In which the pond declares this Friday an "our Henry" Friday ...

 

Let them eat bigly flag poles and flags, and get made-up in the Pentagon, and with Marie Antoinette references out of the way, it's time to celebrate Friday in the best way possible ... by eating fish and declaring this "Our Henry, hole in bucket man day"...

To begin proceedings, a quick survey of the news headlines, featuring the reptiles in a state of tax fear and falling standards fear ...

Why it's Anzac Day, and right there at the bottom there was the caroling Caroll, singing ...

Culture of Anzac: Dawning of the ‘fair go’ nation
Australia’s World War I legend still informs the Australian mind and identity, in mysterious and compelling ways.
By John Carroll

Also on the same page ...

Booing erupts at Melbourne’s dawn service during Welcome to Country

Ah yes, mysterious and compelling, except perhaps for difficult, uppity blacks, and as someone who grew up in a household with a grandfather driven to extreme alcoholism after a stint in the mud in the battle of the Somme, the pond is happy to forget all of that, including the reptiles dragging the 'Nam debacle into proceedings.

Over on the extreme far right portion of the digital edition, all was right and proper, with our Henry top of the world, ma, early in the morning...

Killer was also out and about this day, but the pond only had eyes for our Henry, and luckily our Henry wasn't dwelling on the mysterious and compelling ways of celebrating a world war.

Instead he was contemplating Frank's passing and Frank's significance ...

The header: Pope Francis raised problems but he didn’t solve them, With the Catholic Church having played a vital role in the development of freedom in the West, the next pope must live up to that legacy.

The caption: Pope Francis attends the celebration of the Way of the Cross on Good Friday, 2013.

The mysterious injunction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

It was just what the pond needed, a way of taking the pond's mind off a man who literally and stereotypically saw pink elephants when he raged around the house and kicked everyone out into Peel street ...

Go for it our Henry, show us how the tykes played a vital role in the development of freedumb ...

When the cardinals gather in Rome to elect Pope Francis’s successor, two issues will weigh on their decision: the Catholic Church’s relation to the broader world and the internal governance of the church itself.
Those issues are, in many respects, as old as the papacy. The controversies they have repeatedly provoked have not only shaped and reshaped the church; they have played a fundamental, if poorly appreciated, role in the development of Western freedom.
Never were the problems greater than at the outset of the church’s history. In the West, the bishops of Rome were confronted by heathens or recently converted pagans who, by the fifth century, were forming kingdoms. Meanwhile, in the East, an emerging Eastern Christianity, backed by the powerful Byzantine Empire, claimed spiritual supremacy.
Yet the Roman bishops had no political authority to support them; and to make things worse, their own bid for primacy lacked a strong doctrinal base.
In responding to those challenges, the early popes vaunted their position as the direct heirs of Saint Peter, the first bishop of Rome, to whom Christ himself had given “the keys to the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16: 18-19). To highlight that fact’s implications, they cited a letter (that ultimately proved to be a forgery) in which Pope Clement described how Peter had, in the presence of the Roman community, symbolically handed those keys to his successors.

It seems that developing freedumb means the right to view corpses, because the reptiles slipped in a distracting snap, People wait in line to view Pope Francis lying in state inside St. Peter’s Basilica, with bonus cell phone on view ...

As always, our Henry was keen to show off his knowledge of history ...

Peter’s merits, said Pope Leo I (440-460), were unique; but the Petrine powers could be and had been transmitted, accruing to the Roman church as a matter of grace. As a result, added Pope Gelasius (492-496), only the pope possessed auctoritas: that is, the moral authority to shape things in a manner that was binding on all, including secular rulers.
“You must piously bow your neck to those who have charge of divine affairs,” Gelasius exhorted the Eastern Roman emperor Anastasius I, “and seek from them the means of your salvation.” Byzantium cavalierly ignored Gelasius’s pronouncement. So did the West’s emerging Christian kingdoms, in which monarchs typically claimed the right to appoint bishops, enforce clerical discipline and promulgate religious doctrine. But as the church underwent a sweeping renewal in the 11th century, it vigorously reasserted its prerogatives.
In 1059 Pope Nicholas II for the first time forbade lay investiture and established a procedure for the pope’s election by cardinals, eliminating the monarchs’ role in making papal appointments. Then, in 1075 Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) threw down the gauntlet in his Dictates of the Pope, which stated that the pope was the only true sovereign, having authority to judge all secular rulers.
Nor was that authority limited to spiritual matters: writing to Emperor Henry IV, Gregory made it clear that kings could, at the pope’s discretion, be deposed.
Henry’s reaction was vitriolic. Beginning with “Henry, king not through usurpation but through the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk”, his reply culminated in “You are therefore damned”.

