized on Sunday that there is far more at stake in punctuating Valentine’s Day correctly.  Forgetting the possessive apostrophe is a small error, the kind of mistake that the late Richard Mitchell used to say is like forgetting to tighten one lousy little bolt on the wing of an airplane. 

Cyril presenting his brother Methodius with the first valentine written in Old Church Slavonic

The Christian roots of the now-thoroughly commercialized and erotico-sentimentalized American Valentine’s Day have long since fallen into obscurity, a situation that was not aided by the removal of the commemoration of St. Valentine, an ancient Roman priest and martyr, from the Catholic Church’s liturgical calendar in recent decades, an emendation that cancelled a traditional observance of no slight antiquity.  February 14 is now the mainstream Church’s obligatory feast of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, co-patrons of Europe, the Greek missionaries to the Slavs and inventors of an alphabet for the same.

(Those Catholics with access to worship in the Extraordinary Form according to the Missal of 1962 have the liturgical observance of St. Valentine’s Day preserved for them on Tuesday, a fact which ought especially to delight 7-year-old girls throughout traditionalist Catholic circles.  Cyril and Methodius, worthy fellows indeed, are themselves not slighted in the old calendar, commemorated on July 7.)

The romantic associations of the holiday, which really began to heat up in 19^th century England, long before the American greeting card industry made it into big business, seem to go back at least as far as late medieval poetry about the early-spring mating of birds, which popular lore held to coincide with the feast-day of St. Valentine.  One can find such a reference in Chaucer, and a later allusion in the mouth of the ill-fated Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Now for Catholic Christians, Valentine ought to be a proper name: a unique Saint of the Church whose red martyr’s blood watered the soil out of which our faith has sprung; or, in a de-sacralized but still noble chivalric vein, a byword for the self-giving, self-sacrificing lover, willing to lay down his life for his lady as St. Valentine did for his Lady Ecclesia.  If St. Valentine is in our minds, then we can hardly forget that the 14th is HIS day, in honor of his witness: it is Valentine’s Day, and the possessive apostrophe pays him just tribute.  To omit it is an offense against piety, if perhaps an unintentional one.

In Latin, there's no apostrophe to confuse us--we just use the genitive case

But in the commercialized pagan culture that expresses billboard messages like VALENTINES DAY IS COMING, a valentine is just a common noun, an ordinary thing that admits of endless pluralization: from the millions upon millions of cheap paper greeting cards that will be sold to the parents of little kids in elementary school, to the temporary erotic partners with whom singles happen to be in congress at mid-February, valentines are a dime a dozen, or $5.99 for the mega-pac at Target.  For American mass culture, it is naturally Valentines Day, the day of many valentines.  In the absence of any clear association with the memory of Valentine himself, the correct apostrophe either feels wrong to those who know the conventions of grammar, or to those who don’t, it’s just another way to pluralize a word, as in the sign at the gas station’s cash register that reads MACHINE IS TEMPERARILY DOWN, WE ARE UNABLE TO EXCEPT CREDIT CARD’S.

To paraphrase George Orwell, author of the absolutely indispensible essay “Politics and the English Language”: if our thoughts are careless and sloppy, they will express themselves in correspondingly careless and sloppy language; but if our language itself is corrupted and imprecise, it has a prophylactic effect, preventing clear and correct thought from ever being conceived.  The mind that doesn’t know the difference between valentines and Valentine’s will be in no position to even suspect that they are actually a he, and the day originally his.

So this year, why not give that special someone a gift s/he’s never had before—an apostrophe, and with it, an explanation of the difference between the subjective plural and the possessive singular, and why the distinction matters on Saint Valentine’s Day? 

As a postscript, I am reminded of the following prose-poem attributed to the late D. Powlett-Jones, an important fictional figure in the underground resistance movement against ungrammatical fascism:

When they came for the apostrophe in Presidents’ Day, I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t a president.

When they came for the distinction between “its” and “it’s,” I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t too sure myself.

