Pets and hermeneutical children

PF said something I agreed with!! He criticised a sterile culture in which people prefer to walk their pets rather than their children! I was reminded of the wise words of S John Paul II about "generous fertility". And then the episode grew yet more amusing as the pontiffesses of the Sisterhood moved in with their indignation that PF should try to 'tell them what they should do with their bodies'.

I shall not enable any comments which suggest what the Sisterhood could do with their bodies.

But then, sadly, I came down off my high. I admonished myself: "Remember the Hermeneutic".

There were happy days when Pope Benedict ... and not to mention Father Tim ... encouraged us to think about the Hermeneutic of Rupture and the Hermeneutic of Continuity. Excellent. But life moves on. In more recent times, I have been personally driven to adopt my own new Hermeneutical Principle. This is how it works.

Whenever Pope Francis says anything, about anything, my internal mechanism clicks into operation like a highly sophisticated Enigma Bombe. And the question pops automatically into my head: "So who is it that our Holy Father, with his sweet matutinal levity, is hating this morning?"

Accordingly, a couple of nanoseconds later, the penny dropped in my mind. 

Cats is the key.

I recalled the visit Pope Benedict the Great made to the Birmingham Oratory, when Cardinal Pushkin was still alive (although towards the end of his distinguished life there seemed to be little enough beneath his Eminence's fur other than his bones). 

I will venture categorically to assert that the Cardinal never once celebrated the Novus Ordo.

Never did I see Pushkin stalking through the streets of central Birmingham without his Cappa Magna. 

Nor did I ever hear him utter a single word in praise of arthur roche.

Yet how kindly, how gracious, were the previous Sovereign Pontiff's interactions with that great Birmingham ecclesicatstic!

Ahhhhh ... omnia patent in aperto ... odium felinum radix malorum omnium ...

Wozzat you say? This is unfair because it means that ... for me ... PF will never be able to say or to do anything right? That my whole logical universe is structured upon an invalidating circularity of argument?

Hrrrmmmphhhh ... I suppose you must be right .... er ... hang on ... there must be some way round this ... possibly a category error somewhere ...