Four dioceses quit, one of their flagship seminaries closed and now a cathedral shuts down. They’re going down. Whatever.
I avoid this topic but here are some drive-by comments with familiar talking points. Sayonara.
Catholic integralism is the true seamless garment.
Don't apologize for things you didn't do, to people who don't believe in forgiveness or redemption.
The tenth anniversary of 9/11 came and went on September 11, three weeks ago. Apparently in the US media there was such a downpour of sentimentality for the occasion as to make the recent torrential rains on the eastern seaboard look like a light shower. However, before it becomes “anti-Semitic” even to raise the question, let us with an American commentator of indisputable intelligence and integrity ask just what was the reality of that event.
The commentator is Dr Paul Craig Roberts who announced several months ago his retirement from writing. He was discouraged by the lack of readers interested in the truth. Fortunately his retirement did not last long. He is a truth-teller, and there are too few of them around. “In America Respect for Truth Is Dead” is the title of his Sept. 12 article, published on infowars.com. As he suggests, the loss of truth is the real drama, both of 9/11 and of the ten years succeeding, not only in the USA, but in fact all over the world.
Dr Roberts has himself a scientific background, and as such he says he was wholly persuaded by the scientific evidence presented in a Sept. 8-11 meeting held in Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, on the 9/11 events. In the four days of hearings, distinguished scientists, scholars, architects and engineers presented the fruit of their research into the 9/11 events (their findings may still be accessible here). Dr Roberts writes that their researches “proved that the WTC7 building was a standard controlled demolition and that incendiaries and explosives brought down the Twin Towers. There is no doubt whatsoever about this. Anyone who declares the contrary has no scientific basis on which to stand. Those who believe in the official story believe in a miracle that defies the laws of physics.”
Dr Roberts quotes a few of the many scientific proofs presented in Canada, for instance the recent discovery of nano-thermite in the dust produced by the fall of the Towers, but he writes that “the revelation of malevolence is so powerful that most readers will find it a challenge to their emotional and mental strength.” Government propaganda and the “presstitute media” have such a grip on minds that most people seriously believe that only “conspiracy kooks” challenge the government’s story. Facts, science and evidence no longer count for anything (somebody I know has run into that!). Dr Roberts quotes a Chicago and Harvard law professor even proposing that all fact-based doubters of government propaganda should be shut down!
G.K. Chesterton once famously said that when people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing, they will believe in anything. Gravest of all amongst the many millions of 9/11 truth-losers are the Catholics who cannot or do not want to see the evidence for 9/11 being an inside job, who cannot or do not want to see the truly religious dimensions of the worldwide triumph of such a mind-bending lie as 9/11 represents. Let such Catholics beware. It may seem a wild exaggeration to say that they risk losing the Faith, but do we not have the terrifying example of Vatican II just behind us in time? Did not in the 1960s far too many Catholics take such a sympathetic view of the modern world as to think that their Church should be adapted to it? Was not Vatican II the result? What did it do to their Faith?
Kyrie eleison.
Canada keeps Bush out, U.S. protests growFrom Indict Bush (will never happen).
Torture, war crimes catching up with Bush and Cheney
The movement to hold Bush and Co. accountable for torture and war crimes is gaining steam.
A Canadian Member of Parliament has declared that U.S. vice president Dick Cheney should be barred from entering the country.
Last week, Bush was forced to cancel a fundraising appearance in Toronto, Canada at Tyndale University College and Seminary, an evangelical Christian school. Students and faculty members protested and petitioned to keep him away from their school. Their petition said: “We believe that no amount of new money can justify profiting from a former figurehead whose policies led to the murder of thousands of innocent civilians.”
Bush assumed he would be welcomed by this university, but he wasn’t. Instead, they kept him out of Canada.
Days later, dozens of people, led by former FBI special agent turned activist Coleen Rowley, met George Bush at a Minnesota fundraiser with banners, signs reading “Wanted for torture” and loud chants of “Arrest George Bush!” and “Shame!”
