NLM on Holy Cards

Thanks be to God for Pope Benedict XVI.

http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2015/10/a-tale-of-three-holy-cards.html

Each man must prepare himself for nothing less than martyrdom

Powerful stuff from Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix.

Let us look to John the Apostle and Beloved Disciple for insights into this battle. In his first Letter to the Church, St. John speaks of the three-fold temptation faced by all of us: temptations to the passions of the flesh, to possessiveness, and to pride (1 John 2: 16-17). Are not all sins tied to these three temptations? John puts his finger on the battles that each of us must fight within ourselves. In fact, Christ fights specifically against these temptations during His encounter with Satan in the desert (Matthew 4), and then gives us instruction in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6) on how we are to fight against them.
Turning away from the passions of the flesh, Jesus rejected Satan’s offering of bread in the desert, and in the Sermon on the Mount, twice He instructs us to fast (Matthew 6:16). Notice that the Lord does not say “if you fast” but rather “when you fast.” Fasting is training in self-knowledge, a key weapon for mastery over oneself. If we do not have dominion over our passions, especially those for food and sex, we cannot possess ourselves and put the interests of others in front of our own.
Tempting Jesus to possessiveness, Satan offered Him “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them” (Matthew 4:8), but once again, Jesus refused. This shows us that Christ calls us to freedom from the temptation to gain the world at the cost of our souls. Often, Satan tempts not through persons but through objects like a car, a house, or the latest high-speed technologies. There is no shortage of messages that tempt us to grasp for happiness through possessions. We recall how the Rich Young Man left his encounter with Jesus as “sad” because “he had many possessions” (Luke 18:23). Pope Francis reminds us, “The emptier the person’s heart is, the more he or she needs to buy, own, and consume.”[13] With Jesus, we are called to seek out, not to “settle for,” a simplicity of life which frees us for our mission in Christ.
In Satan’s third attack upon Jesus in the desert, the Lord was tempted to pride. Satan enticed our Lord to use his power for selfish purposes, but Jesus rejected this cross-less glory and chose the path of humility. In the Sermon on the Mount, He exhorts us to humility not once but twice when He repeats, “when you pray” (Matthew 6:5). Indeed, the greatest protection from pride and self-reliance is turning humbly to God in prayer. The new technologies of social media where we can constantly display and discuss ourselves can lead to a type of idolatry that consumes us. Honest prayer will keep us grounded and help us to avoid this temptation.

 He recommends adopting a patron saint based on the virtues we need or the weaknesses we suffer

Each man should make a decision to have a patron Saint. While there are many more, I offer the names of ten saints with whom each and every Catholic man should become familiar. Next to each saint’s name is listed the virtue with which he is associated, as well as the sin which opposes that virtue. When we identify our sin and the needed virtue, we can identify which saint’s intercession will be particularly helpful:

• Joseph (Trust in God – selfishness)
• John the Baptist (Humility – arrogance)
• Paul (Adherence to Truth – mediocrity)
• Michael the Archangel (Obedience to God – licentiousness and rebelliousness)
• Benedict (Prayer and Devotion to God – sloth)
• Francis of Assisi (Happiness – moralism)
• Thomas More (Integrity – double-mindedness)
• Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati (Chastity – lust)
• Josemaría Escrivá (Boldness – worldly fear)
• Pope St. John Paul II (Defending the Weak – passivity)

It's simply awesome.  I wonder how this is being received in the Diocese of Phoenix: is it mailed to each house?  Are there parish-level programs based on this document?  Bishop Olmsted mentions in the document that many men do not attend Sunday Mass.  So how are they reaching those them with this document?  Is there an organized publicity campaign of any sort? 

Good to see on the eve of the synod

Principle of Apologetics: Positive and Negative Information

Anyone who has seen me speak at RCIA can say that I don't know what I'm doing.  And that is strictly true: I've never taken a course or workshop on public speaking, let alone catechesis.  One of the things you pick up in such courses is technical language for the things you do naturally and I am woefully ignorant of such things.  So while I'm sure I calling this by the wrong names, and probably skipping a few steps, but I wanted to write here a bit about what I call "Positive Information" and "Negative Information".

