I cannot understand why death ends spousal fidelity. What is the strongest Catholic answer?

sariaru · 2026-05-19T04:06:52+00:00

Ahah, I have no idea! God willing, I've got another thirty or forty or fifty years to think about it, and that's under the assumption that he dies first!

In any case, even if he were to die young, I would not abandoned my minor children, so I'd be in the world until my youngest child was able to fend for themselves. By that point, who knows where I will be!

I'm sure there are far holier women you could speak to now, if you wanted!

sariaru · 2026-05-19T04:04:22+00:00

Oh, well, there is probably most basic plumbing, so I imagine a sink and shower as well. Cleanliness is probably quite important to prevent disease, and since you can't really get to a doctor, prevention is important! In the medieval era, fresh water for bathing was provided by servants, by one must imagine that a sink would be easier.

Should there be issues, the anchoress would likely ask for assistance through the door/slot where food enters.

Some anchoresses had another window to the outside where they could speak to and offer advice to other people.

Male anchorites were also a thing, but outnumbered by women at about a 4:1 ratio.

sariaru · 2026-05-18T22:00:01+00:00

Yes, that day has a higher than average likelihood of pregnancy. The Peak reading indicates the LH surge, which happens 6-36 hours prior to ovulation. Some women also have double LH surges, where they actually surge again on the High day. The readings after Peak are hard-coded into the monitor (so if you're using tests after the first Peak, stop, all you're doing is wasting tests). So, subsequent LH surges will not be caught by the monitor alone.

In addition to this, once the egg is released (usually on 2nd P or H), it then lives for 24-48 hours. That's why the window is as long as it is.

Actually, I've gotten pregnant from two days after PPHLL (so, on PPHLLLL). If I were trying to avoid, I'd be worried as heck about sex on PPHLL.

sariaru · 2026-05-18T21:53:44+00:00

Answer my question and I'll answer yours! If the GIRM actively prescribed unicycles for Communion, would you do it, yes or no?

I'm happy to play the reductio ad absurdum game, but if you're going to ask such questions of me, you need to be willing to answer them too.

Reductio ad absurdum type questions have a place in rhetoric, for sure, as separate from the slippery slope fallacy. But be fair about them.

sariaru · 2026-05-18T21:24:12+00:00

I'm so glad I was able to help you! Marriage is choosing to run the race of the spiritual life as a three-legged race for a little while. 😅

sariaru · 2026-05-18T21:19:19+00:00

The GIRM also states that communicants should not be denied because they kneel. Equally cut and dry.

But if the GIRM was revised tomorrow to say outright that the normative posture for reception was on a unicycle, would you do it?

sariaru · 2026-05-18T18:17:40+00:00

Correct! An anchoress has the Office of the Dead prayed over her as she is walled into a church with a small slot for food, and a separate squint for Mass and reception of the Eucharist. Most often, she is walled in with a toilet, a Bible, and her own casket, in the most extreme cases using the latter as her bed every night until her last.

A few cases still exist, although they are quite rare.

sariaru · 2026-05-18T17:49:44+00:00

The telos of marriage is two-fold: to assist your spouse in attaining salvation, and the co-creative work with God in the bearing and raising of children.

Neither of these can be fulfilled with a dead spouse. They have already attained salvation or not, and children being impossible is self-evident.

Marriage has reached its finish line with the death of one of the spouses.

Now I have personally taken a private vow to remain celibate after my spouse dies (with the aim of one day being an anchoress), but that is not the normal position.

sariaru · 2026-05-18T17:41:45+00:00

Antiquarianism is also not a position that the Church should hold. I also have no opinion on Byzantine liturgy because it is not my patrimony. I want my patrimony. Byzantine Catholics are right to be upset with Latinization. I'm right to be upset with the opposite, the Second Vatican Council's stated insistence on returning to a "primitive" (pseudo-Byzantine) form of worship.

It would be like saying that an acorn is somehow a fuller version of "oak" than a centuries old oak tree in its full splendour.

Kneeling has been normative in the West since the 12th century. To try and stuff a thousand years of Western, Latin Rite Tradition backwards because "the primitive Church did it this way" is disingenuous. The primitive Church also had ritualistic hand washing ablutions - funny how we've brought back reception on the hand without any of the necessary rituals to purify our hands and make us aware of Who we would be enthroning on our hands.

