He put 1970s liturgical changes up the flagpole, had to take them down.

Pius X (1903-1914) is best known for promoting frequent communion, seen by some at the time as making a sacred thing unduly common and therefore less highly regarded.

This problem seems not to have risen until after Vatican 2, when communion became not only frequent but standard for mass-goers and everyone went — as I noted in a National Catholic Reporter essay in the 1970s, calling attention to an unsung achievement of the council, namely that it had abolished mortal sin.

In any case, this change of his and another, to teach catechism in the vernacular (!), are pretty tame stuff by today’s standards.

Let us, however, put a hold once more on this tenth Pius and his works, looking back a mere hundred or so years before him to the synod of Pistoia, a diocese in…

Consider Dom Lambert Beauduin, previously noted as a World War I hero. This account is from a successor in the liturgical movement, Dom Bernard Botte, in his excellently readable, largely eyewitness account of the movement From Silence to Participation (Pastoral Press, 1988). The book is a translation of that year of a 1973 book in French.

Botte was drafted into the Belgian army in April 1914 and served to August of 1919, having left off his pre-ordination studies to follow the call.

Life was like that in Northern Euro countries where seminarians were not exempt. Indeed it was like that in the early ’50s, when as a Jesuit scholastic studying philosophy I heard from a New Yorker about the French scholastic who returned to studies after a compulsory turn in the French army. For us Americans, of course, seminary occupancy was a ticket to non-service in the military.

He ran…

Budget that tries to reverse the state’s downward trajectory vs. one that kicks can down road:

Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner on Sunday vowed to veto a House Democratic state budget bill if it gets to his desk, setting up a potential election-year blame game against Speaker Michael Madigan should public schools throughout Illinois fail to open this fall.

Pension debt solution vs. same-old, same-old:

The threat came as Rauner and Mayor Rahm Emanuel ratcheted up their battle over the governor’s Friday veto of a bill that would have created a new funding timetable for Chicago police and fire pensions. Emanuel labeled a city property tax hike that now could be needed to fund pensions a “Rauner tax,” while the governor faulted the mayor for failing to come to Springfield to work for comprehensive reforms.

Businesses vs. unions and trial lawyers:

The spring session is scheduled to end at midnight Tuesday…

. . . are being challenged by non-aligned citizens, as we know. 

The Ruling Party is opposed to this. It kept such a proposal off one ballot and wants to do it in another, each time deploying an ad hoc group represented by the party’s lawyer, while denying its own involvement.

Constitutional issues are arguable in the matter, but the party has a very big stake here. Drawing electoral district boundaries is a monopoly they have gotten used to.

The system seems blatantly undemocratic — hermetically sealed office-holders deciding whom if anyone they will run against. As such it was raised as an issue at a town hall meeting described in my Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters.

A softball question had just been answered at the mid-July, 2013 meeting at the Oak Park Library. Then . . .

A Certified Public Accountant shifted tone considerably, urging…

. . . as he himself explains.

But it could have been much tougher.

I mean, he could have voted with the Republicans against the new school-funding bill, which passed (easily) on party lines a week ago.

Sure. And I’m the Easter bunny, as TV news man Len O’Connor used to say at the close of one of his “biting commentaries.”

Anyhow, the state funding of public schools arises in my Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters.

It was at a four-legislator forum at Oak Park’s Percy Julian middle school, on a balmy night in October, 2013.

The legislators were there at the invitation of the parent teacher organization, introduced by the district superintendent and questioned by parent members of the district’s Committee for Legislative Action, Intervention and Monitoring (CLAIM).

An interesting evening all in  all, with Harmon on hand plus Sen. Kimberly Lightford and Reps…