When they took the commas from the magazine cover story about “Rachel Ray—on Cooking Her Family and Her Dog,” I laughed half a cup of coffee through my nose, but failed otherwise to protest.

But when I objected to the misprint that confused the meanings of ‘homoousion’ and ‘homoiousion,’ they said it was all Greek to them;

And when I insisted there was an eternity of difference between “He’ll be my comfort and my joy” and “Hell be my comfort and my joy,” there wasn’t a soul left that gave a damn.

Sunday’s Mass readings Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 77 (USCCB)

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time—February 12, 2012 (Scripture Speaks)

Three men who loved lepers: Jesus, Francis, and Damien 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Mark 1:40-45 Fr. Ryan Erlenbush on (TNTM)

February 10 – St. Scholastica
February 11 – Our Lady of Lourdes
February 14 – Sts. Cyril and Methodius (AmericanCatholic.org Saint of the Day)

The Obvious Truth of Purgatory a selection from a 2008 message from Pope Benedict XVI on (CERC)

The New Rule on Religious Employers and Contraception Coverage (First Things) includes a commentary on and link to this afternoon’s fact sheet from the White House.

USCCB initial reaction to Pres. Obama’s bitter “Plan B” pill (WDTPRS?)

Breaking: Multiple lawsuits filed against contraceptive mandate; megachurch pastor vows jail (Jill Stanek)

Conscience Protection and they urge the faithful to take action now. (NCHLA Action Center)

Bishops Speak Out Against Obama/HHS Mandate (CatholicVote.org)

Huckabee: ‘We are all Catholics now’ (The Hill)

What’s Really at Stake – Leviathan’s Appetite (Chuck Colson Breakpoint commentary MP3)

Obamacare’s Great Gift: Clarification (First Things)

50 Rules for Dads of Daughters (From Dates to Diapers)

Just Another Honor Killing in the News A Muslim woman writes on (Patheos)

Beautiful Sex and the Impact of Porn in Marriage (Patheos)

Mark Shea says “I love Bad Catholic”

The guy is fantastic and a much better writer than I am. You should really be reading him, not me.

KBAQ observes the Arizona Centennial with “Hearing the Century”

You’re invited to a special free screening of… Eggsploitation

Eggsploitation Monday, February 27, 6:00 p.m. Arizona State University Business Administration Building C-Wing, Room 215 Discussion and Q&A to follow.

Eggsploitation spotlights the booming business of human eggs, told through the stories of real women who became involved and whose lives have been changed forever.

A longer version of the following essay by James Matthew Wilson first appeared at First Principles. On Friday, February 10, Catholic Phoenix is sponsoring a happy hour featuring a brief talk by  Dr. Wilson at the University Club in Phoenix. Click here to attend.

Imagine: you are seated in one of the middle rows of a large auditorium on a university campus. Outside, the autumnal swell of falling leaves and idling students making their way to the dining hall for their evening meal; within, the formal and dubiously interested shifting of faculty and hungry undergraduates, as one old professor takes the podium. The lights dim, a projector hums, and soon the front wall is aglow with a slide of Botticelli’s St. Augustine.

“How to describe this painting?” the professor muses. “The huge figure of the saint, seated at his writing desk, his eyes absent, yet turned upward. His left hand on an angled lectern, evidently bracing a manuscript page, his right elevated. Too recessed to meet his gaze, yet in line with it: an armillary sphere depicting the motion of the planets, which mark but do not constitute time.

Directly above him, in line with the end of his face, a small crucifix that in fact marks the outline of a radiant cross rather than bearing the crucified Christ upon it. Farther back, behind and above his head, a densely printed and illustrated text on geometry, while just below him, set aside for a moment, his Bishop’s miter. Another text is set before him, no doubt one on which he has been writing a commentary or sermon. But now, Augustine seems perfectly still, save for one imposing, thick-knuckled hand whose movement this image without extension in time leaves ambiguous. Is the hand moving toward Augustine’s breast, to rest upon his heart? It might then signify the descent of the radiant light from, and signified by, the cross above him: the movement of the Holy Spirit. Or is it moving outward, the familiar outward-sweeping arm of the orator in mid-expostulation? The painting leaves this ambiguous.”