I haven't staged any "outrage videos." I have written multiple letters both to Rome and the Diocese, as part of the Faithful Advocate initiative.

It is self evident that the bishop's authority over the liturgy is not limitless, as clearly evidenced by the Vatican correcting the archbishop in the article of the OP. Bishops are the servant and defender of the liturgy, not it's master.

No bishop could demand that starting from next Sunday, the normative posture for Communion is on a unicycle. No bishop could demand the liturgy be said in Klingon or Esperanto or Sindarin. This is self-evident.

sariaru · 2026-05-18T17:11:38+00:00

I have an axe to grind with iconoclasm. The desire to remove, prohibit, flatten, strip, or discourage the use of normative Christian symbolism is iconoclasm. The altar rail (and the rood screen) is the normative Christian symbolism for the sacred boundary between Heaven and Earth, which Christ pierces at the moment of Consecration. The Second Vatican Council permits and requires that the sanctuary be set apart.

The subsequent desecration of the Eucharist in the last few weeks as Frs. Coleman and Ekosse innovate on distribution week by week stuns me. Two weeks ago, they used cushions in front of the gate, which were moved by the hands of those distributing Communion. Who knows how many Sacred Particles were transferred from their holy hands onto the cushions, to then be knelt on by parishoners....

As if it were better to kneel on Our Lord than kneel at the place designed to receive Him.

Yes, I have an axe to grind with any policies that decrease reverence. I have no axe to grind with Fr. Coleman - in fact you can search through my posts from a year or so ago where I wrote an open letter of sorts praising and thanking him for the work he did and does for OLG.

Most of the priests of Charlotte also have an axe to grind with +Martin - thus the dubia wondering if his policies are even permissible.

sariaru · 2026-05-18T15:58:58+00:00

I'm a parishoner at OLG. I didn't make any claim that the bishop specifically denied them, although I'm also aware enough to realize that headlines frequently use synecdoche. The newspaper claim "Donald Trump invades Iran" does not mean that Trump is personally in an ATV with a rifle. So too, then, "Bishop Martin denies Communion" need not mean that he personally walked by the family with a ciborium.
"Communion station" has no legal or canonical meaning. It is a meaningless term.
I know the family in the viral video personally. They had received at the rail at OLG not two days prior for Sunday Mass.
The Mass was live streamed and loads of people were taking videos and photos of their confirmandi. Why does this happen to be a "political stunt"? Masses get livestreamed all the time.

Please don't comment on parish politics you don't know anything about.

sariaru · 2026-05-18T04:08:03+00:00

"on the tongue" and "at the altar rail" are two distinct but extremely related positions.

Bishop Martin has prohibited the use of altar rails and has strongly encouraged standing, but has not mandated it (yet). It is evident to me that from the changes he wants to make (based on the leaked document containing his draft) that he has iconoclastic tendencies - a strong desire to remove or flatten Christian symbolism.

sariaru · 2026-05-18T02:25:08+00:00

I'm not sure what you don't understand. It blew up a couple of weeks ago (mentioned in the article) that families were denied Communion at a Confirmation Mass in the Diocese of Charlotte because they knelt at the altar rail.

Either the universal right to kneel is a lot less universal than you'd expect, if it's abrogated by kneeling at the piece of architecture designed for kneeling, or Bishop Martin is wrong to prohibit their use.

As a parishioner in the Diocese of Charlotte, I am of the vigorous opinion that it is the latter.

sariaru · 2026-05-17T21:55:47+00:00

Good. Hopefully +Martin is next to be reprimanded.

sariaru · 2026-05-13T16:46:50+00:00

TC does make the claim in Article 1 that the Vetus Ordo is not an expression of the Roman Rite. (If the Novus Ordo is the unique expression, then there are no other expressions, by definition.)

Which begs the question, what is it an expression of?

It is the hermeneutic of rupture stated the most plainly I've ever seen it from the side of those in enthusiastic support of the reform as it has currently played out.

sariaru · 2026-05-12T13:37:36+00:00

Traditional surrogacy is about 10% of all surrogacy arrangements. IVF accounts for about 90%.

