DISORDERED ORDO VIII

Do not try to teach a fool; as well try to cure the dead. Russian Proverb

For our last DISORDERED ORDO post of the summer season, we'll make it as brief as possible. Everyone, including the Readers, is trying to squeeze in one, last mini-vacatiion before Labor Day, so we'll keep our focus on just three of the serious flaws that render foolish Dan's ORDO 2016 dead on arrival.

LITURGICAL ILLITERACY

In our July post, we promised to consider in the ensuing months, in addition to morbid problems with the Latin language, some of the liturgical flaws of grinning Dannie's and Silly Sal's* ORDO 2016. Although many trads mistakenly believe the cult's gaudy shows are indicators of liturgical expertise, nothing could be further from the truth. Without a mastery of the minute details that lie beneath and undergird praxis, Dannie's extravaganzas barely rise to the level of lifeless performance art.

Here's proof in one of the liturgical fine points missed by that pair of fools; by all means, it's subtle, but the liturgy is all about sweating the small stuff: As we've mentioned on other occasions, Dannie's so-called universal ordo irrationally insists on recording a number of local feasts. (Seemingly he doesn't understand the meaning of "universal.") Thus on August 13 (p. 73), Dannie and Silly Sal note the following under the Vigil of the Assumption:

BMV Refugium Peccatorum

While wall calendars may print in English O[our] L[ady] Refuge of Sinners, where the epithet stands in apposition to the informal, endearing equivalent of "Blessed Virgin Mary," according to the Roman Missal, the liturgically correct Latin form is "B[eatae] M[ariae] V[irginis] titulo Refugium Peccatorum," viz. ["the feast] of the B[lessed] V[irgin] M[ary] with the title Refuge of Sinners." If Dannie were the hyper-correct connoisseur of the Roman liturgy that he advertises, we would have at least seen an abbreviation ( to wit, tit.) to indicate he knew the proper Latin form. But, once again, His Insouciancy's ignorance of formalities betrays him for the fool he is.

For Wee Dan, accuracy is a dead letter.

EDITORIAL INDIFFERENCE

As a rule, PL has avoided mentioning the merely typographical errors we've found throughout $GG's ORDO 2016. They're to be expected in such an amateurishly prepared work. Besides, there are so many deadly errors resulting from Dannie's and Silly Sal's colossal incompetence that we don't need typos to impeach the cult masters' efforts.

However, for this post, we'll make an exception, because the example we offer virtually proves the absence of any editorial oversight whatsoever. You may be able to forgive Dannie's ignorance of Latin or his arm's-length relationship with good order, but no one should tolerate an editor missing in action.

On page 43 at April 16, we find "cum sui ℞℞." Now, we're sure this is a mere typo for two reasons. First, our tiresome twosome gets the phrase right on p. 110 at December 31: "cum suis ℞℞." Second, although those two zanies know very little Latin, the Readers believe that even they, illiterate as they are, had to know that the preposition cum takes the ablative, not the genitive singular or nominative plural. (You see, we can give these double zeroes some credit: they must have at least attended the first week of a Latin class, no matter how badly taught.)

So, then, if it's just a typo, and the clown couple got it right once, what's PL's problem?

The problem is ... the same blunder appears again on page 47 at May 2!

Like anyone else, we can understand missing an extremely elementary boo-boo once. But twice? Look, folks, this is one of those dead-wrong blunders that leaps off the page at you when you see it. So overlooking it a second time is hard to imagine. We can only conclude that nobody at the cult took time to read over the ordo once it was completed.

 "Dannie don't care."

LINGUISTIC INCOMPETENCE

We would be remiss if we were to omit mention of at least one grave error in the Latin language, one that can't be explained away as a typo. In a note on April 16, page 43, Dannie and Silly Sal printed the following:

Cras permittitur Solemnitas externa S Joseph in Missis. Omnes Missae, etiam lectis, dici possunt de S Joseph ("Tomorrow the external Solemnity of St. Joseph is permitted in Masses. All Masses, even to or in [?] Low [Masses], can be said of St. Joseph")

The fundamental rules of agreement demand that the participial adjective be nominative feminine plural (to wit,  lectae) in order to modify Missae. It definitely should not be in the dative or ablative plural, as our brace of blunderers printed. A curious soul might easily ask, "How did Dannie and his sidekick fatally foul it up so simple a sentence?"

PL's pretty sure we've got the answer.