For an AV distraction, the reptiles flung in petulant Peta, exuding banality and a statement of the bleeding obvious, as only she can, Sky News host Peta Credlin discusses the sudden death of Pope Francis at the age of 88. “Sudden news this afternoon the Pope has died … at the age of 88 of course he has been unwell for some time,” Ms Credlin said. “Huge crowds will be there at the Vatican.”

Our Henry continued on, contorting tyke history to suit his purpose:

It would, unfortunately, take too long to trace the subsequent developments, which involved a conflict that raged for more than a century. Two points are nonetheless essential.
The first is that the papacy, in attempting to justify its position, encouraged the period’s finest minds, including Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, John of Salisbury and Jean Gerson, to elaborate doctrines that narrowly limited the secular power. As well as setting out a delineation between the secular and the spiritual spheres, those doctrines enunciated a notion of rights that proved immensely influential in the eventual emergence of liberalism.
Second and related, because Gregory’s wildly ambitious bid for power failed, with Boniface VIII (1294-1303) being forced into a messy compromise, the West avoided becoming a theocracy. But nor were the Western monarchs ever truly successful in claiming legitimacy by divine right, as those claims jarred against the papacy’s continuing spiritual dominance.
That made political legitimacy in the West highly precarious, quite unlike the situation elsewhere; and it impelled a search for more secure sources of legitimation – a search that, in the end, led to popular sovereignty.
Here too, the doctrines developed by the church proved crucial. In effect, the church, as Gregory reformed it, was the first modern Western state, with a complex legal system, a professional judiciary, a treasury and a chancery. But its organisation rested on two, somewhat inconsistent, concepts of church unity: a unity maintained by the subordination of all its members to a sovereign head, and a unity assured through those members’ free association, co-operating under the guidance of the Spirit.
The first of those concepts gave rise to theories of papal absolutism; the second, later formalised in the decree Haec Sancta, adopted by the council of Constance in 1415, embodied the seeds of modern constitutionalism.
That constitutionalism’s essence was that the pope was “maior singulis minor universis” – greater than each member of the church taken individually but less than all those members deciding together. It also enshrined the principle that “ut quod omnes similiter tangit ab omnibus comprobetur” – anything that affects all similarly must be approved by all. And it stipulated that the pope could not enact a law prejudicial to the church’s established character and general welfare or retain office having committed a crime.

Time then for another 'looking at corpse' moment, People pay their respects to late Pope Francis as he lies in state in St Peter’s Basilica.

The pond always marvels at the way that some manage to mock the burial rituals of indigenous people, and yet line up to view the corpse of a pontiff or a Lenin or a comrade Mao ...

Never mind, more Henry ...

Writing more than a century ago, great British historian John Neville Figgis* called Haec Sancta “the most revolutionary official document in the history of the world”, because it “expressed the arguments for constitutional government in a form in which they could readily be applied to politics”, thus supporting the transition to freedom under law.

(* Figgis was an Anglican priest and monk who was a student of Catholic Lord Acton, so take his thoughts with a large grain of delusional salt)

Apologies for the interruption, Henry was heading to his closer ...

In the end, the church itself adopted a relatively authoritarian image of the papacy, notably in the 19th century. However, the recognition that its governance must also rest on the express consensus of its members was never lost, despite the tensions it often created.
Those issues – how the church carves out its space in a world dominated by hostile rulers, and how it adapts while maintaining its unity – have recurred periodically ever since.
Clearly, its claims to power over secular matters are far weaker than centuries ago. But in stark contrast to other religious organisations, its leadership remains of global significance. The pope can, as John XXIII showed, lead a far-reaching renewal; as John Paul II showed, shake authoritarian regimes, and; as Benedict XVI showed, reach intellectual pinnacles.
How Francis compared to those predecessors will be debated for decades. But it is reasonable to note that Francis’ acquiescence to the Chinese regime’s demand that it have the right to oversee the appointment of Catholic bishops reversed the church’s long held position that it preferred persecution to complicity with a policy starkly inconsistent with religious freedom. Nor is it unfair to suggest that he proved better at raising controversial issues, such as the ordination of women, than at resolving them.
His successor will inherit those issues. Even more important, he will also inherit the mantle of an institution that, for all of its terrible failings, helped forge Western freedom. Living up to that legacy is surely the greatest challenge of all.