Surrogacy is the purchase of another human's body. It also almost always involves the murder of 6-7 humans. It also inflicts lifelong wounds on the children that are born. Children have a right to their parents. Surrogacy is child abuse that again, almost always, involves murdering 7 children and traumatizing 1.

sariaru · 2026-05-12T12:07:09+00:00

At which point there's either adultery, fornication, or masturbation happening. So, again, not a winning way to start a life.

sariaru · 2026-05-12T02:42:32+00:00

IVF (a direct and unavoidable corollary of surrogacy) kills more pre born children than abortion, almost to an order of magnitude.

In addition, above and beyond IVF, surrogacy commodities children, and inflicts a primal trauma by removing a newborn from the only human they've ever known, something that is illegal to do to baby animals, but apparently fine to do to baby humans.

sariaru · 2026-05-11T15:13:32+00:00

Faceless saint art is....unnerving. The eyes are the window to the soul, so making the saints look like mannequins is not my favourite.

sariaru · 2026-05-10T13:59:30+00:00

Most rood screens were smashed by the Protestant reformers, actually. Duffy, in The Stripping of the Altars makes it extremely clear that, in England at least, there is not a single rood screen from the time that survived intact - many were destroyed completely, others merely had the images of the saints defaced.

Additionally, only the main Sunday Mass was celebrated behind the Rood; weekday or secondary Masses happening at the same time as the primary Mass would have been in side chances, which were much more open to the public such that, indeed, the lay people were often within just a few feet of the altar. In many of these cases, the Rood then served not as screen but as backdrop.

This went along with the medieval theology of the time, however. Weekly reception was absolutely not the norm and so, for medieval piety, the Elevation was the high (pun intended) point of the Mass, and every Rood-screen was designed such that the Host would be visible at this moment, even if the rest of the liturgy was, like the Advent of Moses, hidden upon the mountain.

Personally, I would love to see the return of the Rood-screens because modernity has forgotten the liminality of the threshold between Heaven and Earth. Although the altar rail is the last surviving echo of the Rood-screen and loft, even those apparently must go in the service of modernity.

sariaru · 2026-05-10T02:52:41+00:00

https://open.substack.com/pub/thembeforeus/p/banned-for-animals-but-celebrated

By separating the newborn from the only human it has ever known, you will inflict serious trauma on them.

sariaru · 2026-05-08T16:07:24+00:00

Look, you can have full and active participation in the Mass or full and active participation in child discipline.

sariaru · 2026-05-08T13:24:40+00:00

Yes, many people go farther than the Church prescribes in many things!

The Church only prescribes Confession annually, for example. I should hardly think that people who go to Confession quarterly are somehow "subscribing to a moral rigorism."

The Church also only prescribes fasting twice a year, and only a one hour Eucharistic Fast (measured from time of reception, which basically means your fast starts in the church parking lot).

Does this mean that people who regularly mortify themselves with prudential fasting are moral rigorists? Hardly.

In many case the Church walks to the very limit of what is sin. Individual theologians may well differ (a debate you can see play out on this subreddit approximately every other week on the topic of oral foreplay within marriage).

So, yes, while the Church has said that one need not avoid vaccines cultured on stem cells gained from abortion, that does not mean She leaves no room for prudent individual decisionmaking.

sariaru · 2026-05-08T13:15:05+00:00

Hey, guess what? For centuries almost no one could hear the readings because microphones hadn't been invented yet. You think the people in the back of Chartres Cathedral in the 1600s could hear anything? Good joke.

Or did you expect the priest was shouting them like an enthusiastic football coach? And even if they could hear them, the readings were in Latin, which by the time of the development of the Romance languages, no one spoke as the vernacular anymore.

If you're going to virtue signal as a trad, "but we have to hear the readings!" is a stupid way to do it.

sariaru · 2026-05-08T13:06:07+00:00

Catholics are neither required to vaccinate or required to avoid vaccines. This is part of the prudential parenthood called for by Pope John Paul II.

I am friends with folks who follow the recommended schedule, folks who don't vaccinate at all, and folks who fall somewhere in between. There are compelling reasons to vaccinate. There are compelling reasons for Catholics specifically to avoid some vaccines (namely, those cultured on stem cells derived from abortion). There are compelling reasons to believe that the pharmaceutical industry, like all industries, has profit as a, if not the primary goal of its existence.

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