THE TYRANT'S PLEA

Necessity has a stern face. Schiller

We must've gotten under Dannie's skin.

Two weeks ago PL remarked on "One-Hand Dan's" unusual request for Gertie suggestions about fund-raising and mind-control opportunities for 2017 Lent. As we reported, the sheep aren't flocking together for his "church suppers and recollections," so the sede amazing scapegraces were looking for another way to herd 'em in for a spring fleecing. (Click here for the full post.)

From the looks of it, the cult commissars aren't waiting for input (which wouldn't be forthcoming anyway). Peeved, no doubt, by PL's reading of his dilemma, His Authoritarianship has apparently decided to lay down the law, as evidenced by last week's "Bishop's (?) Corner," where he somberly put his thralls on notice:

We’re busy planning a good Lent, offering everything we can think of, at a convenient time, to make for a truly spiritual and holy “forty day fast.” Make your plans to change your plans and offer up a little extra church time. Recollections [ReCollections??, Ed.], Masses, devotions, Stations for adults and children and even some suppers and social events are on the calendar and in the planning stages. But pray to be generous.

Allow PL to translate "One Hand's" stark Cultspeak for you:

No more surveys. No more waiting for the tongue-tied laity to pipe up. No more Mr. Nice Guy, pouring sugar and syrup all over his cynical pretty-pleases. The forbidding cult Thought Police have gone full steam ahead with their own plans to serve up a smörgåsbord of money-milking, gut-stuffing events at all hours. N.B. The Gerties aren't invited to attend. They're commanded to be there, no matter what else they have on their schedule: "Make your plans to change your plans," Bossman Dan harshly demands with the iron-handed resolve of a banana-republic despot whose back's up against the wall.

No excuses accepted! He doesn't give a refrigerator rat's toenail how tired the Gerties are after a long day of demeaning, low-pay work or futile wrangling with out-of-control kids off their unaffordable meds. They'd better make an appearance! Dour Dan's asking-days are over, got that? He needs Gertie greenbacks!

Everybody —"adults and children" — is expected to show up for cult "social events" during the "forty day fast," which, counterintuitively but not surprisingly, has "even some suppers" calendared. (We'll bet it's more than "some": Lent at the cult isn't Lent without plenty of free eats for the ever-peckish "prelate.") There'll be no question about who's got to fatten the "clergy" — and the vacation fund: Dannie stiffly ordered the Gerties to "pray to be generous," which means they have to come up with extra cash and do all the catering.

Woe to the indigent cultling family that doesn't meet His Inflexibility's hardline standards of generosity toward himself. If he doesn't collect all the money he craves this season, that means Ma, Pa, Meemaw, and Papaw didn't "pray to be generous" as Dannie enjoined. And if they failed to "pray to be generous," then, we imagine, they surely aren't worthy of Prudently-Dubious Dan's "sacraments." (💀WARNING TO GERTIES: Telling His Exigency your prayers weren't answered will get you nowhere!)

PL's going to venture a wild guess that the cult masters'll be taking attendance at all these activities. Our advice to the cowering Gerts who feel compelled attend is to keep an eye on the flinty "principal" and his wife (to see if one or both are keeping a record of who showed up). Try to observe whether they've got a little book where they surreptitiously take names and count family members present. In addition, when the collection plate comes around, watch the usher to check whether he's keeping tabs on who gave and how much.

There will have to be a reckoning of some sort if participation in 2017's Lenten gelt -'n'-grub grab is as dismal as that of past years. Should the Gerties ignore "One Hand" again this year, then he knows it's time to throw in the towel. The conditions are already so bad that SGG has resorted to offering bingo at 12:45 p.m. on Sunday (!!), February 26. Did the cult masters decide to abolish the Third Commandment in the same way that Tony Baloney did away with the Leonine Prayers?

 If Unsparing Dan's gone to all this trouble to slate a host of crypto-fundraising activities and the turnout is still low, he's going to have to make examples of some cultie cheapskates. We kid you not. He cannot  — will not — allow absentees to take Double Decker® Taco Supremes® out of his mouth or filthy lucre out of his pocket. Vacation time is 'round the corner. He's determined to care for his crushing needs.

