The Restoration VI: Cooking

This article originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of The Four Marks as part of a series called "The Restoration." "The Restoration" is a monthly column dedicated to restoring Christian ideals in our modern culture. For more information on The Four Marks, please click here.

I still remember the first time I decided to make the transition from college kid to grown-up, at least as far as food was concerned. I had taken a recipe card to the supermarket, bought everything on it, and now I was going to make some food. Make. Food. My expertise in boiling water for ramen or my speed at tapping in heating instructions to a microwave would not help here. You have to grow up sometime.

Of course, the bachelors brave enough to actually cook probably all start this way. To this day, whenever I have friends over for dinner, they always ask, “Where did you learn to cook?” I learned in part from watching my mom do certain things throughout the years, but I really had to learn on my own.

One of my favorite dishes to make is a penne arrabbiata. Arrabbiata means “angry” in Italian and it means that the sauce is generally spicy. I have only recently started to make my own sauce, but until recently, any of the Whole Foods pasta sauces I used provided a great base. You can add artichokes, olives, bacon, onions, mushrooms, and maybe basil, thyme, or bay leaf, depending. You must add garlic. Meanwhile, cook up some meat in another pan, preferably lamb or buffalo or something else you haven’t had all the time. This adds to the pique of the sauce when you mix it in. At this point the water should be boiling for your pasta. Gently shake, don’t drop, the penne into the water and either set an egg-timer or a mental clock for around 8-9 minutes for al dente. If you have the meat cooked to where you want it, you can blend it in with the sauce, which you’ve been nursing for a little under 30 minutes now.

Now it’s time to let the sauce blend with the meat. Pasta is boiling…good time to make the salad. You toss together some arugula, cut some cucumbers, tomato, and a few slices of brie, and put a salad fork on top and stick it back in the fridge so it will stay chilled. Time to read an article while nursing the sauce and boiling the pasta. You occasionally stir, and after a while fish one out so you can bite down and see if it’s ready to go….not quite…You open a bottle of Italian soda, pour a glass, and start setting the table. Egg timer goes. Double check with a bite test for the pasta, then drain it in the colander. Taste the sauce again. Good. Drop the pasta back into the now empty pot, drizzle some olive oil on it and mix it so the pasta doesn’t stick together. Cover it and the sauce and put it on some hot pads on the table. Pull the salad out, say grace, and start eating.

That’s a typical 9:00pm meal for me (I work until 8pm most nights). What I find intensely enjoyable about that is that when you vary the ingredients for the sauce, you get a slightly different flavor. It can be routine and yet experimental. And all of it was so far from what I thought cooking was in the beginning – some rote following of a recipe card.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say. I have no kids to watch, no cholesterol to be concerned about, and I enjoy cooking. Yet, at the same time – if some bachelor can manage to cook a meal at night for himself after he’s worked all day…can’t anyone? Yeah, I would argue that.

I think one of the greatest daily tragedies that we see, and that I, as an American have participated in far too often, is eating on the run. We can’t seem to help ourselves. We’re content to eat food that is made by someone else, after it has been processed by a machine, processing food that came from a questionable source, if not in the handling of the original ingredients, in perhaps the very seeds and basic ingredients. The simplest thing we can do on a daily basis to watch our health and give thanks is to buy and cook our own food. Life is about simple pleasures. Take this one back.

Interview with Fr. Michael Oswalt, for the Four Marks

Some months back Kathleen Plumb, editor of The Four Marks, asked me to interview Fr. Michael Oswalt. I had heard about his story in March when I was in Florida to interview Bishop Sanborn. In brief, he is formerly of the Diocese of Rockford, via Mundelein Seminary in Chicago. He has doubts about the new rite of ordination that have caused him to stop celebrating Mass concurrent with the day he left Rockford, which was earlier this year. He is getting ready to leave for Mt. St. Michael, where he plans to pray, study, and work until a time he deems fit for conditional ordination, which will be granted to him by Bishop Pivarunas.

Father and I coordinated our schedules and we met in Des Moines, Iowa, one weekend in September. Father is straightforward and kind and in listening to his experiences I relived so much of what I disliked about the Novus Ordo while I was still "in it." As dysfunctional as the internal workings of the robber church he describes are, the path of his discovery is fresh and insightful in the familiar ruts it runs.

One issue that I did not broach in depth during the interview and which needs explaining now is the question of the validity of Fr. Oswalt’s ordination. He does not consider himself a valid priest and no longer says Mass. Now, while not every Traditionalist knows about the various positions regarding the validity of the new forms of Episcopal consecration and priestly ordination, it is blatantly clear to anyone even attending Indult/Motu parishes that there is an inherent suspicion and distrust of the new sacraments among the faithful. Some give the standard lame boilerplate: “Well, I’m just a layman, so I can’t speak to sacramental validity and efficacy.” Well, this is patently false as any Catholic worth his salt can tell you what makes Baptism, Communion, Confession, etc. valid, and what makes them invalid. Part of being a Catholic is knowing your faith, and knowing your faith is, in part, knowing what makes valid sacraments. On the other hand, given that such cases of doubt regarding sacraments were normally referred to Rome, and that Traditionalists range from thinking that the Pope is “sick” (SSPX) to MIA (sedevacantists), there can be no authoritative pronouncement regarding an opinion on the invalidity of orders. No Traditionalist priest or bishop possesses a mandate from Rome to rule on these issues, and further epikeia, as in the case of annulments, cannot be invoked here. We are in an unfortunate, strange position.

Given the grave concern for valid sacraments, I agree that Conciliar priests who come to Tradition owe it to everyone to be conditionally ordained. Bishop Tissier de Mallerais implied as much in a recent interview: "It is necessary to begin by the liturgy; that would be the simplest [issue], because it will be possible to point out the deficiency of the new rite of priestly ordinations, for example. A deficiency which, on the other hand, when we speak of the new mass, includes much contradiction, pure and simple; because it is a new theology which is expressed, hence a new religion." The Conciliar religion is a mutated, bizarre version of Catholicism, and should, especially regarding sacraments, be treated with deep suspicion.

I also want to mention that Father Oswalt mentions reading a website which we have taken care never to mention by name on TR, but which I want to make clear that I consider to be a hubristic rag, penned by a dubious priest, which features writing of the lowest, trashiest, most salacious order. I believe Father Oswalt is new to some of these sites, and as such, is not yet familiar with their respective histories. Suffice to say, we do not endorse that website at all.

Please enjoy this interview with Fr. Michael Oswalt. He is a good and brave priest who has left the security of the usurpers of our churches for the uncertainty of the Traditionalist wilderness. One more priest forever, according to the order of Melchisdech, to serve faithful who want true sacraments. Deo gratias.

This interview was originally printed, in part, in the October 2009 The Four Marks. For more information, please visit http://thefourmarks.com/

Note: If you would like to help support Fr. Oswalt, 50% of the sales of the DVD of this interview will go directly to him. You can purchase the DVD at http://truerestorationpress.com/cddvd/fr_oswalt_interview.