A literary theorist in the audience stirs, whispers to an already enervated colleague from History that, of course, it is ambiguous, because this is a painting, not history, narrative, or reality. It lacks the temporal dimension necessary even to claim the hand is in motion.

A theology undergraduate, plunked a row back, sinks down in his seat still more, ashamed to confess that he thought the hand must be moving both ways. Augustine is touching his hand to his heart, signifying the presence of the Holy Spirit within him, and so this movement signifies not the evident physical rest of the painting, but Augustine’s confession to his Lord that “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” But no less is his hand sweeping out, the gesture of one who professed rhetoric for years in Carthage, Rome, and Milan before abandoning it as a profession for a vocation in the Church—only, of course, to become the first great rhetorician of Christianity, who reinterpreted literally all of creation (that armillary sphere up above) in terms of the creative light of the Cross. The undergraduate knows when he is out of his depth; he just never got art.

This student, if we may imagine him beyond the present scene, will doubtless sink lower and lower in his figurative chair during the remaining years of his education until finally exiting the academy for good. He will go and find a job—unrelated to theology, most likely—aware, with a hint of relief, that he is not intelligent enough to join the tenured ranks of historians and literary theorists. And yet he is correct in his interpretation of the painting and the confident professor is wrong. Further, he is a fictional instance of that minority of living persons who would interpret Botticelli’s painting without, as it were, destroying it: one of those who know that the temptation an ambiguity sets before us to throw up our hands gleefully and exclaim, “It’s indeterminate! Who’s to judge?,” is a temptation to all manner of error—and even to sin.

Conservatives, or rather persons outside the academy in general, have long tended to view the rise of literary theory as a desecration of traditional values of art. What we tend less often to observe is that modern education in literature and the arts has, from the beginning, been in tension with how most reasonably educated persons would read a book, look at a painting, or listen to a piece of music.

Deconstruction, for those who do not remember it or were educated after its relative decline from academic fashion, insisted that writing existed, on the page, hermetically sealed off from ideas in the mind and things in the world themselves.

Such claims seemed to undermine any positive assignation of meaning and merit to a work of literature, and so also seemed to threaten the two pillars of twentieth century academic criticism: interpretation and evaluation. And they routinely excited the disgust of the casual reader, the retail banker and the candlestick maker, because it seemed preposterous that some academic in a turtle neck and corduroy jacket would presume to tell anyone who lives in the world that sentences do not bear a determined, that is to say, delimited, meaning inherent to themselves.

The scandal of Deconstruction has slackened considerably in the last couple decades. Few persons today would hesitate to deride the absurdity of Deconstruction—unless, of course, they are seeking tenure somewhere. But would such persons as quickly affirm that a printed word on a page signifies an idea in the mind that, in turn, immediately signifies a thing in reality? “Cow” on the page immediately conjures “cow,” an idea, in my mind; but does my idea correspond in some intrinsic way to that real creature chewing the real cud on some real pastoral hillside?

My suspicion would be that many, even most, persons would answer, “No.” The relation of a written word to the mental word of an idea is an internally consistent, but closed, system. Any relation between that closed system and reality is strictly arbitrary, as we may conclude from the obvious phenomenon of there being thousands of languages with different and unrelated words for the same thing. “La vache” signifies cow in the mind of a Frenchman, as “cow” signifies the heifer in my mind, but neither sign signifies of itself a real cow or, to speak in terms of essences, the reality of “cowness.”

Clearly, the words of a language are “conventional” signs; the real cow does not necessitate its being called “cow” and nothing else, as we know simply from the fact that other people call cows something else. But a necessary causal connection between reality and word is not the only possible kind of real connection. As Jacques Maritain argued many years ago, the system of signs that constitute a particular language are not simply modeled upon, but derive from, the system of natural signs we encounter from the very beginning of our lives.

