“There is a definite battle being waged within the Catholic Church. It is the same ‘culture war’ being waged by secular moderns against those who uphold traditional morality, it is pro-life vs. pro-choice. But within the Catholic Church the same battle is fought along liturgical lines.”

Or so insists an editorial at LifeSiteNews, responding to a note in L’Osservatore Romano in which Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Karaganda, Kazakhstan, asks the Church to reinstate kneeling to receive communion: “Wouldn’t it correspond better to the deepest reality and truth about the consecrated bread if even today the faithful would kneel on the ground to receive it, opening their mouths like the prophet receiving the word of God and allowing themselves to be nourished like a child?”

There are interesting points to consider when one thinks about kneeling for communion—and then there are interesting points to consider when one thinks about the divisions in the Catholic Church over the liturgy.

It’s the latter that has drawn in Richard Stith, the smart legal commentator from Valparaiso. Stith points to the LifeSiteNews editorial and, generally accepting its line that the sides in liturgical debates correspond to sides in the cultural debates, offers an explanation: “This (frequent, certainly not universal) connection lies in a common lack of perception for dignity or sacredness, and with it the loss of respect or reverence for life, on the one hand, and for the Host on the other. This absence of awareness of the great or holy is a result not just of becoming friendlier and more informal, but of the reduction of the whole world to the banal categories of ‘fact’ and ‘value.’ This reduction endangers not only the unborn and the liturgy but any firm recognition of the human individual.”

Is that right? Or, at least, is some similar explanation right? This is a claim that the relation between post-Vatican II liturgical reformers and the left end of the American political spectrum is not adventitious, or cultural, or even political. It is, rather, logical, and though Stith admits it is “not universal,” the implication is that those who don’t join the stripping of the altars and the murder of the unborn are simply failing to follow the logic of their own positions.

Well, probably I’m overstating Stith’s view. But I’m not overstating the editorial on LifeSiteNews, and I find myself very uneasy with this line of analysis.

When was the last time you read a book on rock ‘n’ roll that had a bibliography with St. Augustine (City of God and the Confessions), J. Budziszewski, Peter Kreeft, Thomas Merton, Fulton Sheen (3 books), Richard John Neuhaus, and George Weigel?

The book in question arrived in our office some weeks ago, and is called Achtung Baby: Meditations on Love in the Shadow of the Fall. The author is Stephen Catanzarite, Managing Director of Pittsburgh’s Lincoln Park Performing Arts Center, and a Catholic. His little book is part of a series examining the ideas behind rock’s greatest albums, this installment being dedicated to Achtung Baby by U2. The album is pregnant with Christian imagery (a whole song is sung from the perspective of Judas Iscariot) and heavy thoughts on love, sexuality, and the modern age. Catanzarite walks us through these themes, creating a story along the way to carry his exploration. The story is not that enlightening, but his unraveling of the album’s intricacies will interest fans of U2 and those who care about Christianity in popular culture. Here’s a sample:

Each song on Achtung Baby provides a variation on [the devil’s discordant tune]. Taken collectively they offer an insightful meditation on the Fall and the consequences of our “fallen-ness.” It is all there: our infinite potential for dreaming, discovering, and building, and the trouble we cause by confusing our liberty with license; . . . our reveling in the fact that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” and the sad acceptance of our brokenness; the excellence of fidelity, and the appeal of seduction; the glamour of evil, and the disaster of sin; the paradox of being rooted in time but destined for eternity; the God-shaped hole at the center of our being, and our vain attempts to fill it with something, everything, anything but God.

If you don’t already know about the Christianity present in U2, or have never heard Achtung Baby, find a copy and listen to it. And if you are interested in a thoughtful engagement by a Catholic with the best of modern rock, you might like Achtung Baby: Meditations on Love in the Shadow of the Fall.

I can’t remember Ms. magazine receiving this much attention since about 1978, but the magazine is back in the news—this time for turning down an ad from the American Jewish Congress.

You can see the pro-woman ad here. It shows photographs of Tzipi Livni (Israel’s foreign minister), Dorit Beinish (Supreme Court), and Dalia Itzik (speaker of the Knesset). Underneath the photos, the ad declares: “This is Israel.”

According to the AJC, Ms. magazine explained that the ad was too controversial and “will set off a firestorm,” merely for daring to say anything positive about Israel. Not that it really needed any more proof, but here’s one more bit that shows the old-line feminist organizations aren’t really about women. They’re wholly owned subsidiaries of the left—and if the left rejects Israel, then Ms. magazine must reject Israel’s women.

. . . and it’s incredibly annoying.

Paul McCain over at his Cyberbrethren blog hearts Amazon’s Kindle. It seems that the days of the paper book, periodical, and newspaper are numbered.

Feh! I remember when they said 8-track tapes were doomed. My 8-tracks work just fine THANK YOU VERY MUCH. I don’t need your fancy cassettes!

It seems like every five years there’s some new gizmo that’s supposed to make entertainment/information more portable and more accessible. So fine—I broke down and bought a Betamax. Try and find movies for it! Another fad—like television. I may buy a microwave this year. Although I’m told that more than 20 million people a year die from radiation exposure directly related to microwave use. Don’t believe me? Stand outside the Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street subway station and tell that to Yevgeny the Mad Russian, who screams about it every morning. (That and the fact that the KGB owes him $5,000 US for surgery to remove the little men from his head planted there during a bad patch in the 1970s. )

Like a bad mung bean, this too shall pass . . .

Until this Sunday, January 13, three panels from Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise will be on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For those Americans who have never been to the Baptistery in Florence, and who don’t plan on visiting Italy any time soon, the exhibition provides a splendid glimpse at one of the masterpieces of the Renaissance. The Met is showing three newly restored panels from Ghiberti’s doors to the Baptistery, as well as some of the sculptures surrounding those panels. The panels on display at the Met depict the stories of creation, Jacob and Esau, and David, while the side sculptures depict various prophets and figures from the Renaissance.

Art historians can provide more insight into Ghiberti’s technique and its impact on European art, but as an ordinary museum-goer, I was struck by the depth of emotion Ghiberti conveyed through the small bronze figures. This was especially apparent to me in his depiction of the creation of man and woman. On the left, God lifts Adam out of the dust of the earth, infusing him with divine life. In the center, God draws out Eve from Adam’s side, and she proceeds forth in all her beauty, guided with exquisite tenderness by angels. I know of no comparison in art for the depiction of the love of God and the simple splendor of man and woman as his creation.

But the small picture online cannot do justice to the real thing. If you are in New York at any time before this Sunday, I highly recommend paying a visit to Ghiberti’s doors at the Met.