When I use the terms "positive" and "negative", I don't mean that in a emotional sense.  I simply mean that positive information says what something is and negative information says what something is not.  It is my intention to demonstrate that both are necessary to effectively communicate an idea.  I won't say they are necessary in equal measure, but as you'll see if the scale is tipped to far to one side you can have problems.

Let's start with a stupid example.  "I was born in Ohio, lived in Ohio for 23 years then moved to Texas where I've been ever since."  That's positive information.  It describes what my history is.  If I were to say "I was not born in Texas, I never lived or spent time in Texas for the first 23 years of my life".  That would be negative information.  It describes what my history is not.  It's also somewhat nonsensical.  Why would I stipulate whether I spent the first 23 years in Texas?  Furthermore, "I wasn't born in Texas" doesn't imply that I was born in Ohio.  I'd have to tick off all the states that I was not born in to establish the fact that I was born with a buckeye in my mouth.  That's clearly inefficient.

So my first statement is: Positive Information is the most effective way of conveying an idea.  Negative information tends to leave a hole in the story that raises more questions than it answers.

However, there is a situation where my negative statement above would make sense.  Suppose someone accused me of committing a crime when I was 18 and living in Texas. In this case, positive information does not help me.  "I lived in Ohio until I was 23" does not mean that I lived only in Ohio, that I didn't visit Texas or even spend a few months here with relatives with I was 18. In that case a person could understand that I was living in Texas, but still a resident of Ohio and considered that my home.  In that case, negative information is the most efficient way to refute the argument.  To do so with positive information leads to the same issue as above: I'd have to enumerate each and every state I visited for even an hour to prove that I was never in Texas.

But note: the statement that I committed a crime in Texas when I was 18 is a positive statement.  This leads to my second point.  A positive statement is hard to refute with another positive statement, and vice versa.  Positive information and negative information each have their purposes.

This leads to something that I can't explain but I have experienced it over and over again: Both positive and negative information are annoying, but negative information is more annoying.   Texans are proud of Texas.  Ohioans are proud of Ohio too.  If I was standing in front of a group of Texans and mentioned that I wasn't born in Texas, there'd be no issue.  If I said it twice, no problem.  If I said it three times, four times, definitely by the fifth time people would be wondering "what's wrong with Texas?  If he doesn't like it here, why doesn't he leave?"  Maybe not everyone, and depending on how I said it I could probably drag that out a little more.  But eventually people would hear something in my words that I didn't say.  On the other hand, if I was standing in a group of Texans and mentioned repeatedly that I was born in Ohio, eventually people would think "What's so great about Ohio? If he likes it there so much, why doesn't he move back?"  My contention is that people will get annoyed with negative information before they get annoyed with positive information.  It may not be by much: maybe they put up with "I wasn't born in Texas" and "I was born in Ohio" four times, but if I keep hammering on that point eventually I'll lose the crowd.

Again, I'm sure there's a technical term for that but it basically stems from preconceived notions and biases that your audience has.  When you speak, that information gets filtered through those notions to some extent before it gets into your audience's heads.  Eventually, though, that filter clogs and no more information can get in. For some reason, it seems that negative information offends or clogs a person's preconceived notions faster than positive information does.

Let's consider this in light of the issues the Church is facing today.  Many people would only like to talk about positive information: the Church is in favor of life, the Church promotes the dignity of the man-woman union, the Church loves everyone.  In doing so, they can avoid condemning anything that anyone had done in the past.  This is incomplete.

As an example: it's possible for someone to be pro-life and favor abortion in some cases.   Two positive statements: The Church is pro-life and Abortion is OK in some cases.  Can these co-exist in a person's mind?  Of course it can.  We see it every day: people feel abortion is nasty business and they'd prefer not think about it, but they can always think of a scenario where it's the compassionate thing to do.   In my example above, I said I'd have to enumerate every place that I ever lived if I was to disprove the fact that I was in Texas when I was 18.  The analogous situation here is to enumerate that the Church favors life in every imaginable situation. What if the mother is 12 years old? The Church is in favor of life. What if the mother was raped? The Church favors life. What if the child is deformed? The Church favors life.  And on and on.  And in the process there's the impression that the Church is OK with abortion in some cases, we just haven't figured out what they are yet.  But nothing has indicated so far that it's an absolute prohibition.  It's much simpler to say "Direct abortion can never be morally justified."

