Fraudulent Lawyers & Incapable Modern Man

Today is another bonus day “On the Square.” In Kagan’s Fraud Upon the Courts , Joseph Bottum reflects upon the discovery that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan rewrote the central claim of the infamous American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists report on partial birth abortion. This should raise problems, notes First Things ‘s editor, for what had seemed an inevitable confirmation.

And in Glorify God By Your Life , Archbishop Charles Chaput reflects upon the challenge issued by the great Catholic theologian Romano Guardini in 1964, in a letter to a major liturgical conference:

In his final lines he offered an opinion that left people stunned. He wrote: “Is not the liturgical act, and with it all that goes under the name  liturgy , so bound up with the historical background—antique or medieval or baroque—that it would be more honest to give it up altogether? Would it not be better to admit that man in this industrial and scientific age, with its new sociological structure, is no longer capable of the liturgical act?”

“There’s no evidence that theologians or liturgists ever took his concerns seriously—though he put his finger on one of the key questions of mission in his time and also in ours,” writes the Archbishop of Denver, who proceeds to take it seriously.