COMMENTARII DIURNI

1. UKRAINE. Professor Tighe has drawn attention to two good pieces, under Spengler and Eric Posner, on the Ukraine Business. My own view is that this is a matter on which the Roman Pontiff ought to be in the public forum. The Church was into the subjects of Just War and International Law long before the modern secular Nation State had been invented. Let's have some substantial Magisterium on all this, Holy Father! S John Paul II was very definite during the Gulf Wars!

2. FR RAY. Another very good one. Why can't I produce stuff with such good sense ... and so fluently?

3. BLOGGING ETC.. A fine letter from Bishop Egan on the ethics of the use of these modern media of communication, with real  and sensible warnings for all of us. Worth reading three times ... One columnist has suggested that there's hardly a member of the English hierarchy who doesn't have it in for "clerical bloggers". I don't have the faintest idea whether that's true (how could I possibly have?), but if, sadly, it were to be true, Bishop Egan would certainly, by this, have put clear blue water between himself and a number of his brethren. There's all the difference in the world between giving such sound pastoral advice to everybody ... whether episcopal, presbyteral, diaconal, or lay ... and (creating at least an appearance of) being a Management Caste anxious to repress legitimate comment among (what the aristocratic Whig Anglican bishops of the eighteenth century used disdainfully to call) the Inferior Clergy.

4. HELL. Good to know that the Sovereign Pontiff has just reaffirmed the existence of Hell. But won't this make him unpopular among the liberals? I foresee a scenario in which the Guardian (and the Tablet?) will be condemning the Papacy simultaneously for (1) not condemning the Mafia loudly enough in the past, and (2) telling them now that they risk going to Hell.

5. LINKS. I'm no good at technology, which is why I can't supply links. What I do myself is simply to go to the Hermeneutic of Continuity and make my way down the things at the side. I wish I did know how to do these things ...