It being meditative Sunday, the pond battles typos, gerunds, Lego and brown envelopes ...

The pond has been taking a welcome break from the crazy fundies that litter the world - watching the fundamentalist Christian right attempt to wreck America econmy has been more than enough fun - but every so often, a siren song comes along, like the Vatican's mis-spelling of Christ's name ...  

Oh if only the pond had a dollar for every time some wag erupted with "leaping lizards" or "Lesus Christ"!

It was pun heaven, as you can read in Coins Celebrating Pope Misspell Name Above All Names.

It turned out that the media's attempt to grapple with the quotation was just as peculiar:

The Latin phrase translated into English means: "Jesus, therefore, saw the publican, and because he saw by having mercy and by choosing, He said to him, ‘Follow me.'" (here)

Or:

The sentence, by the Venerable Bede, a seventh-century theologian, contains Francis’ self-chosen motto, ‘‘miserando atque eligendo,’’ which loosely translates as ‘‘lowly but chosen.’’ :

Or:

The inscription is Francis's papal motto, taken from a meditation by the eighth-century English monk the Venerable Bede, from a passage of the Gospel in which Jesus calls St. Matthew to be an apostle. The motto on the Vatican website reads: "Vidit ergo Jesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi, 'Sequere me,'" or "Jesus therefore sees the tax collector, and since he sees by having mercy and by choosing, he says to him, 'follow me.'" (here)

Seventh century? Eighth century? Whatever.

Publican? Tax collector? Whatever ...

Nah, nah, the Lesuits got it wrong ...

As always, when confronted by Latin, the pond turns to Google:

Saw Jesus the publicans and choosing SEEN AND BECAUSE pity, he said, follow me

Publicans it is, and it turns out that after a battle with gerunds, Father John Zuhlsdorf came to the same conclusion explaining the Pope's motto and its translation here.

More about Molesworth and gerunds here, and at least the wiki has the good oil on the venerable Bede.

It's a cunning ploy. While everyone is lapping up Lesuit thinking, Francis can talk the talk about a new style for the church, while the conservatives keep walking the old walk. At least there's an irony to be relished as Gerard Windsor noted here:

It's a grim time for Pell. He has his loyal Praetorian Guard, but the royal commission must haunt his dreams. Now - fearful irony - he's having to cope with Francis, a pope he certainly didn't want, a Jesuit, an order he is not partial to, and whose increasingly liberal statements he is furiously having to recast for local consumption, or at least for readers of The Catholic Weekly. 
It's hard not to feel for someone in such straits, but the old remedies of hardball lawyers and creative spin doctors are no longer the solution.

It turns out that when he's not a climate science expert, or a luddite conservative, war monger Pell just loves fireworks, the deviant Prince Harry, and naval ship displays, as he explains for the Daily Terror in a piece on the International Fleet Review (behind the "lite" paywall because you can't get "lite" Pellist thinking for free, you have to give up your personal details)

Not to worry, thank the long absent lord that the media's general hopelessness with gerunds allowed the pond to sneak off for a little word play time with 'snollygosters' and 'wamblecropts', as revealed in Mark Forsyth's top 10 lost words. 

The pond loved them all, but found 'snollygoster' had particular appeal if applied to Pell's good chum Tony Abbott:

Snollygoster is a 19th century American word for "a dishonest or corrupt politician". Or, to take an original definition from the editor of a Georgia newspaper: "a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy". The only reason I can imagine such a delicious word would die out is that all politicians are now honest.

And thanks to a reader's link, a handy reminder of Jack Winter's How I Met My Wife.

It's inside The New Yorker paywall now, but you do get a good sampling of Winter sending up Barnaby Joyce style prose-writing:

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn't be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do.

Oh okay, this is supposed to be about religions and their vicious ways.

But a host of people have already scribbled about the way Vladimir Putin has the support of the Russian Orthodox and fundamentalist American Xians, and you can read about it in American Religious Right and Russian Orthodox Leaders are Colluding in Putin's Persecution of Gay People.

All the pond can do is stay off the vodka and boycott the Olympics, itself always willing to get into bed with dictators and repression if it can see a dollar to be made. Already the chatter about the festering corruption and the cost - Sochi is the costliest ever - has overshadowed the actual event, as you can read in Sochi 2014: the costliest Olympics, and Corruption and censorship cast shadow over Russia's Games, and dozens of other reports.

No, it's time to get back on the horse, and see what the angry Sydney Anglicans are up to, and the great news is that they've moved on from Meccano and Bilda-Brix, and embraced Lego:

Oh dear.

Truth to tell, the Sydney Anglicans have gone a bit quiet since the nepotic Jensenist monopoly was pushed aside, and even the old push has got a dose of the guilts, if Phillip Jensen's The method is the message is any guide.

Jensen broods about the fund-raising methodologies deployed by both the Catholic and the Anglican churches in the 1960s and 1970s, which moved beyond the cheapskate possibility of flinging a coin or two on the plate to making sure everybody had to fill envelopes with a decent amount of cash in the paw. It was a shakedown worthy of the Maifa:

... while it aimed to help the ‘individual soul…own spiritual growth’, the scheme undermined its own aim. The method was the message; and the method built upon peer pressure; bred reluctant compulsion and finally manipulated money from people by guilt.

There's a lot more, revealing the wretched way the churches carried on, a kind of Amway/Holiday Magic pyramid scheme, dubbed the Wells Scheme, and the piece is framed by a personal failure that Jensen experienced with one "poor lady":

Try as I might, even with return visits, I never got her to understand my concern for her. She only ever thought I was after her money. As best I could see, she died not knowing the message her money was paying me to bring her.

Indeed. The story reminded the pond of its mother's weekly struggle to fill the brown envelope week by week, a bit like drug dealers filling the brown paper bag for the cops in Kings Cross.

Being lumpenproletariat and poor, it was an unnerving balancing act. Too much, and the food on the table would suffer. Too little and there'd be hectoring and nagging from the church ... all on the misguided promise of pie in the sky by and by ...

It was invidious and it quite turned the pond off churches, and their un-Christ like ways for all eternity, and reading breast-beating Jensenist guilt is way too late to change all that.

A robin redbreast in a cage 
Puts all Heaven in a rage
And a cunning tither with an envelope
Turns the pond quite misanthrope.

All the tithing churches are still after cash in the paw from their parishioners, so that, in the case of the Sydney Anglicans and Putin's followers, they can go on persecuting gays and denying equal rights for women ...

No doubt in fifty years time, someone will attempt an expiation of these misdeeds.

Speaking of pie in the sky, here's what Santa was peddling for Xmas 1953.

You never got first play with this if you were a girl. Maybe not even second or third play ...

Who gets first play with the Lego in the Sydney Anglicans? No prizes for guessing ...