It all started because Prof. Esolen, living in the pure wilds of New Hampshire, peered out the window of his study long enough to contemplate the decline of Western civilization and work himself into a pique. This time he was upset about Maya Angelou’s black countenance staring at him from a quarter, and he got on Facebook and wrote: “I hear that Maya Angelou (nee Marguerite Johnson) will be gracing the US quarter — or one such, such as we’ve done with the states, and other things. It’s fitting, I guess, because neither the quarter nor her poems are worth two bits. All’s political, and all’s sloganeering.”
Catholic professor Tony Esolen & Catholic apologist Karl Keating say black female poets are inferior.
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • April 14, 2022 • Literature
Mary writes: “Meanwhile I have seen many, many people whose birth trauma or traumatic memories of abortion were triggered by the photos and videos the past several days, leading to terrible suffering. I have seen many, many pro-choice people more convinced than ever that pro-lifers are ghoulish and insane. I have seen no minds or hearts changed. None at all. Graphic and disturbing attention-seeking media circuses don’t change people’s minds about abortion. If they did, they would have by now. We’ve had many. They don’t work.”
So I was going to write a post about Cardinal Marx and his dumb remarks recently about how Catholics are perfectly free to be flexible with the Catechism, especially when it comes to those troublesome paragraphs on homosexuality. Then I saw that Bishop Strickland opened his yap about it on Twitter, and so I guess I have to sweep up the detritis of Strickland’s error before I turn to Marx’s. Strickland saw the story at Catholic World Report and, apparently without exercising any theological forethought, tweeted that Cardinal Marx had “left the Catholic faith.
By now you’ve all heard the horrific details about Lauren Handy, the so-called pro-life activist who was keeping five frozen fetuses in her home. There are still unanswered questions about how these dead bodies were obtained, and whether they were all (or if any of them were) actually aborted; for example, one was still intact and attached to the placenta, and another was en caul. There is some speculation that Handy, with or without the group she belongs to (Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, or PAAU), intended to use the corpses in a publicity stunt of some sort. I don’t know. My friend Mary Pezzulo at Steel Magnificat writes about all of it here, and you should read her article. It’s the only really good thing I’ve read about the whole ugly story.