Smoke is a natural sign of fire—not a cultural convention levied upon the burning villages of natives by colonial invaders! A shout, a scream, and a cry—very different though they are—may be natural signs of that singular phenomenon, a body in pain. These are three different ways of expressing pain, but no one would say that they are three merely “conventional” expressions; in their variety and proliferation, natural signs make possible the multitudinous variations of signs that, through the art of human reason, become a complete language.

The ambiguity of a word, a sentence, a play, or even a picture of St. Augustine, arises not from its being “indeterminate.” It arises rather from even a simple word’s being what Dante called “polysemous,” or polysemantic. Even so simple a word as that I have used as an example—“cow”—does not suffer from a dearth of definite meaning but from a surfeit of meanings. When we encounter that or another word in a sentence, our task seems not so much to be to decide if “cow” means anything, but rather, to determine which of the myriad possible meanings seems most immediately—if not exclusively—relevant. “Cow” as in a Holstein in the Irish countryside? Or a lean and hunkering steer on the range? Or perhaps poor, loud, gluttonous Aunt Ruthie? Or an overreaction according to the lights of Bart Simpson?

All of us are aware of the de-signification of everyday life that stands out as one of the apparent hallmarks of modernity. A number of years ago, cultural critics bemoaned the loss of the “figural imagination,” the “sacramental imagination,” the “ritualistic imagination,” or of, as the anthropologists had it, “savage thought.” The surfaces and interior of the things of this world seemed to have been scoured with lime, until all that remained were the inert facts and things of “objective” reality. Things had been reduced to facts rather than objects; that is to say, the world beyond the human intellect seemed to stand in no real or meaningful relation to it.

But such a narrative describes neither the necessary course of history nor an irreversible course. What makes the world seem to coruscate with meanings is not primarily the conventions a given society builds up over time, as if culture were constructed upon the meaningless void of “thing-ness.” Meaning inheres in things. The signs that we call conventional or cultural are founded on natural signs, upon the real disposition of all things to signify more than their literal, factitious existence.

The world is composed of signs—things that are intelligible because they have meaning to divulge, something intellectual to share with minds equipped to know it. That’s the real story.

Parishioners in the Diocese of Phoenix heard the following letter read from the pulpit this weekend:

January 25, 2012

Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

I write to you concerning an alarming and serious matter that negatively impacts the Church in the United States directly, and that strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith.  The federal government, which claims to be “of, by, and for the people,” has just dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people–the Catholic population–and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception.  Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those “services” in the insurance policies they write.  Almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their health insurance plans.

In so ruling, the Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty.  As a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled either to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so).  The Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.

We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law.  People of faith cannot be made second-class citizens.  We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom.  Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God-given rights.  In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties.  I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same.  Our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less.

Therefore, I would ask of you two things.  First, commit ourselves to prayer and fasting, that wisdom and justice may prevail, and religious liberty may be restored.  Pray the rosary, asking Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Patroness of our nation, to intercede for us.  Without God, we can do nothing; with God, nothing is impossible.  Second, I recommend visiting www.usccb.org/conscience to learn more about this severe assault on religious liberty, and how to contact Congress in support of legislation that would reverse the Administration’s decision.

United in prayer and in confidence in God’s mercy, I remain

Sincerely yours in Christ,

+ Thomas J. Olmsted

Bishop of Phoenix

Beginning next month, Catholic Phoenix will begin to hold a semi-regular series of happy hours at the University Club in central Phoenix.

We hope to see you at our first happy hour on Friday, February 10. James Matthew Wilson, assistant professor of literature at Villanova University and my colleague over at Front Porch Republic, will speak on “John Paul II and the Problem of Beauty.” It will be fun.

Read more here. Keep in mind that capacity is limited to 30 45 or so people, so if you want to come, buy early (but not often).