There he went again, talking of the forging of Western freedumb, but bravo, the pond always admires any writer who can get through a piece about the Catholic church's significance without mentioning the Inquisition, or the heavily Catholic inspired killing fields of South America, or - as our Henry keeps blathering on about freedumb - the role of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which, according to its wiki, lurched on to as late as 1966. Inter alia:

The aim of the list was to protect church members from reading theologically, culturally, or politically disruptive books. At times such books included the works of theologians, such as Robert Bellarmine and astronomers, such as Johannes Kepler's Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae (published in three volumes from 1618 to 1621), which was on the Index from 1621 to 1835; philosophers, such as Antonio Rosmini-Serbati and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781); and editions and translations of the Bible that had not been approved. 

There's your freedumb in a nutshell, and what a pity it carked it, because our Henry would be a prime candidate for a banning, if only on the basis of too much twaddle rots the mind.

And having sworn not to revive any more Ēostre treats, here's our Henry from the week before.

His nimble mind was up for anything, and so he turned from Ēostre to the Passover in From generation to generation, we share the enduring lessons of Passover, As Jewish families gathered at Seder tables, the Exodus message was more relevant than ever.

It began with another of those epic, inspirational layouts, featuring a nonsensical parting of the seas worthy of Cecil B. himself...

The caption: Frederic Schopin’s The Children of Israel Crossing the Red Sea. Picture: Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives (sic amp and thus)

The mystical injunction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

And so unto the mystical and mystifying our Henry, mired deep in past myth-making:

At last, the time had come: as they prepared to flee Egypt, the children of Israel’s long-awaited deliverance from bondage was at hand.
But even before their liberation they received a commandment that would echo through the ages.
“This day shall be unto you for a memorial,” said the Lord; “and throughout your generations you shall keep it a feast forever.”
That commandment, made thousands of years ago, was once again respected and renewed this week when Jewish families gathered, as they have for centuries, to celebrate Passover.
Even when surrounded by death, weakened by starvation and racked by disease, the Jews in Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps murmured the ritual’s prayers and wished, with all their heart and soul, for “Next year in Jerusalem”.

Perhaps it takes a Holocaust to appreciate how to attempt a genocide. The pond couldn't help but note a recent headline in Haaretz ...

It was just more of the same... (archive link)

Medical sources reported at least 44 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip since Thursday morning, 21 of them in Gaza City and the northern region of the Strip.

The reptiles preferred to slip in a snap of fundamentalists in action, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men participate in a blessing during the holiday of Passover, at the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray, in the Old City of Jerusalem on Tuesday. Picture: AP

Here the pond should confess to finding the Jewish religion just as absurd, and with just as much a weird obsession for clothing, as the Catholic religion ... though it has to be said that the Catholic devotion to wearing frocks would likely send J. K. Rowling into a frenzy, and that's a tad more amusing than an obsession with hats and locks ...

Back to our Henry ...

And now, with the scourge of anti-Semitism re-emerging, the Exodus message that injustice and the abuse of power are not inevitable is more relevant than ever.
Central to that message is a momentous fact. The book of Genesis tells us about families; but early in Exodus’s first chapter there appears a word we have not yet encountered – the word Am, which means “a people”.
The exodus is, in other words, about the transformation of individuals into a people, and of a people into nation: a nation that must think of itself and for itself as binding together the generations past, those of the present and those of an unlimited, always to be shaped, future. But that is not the only momentous event the Exodus story heralds. For it is that people, that nation, that will enter into a covenant with the Lord.
As the text twice emphasises, the covenant binds the children of Israel not because it has been accepted by their leader, Moses, but because, in a move that is historically unprecedented, it is agreed to by “all the people”.
Moreover, that agreement requires them to abide by a law – a moral code – that they must “keep in its season from year to year” for all time.