Another example.  Marriage is a unique bond between a man and a woman and Marriage can be established between any consenting adults.  Can both be believed at the same time by the same person?  Sure. A man and a woman are consenting adults, after all.  So are two men and three women.  Better to say "marriage is only between a man and a woman" which is kind of a positive and negative statement rolled into one ("only" implying "this and nothing else").

My final example on this point is the Kasper proposal, that says that marriage is indissoluble and permanent, but it is possible in some cases to divorce and get remarried anyway.  Cardinal Kasper has these two ideas firmly in his head and will not be shaken from either one of them. So if someone way "Marriage is indissoluble" Kasper is the first to shout "Amen!" because he believes it.  But when someone else says "people can get remarried in the Church" Kasper will be the first to shout "Credo!" because he believes it.  The only way to counter that is to say "People can NOT get remarried in the Church after divorce without an annulment".  Then Kasper will shout something else, which probably sounds even worse in German.

I mentioned that both positive and negative information can be annoying.  It's true in the Church as well.  If we only say "abortion is wrong" then eventually we'll prick someone's conscience or biases and we'll get no further with them.  And if we only say "all life in sacred" we'll do that same.  In fact, given our current political climate, it's possible that both are equally annoying at this point.  So it's necessary to use both statements, at least for the purposes of avoiding a shut-down of the dialog for as long as possible. Maybe a statement about the sanctity of life, followed by another statement, followed by a condemnation of abortion, followed by another statement about life, followed by a condemnation of the death penalty, and so on.  Alternating back and forth to give not only a complete view of Catholic morality, but also give people a break to recover from the last blow to their sensibilities.

Perhaps it's easy to see how negative information ("abortion is wrong") can be annoying, but how can positive information be annoying?  For one thing, it looks like you're avoiding an issue, which you are.  Most people will understand that if you are "prolife" that means you are opposed to abortion and if you're "pro-marriage" -- and we need a better term for that -- that  you're opposed to gay marriage. But if you don't actually say that, then  you're taking the easy way out.  And you are.  For another thing, you're implying that something doesn't meet the Catholic moral code, but you're not saying how.  "Yes, yes, you love babies. I get that. I'll buy you an Anne Geddes print for Christmas.  But how is abortion not allowable in some situations?  After all, I'm in favor of animal rights, but I still want to kill the rats in my house. Why can't you draw the line in some situations?"  By leaving that hole in the discussion, you create tension and frustration.

But in the end you'll still get yelled at.  It's no shame having people walk away from the Church's message, as long as you presented it as well as you could. If they walk away from your delivery, then you need to humbly seek to improve your own performance.  But never seek to change the message to gain favor with the crowd.

Another one bites the dust

Word broke this week that First Things has dropped Maureen Mullarky's blog from their website.  I enjoy her writing.  She was sarcastic and humorous with a clear artistic and aesthetic sense.  And there's something about disdain and exasperation that only old women can pull off correctly.  But with that said, I'm not entirely surprised that she's left the site.  I'm still sad about it, but I'm not surprised.

It's been a hard year at First Things for M Mullarkey.  In January she penned a piece that seemed to get the ball rolling (still available at First Things, but for how long?).  An excerpt (in case it disappears soon)

He [Francis] is an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist. His clumsy intrusion into the Middle East and covert collusion with Obama over Cuba makes that clear. Megalomania sends him galloping into geopolitical—and now meteorological—thickets, sacralizing politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.
Later this year, Francis will take his sandwich board to the United Nations General Assembly, that beacon of progress toward the Kingdom. Next will come a summit of world religions—a sort of Green Assisi—organized to lend moral luster to an upcoming confederacy of world improvers in Paris. In the words of Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Francis means “to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.”
There is a muddle for you. The bishop asserts a causal relation between two undefined, imprecise phenomena. His phrasing is a sober-sounding rhetorical dodge that eludes argument because the meaning is indeterminable. Ambiguity, like nonsense, is irrefutable. What caliber of scientist speaks this way?

...

Francis serves an environmentalist mindset that, unlike the traditional ethos of conservation, views man as a parasite (Western man in Francis’ marxisant variant) and understands wealth in pre-modern terms as a zero-sum game. It discards the West’s great discovery—realization that wealth can be created. The endgame is transfer of wealth from productive nations to unproductive ones.