Admission is $10. Cash bar, with complimentary hors d’oeuvres, opens at 5:00. Dr. Wilson will begin his brief talk at 5:30, and end by 6:00, with the happy hour continuing until 6:30.

Thank you for supporting Catholic Phoenix!

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 71 (USCCB Sunday Mass readings)

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time—January 29, 2012 (Scripture Speaks) reflections on the readings.

January 27 – St. Angela Merici
January 28 – St. Thomas Aquinas (American Catholic.org Saint of the Day)

MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI FOR THE 46th WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY

If God speaks to us even in silence, we in turn discover in silence the possibility of speaking with God and about God. “We need that silence which becomes contemplation, which introduces us into God’s silence and brings us to the point where the Word, the redeeming Word, is born” (Homily, Eucharistic Celebration with Members of the International Theological Commission, 6 October 2006). In speaking of God’s grandeur, our language will always prove inadequate and must make space for silent contemplation. Out of such contemplation springs forth, with all its inner power, the urgent sense of mission, the compelling obligation “to communicate that which we have seen and heard” so that all may be in communion with God (1 Jn 1:3). Silent contemplation immerses us in the source of that Love who directs us towards our neighbours so that we may feel their suffering and offer them the light of Christ, his message of life and his saving gift of the fullness of love.

On that note, I think I’ll stop here.

 (Note to Arizona’s  Governor Brewer: if you really want to put the public smack down, it helps if you can get the other guy on his knees first.) 

The photograph depicts the famous Managua airport encounter between Fr. Ernesto Cardenal and John Paul the Great, upon the arrival of the Pope for his 1983 pastoral visit to Nicaragua, then under the revolutionary Marxist dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas.  Cardenal, ordained a priest in the 1960s, was already well-known throughout Latin America as a poet, wandering liberation theologian, and leader of an “artists’ commune” when the Sandinistas overthrew the ugly Somoza regime in 1979; he accepted the government’s offer to become Minister of Culture, a post he held until the late 1980s. 

Cardenal had been ordered by his bishop, who was relaying orders from Rome, to resign his governmental office, it being inconsistent with the obligations of holy orders for a priest of the Church to serve in such a capacity.  Cardenal of course insisted that serving the revolution was the true fulfillment of his priestly duties, and his refusal became a public scandal.

When the Pope approached the official welcoming delegation at the airport, Minister Cardenal dropped to his knees and asked for a blessing.  What he got instead was the famous, finger-wagging admonition: “You must regularize your position with the Church!  Regularize your position with the Church!”  Cardenal is reported to have answered “Yes, Holy Father”–which I suppose is what you always say to the Vicar of Christ, even if you have no intention of obeying him.

Cardenal remained the Sandinista Minister of Culture, was eventually suspended from the priesthood, and then later broke with the Sandinistas because of what he saw as the “inauthenticity” of their revolution.   He still writes poetry and accepts invitations to deliver lectures at American Jesuit universities, where he presumably tells his audiences that the only “authentic” revolution is repentance and conversion. (?)

“Have we ever eaten here before, Daddy?” asked my newly-turned- 5-year-old daughter on what was our third trip to Habit Burger.

“Sure, we have, sweetheart—remember, the first time was with everybody, and then we went another time last week when mommy was having surgery.  Your brother spilled his lemonade all over the table.”

“No, no, no—I mean, did we ever eat here BEFORE our first time?”

I adore this daughter’s moments of metaphysical perplexity.  Of all our children, she is the one whose  way of looking at the world most consistently delights—either because of the deep wonder in her questions, or because she sounds like she is repeating Steven Wright jokes, or both.

Last summer, for example, she was waxing lyrical to my mother about a deep passion of hers: popsicles. “I just love them so much,” she cooed, beside herself with cold, sweet delight.  “I LOVE POPSICLES, GRANDMA!”

Traditional marriage

“Why don’t you marry one then,” replied grandma, who taught 5^th grade for 27 years and thus can lay down the repartee like she’s at the court of Louis XVI.

“Grandma, you can’t marry a popsicle!”