If you compare Dannie's note to the notation found in some older American ordines, say, for instance, those of the archdioceses of St. Paul, MN, in 1948, or Cincinnati in 1954, you'll find the following boilerplate on Saturdays following the Solemnity of St. Joseph:

Cras permitt[itur] Solemnitas externa S Ioseph in Miss[is], etiam lectis... ("Tomorrow the  external Solemnity of St. Joseph is permitted in Masses, even Low [Masses]")

Now it's as plain as day how Dannie and Silly Sal blew it. They decided they'd gild the lily by adding a further explanation about the permissibility of the Solemnity's Mass-text for all the Sunday Masses. However, when the dumb duo refashioned the older notation into two sentences,** they didn't have enough Latin to get it right. Insofar as the original boilerplate actually read in Miss, etiam lectis," (i.e., used an abbreviation thus obscuring the fact for Latin-less dunces that lectis modifies Missis, an ablative plural), Dannie and Sal must've reproduced the phrase in the new sentence blissfully unaware that a grammatical change was necessary now that the antecedent Missae was a nominative plural.

This seemingly small but mortal mistake, then, is yet one more infallible sign that Dannie and Co. have no business producing ordines for the traditional liturgy. It's also another warning for Catholics not to buy moribund $GG's ordo or calendar for 2017. Furthermore, it should tell everyone to avoid anything the cult offers or tells you about the faith. Anybody this ignorant of Latin must not be trusted in matters Catholic.

It's spiritual and liturgical death. Get out today.


* We call Dannie's as yet unmasked and equally ignorant collaborator "Silly Sal" after Umberto Eco's babbling beast-like character Salvatore de Montferrat in the novel The Name of the Rose. (For full details, see our July post here.) To get an idea an idea of Salvatore's gibberish, click here for a clip from the movie.

** Another lethal boo-boo. Latin, even Church Latin, prefers to combine very closely-related information into one sentence, as did some American ordines from the 1930s, e.g., Cras poterit celebrari Solemnitas externa S Joseph, universal Eccl Patroni, de qua permitt Miss omnes etc. But style is something far beyond twin air-heads who can't manage to get rudimentary Latin grammar straight.

A MULLIGAN FOR "ONE-HAND DAN"

Occasiones non modo accipe, arripe. (Don't just take opportunities: snatch 'em!) Publilius Syrus

Don't say we didn't try!

Last week, we deliberately posted super early about Dannie's plagiarism of  the work of blogger Paul Anthony Jones (click here). Our aim was to give Copycat Dan enough time to pull the second installment of his Latin series from the August 14 bulletin or at least to substitute something original. As much as we enjoy watching "One Hand" stew in his own mess, his shameless behavior discredits all traditional Catholics.

So that's why we attempted — unsuccessfully —to intervene. Other people, you know, judge all traddies against His Lawlessness's bad form.

But Li'l Daniel didn't take our gracious hint. Instead, he doubled down by continuing with Mr. Jones's next two explanations of useful Latin phrases. (Click here for the Aug. 14 bulletin and here for Mr. Jones's post on mental_floss.) The intellectual horror in this case is that not only did Dannie keep on plagiarizing like the week before, but he also perpetuated a gross error.

As we did in our previous post, we won't fault Mr. Jones here either. He's simply an enthusiast with no pretension to deep knowledge. However, he got it very wrong when he suggested that the Latin saying Caesar non supra grammaticos ("Caesar is not above grammarians") originated in a rebuke to the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund at the Council of Constance in 1414. To the contrary, the phrase has its roots in antiquity, from the reign of Tiberius Caesar (AD 14-37).

The historian Suetonius tells of a persnickety grammarian, one Marcus Pomponius Marcellus, who criticized a word in a speech of Tiberius. In the same way in which addled Gertie apologists for Dannie respond to criticism of their cult master, an imperial toady affirmed that the usage was proper Latin, or if it wasn't, it certainly would be thenceforward. Never at a non-plus, the exacting Marcellus, after calling the brown-noser a liar, admonished the emperor, "For you, Caesar, can grant citizenship to men; you cannot to a word."*

Now, for those of you out in cyberspace who aren't classicists, we can tell you this little episode is very well known among professionals.  In fact, it's famous enough to have been included in Norbert Guterman's popular 1966 Anchor Book of Latin Quotations. And, quite honestly, we can't imagine a serious Latinist's never having heard it once or twice from a fastidious prose-comp prof.

But inasmuch as Dannie and his clown crew haven't been formally schooled in humane languages and literature, none of them could possibly know the true source of the saying.** That very real limitation, therefore, should teach them to stay away from anything that has to do with Latin, either classical or ecclesiastical or dog or pig. Should Dannie ever stop trying to pretend to be someone other than the lout he is, he would spare himself — and traditional Catholics — a load of discomfort.

Accordingly, PL suggests he cancel the third, plagiarized installment. We've posted very early again so he's got plenty of time to do it today to make sure it doesn't appear in the Sunday bulletin for August 21.