Orthodox environmentalism resents human sovereignty over the earth we inhabit. It begrudges ingenuity in the transactions we invent with nature and with each other. Its radical form, which beckons Francis and Vatican academics, is atavistic, even animist. Discount the gospel gloss. What matters is the spectacle of the Church imitating the world by justifying political agendas based on still-contended data and half-baked Gramscian dogma.

I wrote to a friend at the time that I didn't much care for the harsh language, but I quite enjoyed the line "...Francis will take his sandwich board to the United Nations..."  And I still do.  That's classic Mullarkey: rich with imagery (the sky is falling!) and snark.

That piece apparently generated a flurry of hate mail to R.R. Reno, First Thing's publisher. He hurried to the website to assure the readers that First Things wasn't going all sede vacantist.  But things didn't get much better after that.  For the most part, she associated Francis with some movement, then complained about that movement thus indirectly criticizing Francis himself.  An example is her piece "The Second Coming of Peronismo".

By whatever varietal name you call it, populist leftism is experiencing a rebirth, with the Vicar of Christ as an attendant midwife. Jorge Bergolio grew up amid extravagant devotion to Juan and Eva Perón. The agitated history of those years and the collapse of the peronato into violence and economic ruin is well documented. What matters here is that Pope Francis brings to the Chair of Peter an embrace of the Peronist mystique untempered by its lessons.

She then goes on for many paragraphs detailing the ills of Peronism.  The bottom of this article linked to a related article in The Federalist where she was somewhat less charitable. 

However, the point where I saw her time at First Things growing short was another article she recently wrote on The Federalist, charmingly titled "Che Guevara's Pope".

In large measure, Thursday’s propaganda event will prove a concluding flourish to what this pope is on course to achieve: the descent of the Catholic Church into one more geopolitical “ism,” a pious-seeming companion to every other materialist -ism that tempts modern man away from freedom and toward submission to totalitarian order. Since ascending to the papacy, Francis’ actions have served a mongrel papo-caesarism that drains Christianity of its soul. Christian idiom degrades into the carrier of a secular agenda.
...
Something in me gave way at the sight of an exultant image of Che Guevara overseeing the altar in Plaza de la Revolución, the approved site of the recent papal Mass in Havana. A sadistic, murderous thug looked down on attendees in an obscene burlesque of Christ Pantocrator. Under the gaze of a butcher and amid symbols of the regime, Jorge Bergolio joined his fellow Argentine in service to the calamitous Cuban revolution. The entire spectacle played like a farcical inversion of John Paul II’s presence in Warsaw’s Victory Square, in 1979, and in stark contrast to the message he brought to Cuba in 1998.

What collapsed was any lingering sense of obligatory constraint. Gone is the time for courtesy extended to an occupant of the papacy despite his hubris and ruinous impulses. Out the window is dutiful tolerance for this man’s accusatory or incendiary language. Politesse has run its course. Historian Roberto de Mattei, writing on the wound to marriage delivered by Francis’ recent motu proprio (a personal mandate) ends his analysis with this: “Silence is no longer possible.”

Out the window is dutiful tolerance for this man’s accusatory or incendiary language. Politesse has run its course.

You are likely thinking that silence is hardly what we have had. Gushing prattle has not stopped since Francis hopped a bus back from the conclave. De Mattei used the word silence to cover the servile readiness of clerics and the court press—the credulous, the timid, the self-serving—to spit-polish the veneer of goodwill that overlays the discernible hostilities driving this pontificate and its planetary ambitions.

Make no mistake—there is malice in this pope. It takes little sophistication to realize that the intentions by which people understand themselves to be motivated are often not the ones that really drive them to speak and act as they do. However incoherent Francis’ logic on issues from economics to munitions, his stridency makes clear his antipathy toward the developed world. In this, he is a commonplace Leftist ideologue intent on finding ever-new sources of incrimination in the works of the West.

But actually after reading all that, I didn't think First Things would fire her. I thought she'd quit.  I figured she was in the process of packing up her things and moving to The Federalist, and perhaps that was the plan all along (or heading to another place).  Comparing her articles on The Federalist to her articles on First Things, it's clear that First Things had a moderating influence on her (which may have lead her to feel the need to lash out on a less sober-minded website).

I guess Reno just got tired of putting up with the angry letters and threats to cancel. 