. . . . . . . . .

It's a little off track, we know, but PL can't resist commenting on a couple of serious errors recently committed by the cult kingpins. Traditional Catholics need constant reminders that these clowns are NOT AT ALL like the highly educated clergy of pre-Vatican II days. To be brutally honest, the cult masters aren't equal to the educated Novus-Ordo clergy of today. To err is human, we'll be the first to admit. But the mistakes the cult "clergy" make are unpardonable, because they're not simple slips of the pen or Spell-Check intrusions. They're the unmistakeable marks of the illiterate and unschooled.

Last week, one of you noticed Big Don's February schedule listed the 24th as the feast day of St. Matthew (!) rather than of St. Matthias. Perhaps another hand drafted the schedule. It might have been the sloppy work of one of the (so-called) high-school-graduate-only "nuns" or an uneducated lay cultling. Nonetheless, a subordinate's ignorance doesn't excuse the Donster in this case: he either failed to proofread the document, or he missed the blunder when he did read it over.

If Tradzilla, or Junior, or one of the pesthouse "professors" (LOL) is responsible for this disgraceful blunder, then the fool would merit our most severe condemnation. Anyone who's been celebrating Mass for as long as he  has (or, for that matter, for as long as the Kid, Scut the Prefect, and Squirmy have) should know St. Matthew's feast day doesn't fall in February. Furthermore, such a gross error might indicate that Big Don and his "priests" aren't familiar with The Acts of the Apostles and so thought Matthias and Mathew to be one and the same.

But as head-shakingly awful as this blunder is, it doesn't match the egregiousness of Dumbo Dannie's mistakes in his Feb. 12 "Corner." They signal an ignorance more profound than not knowing the New Testament, for they present a triple threat to literacy in one sentence: (1) badly mangled prose, (2) mistranslated Latin, and (3) unfamiliarity with elementary English usage. Take a look at the mess:

... Lent itself is called for a number in Latin, Quadragesima, or forty, for the forty fasting days that comprise it.

(1) The sentence, with its awkward passive and unwieldy phrasing, reads as if the English word Lent got it's name from the Latin word Quadragesima. That's impossible, as any schoolboy or schoolgirl knows. The Modern English word Lent, comes from the Old English lencten, which originally meant "springtime, spring" (compare the Modern Dutch lente). What he should have written is:  "The liturgical Latin word for Lent is Quadragesima..."

(2) After stumbling over his unsure English, Li'l Daniel then obliterates his small Latin by wrongly informing Gerties that Quadragesima means "forty." Forty — quadraginta in Latin — is a cardinal, but quadragesima is an ordinal, so the correct translation is "fortieth." (The unexpressed noun that the numeral adjective quadragesima ("fortieth") modifies is dies, "day.")  Real Catholic clergy know the difference.

(3) Lastly we come to the usage howler "comprise." His Inadequacy wasn't privileged to receive a university education, so he never learned this simple rule: the whole always comprises the parts; the parts compose (= constitute, make up) the whole. Thus Lent comprises forty fasting says, or forty fasting days constitute Lent, but never do "forty fasting days ... comprise [Lent]."  As the redoubtable Fowler complained in Modern English Usage: "This lamentably common use of comprise as a synonym of compose or constitute is a wanton and indefensible weakening of our vocabulary."

Wantonly Wrong Dan needs to buy himself a copy of Garner's Modern American Usage or Roberts' Plain English out of this Lent's collection. Then all he'll weaken is the liturgy and the faith.

* Scholarship tells us the name Matthias (probably a shortened form of the Greek Mattathias) is a variant of the Greek form for Matthew, Matthaios, which itself represents an Aramaic Mattāi, a shorter form of the Hebrew Mattityāhû or Mattanyāhû, "gift of Yahweh." Although the two names come from the same word, the apostles bearing them are separate figures in sacred history. Need we repeat that a real priest or a real bishop would know that?