Who’s Zoomin’ Who?

Who's zoomin' who, take another look, tell me baby
Who's zoomin who
Who's zoomin' who, now the fish jumped off the hook
Didn't I baby...Who's zoomin' who
-Miss Aretha Franklin

Well, Toads and Toadettes,

     The Toad is back. Amphibian-about-town that he is, he can’t resist swimming in the brackish waters of comment on the new Apostolic Constitution. You know, boys and girls, this is the document from the “front office” that covers “the establishment of special structures for Anglicans who want to enter into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.”

The Toad notes that the Vatican's chief ecumenist (that’s Latin for “travel lots of places for good food and drinks”), Cardinal Walter Kasper says that this is “absolutely is not a signal of the end of ecumenical dialogue with the Anglican Communion.” In an interview published in the Nov. 15 edition of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican hotsheet and fish-wrapper, Kasper the Friendly Ghost said that the papal provision is not anti-ecumenical. “To think, as some commentators have said, that the pope made this decision just to ‘expand his empire’ is ridiculous,” the also cardinal said.

     Right. Just like firing those cannon things on Fort Sumter wasn’t the end of Confederate “ecumenical dialogue” with the Yankees. Heavens no, boys and girls. The panzer pope, a personal fave of the Toad, just suddenly developed a taste for fish and chips and Smithwick’s Ale. Or would that be Foster’s Export and kangaroo burgers. Rawk.*

     The Toad also is highly amused by the coterie of “former Anglicans” that are effervescing over this like Alka-Seltzer in club soda. Yo, Anglican enthusiasts, chill out you band of obsessed aesthetes. (The Toad likes that-it might be a literary device, but he doesn’t care.) If Rome really were the place to be a la Green Acres, why are you still obsessing over your past, which of course was a schism based on a lascivious monarch’s desire for divorce anyway? At least that’s what the line was in RCIA reeducation camp, that is if the lesbian nun teaching it ever got past ranting over her anger concerning the oppressive male priesthood. Rawk, rawk.*

     Get over it. You are part of the Roman Catholic Church now. So former Anglicans turn in your copies of the 1940 Hymnal—we’ve got some nice soothing Marty Haugan for you.

     Why would Pope Benny want to lay hold of liturgy and “traditions” that were perpetrated by a bunch of Englishmen whose Holy Orders and purported Sacraments were as bent as their teeth? (Dear God! Doesn’t National Health in the U.K. have a dental plan? Rawk.*). Worse, many of these guys are already using the same kind of banal language and dopey music as in the local Catholic joint around the corner from Toad Pond, or the local community-theatre production of The Lion King. Naw, the Big Guy is looking for clergy and lay bodies who are more or less simpatico with the his reform of the reform, and “former Anglicans” are just the perfect material to become “traditional Catholics.” They might even get oiled up on sherry, stand up against Clown Liturgies and Halloween Masses and lead a torchlight procession to deal with certain “liturgists”. Yep, B-16 might be getting some folks with actual backbones-to be absorbed and homogenized into the Roman Catholic Church never to be heard from again.

     But one thing’s for certain, toads and toadettes, Uncle Kasper isn’t rolling out the carpet for non-Anglican Communion Anglicans. You know, the “the Traditional Anglican Communion, a group that claims more than 400,000 members and describes itself as ‘a worldwide association of orthodox Anglican churches, working to maintain the catholic faith and resist the secularization of the church.’”

    No, the Kasper-dude scored these folks as Johnny-Come-Latelies: bandwagon types who “did not participate in the conversations that led to the pope's recent provision.” Whoa! That’s news! What about all of the nearly-shouted pronouncements about the “negotiations that could not be spoken of” emanating from the TAC over the last couple of years?

     That old wet-blanket Kasper went on to lift a giant ecclesiastical leg on that entire idea, stating that, “Now, however, they [TAC] are jumping on a train that already has left the station. If they are sincere, OK, the doors are open. But we cannot close our eyes to the fact that they have not been in communion with Canterbury since 1992”. Therefore, they are not technically leaving the Anglican Communion to join the Roman Catholic Church.

     What’s this? The TAC was not the principal, the prime mover, the capo di capo tutti in landing this offer from Rome to the benighted Anglicans. Had the train already left the Roma S. Petro station? Shades of Love in Vain by the immortal bards Messrs. M. Jagger and K. Richards:

Yeah, the train left the station, it had two lights on behind…
Well, the blue light was my baby and the red light was my mind.

     Could someone be over-blowing their role in this whole Anglican thing? And what of the allegedly forthcoming “special Apostolic Constitution” that makes a deal with these traditional Anglican folk? You know, the one like the Double Secret Special Probation imposed by Dean Vernon Wormer on the hapless denizens of the Delta House at Faber College. Isn’t the Vatican going to design a special program just for an entity with multiply-married, frequently uneducated clergy whose numbers are at best, shall we say vague? It certainly seems as if someone’s mind has left the station.

     Frankly, boys and girls, it looks like Kasper the Friendly Cardinal has thrown big…well…something into the celebratory punchbowl. More to the point, it seems like someone somewhere may be exaggerating just a wee little bit? Could it be the venerable Kasper who is no stranger to the occasional press retraction? Or is it a certain unnamed “thunder from down under” who is, shall we say, cutting things out of whole cloth particularly now that there are people proving a bit squeamish over becoming “former Anglicans”?

     Well, the Toad says, somebody is zoomin’ somebody. Had the train really already left the station leaving the claims of a certain primate suspect? Or is the Cardinal just miffed that he won’t be making the regular trip to Canterbury for shepherd pie and Watney’s Red Barrel? We’ll soon know if we don’t already. In the meantime, the Toad is going round the corner for mid-day devotions at Sacred Bleeding Heart parish in the hopes that the liturgist has laid on We Are a Pilgrim People or a little ditty by the St. Louis Jesuits. He then plans to follow up with a different divertissement from Australia:

The God of Chunder Cocktail

1 tablespoon of sugar syrup
juice of one lemon
2 ounces of gin or vodka
shaved Ice
Cold beer (Foster’s, of course)

To make syrup, heat the sugar in a few drops of water until dissolved. Mix syrup, lemon juice, gin or vodka; stir well. Pour into a tall glass; add shaved ice, and fill the reminder of the glass with beer. Stir.

Six or seven of these and you’ll have no constitution at all.  Rawk, rawk, rawk.*

Yr. Obed. Serv.,

Roy Aldous Toad, DD-VS (Very Specious), LSMFT, D.Phil. (University of Wallamaloo)
*The Sound of One Toad Barking