A carnival of technology

#27: Ommegang Biere de Mars

Ommegang is a Belgian Style New York brewery capable of occasional magic.  I remember them best for taking their own abbey ale, which I find pretty boring, and Lindemans Kriek, which I think tastes like cough syrup, and mixing them into Three Philosophers, which I think is fantastic.  I also had their Chocolate Indulgence a couple of years ago when some of the former Taco Macs used it as a chance to get out the fancy glasses, and that was also something pretty special.  A biere de garde is a little farther south than Ommegang’s usual styles, but I have high hopes.  The twist in the Mars is that it’s bottled with a Belgian wild yeast strain that’s supposed to bring the noise and bring the funk, and that sounds like it might be either wonderful or awful.

The first smell is a big whiff of oats that rushed out behind the cork.  Once it made into the glass—orange and clear, all the chunky, cloudy yeasts hanging out in the very bottom—I start to smell the funk, a kind of dull, earthy, musty odor.  It’s not unpleasant, but I’m not sure what to make of it.  The head is big and plans to stick around, and besides the yeast weirdness smells like oranges and nectar.  The musky funk hits a little harder in the taste, leading a wave of citrus and spice.  There’s a little floweriness and bitterness from hops, and though the oats from earlier foreshadowed something thicker, Mars feels light and lively, the sweet orange taste cutting through any malty heaviness.

I’m not really sure what to think of this beer.  It’s light and tasty, but it has that weird funky chewiness from the yeast that sticks around a little past its welcome.  It’s interesting.  It’s kind of weird.

Pope Benedict XVI’s recent visit to los EEUU got me thinking about few things. Even though Joseph Ratzinger has been the head of the Holy See for over three years now, I, and I suspect many other Catholics, have a hard time really getting a feel for just who this guy is as a person and a pope. I think that timing had a lot to do with it; everyone loved JP2, who managed to come across as a rock star despite being pretty conservative, so this former prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the man who was in effect in control of the nuts and bolts of Catholic doctrine during much of the reign of John Paul II, will always be overshadowed by his predecessor. With JP2 people were all like aw damn, who is that fine pontiff, and Pope Benny16 just can’t ever hope to hit that level of popularity. It’s a shame, but that’s how it goes.

The pope’s US visit showed us a man more academic than punk rock, a dude with a German accent who wears red shoes and carefully grounds his views in the tradition and theology of the church. He seems like an okay guy; he had a tough situation to dive into, with the child abuse scandal weighing heavily on everyone’s minds and ecumenicism always being a concern, but from what I’ve seen of the things he said he seemed to do pretty alright. And maybe he’s what the Church really needs. As Pope John Paul II once said, “It’s a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to the faith and truth.” So we’ll just have to see how this papacy goes and history will be the judge.

And it’s history that brings me here. Another of the things brought back to the forefront by the pope’s visit was the number after his name. There hasn’t been an original pope name in about 900 years. Even John Paul was a combination of the names of the two previous popes. There has been fifteen other popes named Benedict. What did they do? When did they reign? I dunno. Pope Benedict XVI is the 265th head of the Roman Catholic Church by the official reckoning, and I only know anything about a tiny handful of them. I’d like to change this. I’m going to try to research the lives of the 265 popes.

One of the basic tenets of the Catholic Church is the concept of Apostolic Succession, the idea that the authority of the Church is derived from a continuous line beginning with Jesus’s appointment of Saint Peter as the leader of the new faith. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Just as the office which the Lord confided to Peter alone, as first of the apostles, destined to be transmitted to his successors, is a permanent one, so also endures the office, which the apostles received, of shepherding the Church, a charge destined to be exercised without interruption by the sacred order of bishops.

So each one of those 265 bishops of Rome are members of an unbroken succession from Jesus himself. This doctrine can be somewhat problematic when viewed through the lens of history—there have been good popes, but there have also been some very bad popes along with some antipopes during times when the Church was broken by schism or messy politics, and there’s some serious question as to whether some popes, like the second, Pope Linus, even existed. Of course questions like these present no real challenge to a church that has two thousand years of tradition, regardless of its ultimate base, to stand upon, but they do create interesting areas of study, and it’s those questions that I’d like to explore.

The first pope is, of course, Saint Peter, and, being a key figure in the formation of the Christian church, about the only historical record available for him is the New Testament: the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. So I figure I’ll start there. I’m going to break out my copy of the New American Bible, the modern translation commissioned by the Dei Verbum issued by pope Paul VI, and try to make some sense of the history of Saint Peter. Keep your eye on this space for my findings. I expect that Pope Linus will be a lot easier since there’s only three surviving sentences establishing him as a pope. Hazy as some of this historical exploration may be, I at least hope it’ll be interesting.