If there's a moral to the story it's this:  It's hard to be the loyal opposition without becoming simply the opposition.  It's hard to criticize just a little.  First you criticize actions, then you discern motivations for those actions, then you criticize those motivations. Meanwhile, you're just a lone blogger, the object of your ire either doesn't know of your musing, or doesn't care. So you amp it up because obviously your enemy is craftier than you thought because he's immune to your barbs. So you derive his motivations to ignore your brilliant insights and it goes on an on until "there is malice in this pope". 

But I want to remember Mullarkey's time at First Things so I'll end with this wonderful article she wrote last year titled, appropriately enough "Who Killed Extreme Unction?"

...
A precious friend died not long ago. Some weeks before the end, while he was still able to speak and take the Eucharist, the local pastor came to anoint him. In requesting the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, the family anticipated Extreme Unction as they had always known it. They were wrong.

The priest commissioned to carry out this liturgy in the name of Christ arrived in dungarees, a plaid flannel shirt, and red suspenders. He had troubled to put on cologne but not his Roman collar. Was dishabille a democratic gesture toward the demotic tastes of the times? By the look of him, he had come to help with yard work. Left behind with his clerics was any visible sign of the divine Agape that was the reason for his being there.

He offered no personal words of consolation, no talk of Jesus, nothing of what it means to pass through death to life as a child of God in Christ. After a bit of light chat about his sciatica and the hazards of an icy road, he announced his intention to get on with administering the Sacrament of the Sick.

The dying man quipped, “Well, I certainly qualify.”

It was the remark of a man fully conscious, poised for accompaniment through the concluding step of the dialogue between himself and his God. But the move never came. The family was not asked to leave the room while the priest heard the man’s last confession. There was none. After a brief spasm of blessings, the priest was gone. Bewildered by grief, and constrained by deference toward a priest in their home, the family saw him politely to the door. But the deficiency stayed behind, dangling like an unpaid debt.

Some weeks later the wife asked why the traditional sacrament of Penance had been omitted. The answer: “Unless someone requests confession, we don’t offer it any more. That would be an intrusion.”

The pity of it.

Nikolai Ge. Crucifixion (1893). Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

We call it Anointing of the Sick. But the dying are not sick. Not any longer. They and sickness are finished with each other. Sickness is a tool of mortality, a loyal servant to the germ of death we were born with. In the moribund, sickness has done its work. It has accomplished what it was ordained to do. No matter now the affliction or assault that opens the grave. Every deathbed is a slaying stone.

The dying lie at the edge of the world, at the very verge of their allotted time. In their extremity, they suffer on the margin of time itself. All flesh is grass, Isaiah tells us. It shrivels at the root; dust in the wind. Where is grass on Golgotha? The place of the skull is rock. The shadow of the Cross is sharpest there. And in that shadow mercy learns its own name.

A fatal chasm exists between the hour of death and the deluge of unwelcome conditions that overtake us. Sickness yearns for treatment; death thirsts solely for redemption. And for the last rite that escorts the dying into the fellowship of those for whom time no longer exists.

Extreme Unction has been relativized, made friendly for a generation that does not want to hear the death knell in the words Last Rites. All the while, death grins in our faces.

I hope that Maureen Mullarkey finds peace.  I hope that either her hatred for this Pope dissipates on it's own, or Francis changes her mind. I hope she finds her way out of the fever swamp.  I hope that she doesn't tone down her razor wit, but that she directs it where it would be better served: against the enemies we all face, not against our leader who's actually on our side, even when it doesn't look that way.

The Francis Effect

Of interest.

A brief note about politics

If you read PJ O'Rourke, and if you don't then shame on you, you'll eventually read this, about the famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence "... life, liberty and pursuit of happiness"

What’s happiness doing in the Declaration of Independence anyway? The original phrase is “Lives, Liberties and Estates,” a brief catalog of man’s inherent rights that appears several times in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Locke was one of the Enlightenment’s foremost proponents of natural law and the rights it naturally bestows, rights that are so much a part of our nature nothing can take them away, and we can’t get rid of them. There were other important natural law theorists, such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui. America’s patriotic thinkers relied mostly on Locke because he argued the case for people’s right to dissolve their government. Also, he was easier to spell. When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence he was referring directly to chapter IX of the Second Treatise, where Locke says that men are “willing to joyn in Society... for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties, and Estates, which I call by the general name Property.” Every educated person understood the reference (moral philosophy not yet having been replaced by civics in the educational curriculum). Many educated persons must have wondered about Jefferson’s substitution of laughs for land.