In an article about the protest, Rowley posed the question, “When will Bush be ‘Pinocheted?’” She also asked: “Is it proper to honor this war criminal who launched pre-emptive, unjustified wars of aggression and ‘shock and awe’ that led to hundreds of thousands of people killed, mostly civilian ‘collateral damage’ and widespread destruction in the Middle East?”
Because of this broad-based and growing movement for accountability and justice, Bush’s world is getting smaller. He is canceling more and more events and is being dogged by passionate protests wherever he goes.
The same is true for Dick Cheney.
Following protests in Orange County, New York and Chicago, Cheney was met by another demonstration in the most improbable of places, conservative Simi Valley, Calif. at a book signing in the Ronald Reagan Library. Cheney thought he would evade protest here, but he couldn’t. The movement against torture was on to him. Dozens of protesters outside the venue denounced Cheney’s complicity in torture and demanded indictment for his crimes.
This is unprecedented. Former top U.S. officials are unable to travel in their own country without being challenged by our movement.
Let’s keep up the pressure. More and more people are joining the ranks of our movement and demanding indictment for Bush, Cheney and their gang.
The Palestinians never put a Jew in a camp – the Germans did – so why take it out on the former?Speaking of ‘never again’, where’s the zillion-dollar museum dedicated to the far more victims of Communism? Why isn’t the NYT giving back the Pulitzer for Will Durant’s propaganda? Why’s John Demjanjuk still in prison?
I wonder sometimes if the ‘sex’ part (as in the ‘style, sex and storytelling’ I like without hipster irony or PC condescension) is anachronistic. Not the sexy, feminine women, of course, but the promiscuity.Of course that’s part of Playboy (as are the little sermons about blacks’ plight and homosexuality; Playboy always wanted to look highbrow and hip) but yes.
If I could change one thing it would be to go back to kneeling. Big mistake.
It (standing Communion) works in the Eastern churches but their reception is by spoon with a lump of bread and wine on the tongue and people kiss icons or the chalice as well.
Why don’t we have elegance and style en masse anymore?Official site.
In many dioceses [in Europe], there is a long tradition of the Bishop being elected by the Chapter of Canons and then ratified by the Pope. There is also the Kirchengemeinde (church association) tradition in the German-speaking countries, where the laity are very powerful in the parishes and limit the authority of the priest. Here in France, since the separation of Church and State in 1905, each diocese and parish is constituted as an association, and that implies lay participation. In the German-speaking countries, the Kirchengemeinde is often very liberal as is seen by the present schismatic tendencies in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Of itself, the church association is not inspired by Congregationalism. Congregational polity – strictly, each local congregation at “parish” level is totally autonomous and there is no diocesan hierarchy of any kind.Theologically no problem; practically it can go very well (the grassroots traditionalism of ethnic national parishes and of the Orthodox at their best, under which system a Novus Ordo is impossible) or very badly (the liberals in the German-speaking countries).
Some years ago an ACA bishop (whom I will not name) told me that many of his faithful, even those who go to confession regularly or who frequent Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, embrace, if not always consciously at any rate in practice, a Protestant “denominationalist” ecclesiology — as no doubt do many American Roman Catholics. Given that the religious outlook of many Americans, even those that are not particularly religious, is a kind of secularized debased Protestantism, in which America (the United States) is itself their (capital C) Church, and their denomination or congregation a kind of “religious society” which (as they seem to think or assume) ought to embody and reflect their own social and cultural outlooks and predilections, this should come as no surprise.Fr C:
You really have hit it on the head here! I was commenting about the question of religion and culture. So-called “cultural” Catholics are known not to take religious obligations very seriously, but there is something more deeply rooted than the “American” outlook you characterise. Americans seem to be “converts” from one church to another church and so enthusiastic about everything, but rooted in little other than secular values. I don’t want to seem anti-American, as many of my friends are Americans. I have a lot of sympathy for their optimism and “let’s get on with it” approach. Our cultural religion in Europe is just about over, so what is better, enthusiastic “congregationalist” religion or cultural death in the European way?
