On the Square Today

Elizabeth Scalia on the conceit of primacy :

Just as coastal conceit can devalue what comes out of “flyover country,” our First-world conceit can blind us to what is happening in the church “out there” among the “thems.” Upon learning that in 2004 Hungarian Archbishop Csaba Ternyakny reported such a worldwide increase in seminarians that the number bested the Catholic heyday of 1961, my friend was stopped in mid-snort. No provincial, he, the notion that third-world priests would be missioning the church in America nevertheless left him discomfited. We wouldn’t need to be missioned-to, he argued, if the church would just be reasonable, do its social duty and either allow priests to marry, ordain women, or both.

Also today, John Daniel Davidson reviews Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality :

A few days before he fell ill, Christopher Hitchens said in an interview, “One should try to write as if posthumously. Because then you’re free of all the inhibition that can cluster around even the most independent-minded writer.” At the time, he was on a book tour in New York promoting his new memoir, Hitch-22 . One morning he woke up in his hotel room, “feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement.”