The reptiles offered another visual distraction, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish children watch a fire burning leavened items, in a final preparation before the start at sundown of the Jewish Passover (Pesach) holiday, in the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem, on April 11. According to biblical narrative, due to the haste with which the Jews left Egypt, the bread they had prepared for the journey did not have time to rise. To commemorate their ancestors' plight, the religious avoid eating leavened food products throughout Passover. Picture: AFP

The pond thought it might be right to mention another Haaretz story ...

Killing of Gaza Aid Workers: IDF Troops Fired Indiscriminately for Over Three Minutes, Some at Point-blank Range (archive link)

It's just a rehash of the official line, glossing over the way these things keep happening, and the punishment for the slaughter and the war crimes?

Following the incident, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir dismissed the deputy battalion commander "due to his responsibility as the force commander on the ground and for his incomplete and inaccurate reporting during the debrief." It was also determined that Col. Tal Alkobi, commander of the 14th Brigade, had been negligent in preparing for the operation, and he received a formal reprimand in his personal file.

That's it? A dismissal and a note to file?

Perhaps it's better to wander off with Henry...

It is, in that sense, an error to believe the flight was from slavery into unbridled freedom. Indeed, the words for liberty in biblical Hebrew – d’ror and hofesh – are never mentioned in the text. The Israelites will certainly have the power and opportunity to choose; but what they will be invited to choose is not licence but the righteousness that defines freedom under law.
All those things we study every year: the sense of nationhood and of collective responsibility; the necessity of agreement by the people to a moral standard that brings meaning to individual life and peace to social life; the overriding importance of fidelity to law.
But the text also warns of the immense difficulties faithfulness to those imperatives entails.
As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks put it, in his brilliant commentary on Exodus, “the Israelites are portrayed as fickle and shortsighted; they complain; they readily give way to despair” – in short, they are, like all human beings, more than capable of being “capricious, fractious, wayward, hardly able to see tomorrow, let alone the unfolding drama of the centuries”.
That is why we are repeatedly reminded of the three pillars on which a decent society must rest: the family, with its boundless joys and compelling duties; the memory of the blessings we have received and the promises we have made; and above all education, which transmits to the young the wisdom of the ages and bestows the only gift that is truly priceless, which is the love and discipline of learning.

Don't get the pond started on Exodus myth-making, better to note another snap provided as a distraction, A young Jewish worshipper takes part in the Cohanim prayer (priest's blessing) during the Passover (Pesach) holiday at the Western Wall on April 15. Thousands of Jews annually make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem during the eight-day Pesach holiday, which according to Jewish tradition commemorates the Israelites' exodus from slavery in Egypt, as they remember their plight by refraining from eating leavened food products. Picture: AFP

Refrain from eating leavened food? Well at least they're not refraining from eating shellfish and pork, and mixing up their fibres ...

Sorry, the pond always has the absurdities of Leviticus hovering nearby in the ether. Perhaps another Haaretz story?

'We're Champions at Repression': Israel Air Force Pilots Open Up About the Moral Dilemmas of the Gaza War (archival link)

Last week, the Israel Defense Forces assassinated the commander of Hamas' Shujaiyeh battalion. The air strike hit a four-story building and killed around 40 people, most of them women and children, according to reports. Sources in the Gaza Strip said that eight adjacent houses were damaged, and that among the dead were 15 members of a single family. According to the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, this was the third Shujaiyeh battalion commander to be taken out since the war began. In the meantime, his replacement has been killed as well.
The morning after the attack, the pilots' letter was released. It called on Israel to do all it can to bring about the release of all of the hostages, even if that means ending the war. In its early drafts, the letter's tone was much more aggressive, but moderating forces among the signatories prevailed, and the final version was kept well within the bounds of the national consensus. Nevertheless, the initiative of the pilot signatories, most of them in the reserves, caused a rift within the Israel Air Force, one that has quickly broadened to other IDF units. "The continuation of the war," they wrote, "will cause the deaths of hostages, IDF troops and innocent civilians." It seems as though the mention of innocent civilians was an act no less subversive than the call to stop the war. It sparked tremendous arguments among the initiators of the letter; some refused to sign it because of it.
Others insisted on the centrality of the issue, and complained that the wording was too neutral, not biting enough. "We're killing innocent people in Gaza, and people are silent," one of the initiators said to us during the interview. The tumult caused by the letter raised an opportunity to ask the pilots themselves about those innocent non-combatants killed over the past year and a half. Are they as marginal in the pilots' consciousness as they are in the public consciousness, or do they have the power to widen the fissure within the air force?