Here in Europe, the attitude is “I’m a Catholic but not a practising one, and certainly not interested in going to church, but I would never leave the true Church”. [What I call Bad Catholics. Not Protestants or Modernists.] It’s a one-shot deal, and once it’s gone, it’s gone.
Bottled Water Free Day was March 11, 2011; bottledwaterfreeday.ca (good old swippler-than-thou Canada). And we missed it. Shucky-darn.I don’t buy bottled water but am obviously not on a crusade against it.
So yer clever and uppity busybody inbred-city-types (and their idiot rural in-laws, and all the obedient eco-issue clones) keep coming up with teh newfangled stupid, because (1) big reliable operational cities & modern systems are the only real, and (2) said smarter-than are SO much smarter than more realistic types, because of their goormay coffees, and ironical chatter, and fancy experiences.
What was one of the first things off the trucks after Hurricane Katrina? Cool, clear water – 200,000 cases in the first weeks. In those ubiquitous & hand-sized plastic bottles, full of liquefied dihydrogen monoxide, H2O, sweet, sweeet Adam’s Ale.
Stick this in your craw, eco-flaky city-twerps: bottled water saves lives. Yes, even the dreaded plastic water-bottles of horror. What – you wanted poor blacks to die of dehydration?
Imagine... just for one moment.. your water system fails. Or gets polluted.. or attacked... or hit by a storm. What’s that? You need to refill it, you say? Here’s a plastic water bottle, of fresh, clean, unpolluted water... Oh, wait. Didn’t you and your ilk locally ban those last year? You are welcome to clutch your little aluminum water-container as hard as you wish, it will not pour forth water for you. Same for your Brita. Try the ditch, or the pond, or the lake. Word has it you can even drink your urine once or twice through. Best of luck, then.
Every rural dweller knows: water can’t be taken for granted. Many homes have wells, water coolers, filters & softeners, downspout barrels, and even bottled water big and small, Just In Case. Some communities have dodgy water systems. Everywhere can get storms, power-failures, and other short- or long-term emergencies. Every time a big storm threatens here, we grab an extra refill for the water-cooler.
It goes without saying that bottled water should be tested, clean, safe, and all that good stuff. Selling unhealthy water is evil, and bad business.
Time is long-past when micro-minded urbanites (and their idiot rural in-laws) should be dictating & banning and nagging based on the assumption that we’ll always have working & safe giant urban water systems. This is a kind of blindness, as if They (The Nanny-State) have made things so safe and predictable that the proposed general banning of the convenient mass-production of bottled water in plastic water bottles is a mere afterthought.
Because sometime, sooner or later, Just In Case comes along.
This message not brought to you by The Bottled Water Über Alles Global Syndicate, a.k.a. Big Water.
The alternatives are not and were never ‘science’ versus ‘religion’; nor God against evolution. If God makes things, surely it is in a somewhat more complicated way than an engineer makes a design, or a factory makes a car. That stuff tends upwards, that life tends to work really really well, that there are so many and various forms of life now, and in the fossil record? Neither a ‘proof’ of Darwinism, nor a simplistic creationism where God winds stuff up at the beginning and lets it race around with no further influence.
If God exists, then the relation of divine activity to the universe of created objects might be more like a singer and a song; or a face and a mirror; or a painter and his paintings – except the singer is living in the song as it is being sung, and as the notes also each sing themselves. It’s both-and, since (if he exists) God is not a creature, but the creator. Nor is his relation to individual elements or living beings in creation that of an inventor to a car. Sorry. more analogies just there.
That makes more sense to me than self-inventing whales.
The Binks is not in the pocket of Big Evolution, or Big Intelligent Design. He just likes spouting off in general. I fully and cheerfully confess to being in-pocketed by Big Jesus.
