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Being trapped so long in AmChurchLand makes you say strange things. ;-).

You make me smile, because just before logging on to FR tonight I was checking out a certain bishop of an "American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Diocese" to find out whether the fellow's fish or fowl (he's one of theirs). He has a very good guide to examination of conscience prior to confession, which I propose to bring to RCIA for the benefit of our prospective confirmands -- we presented three to the Archbishop today (what a canting, smirking mannikin), and I was honored to be asked to stand-in as a proxy sponsor.

And speaking of swimming the Bosphorus, if there's anything that could make me do it (and there isn't), it would be relentlessly insipid AmChurch liturgies -- ugly, unholy, self-regarding, and in a word, common -- such as I saw today. How blessed that I was able afterwards to walk up to Camp St. for solemn Lenten Vespers, chanted antiphonally, in Latin. This isn't mere snobbery, as you know yourself; the AmChurch faux-hip will-to-ugliness is so extreme as to verge on the theological. Surely the incomprehension of ecclesial integrity in the cynical use of decorative tags in language, liturgy, and art reveals a spiritual poverty; as we've learned, spiritual sickness follows close behind.

But no, I could never leave Rome. And why should I have to? The greatest theologians of the East are ours as well. Ecclesial differneces are no bar to their spititual sensibility -- a treasure house that I've barely begun to explore, with an honored place in our communion, largely owing to the leadership of the Universal Patriarch my closepersonalfriend JPII.

Only today, Francis of Assisi dragged me to my feet to render some small spontaneous courtesy. Any communion capable of producing a Francis is good enough to go the distance, and surely good enough for me.