“And why not?” 

She had to think about that one.  Would it have something to do with the natural law?  One man, one woman?

“IT DOESN’T HAVE ANY ARMS!” 

Her most arresting aphorisms seem to come when an adult is losing patience and is trying to abort an unwanted conversation.  Last August, I was driving the family to an unfamiliar restaurant on a Saturday afternoon—it was so unfamiliar, I knew neither the name nor the address, and the conversation in the front seat about our uncertain destination got someone’s attention from the middle row.  “Daddy, where is this restaurant that we are going to?  What is it called?  Do you know where it is, Daddy?  What kind of food will it be?  Do they have cheeseburgers, Dad?  Is THAT the restaurant over there?  Is it that one?  IS THAT THE RESTAURANT, DADDY?”

Stressed out by the prospect of a voyage to nowhere, aggravated by the hammering of her questions, I vented a bit.  “Sweetheart, the restaurant we are going to might not even exist.”  An unwise response, for I offended what seemed to be her native ontological realism.

“Daddy—you can’t say THAT.  Everything exists!  Trees exist…birds exists…cars exist.  Everything in the whole world exists, so restaurants exist, too!” 

An interesting attempt at proof; I wondered what St Anselm would make of it.  But then I did something reckless.

St Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)

“What about God—does he exist?”

“No, silly—you can’t SEE him!”

Drat—like many a philosophically precocious young person, this 4-year-old was flirting with atheism, and my reckless pedagogy had pushed her there.   I quickly pivoted to attempt a save, lest I merit a millstone instead of lunch:  “But what about Jesus?”

(John 14:21: Whoever sees me sees the Father.)

“Of course, Daddy—Jesus exists.  We can see him hanging on the cross in church on Sunday.” 

Whew.  Grateful for her having come back from the abyss, I decided to save the Real Presence and an exposition of the words of Adoro te devote for another time.  Faith was saved, and we found our restaurant. 

Last spring, when my wife left town for a week to spend time with her ailing father, I had a long stand at home alone with my daughter’s relentless mind and incessant questioning.  The two eldest were away at school all day, and the younger brother, at home with us, was still sub-conversational—it was just she and I, in an exhausting tête-à-tête that lasted from morning till afternoon.  I lay prostrate on her anvil day after day, and the questions fell like blows.

“Dad, are there grocery stores on Jupiter?”

“Dad, when a lady dies in an opera, does she REALLY die, or is she just sleeping?”

“Dad, why is it OK to take a rosary to Mass, but not a stuffed penguin?”

“Dad, do fish have mommies and daddies?”

“Dad, why is my birthday ALWAYS in January?”

“Dad, do Latin words mean anything, or are they just nonsense?  What about German?  Is German nonsense?”  (All depends on who’s writing the German, my dear.)

After one particularly grueling day, I had had it, and I attempted to pull the plug after she stopped waiting for the answers to be finished before launching into the next one, like an impatient ladies’ rosary circle starting Holy Mary, Mother of God before the end of blessed is the fruit of thy womb. 

“Sweetheart, I want you to stop asking questions for a little bit.  Maybe you could tell me some things, but let’s take a little break from questions for a while.  No more questions, okay?”

Her brow contracted, and I watched the lights blink on her modem status indicator for a couple of seconds as she considered her response. 

“Dad, what does—?”  She broke off, shaking her head at herself, and uttering a grunt of frustration.

“Dad, why is—what—does—?”  Her agitation rose.

“Dad, is—what—can we—AAAGH!  If I can’t say any questions, Dad, I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY!”

“Well, then, maybe you could be quiet for a little bit.  Take a rest from talking.  Say nothing.”

At this suggestion, her expression changed completely.  The furrowed brow relaxed; the storm clouds cleared; she relaxedly threw her head to one side, with blond locks bouncing as her face lit up with an incredulous grin, like it does when I deliberately jumble the order in the alphabet song.

“No, Daddy—I can’t do THAT!”