In the measured decade, churches, temples and synagogues told surveyors that congregations that were innovative and contemporary showed the highest amount of “high spiritual vitality.”‘Ladies love Joe Schmoe’, said Joe Schmoe. Biased much? How about an independent measure of success or failure?
Forty-seven percent of congregations that said their worship experience was “innovative and contemporary” reported high spiritual vitality, versus 17% that said their congregations were “neither innovative nor contemporary.”
Prepare better than the next person. Wake up 15 minutes earlier than everyone else. Read a little bit more. Clean that extra thread hanging off your pants. Doing the right amount of due diligence before an investment. Repeating that 10 times over for 10 different investments even though nothing has come thru yet. Writing the best post you can before you hit publish. Sending those first few emails to flirt, to entice, and then confirm a first date. Practicing the Daily Practice.Take with two grains of salt and the teachings of the church to counter any narcissism and thus deal better with suffering (a limited dose of bootstraps, ‘go get ’em, tiger’, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller’s optimism from 50 years ago, not the whole thing as a substitute gospel... a lot of it is the good old northern-European Protestant work ethic) and it’s not too bad. My parents liked this sort of thing and as I get older I see their point.
The outcomes are all uncertain. Life hasn’t changed just yet. You can be anxious for the outcome. Or you can relish the moment, knowing the preparation is in place. You’ve done all you can. Good things will happen.
You can say “live life as if its your last moment before you die.” But there’s also “live life as if it’s the last moment before you really come alive.”
How does the founding philosophy of the Constitution define your principles for how to serve as a public official in the United States?Nice thought but everybody except Ron Paul and Gary Johnson will dissemble away. Not a dahm’s wuth of difference, or the Republicans do a libertarian song and dance when they’re out of power, like 15 years ago when an alleged Great Satan and actually accidentally the best president in decades was in office. From Richard Viguerie.
Hollywood glosses over this more than almost anything else, but some of us work at jobs because we need the money. Women don’t work just to get out of the house and do something fun. The conflict isn’t between our fascinating project at our architectural firm and our kid’s Little League game. It’s between going to the kid’s Little League game and being able to pay for the kid to stay in Little League.
When someone’s working ridiculous hours to the point they can’t go out and meet people, it’s possible they’re doing it because of a burning ambition to get ahead and make partner someday, but it’s even more likely they’re doing it to pay the exorbitant rent on the fancy Manhattan apartments so many of these movie characters have, or just pay off their student loans.
There’s a lot of ways to make a female character relatable as she struggles to balance her career and her personal life, but giving her some kind of hobby-like superjob she doesn’t even need sure doesn’t help.
“They flew the plane in, but we caused it,” the 85-year-old crooner told Howard Stern on his Sirius Radio show Monday night. “Because we were bombing them and they told us to stop.”From LRC.
Bennett’s controversial answer came after Stern asked the World War II vet how the U.S. should deal with the terrorists responsible for toppling the Twin Towers.
“But who are the terrorists?” Bennett said, according to ABC News. “Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Why are we human beings here on earth?” an old friend just asked me. I said, of course, “To praise, love and serve God, and by so doing to save...” He broke in – “No, that’s not the answer I want,” he said. “What I mean is that before I came into existence, I was not, and I was not in any danger. Now that I exist I am seriously exposed to the danger of losing my soul. Why was I given, without my consent, this perillous existence which, once given, I could no longer refuse?”
Expressed in this way, the question is serious, because it casts a doubt on the goodness of God. Certainly it is God who gives to each of us life and thereby sets before us the choice which we cannot opt out of, between the steep and narrow path to Heaven and the broad and easy road to Hell (Mt. VII, 13-14). Certainly the enemies of the salvation of our souls, the world and the flesh and the Devil, are dangerous, because the sad fact is that the majority of souls fall into Hell at the end of their lives on earth (Mt. XX, 16). Then how can it be fair for me to find myself in such danger by no choice of my own?