One side doing a suicidal Black Knight routine, the other side killing with wild ethnic cleansing abandon...

Best retreat back to Henry ...

It is therefore no accident that Moses, when he addressed the Israelites on the brink of their release, spoke not about the daunting challenges that lay ahead but about teaching the generations as yet unborn – and about how to reply when their children, in celebrating Passover, asked “What does this ceremony mean to you?”
Nor is it an accident that the rabbis would command: “If a city has made no provision for educating the young, its inhabitants are placed under a ban, until teachers have been engaged; and if they persistently neglect this duty, the city is excommunicated, for the world only survives by the merit of the breath of schoolchildren.”
And least of all is it an accident that children play so large a role in the Seder – a word that means order or sequence but has come to stand for the Passover dinner, in which one recites the liturgy, drinks four cups of wine and en­gages with symbolic foods by breaking, dipping, indicating or hiding and seeking them.
There, under the spell of narrative and ritual, with endless questions and lively arguments, cast and audience merge in expressing thanks, in word and song, for God’s graciousness in delivering us from bondage.
“It is,” we say, as if we were there when it happened, “because of what the Lord did for me when I went forth from Egypt.”
Little wonder, then, that the story of the Exodus has always framed the journey to freedom.

There's not much point talking about Gaza's journey to freedumb, what with its journey about the freedumb to die, so the pond took in another distracting reptile snap, Samaritan worshippers take part in a Passover ceremony on top of Mount Gerizim, near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, early on April 29, 2024. The Samaritans trace their lineage to the ancient Israelites led by the biblical prophet Moses out of Egypt. Picture: AFP

By this time the pond was heartily sick of the Gaza slaughter, and couldn't even muster a 'good Samaritan' joke in honour of King Donald and his minions ... especially given the recent events and actions in relation to Ukraine...

And so to the last of our Henry, showing off his love of arcane historical references, as he always does ...

It was at the heart of a brief text by Samuel Sewall, a Puritan judge in Massachusetts, who in 1700 wrote what is generally regarded as the first emancipationist tract in North America.
And it rang through the sermon Martin Luther King delivered the night before his assassination, when he assured his audience: “I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
That was also the fate of Moses, who, having led the children of Israel out of captivity, was not privileged himself to enter the land, flowing with milk and honey, that would become the home of our fathers.
Perhaps that is our fate, too – to always see a better future, to strive for it, yet never to witness, in a necessarily imperfect world, its full realisation. But precisely because a better world is possible, addressing its woes remains our duty.
As Rabbi Tarfon, who lived through the destruction of the Second Temple in AD70, put it: “It is not for you to complete the task; but neither are you free to desist from it.”
There may, God forbid, come a time when children no longer know how to ask, and parents no longer know how to answer.
But for so long as Judaism flourishes – with its love of questions over answers, of debate over conformity and of the power of learning over the curse of ignorance – Passover will teach generation after generation the joy of inquiry, the virtue of wisdom and, most of all, humanity’s inextinguishable quest for freedom from lawlessness and oppression on this earth.

Has there been a force more devoted to wanton destruction and mass stupidity than the belief in an enormous range of gods? The pond finds it hard to think of decent competition ...

After all that guff, the pond finds itself in the uncomfortable company of angry atheists and that old punch line ...“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

Only our Henry could blather on about tykes and Jews while failing to note that both sides see the other worshipping a false god, with an imaginary hell the destination for heretics ...

And so to a token mention of politics for the day, courtesy of Wilcox ...

And now briefly back to slide night, in honour of the day. 

The pond happened to stop at the mighty Wang for a charge (that's Wangaratta for those unfamiliar with the mighty town) and came across a reminder of a feature in every bush town ...(click on to enlarge) ...

For some reason the Boer war always scores a mention ...

Sadly the town had knocked down its original memorial hall and put up an arts centre dedicated to cover groups and such like (how much Bee Gees can a possum bear?), and all that was left was a reminder of the original plaques ... sadly diminished and looking sorry for themselves...