The duping of Bogie and Bacall, and more
- The duping of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. That's right; the "streetwise," unpretentious Bogie was a sap for the Reds. Bacall was all her life. Hollywood, pink then and now. The Hollywood Ten were guilty as sin; Joe McCarthy was right. My first vote was for Reagan; I remember the left snottily dismissing him as just an actor. (He wasn't much of a conservative but anyway. I don't hate him.) One finger pointed at him; three back at them. Sidebar: Be suspicious when the left sounds nostalgic for the golden era.
- Rome's chief exorcist: In reality, the devil is afraid of all of us. One only needs to live in God’s grace!
- The South Tyrol belongs back with Austria. It's not Italian, although disco-king native son Giorgio (really Hansjörg) Moroder makes much of being Italian (he's a citizen and winner of a government award); his and their language is German. Being Italian is great of course but the South Tyrol is the southernmost outpost of German civilization; the Saxons in Romania were the easternmost. Those Saxons were medieval settlers; after Communism fell, most of them, about 500,000, migrated to Germany, as they get automatic German citizenship.
- How Ryan T. Anderson responded to a gay man who wants to redefine marriage. Marriage is about reproduction and thus society, not how the couple feel about each other.
- The Orthodox tradition (as Catholics we don't believe in the Orthodox Church — Cardinal Kasper: they're so divided we can only speak of Orthodox churches — but do in the Orthodox tradition): Sr. Vassa on canon law. My understanding going back to reading Timothy Ware (Metropolitan Kallistos) nearly 30 years ago is Orthodox canon law is a tangled mess, unenforceable if taken literally, so they don't. The living tradition, small t, of the church interprets it and life goes on. The Roman Catholic Church was the same until our canon law was codified in 1917. The other impression from Ware: theologically there's nothing holding that up; "sloppy theology" as a Catholic friend put it. Basic small-o orthodoxy (all of their defined doctrine, from us, is true), a pretty pseudo-historical argument against the Pope like the King of England's divines cooked up later, valid holy orders... and that's it. The rest is really worshipping one's culture or tribe.
- Summing up: With us it's not about pitting one rite/culture against another (a great thing about being here is it doesn't force you to hate one to love the other; both the unlatinized and latinized forms of the Byzantine Rite have the right to exist), or the Pope as a tyrant (he's no more a tyrant than the Orthodox strictly enforce canons), but about the body of beliefs we share — God, Christ, Trinity, hypostatic union, Mother of God, bishops, the Mass, and optional images. The church is a loose communion run by traditions — which includes the Pope as sharing in the church's charism of infallibility. For 2,000 years sinful Popes have been nothing but good caretakers of that faith. The Church of Jesus Christ is neither Latin nor Greek nor Slav, but Catholic; accordingly she makes no difference between her children and Greeks, Latins, Slavs and members of all other nations are equal in the eyes of the Apostolic See. — Pope Benedict XV, in the encyclical Dei providentis, May 11, 1917.
- Gavin McInnes: How to be fired. One Man 101 I've learned: never apologize to the PC jackals.
Catholic integralism is the true seamless garment.
The Orthodox got their defined doctrine from you?! All 7 Ecumenical councils took place in the East and at none of them was there a Pope of Rome present (nor were they called by the Pope, but rather the Emporor), so shouldn't that mean the Western church of the first millennium got it's defined doctrine from the Eastern Orthodox?
ReplyDeleteIf the Orthodox Churches are so divided, then why do they all have the same theology and faith? It's because of the Holy Spirit, that's why. And as far as the canon law being a tangled mess, that's one of the reasons we have synods of Bishops who know when and how to enforce them.
Your charge that the Orthodox worship cultures and tribes is a slur in an attempt to justify you leaving the Orthodox Church . Do we sing about that in any of our liturgies??
The burden of proof is on you to show that the Pope has hindered the spread of the gospel, by which I mean the list of beliefs in the original post. The church has fulfilled the Great Commission. The Orthodox sect hasn't; rather, it's been self-limiting, its reason to be a separate church simply the desire of sultans, tsars, and Balkan princes taking priority over Christ and the church, so naturally it's been mostly limited to the Second and part of the Third Worlds. The issue isn't whether the Pope called those councils but rather, again, has the church been faithful to that list of beliefs?
DeleteThe battle royale in Orthodoxy is between the second and third Romes, Constantinople and Moscow, always on the verge of going out of communion with each other. Orthodoxy's initial reason to exist apart from us was to be the imperial church, like Henry VIII's Anglicanism and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, hence Constantinople's claimed clout now, vs. the real clout of Moscow, the church of long the only Orthodox country that's mattered geopolitically because it retains its empire and now has nukes. But Byzantine or Russian universality are idols, imitations of real universality, which isn't the person of the Pope but the list of beliefs I give here. So yes, on the popular lay level Orthodoxy is about the worship of one's culture and tribe, which most Americans outgrow after about three generations here. Anybody who's really spiritual sees through it.
The Orthodox might not normally sing about this self-worship in their services, except maybe in the propers for one of their specifically anti-Catholic saints (Greek or Russian patriotism/propaganda, such as the fictional St. Peter the Aleut), but I've heard it preached, under the guise of claiming we are a completely different religion, heretical. Impossible since we share the list of beliefs I gave, only we defend the Pope's having a share in the church's infallibility, as he has done nothing but defend those beliefs.
Finally, for now, true religion is about God; fake religion is about self. I've said that a Westerner becoming Orthodox, turning his back on Western Catholicism, is committing a self-hating act; it's about self, not God. Likewise, leaving the church because you don't like the Novus Ordo or like the Byzantine Rite better is self-centered. The older forms of liturgy, Western and Eastern, are better, but the church has all those old forms, plus every word in the Latin original and Pope Benedict's English translation of the Novus Ordo is true, which is why I can and do go to it several times a year (vacation, holy days of obligation, and making time for special activities some Sundays). I came back to the church, again, literally for Christ's sake, so I don't regret leaving Orthodoxy for a second.
You are in a spiritual dead end. Come home.
newspaper propaganda. For example people were suffering hunger in Soviet Russia but the newspapers in Russia didn't put the blame on themselves but on Americans who linch Negros in the South. The Russian was hungry and didn't have anything to eat but at least his propaganda reaffirmed in him the feeling that the Soviet man was better than the American.
ReplyDeleteThe Russians do that a lot; the Ukrainian Catholics are one of their scapegoats too. The Russians hate the Uniates because, while not perfect, the Uniates in the Ukraine and Ruthenia are "Russian" Christianity without schism, without the Russian imperial myth, so the Russians see them as traitors; true universality as opposed to Russian universality is foreign to them. Soviet atheism was only on top of all that.
DeleteIt also reminds me of Walter Duranty of the New York Times winning the Pulitzer Prize for repeating Soviet lies about the starvation campaign in the Ukraine.