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Zviadist's arguments are rubbish, and I'm ashamed that you spare them your ordinarily penetrating scrutiny. So Law has been fixed up with a swell retirement post and not been packed off to a hospital chaplaincy in Calcutta as he deserves and (considering the state of his soul) probably needs. And Askel is shocked, shocked to see that even popes are susceptible to disordered loyalties and that evil men prosper in this dark world?

I am shocked too -- and probably I need to confess that because what should shock me most of all is my own appalling presumption and uncharity and self-absorption and lack of humility. I need to confess my resistance to the truth that if the world is going to be illuminated at all, it won't be done for me, but through me, and that no light can come into the world from a dark heart.

When was the Church Militant ever not a church of sinners in desperate need of conversion and repentance? Did you ever read any of my responses to Z, or to the other angry, prideful schismatics who lament the world made unsatisfactory by the sins of others? Did you ever read my post of Jerome's Dialogue against the Luciferians?

Z broadcasts a spirit of rebellion and pride, which gravely compromises his ability to be at one with the Church he professes to love as his mother.

As he's about to take up residence at Sta. Maria Maggiore, Cardinal Law looks fixed to inherit the choice rooftop apartment of a better man, a canon of that basilica who's dying of metastatic cancer in a nursing home in Lafayete, where I visited him Monday night to say goodbye. If he survives till June 11, he'll be 55 years a priest. I owe a great deal to him. If you're ever minded to do me a kindness, please pray for him and others who're close to him. And pray for Cardinal Law and Zviadist and me too.