Second chances don't come too often. Dannie shouldn't pass this one up.

But since it's probable that His Obtuseness will choose not to answer opportunity's knock, at least let him give poor Mr. Jones credit for his work, amateurish as it is.

We'll all be watching sgg.org this weekend.


*tu enim, Caesar, civitatem dare potes hominibus, verbo non potes (Brugnoli's edition of De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus, 22, 2; Teubner, 1963).

** Actually, poor Mr. Jones seems to have conflated the elements of the account of Suetonius and the details of the incident at the council, if we are to believe earlier sources. For example, W. F. H. King, adding to the anecdote on Marcellus, recounts the conciliar incident as follows (Classical and Foreign Quotations, # 2534; Whitaker, 1889):

A later Emperor, however, Sigismund I., disclaimed any such absurd limitations and, at the Council of Constance 1414, replied, to a prelate who had objected to H.M.'s grammar, Ego sum Rex Romanus et supra grammaticam, I am the Roman Emperor and am above grammar. (See Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, 3d ed. cap. 325; Buchmann, Gefl. W. p. 326 ; and Carlyle's Frederick the Great.) 

Now compare the two accounts we've given to that of  Mr. Jones's post, which Dannie flagrantly appropriated in his  Aug. 14 bulletin:

In a speech to the Council of Constance in 1414, the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg happened to use the Latin word schisma, meaning "schism." Unfortunately for him, he muddled up its gender—schisma should be a neuter word, but he used it as if it were feminine. When the error was pointed out to him, Sigismund angrily proclaimed that because he was Emperor, even if the word was neuter (which it was) it would be feminine from now on, at which point one member of the Council supposedly stood and replied, "Caesar non supra grammaticos"—or "the Emperor is not above the grammarians." The phrase quickly became a popular proverbial defence of the importance of good grammar and spelling.

Had Dannie possessed merely a teensy bit of formal training, not only would he have recognized Mr. Jones's apparent conflation of the two anecdotes, but also he would have understood that Caesar non supra grammaticos is a saying, not a quotation. But without an education and disdainful of the stigma of plagiarism, our parroting prelate is doomed embarrass us all by uncritically repeating others.

Dannie and Co. are not the real thing, ladies and gentlemen.

WISING UP

The chief aim of wisdom is to enable one to bear with the stupidity of the ignorant. The Ring of Pope Xystus 

It's confirmed.

Dannie's weekly bulletin will indeed carry a regular feature about the Latin language (see PL's post of July 10).

The title of Dannie's failed self-rehabilitation effort has, however, metastasized from "Latin Hiding in Plain Sight"  to "Latin for You," which promises to enrich Gerties with "20 Phrases for Daily Life" at what looks like a rate of two phrases per appearance. As with all Wee Dan's ploys to convince his cultlings he's not the ignoramus we've shown him to be, we'll use his series to demonstrate he's every bit the untutored boob we say he is — and worse.

However, before that, indulge us as we point something out: the two paragraphs Dimwit Dan chose for his Aug. 7 bulletin were lifted — cut-and-pasted is more like it —verbatim without appropriate attribution from a mental_floss blog post by Paul Anthony Jones. (Click here and then compare that gentleman's first two pieces with the entries on Dannie's last page found here.)

It's obvious that the $GG strangers to academic standards harbor no respect for intellectual property rights. In addition, their failure to give credit to Mr. Jones provides another witness to malformation in moral theology. Even more telling, their necessary recourse to out-and-out plagiarism from the Web betrays the poverty of their personal resources as well as of their imagination. Less obviously, this disgraceful literary pilferage confirms once more the cult masters' abject unfamiliarity with basic Latin grammar, as we'll presently show.

In explaining his second adage, Mr. Jones writes (and Dannie's bulletin unashamedly apes):

A man described as barba tenus sapientes is literally said to be "wise as far as his beard"—or, in other words, he might look intelligent but he’s actually far from it. 

Mr. Jones, a writer and musician, does not (apparently) claim to be a Latinist. Therefore, we can easily pardon his not knowing that sapientes is plural, so the word could never refer to A man. That being the case, an accurate translation is not "wise as far as his beard" but rather something like "sages as far as the beard." Now if the cult masters knew Latin, they would have cured the infelicity by fixing Mr. Jones's explanation.

But, then, if Dannie and Co. knew Latin, there would've been no need to purloin another man's work. The cult masters could've supplied 20 adages of their own, perhaps by consulting Catholic authors. Better yet, they might have chosen effata from their own commonplace books (if, that is, they had received a formal, classical education, where the practice is encouraged).

