Surfing the Blogs

Despite the vacation being taken by that superb blog Massinformation, we are still very well served in re blogiana: by two Anglican Catholic Blogs which deserve the daily attention of all good women and true, onetimothyfour and de cura animarum. For a fine piece on sexual mores and a fine piece on the Anglican Primates' thingummy, which say just what I would say if I were less lazy, turn to those two blogs. They have the additional advantage of being done by incisive young priests who are the future of our Anglican Faith-Tradition, rather than by an old fuddy duddy like me (no need to write in to agree). And, by the way, the American magazine Touchstone has in its present number a good article or two on matters of sexuality.

De cura animarum did me the honour, a few days ago, of repeating my piece on the Perpetual Virginity of Our Lady. Among comments it elicited was a shirty piece by some character who said that I was intellectually shoddy, or something like that, for not mentioning the "explicit" statement of S Paul that Joseph was the father of our Lord.

This puzzled me. Because, of course, S Paul's letters do not contain any mention of S Joseph. I assumed that in some arcane sort of way, the writer was trying to draw an inference from S Paul's statement that Christ was descended (without any suggestion of whether this was on a father's or a mother's side) from David; and I just made a few sarcastic remarks in reply about the difference between the words Explicit and Implicit. It doesn't take much to resurrect the Schoolmaster in me.

Mulling it over, I feel inclined to recant. I think I credited that individual with far too much erudition. I now deem it more likely that he/she actually was under the impression that S Paul does speak of Joseph as the Lord's father. It is easy for the unwary to get this impression from Liberals who talk lengthily about the absurdity of the Virgin Birth and prop up their case with an 'argumentum e silentio' based on the fact that Paul never mentions it (just as, if I Corinthians had not not survived, the same gentry would use an argumentum e silentio to 'prove' that S Paul knew nothing about the Eucharist).

Actually, my piece was not on the Virgin Birth so much as on our Lady's virginity after the birth of the Lord. Had my primarily concern been the Virginal Conception of the Lord, I would of course have mentioned the three rather obvious pieces of evidence which show that S John's Gospel does bear witness to it.

Finally, thank you for nominations in the Daft Bishop category. On reflection, perhaps it is not Kind to list too many of those individuals who labour so devotedly under the burden of episcopacy that their minds give way. Can I just leave it that my own favourite three are, in no particular order:
Donald 'Ineffable' Trautman, whose nappy traing got so disastrously arrested in the liturgical early 1970s;
Richard 'Keep the Girls out of Winchester College' Williamson;
and, doyen of them all, the only Anglican to merit inclusion in such company, the Barmy Bishop of Bux.