The fact that property wasn’t mentioned in the Declaration of Independence still seems odd. The French revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man lists property second only to liberty, and the French revolutionaries had less respect for other people’s property (and less property) than did the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson may have been trying to convey the idea that our new nation wasn’t going to be a European kind of place. America wouldn’t be parceled into aristocratic estates kept intact by primogeniture and entail. Entail is a legal restriction on property, usually land, limiting its inheritance to linear descendants of the owner, and primogeniture is a further restriction that leaves out the girls in the family. Entail was necessary to preserve the power (formerly military, later economic) of the holders of the titles of nobility, which titles the U.S. Constitution would soon ban.

O'Rourke, P.J. (2010-10-05). Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards (pp. 28-29). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition. 

And a few pages later

Roger Pilon, chief constitutional scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, in Washington, D.C., believes there was another reason that property rights were handled with delicacy in the Declaration of Independence. Pilon concludes that Jefferson detected a flaw in the logic of Locke’s “unalienable” rights. Property has to be alienable, in a legal sense, or you can’t sell it. If we lived in a country where property was unalienable, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would still have the pocket calculator that they sold to raise the money to start Apple. Therefore when we go to work there’s nothing on the screen of the computer that doesn’t exist at the job we don’t have because we’re still farming the twenty-acre tobacco patch that our ancestors gypped the Indians out of for beads and trinkets the last time anybody was allowed to buy anything, in the reign of George III.

O'Rourke, P.J. (2010-10-05). Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards (p. 32). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

None of this makes any sense.  First of all, the idea that a member of Government could have any familiarity with the founding documents of the United States, let alone write them, is bizarre.  I mean, I did learn in school that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but I just can't square my experience with American Presidents with the idea that Thomas Jefferson (a future American President) writing the Declaration of Independence.

But a further confusion is that the founding fathers of the United States of America were conversant enough with philosophical ideas to apply them in every day life.  If PJ O'Rourke is to be believed (never a sure thing) it would seem that Jefferson, Adams and the rest sat around and debated high-flung ideas like "liberty" and "property" and "inalienability".  Wut?

There aren't too many philosopher kings in the US today.  Politicians think and speak in sound bites.  No idea is expressed unless it can be done so in less than three minutes.   The chattering classes take those three-minute sound bites and cast thirty minutes of scorn on them, which in turn leads opposing politicians to extract three minutes of goodness out of those rants for the next evening-news-friendly quip.  The politicians are really only experts in getting elected and the wonks are really only experts in getting their stuff published.  None of them know "inalienability" from "illegal aliens".

There is one guy in Washington who's eager to expound on his philosophy: Justice Anthony Kennedy.  “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.” You don't say?  I must have missed that part about "expressing identity."  It's stuck behind one of those penumbras that always seem to be getting in the way.

Our political leaders are simply fools.  And we're even bigger fools for putting them in charge.

A Visit to EWTN

We had the opportunity to visit EWTN yesterday.

EWTN has two main sites in Alabama: Hanceville which contains the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament and is where the nuns live, and Irondale which is where the studio is.  We started in Cullman, AL, near Hanceville.

The drive south into Alabama on I-65 is beautiful with rolling hills and densely wooded forests on each side of the highway. Cullman itself is a small town in a pretty area.  This is the lower stretch of the Appalachian Mountains and the hills are varied enough to be attractive but gentle enough that you don't need to hire a sherpa to get around.  I decided to stay in Cullman the night before we visited EWTN for the simple reason that it's a bigger city than Hanceville and I could find a hotel next to a restaurant that had a bar, but the choice was fortuitous.  Cullman is also the site of the Ave Maria Grotto.

The Ave Maria Grotto is the work of a Benedictine Monk at St Bernard Abbey.  The detail of the miniatures is amazing. Brother Zoettl created these miniatures with whatever materials he had on hand: the raw rock of the grotto, bottles and old votive candles, etc. The settings are mostly religious: there are miniatures of Rome and Jerusalem and various shrines and basilicas.