The answer is surely that if the danger was in no way by my own fault, then indeed life might be a poisoned gift. But if often the danger is in good part by my own fault, and if the very same free-will that when used wrongly enables me to fall into Hell, also enables me when used rightly to enter upon an eternity of unimaginable bliss, then not only is life not a poisoned gift, but it is a magnificent offer of a glorious reward out of all proportion to the relatively slight effort which it will have cost me on earth to avoid the danger and make the right use of my free-will (Is. LXIV, 4).
But the questioner might object that none of those three enemies of his salvation are his fault: “The world which incites us to worldliness and concupiscence of the eyes is all around us from cradle to grave, and can only be escaped at death. The weakness of the flesh goes with original sin, and goes back to Adam and Eve. I wasn't around then! The Devil also existed long before I was born, and is running wild in modern times!”
To which one can reply that the three enemies are all too liable to be our own fault. As for the world, we have to be in it, but we do not have to be of it (Jn. XVII, 14-16). It depends on us whether we love the things of this world, or prefer to them the things of Heaven. How many prayers in the Missal ask for the grace to prefer the things of Heaven! As for the flesh, the more we flee from its concupiscence within us, the more it can lose its sting, but which of us can say that he has by no personal sin of his own strengthened the concupiscence and the danger, instead of weakening it? And as for the Devil, his power to tempt is strictly controlled by Almighty God, and God's own Scripture assures us that God offers us the grace necessary to overcome the temptations he allows (I Cor. X, 13). In brief, what St Augustine says of the Devil applies also to the world and the flesh – they are like a dog chained up which can bark but not bite, unless one chooses to go too close.
So there is indeed an inescapable degree of spiritual danger in human life, but it depends on us, with God’s grace, to control that danger, and the reward is out of this world (I Cor. II, 9).
Kyrie eleison.
Father Francis L. Sampson was a Catholic priest who served in WWII as the chaplain for the famous 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division – a U.S. Army paratrooper unit that wound up being one of the key groups to drop on Normandy on D-Day as part of Operation Overlord.From Cracked.
He wasn’t expected to participate in the fighting because naturally he didn’t carry any form of weapon (with the exception of a crucifix, which only works on vampires), so he found a small frontline aid station and began ministering to the wounded. When American units in the area came under attack and had to retreat, the wounded who couldn’t be moved had to be left behind. Sampson decided to stay with them, where, despite absurd amounts of danger, he continued to tend to the injured soldiers.
Unfortunately for everyone, some of the German troops who took over the aid station were Waffen SS and they, being despicable cockholes at the best of times, decided to put Sampson up against a wall and shoot him.
Fortunately, a German Army non-commissioned officer saw what was going on and rescued Sampson, taking him to an intelligence post, ostensibly for interrogation. There he was found to be a priest and therefore not someone the Germans really needed to be threatened by. They let him go, at which point he ran away to join the Allies ... oh, no, wait. He calmly returned to the Nazi-occupied aid station, where he went back to administering to the wounded. The wounded, by the way, now included lots of Germans, to whom he ministered all the same.
After the aid station was retaken, Sampson heard of an American soldier whose three brothers had all been reported killed in the same week (although one was actually a POW and survived the war). Moving quickly, he instigated the search for the fourth brother, Fritz Niland. Sampson went out, found him and brought him back to Utah Beach, where he was evacuated back to the States. Does that story sound familiar? It should, because it served as the plot for “Saving Private Ryan,” where the part of Father Sampson was played by an entire squad of rangers.
Sampson went on to jump with the 101st in Holland later that year, where he was captured again and spent the rest of the war in captivity. Then he got out and ... went right back to war, jumping into Korea. When that was over and Vietnam came along, he was of course on board for that, too, taking the position of Chief of Chaplains.
What the hell was he going to do, stay home?