Had PL had been invited to contribute to Dannie's series, the Readers would've suggested Canis in praesepi ("dog in the manger") as a phrase the groveling Gerties should be using. It's eminently apropos because it perfectly characterizes Wee Dan's behavior a few years ago, when he meddled in the affairs of distant French traditionalists in Chambéry. Without a regular priest to serve their small chapel, they engaged a man who had challenged His Dubiety during the $GG School Scandal. That was too much for pay-back Dannie. Although he couldn't staff the chapel with a valid, residential priest, he nonetheless determined to prevent the community from keeping the good man they had found.

Under coercion, the weakling laity, to their eternal shame, asked the priest to return to his native country. The only good news is that Wee Dan's savage triumph over the consciences of others was short lived: A while later, the collaborationist French "priest" who enabled Dannie to pressure those gutless laymen broke with "One Hand." Now, thank goodness, the Wee One's out of France, and the French are out of his malicious reach.* Sadder but wiser, they learned the perils of associating with ill-educated American spoilsports.

. . . . . . . . 

From e-mail correspondents, we're heard many Gerties who follow PL are beginning to have second thoughts about their "old bishop's (?)" qualifications to speak about anything related to the authentic Church. 

Now that's the kind of worldly wisdom that can't be faked by exterior signs!

In fact, the testimonies bring to mind a pearl of Latin sagacity from Cicero, which the cultlings should apply diligently to their daily cult life: Posteriores enim cogitationes, ut aiunt, sapientiores solent esse, "to be sure, second thoughts, as they say, are usually wiser." 

So get wise, everyone. Heed your second thoughts. Stop putting up with stupidity, and get out of barking Dannie's non-Catholic cult today.

* If the cult masters had also asked us to contribute an adage of our own invention, we'd have submitted the following to describe all the posturing kingpins of the U.S. bishop (?)-led cults : Mitra tenus praesulastri, which we freely render, with some assistance from Tennyson, as "mountebanks with no more sign of prelacy than a miter."

DOG DAYS OF SUMMER EDITION

No rogue like to the godly rogue. Fuller

We are, to quote Hesiod, "in the season of wearisome summertime," with parching Sirius still hard upon us. It's far too hot for a longish post on the hypocrisy, greed, ignorance, and outrageous pretense of the cult curs. So today, we'll keep it short, and then, like our poet, take our ease with "sparkling wine in the shade."

After Dannie returned from his third (!!) vacation to Mexico this calendar year, he whined about "scandalous ordinations" south of the border, as though we gringos didn't have a similar example in the SW Ohio cult. Our good friends in Mexico, you know,  were very offended at the slur, so they asked us to vindicate their beautiful and proud land by reminding everyone of the "ordination" of Uneven-Steven McFaker. Obviously, they deeply resented the imputation that cult-master Dannie was somehow the authority on who's rightly ordained and who's not.

Although we've posted on Uneven's shocking case several times since 2012, a quick reminder is in order, just so everybody realizes that scandal is typical of all Traddilandia and not just limited to one country.

In a nutshell, "One Hand" ordained to the priesthood a man who had not even attended one of Tradistan's so-called seminaries. While living in the state of Washington, Uneven only worked under a former-CMRI "priest," who labored at the same time as a busy "pastor" of a traddie chapel. Uneven then left Washington for short stint of independent study under the benighted Blunderer, before priestly "ordination" by the ever-dubious "One-Hand Dan."

We won't go into how such shoddy "preparation" is completely at odds with the "Tridentine system" Checkie once touted in his monograph "Untrained and Un-Tridentine: Holy Orders and the Canonically Unfit," where the Cheeseball asserts the law demands candidates live in a seminary. (For that discussion, go to our post of February 16, 2014, YE BROOD OF VIPERS.) And we hardly need to say that under no circumstances can Uneven's residence in Washington state or at $GG ever be called a seminary.

All we'll say today is that Uneven Steven's ordination ranks right up there with all the other howlingly scandalous ordinations and consecrations that have disgraced the traditional movement. Maybe — just m a y b e — independent study might have been good enough for a simplex priest, as long as the faithful were advised of his minimal training and properly cautioned after his ordination. However, to pretend that such "training" is equivalent to the demonstrably low level of "schooling" on offer at the inferior cult "seminaries," which at least have some (albeit minuscule) formal structure, is too much to endure on a sweltering day.

Wee Dan's double standards remind us of the fate of those universally disrespected teachers who reply, "Don't do as I do: Do as I say," when challenged for violating the standards they insist their pupils observe. Just as flagrant self-exemption results in loss of authority, Dannie's wanton Tartuffery disqualifies him from making judgments about conditions in Traddilandia. Only depraved cultlings listen to him anyway.

Mexico — and the rest of TradWorld — should join us norteamericanos as we laugh ourselves silly as Li'l Daniel barks alone at the moon.