With all due respect to Kermit the Frog, it is easy being liturgically green. Yesterday, for the first time since Ash Wednesday was a nice green ferial day. There were no special antiphons, no flipping pages in books and no alleluias, which we’ve sung more than 3,000 of since the Easter Vigil. There was just the everyday office flowing on from column to column and page to page in the psalter. It almost felt novel.

I should have gotten something up earlier today given that the Times article had about the same effect on traffic as a direct hit from Fr. Z., but the morning was given over to outside work, beginning with moving more railroad ties after Terce and then heading to the city wood lot to use a pitchfork to fill the bed of our old pickup with free wood chips from the town’s wood chippers then to spread it on the vegetable garden.

I know that those of you who saw yesterday’s piece in the Times might have been led to believe that the labor of the folks at LaserMonks allows us to spend the day pursuing gentile hobbies, but the reality is that there’s a lot of sweating and getting dirty involved in maintaining 300 acres of forest, 100 acres campground, as well as the abbey property. Which is exactly why I chucked a job in human rights PR and marketing on the East Coast and came to this particular house. This afternoon will be spent baking dog biscuits to sell on the web. (Hundreds and hundreds of dog biscuits cut individually by hand.)

Some of you have asked why I don’t seem to think that yesterday’s story was negative. I spent a long time working in a job where my main task was to understand the mind of the average Times and New Yorker reader and raise several million dollars a year in contributions. In the progressive intellectual frame, there are only three kinds of Catholics: Unaccountable powerful men (who are quite probably libidinous, and nefarious), ignorant and oppressed masses (preferably with colorful customs and heart-warming aspirations for self betterment), and unexpectedly intelligent and altruistic people who are credits to the race (or to the religion, as it might be). The best we could hope for was a credit to our race story, which is largely what we got.

Laurie Goodstein is someone I once dealt with on a story in my past life. (I was away when the interviews for this story were done.) She’s earned a reputation as a good and conscientious reporter and that is my own experience of her. But asking someone from the Times to come to flyover country and write about Catholics, while leaving her context (and that of her readers) back in New York, is like asking a correspondent from Latin Mass Magazine to write a piece on the very good social justice programs of the Community of Sant’Ejidio without a bit of culture clash showing through in the article.

The Times article sold a lot of soy toner and dog biscuits, which I’m off to bake now. That makes it a good article.

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