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Yes, he does:

Singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, who popularized beach bum soft rock with the escapist Caribbean-flavored song “Margaritaville” and turned that celebration of loafing into a billion-dollar empire of restaurants, resorts and frozen concoctions, has died. He was 76.

In the process of that famous song he showed a better grasp of responsibility than many
“church people,” as I pointed out in Jimmy Buffett and the Miserable Offenders of the Book of Common Prayer, where I referenced an earlier post about the same subject in the Novus Ordo Missae:

As far as the sins are concerned, the Roman Catholic Church’s (the Jesuits of Pascal’s days notwithstanding) emphasis on the seriousness of our sins is well founded, and anyone with a Biblical understanding of the subject should know this. Even some whose Biblical understanding falls short know this too. In the same 1970’s when the “old” NOM translation was current in Catholic Churches, Jimmy Buffett, wasting away in Margaritaville, knew all too well whose fault it was. His lyrics, although liturgically inappropriate, were in their own way closer to the NOM Latin original than what was recited every Sunday.

One of these days we’re going to face reality on whose fault our sins really are. Miserable offenders who know it’s our fault, our most grievous fault just might blurt out Buffett’s admission. And, as someone who came of age just up U.S. 1 and A1A from “Margaritaville,” it wouldn’t be very nice but it would be truthful and refreshing.

Memory eternal.

Recently the North American Anglican took up the issue (quite ably I might add) of the Immaculate Conception. This implies that there are Anglicans out there who actually believe that the Blessed Mother was in fact immaculately conceived, i.e., conceived without sin.

As the NAA points out, the church’s witness to this is not univocal, certainly not before the bull Ineffabilis Deus in 1854 and really not afterward. Aquinas, who certainly believed that Mary was infused with many graces after her conception, did not support the Immaculate Conception. The question is discussed in the Summa and his answer to it is as follows:

The sanctification of the Blessed Virgin cannot be understood as having taken place before animation, for two reasons. First, because the sanctification of which we are speaking, is nothing but the cleansing from original sin: for sanctification is a “perfect cleansing,” as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. xii). Now sin cannot be taken away except by grace, the subject of which is the rational creature alone. Therefore before the infusion of the rational soul, the Blessed Virgin was not sanctified.

Secondly, because, since the rational creature alone can be the subject of sin; before the infusion of the rational soul, the offspring conceived is not liable to sin. And thus, in whatever manner the Blessed Virgin would have been sanctified before animation, she could never have incurred the stain of original sin: and thus she would not have needed redemption and salvation which is by Christ, of whom it is written (Matthew 1:21): “He shall save His people from their sins.” But this is unfitting, through implying that Christ is not the “Saviour of all men,” as He is called (1 Timothy 4:10). It remains, therefore, that the Blessed Virgin was sanctified after animation.

ST, 3, 27, 2

My logic teacher, who pointed out to me one time that You’re Not as Dumb as You Look, noted that, if Mary was immaculately conceived, such could be extended back to her parents and beyond, all the way back to Adam.

I really think that the desire to go along with this manifests the desire to “keep up with the Joneses,” when, like the Patriarch Nikon and his allies in Moscow, we need to stop and consider just who the Joneses really are.

The controversy continues:

One following the news in the Anglican Communion will know of the steady stream of persons, including clergy, who have moved to Roman Catholicism or to Eastern Orthodoxy. Fr. Alexander Wilgus thinks we have grossly misunderstood the phenomenon’s roots. The moves do not expose a weak self-understanding and feeble self-confidence in Anglicanism’s Protestant roots—traits which, combined, lead to dabbling in other traditions before jumping ship for them.

As someone who started out in the “Old High Church” and passed through Roman Catholicism just coming out of Vatican II, I find this debate frustrating because there are too many terms which are used “equivocally,” as the Scholastics would say. I have a few observations which may add heat, light, or a mixture of the two to the whole discussion:

• It’s true that High Church Episcopalians/Anglicans have undermined confidence in their own spirituality by leaning on ceremony too much, something I observed in There’s Catholicism and Then There’s…. Over-reliance on ceremony can lead people to think that “If they miss a step in the playbook, the sacraments are invalid,” which may not be the idea but may end up being the impression left. That’s a lesson that Trad Catholics would do well to learn.
• There’s too great a tendency to equate “Protestant” and “Reformed” these days. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Anglicanism isn’t a Reformed religion because both its Articles of Religion and its BCP’s do not support the idea of unconditional perseverance (among other reasons.) Just because the Reformed people have done such a good sales job convincing so many they’re the true Protestants doesn’t make it so. It’s also worth noting that “Catholicity” is also an equivocal term in its own right, as the internal struggles the RCC is going through show.
• As discussed in Book Review: Trevor Gervase Jalland’s The Church and the Papacy, the Church of Rome had one job:

The second is that the principal objective in bishops of Rome exerting this primacy was to insure that the faith which was handed down by the apostles–the paradosis, to use the transliterated Greek term that Jalland employs frequently–was preserved and maintained.  That brought a conservatism to the way Rome responded to the many doctrinal crises that came from the East, a salutary one in most cases.

I think it’s fair to ask whether the Occupants of the See of Peter have botched the job or not, especially after the collapse of the Western Empire. The Reformation in its entirety rests on the assumption that they have, and we have a current Occupant who is doing his best to remind everyone of that failure.

Roman Catholicism is certainly capable of making it all work, as I noted in my book review of Bossuet’s History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches:

The Variations were Bossuet’s efforts to show the serious problems inherent in the Reformed churches.  So how successful was he? Part of how successful he seems depends upon how you accept his view of Roman Catholicism.  A Roman Catholicism which is more like Bossuet envisions it–conscious of Scripture, independent of the state, Augustinian in theology–would be a better entity to adhere to than the one that he had then and we have now.  A big part of the problem is that the reverends pères jesuites, or at least one in particular (Pope Francis,) are once again propagating their morale accommodante, as they did in Bossuet’s France (much to its long-term detriment.)  Unfortunately then and now the situation is more complicated, but Bossuet tends to ignore this.

But all too often they do not rise to the occasion.

Anglicanism, with all of its institutional problems, was and is a reasonable attempt to bring Christianity back closer to its roots. It is not perfect. If it spent as much time worrying about the calibre of its parishioners and less on how close to Rome or Constantinople it is, we would all be better off.