 

The Agony in the Garden

Golgatha and the Empty Tomb. Note the three crosses at the top, presumably the middle cross is Jesus with the two thieves yet to be crucified.  In the scene below, the tomb is empty.  He is Risen!

The Ave Maria Grotto is definitely worth a visit, but it more "interesting" than "inspirational".  But if you're going to the Hanceville Shrine, it makes no sense to leave this off your itinerary.

The Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, is the highlight of the trip.  The road leading to the shrine is beautiful, framing the shrine in front of distant mountains.  The shrine is composed of a number of sites, but the ones that most people would think of are the Upper and Lower Church.  For some reason, EWTN doesn't allow photography in the Churches so I'll have to link to the pictures off EWTN's webpage (which are better than I could take anyway)

Mother Angelica has a strong devotion to the Divine Child and that is reflected over and over again at the Shrine.  The upper Church is called the Temple of the Divine Child.  When we got there, workers were tearing down a recently completed festival of the Nino Divino and even the gift shop is called the Gift Shop of El Nino.  At the center of the shrine is a statue of the Divine Child.

The upper church, the Temple of the Divine Child is almost indescribably beautiful.  The Blessed Sacrament is permanently exposed. The nuns can adore the Blessed Sacrament from behind the reredos while the public prays from the front.  Reverence is enforced through a strict dress code: no shorts or miniskirts allowed (when the rules were written, it was miniskirts on women, but today you never know).

Outside the lower crypt is an exhibit of the Shroud of Turin.

I honestly wasn't quite sure what to make of this. I assume the images are life-sized. There image above is the famous "front view" and across from it is what I assumed to be the "back view" (the shroud is believed to be a long strip folded over the head, so it shows the front and back of Jesus with the images head-to-head).  It was interesting, but with no description next to the images I was left a little confused at the various things I was looking at.

The crypt church itself was nice. It's much more humble than the upper church and is used for daily mass. The most moving aspect of the crypt church is the crypt: the final resting place of the nuns, including Mother Angelica's mother.

And unfortunately, that's about all we saw.  We walked the colonnade on the way to the John Paul II Eucharistic Center and took the tour.  The tour itself was nice, but frankly I wish we skipped it since we only had a few hours to visit.  I didn't get to see the Lourdes Grotto or the Eucharistic Stations of the Cross (which I'd never heard of).

Then we drove down to Irondale and visited the studio and prayed at that chapel, the one you see on televised masses.

The studio tour was interesting and contained the most interesting nugget of information about EWTN.  EWTN has many sites around the country: studios, warehouses, broadcasting stations and so on.  All of them have a chapel with the Blessed Sacrament exposed.  Our guide said that their shortwave antenna nearby has seven employees, all of whom are Protestant, but there's still a chapel there with the Blessed Sacrament and the "EWTN priests" (Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word) take care of the chapel because Mother Angelica wanted the Eucharist to be the center of everything EWTN does.   The Eucharist is there so that It's grace can be spread through EWTN's efforts.  That was really something.

In total we were at the two EWTN sites for about 4 or 5 hours, with another hour-long drive between them.  That's not nearly enough and I'd like to go back.  There are a number of retreat houses outside the shrine in Hanceville and it'd be nice to do a two or three day retreat including prayer time at both places and catching a live show in Irondale.  For larger groups, EWTN offers catechesis sessions in Irondale and that would be nice as well.  Other than the tour and live shows in Irondale, there's not much to see down there unless you organize a larger group (if you are pressed for time, you can skip the tour altogether).  The drive between Hanceville and Irondale might undermine some of the peace and comfort you derive from either place (which is about as diplomatic as I can be) so it'd be nice to spend time in Hanceville, then finish off in Irondale or vice versa rather than running back and forth each day.

But in total, EWTN is a blessing to the Church and the world and it was an amazing trip. I recommend it to anyone, given the proper amount of time to fully appreciate it.  Mother Angelica was truly a force of nature and seeing the physical evidence of it is somewhat humbling when I consider what I've done with my talents (or failed to do as is usually the case).  Mother Angelica has suffered several strokes which robbed her of her vitality these days.  She sleeps most of the day and can't speak very much during the few hours she's awake.  Yet our tour guide at the studio said that Mother Angelica is doing more for the Church now in her much diminished state through her prayers and by offering up her sufferings.  That's even more humbling considering how much I kvetch and complain.