Ditch Doc

Well, not really. But at least I’ve been published in a real live magazine. See what you think.

Check out this new winery. Only a year old, and producing wines that my untrained palate finds just delightful. Especially consider the Pinot Noir and the late harvest Kerner. If you can figure out how to order it. I can’t.

Check out this website, valuable not only to bachelors, but married men and monks as well. Don’t bother with the comments, though. Most of them are eminently skippable.

So it’s the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, and the second most popular comment on conservative blogs after “All its predictions were right” is “Paul VI picked the worst possible time to publish it.” I don’t get it. Yes, the sexual revolution was just finding its legs, but doesn’t that make it an especially GOOD time to preach chastity? He couldn’t have done it much earlier; the pill had been widely available for less than a decade, and he himself had just entered the sixth year of his reign. He certainly couldn’t have put it off. That would have resulted in widespread use of contraception even by well-intentioned Catholics, out of simple lack of direction. And the thing about the faithful being confused by Vatican II doesn’t cut it either. Certainly, there were some who thought that the council had done away with Magisterial authority, but that means it was time to publish a corrective. Unequivocally setting out the Church’s immutable stance on a hotly disputed moral question, Humanae Vitae was just that. Forty years after its promulgation, we should recognize it for what it was: a deeply prophetic work, issued exactly when it was needed. After all, if a Pope isn’t a sign of contradiction, he isn’t doing his job.

The poor workman blames his tools, and so, I suppose, the good one doesn’t. But it’s not because he does a good job in spite of bad tools. It’s because he buys good tools.

I was mildly pleased to read the name of my former home town in Mark Steyn’s commentary on the cherry-picking of the BC “Human Rights” Tribunal by a bunch of Ontarians:

“Khurrum Awan, the Osgoode Hall law student on the witness stand, is an alumnus of the Osgoode Hall in Toronto, not some entirely different Osgoode Hall at Fort Nelson.”

He’s right. Fort Nelson’s law school isn’t called that at all.

I was taking the bus downtown today when we came up on a funeral procession going the other way. No one else on the road seemed to notice, but our driver pulled over and waited until the last car had passed. Requiescat in Pace.

There’s nothing more frustrating than an argument with a relativist. It’s kind of like playing chess like this:

“Aha! Mate in three moves.”
“Uh, not if I don’t move any of my pieces. Oh well, guess it’s another stalemate.”
“That’s not a stalemate, it’s…”
“Yeah, well that’s your opinion.”

The prayer service for those who donated their bodies to the anatomy department this year was held yesterday. All the donors’ names were read, and every few names a student presented a brief meditation. Here was mine:

“Perhaps it is fitting that every aspiring doctor, at the beginning of his career, is forced to contemplate its end. On the day we received our white coats, we pledged our lives to medicine, to the maintenance and preservation of human health. It was a heady day. Not long after, in the anatomy laboratory, we looked down at the most unsettling basic fact of medicine: no matter how cleverly we outwit death, or how long we hide our patients from his gaze, though we might snatch a thousand years out of his hands, all of our patients, and all of us, will end in the grave. Faced with death, we are forced to ask: what does life mean?

“These donors offer us an answer. This man on the table in front of me, whose name I do not know, loved his neighbours, loved me, so much that he submitted his body to the ignominy of my scalpel, so that I might learn from him how to treat my patients. His sacrifice demands another. To be loyal to this man’s gift, I must take his example and give my own life to those I treat.

“But what can I do for him? Is there anything we can do for those who have gone before? Our very presence at this prayer service proclaims our confident hope that there is. Though his body has been of use to me, I can be of use to his soul. Wherever I go in my medical career, I will keep his memory with me and pray that God might give him what medicine could not: life everlasting. Goodnight, sweet prince, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, and until we meet again, may you enjoy the reward of your generosity. You are in my prayers.”

So far as I can remember, this was the first weekend I’ve ever spent at an event mentioned on page one of a Major National Periodical. Do give the article a gander: it’s called “Faith put into Practice.”

If anyone is entertaining ideas that I’m involved in a conspiracy to take over the medical world in the name of the Vatican, I’d like to confirm your worries by telling you that I stayed for the weekend in a residence operated by Opus Dei.

After a rejuvenating weekend of the laughter and good red wine to be expected at such an unapologetically Catholic gathering, I said goodbye to a couple of good friends and went back to the residence to sit down for a talk with the superior of the house. (Chosen for the priesthood by St. Josemaria himself. Conspiracy theorists take note.) We said vespers in Latin, and he heard my confession. I was on my way out when I realized I’d forgotten my penance.
“Could you remind me what my penance was Father?”
[Deadpan] “It was the Memorare.”