This is what I call receiving mixed messages. After regular doses of pestering, my mother finally drove me to Saint Benedict Center, where we enjoyed a Traditional Latin Mass on Sunday. Later on, we got a few goodies at their book store; I selected Father Leonard Feeney's The Bread of Life and Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton's The Party System [with a foreword by Ron Paul and an introduction by an Italian prince]! And as always, one of the most enjoyable parts was Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M. His subject this week was culture. With a comic's pity, Brother detailed the archetypical teenager of the anticulture, whose idea of a fancy meal is McDonald's, and whose cultural reference points are late night, sitcoms, "and if you're lucky, a 'classic' like The Three Stooges". Expectably, his outlook on life is that of a fool. To my dismay, but less so than it would have been were it not expected, he noted that while some art forms can be incorporated into an authentic Catholic culture (he mentioned folk music, and the general ease missionaries found in adapting traditional Japanese culture to the Faith- score 1 for my all-time favorite TV series, The Vision of Escaflowne), others could not: he mentioned video games (that's 1 down each for The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess) and popular music played on the radio. Alas, what a jab at my beloved Sarah McLachlan, Nelly Furtado, Backstreet Boys, et al! True enough, they shall never find a place in local, community festivals, but can their music really be declared antithetical to Christianity unless it nearly always leads one to improper thoughts? It certainly has never had that effect on me.

And then there was this. The Diocese of Burgos is preparing the cause of beatification for Marta Obregon, a pious Spaniard who was killed resisting a sexual assailant in 1992. Her story is moving, and reminds me of the tragic tale of Saint Maria Goretti. Curiously, though, she was murdered on her way home from a night club [while this provided a segue to the discussion of pop culture, I have since learned that this was a mistake on the part of the news agency which was my source; please see the comments]. Canonized saints are models for Catholics in future ages to emulate; in light of Brother's words on pop music (and then, I would expect, the dancing that goes with it), this is quite a mixed message. The only other good Catholic partyer that comes to mind is Primo de Rivera, who once upon a time ran a brief but highly successful and Church-friendly moderate dictatorship in Spain- he was apparently quite wild during early military career, and yet he now lies alongside Francisco Franco in the Valley of the Fallen.

Perhaps more troubling still, though, Marta Obregon was also a member of the Neocatechumenal Way, of which I have heard only bad words from my traditionalist surveys.

In light of this development, my fellows in Backstreet Boys fandom would be wise to set up a John Paul II-style canonization-process-that-begins-before-death for said group's Howard Dorough, who is very public about his Catholic faith- enough to open his own line of jewelry, available from Rock your Religion, with the proceeds going to battle Lupus.