Punchy Bishops

With the House debate on health care at its hottest, the U.S. Catholic bishops issued a stunning ultimatum: Impose an absolute ban on tax funds for abortions, or we call for defeat of the Pelosi bill.

Message received. The Stupak Amendment, named for Bart Stupak of Michigan, was promptly passed, to the delight of pro-life Catholics and the astonished outrage of pro-abortion Democrats.

No member was more upset than Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, son of Edward Kennedy, who proceeded to bash the Church for imperiling the greatest advance for human rights in a generation.

Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin responded, accusing Kennedy of an unprovoked attack and demanding an apology. Kennedy retorted that Tobin had told him not to receive communion at Mass and ordered his diocesan priests not to give him communion.

False! The bishop fired back.

He had sent Kennedy a private letter in February 2007 saying that he ought not receive communion, as he was scandalizing the Church. But he had not told diocesan priests to deny him communion.

As Rhode Island is our most Catholic state, Kennedy went silent and got this parting shot from Tobin: “Your position is unacceptable to the Church and scandalous to many of our members. It absolutely diminishes your communion with the Church.”

The clash was naturally national news. But Tobin’s public chastisement of a Catholic who carries the most famous name in U.S. and Catholic politics is made more significant because it seems to reflect a new militancy in the hierarchy that has been absent for decades

Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., just informed the city council that, rather than recognize homosexual marriages and provide gays the rights and benefits of married couples, he will shut down all Catholic social institutions and let the city take them over. Civil disobedience may be in order here.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York sent an op-ed to The New York Times charging the paper with anti-Catholic bigotry and using a moral double standard when judging the Church.

During the “horrible” scandal of priest abuse of children, wrote the archbishop, the Times demanded the “release of names of abusers, rollback of the statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records and total transparency.”

But when the Times “exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuses in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish Community ... 40 cases of such abuses in this tiny community last year alone,” wrote the archbishop, the district attorney swept the scandal under the rug, and the Times held up the carpet.

Dolan singled out a “scurrilous ... diatribe” by Maureen Dowd “that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish or African-American” faith.
Dowd, wrote Dolan, “digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription ... into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics and his recent welcome to Anglicans.”

Dowd, said Dolan, reads like something out of the Menace, the anti-Catholic Know Nothing newspaper of the 1850s.

The Times’ refusal to publish the op-ed underscores the archbishop’s point.

Nor are these the only signals of a new Church Militant.

The Vatican has reaffirmed that Catholics in interfaith dialogues have a moral right if not a duty to convert Jews, and reaffirmed the doctrine that Christ’s covenant with his church canceled out and supersedes the Old Testament covenant with the Jews.

When Abe Foxman, screech owl of the Anti-Defamation League, railed that this marks a Catholic return to such “odious concepts as ‘supercessionism,’” he was politely ignored.

The new spirit was first manifest last spring, when scores of bishops denounced Notre Dame for inviting Barack Obama, a NARAL icon, to give the commencement address and receive an honorary degree.

Among the motives behind the new militancy is surely the wilding attack on Pope Benedict for reconciling with the Society of St. Pius X, one of whose bishops had questioned the Holocaust. The pope was unaware of this, and the bishop apologized. To no avail. Rising in viciousness, the attacks went on for weeks. Having turned the other cheek, the church got it smacked.

In his May address to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, Archbishop Raymond L. Burke said, “In a culture which embraces an agenda of death, Catholics and Catholic institutions are necessarily counter-cultural.”

Exactly. Catholicism is necessarily an adversary faith and culture in an America where a triumphant secularism has captured the heights, from Hollywood to the media, the arts and the academy, and relishes nothing more than insults to and blasphemous mockery of the Church of Rome.

Our new battling bishops may be surprised to find they have a large cheering section among a heretofore silent and sullen faithful who have been desperate to find a few clerical champions.

- Pat Buchanan

Cultural Issues Cannot Be Solved By Political Means

And this is a good article discussing some cultural issues we keep trying to solve by political means: redefining prosperity.

"Crappiest Generation of Spoiled Idiots"

Stuff White People Like

Really.
Read as many of the posts as you dare.
I do like so much of that stuff.

Christian America?

America is not a Christian county.
It is a post-Christian country.

Having Some Irish-American Fun

A different version:

Dystopian Dystopias

When I was at school in the early 90's, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was popular among the pseudo-scholar feminists of the day. The novel envisions how a totalitarian psuedo-Christian fascist-militarist theocracy will enslave fertile women as valuable commodities, forcing them to have children. One aspect of the social critique embedded in the novel, and intended by Atwood and her pseudo-feminist followers, was a prediction of sorts: that women will be treated as slaves as a result of the imminent backlash against feminism Atwood thought she was seeing in the mid-80s (the novel was published in 1985).

She is still a highly celebrated writer today, despite the fact women are increasingly treated like commodoties in more secular-progressive societies viz-a-viz others. Proof? See this article.

Forced steralization of women in Holland? Who thinks that's a good idea? Not anyone even remotely intellectually informed by Christian orthodoxy.

"Lots of Boys and Lots of Guns"

Just watch the video. Trust me. You'll understand.
No foul language. No bad pictures.
Just a world you likely have not seen.

HT: Pop.

Blithering Idiots: Spoilt Generation

Economic policy disaster as cultural and generational legacy (from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph):

The slide in sterling has turned "disorderly".

We can argue over whether or not the first phase of devaluation acted as a shock-absorber for a badly mismanaged economy, providing a cushion against debt deflation and the housing crash. But the latest dive has a very malign feel.

For the first time since this crisis began eighteen months ago, I am seriously worried that British government is losing control.

The currency has fallen five cents today to $1.39 against the dollar. It is now perched precariously on a two-decade support line -- the levels tested in 2001 and 1992. If it breaks that line, traders may send it crashing down towards dollar parity.

The danger is blindingly obvious. The $4.4 trillion of foreign liabilities accumulated by UK banks are twice the size of the British economy. UK foreign reserves are virtually nothing at $60.6bn. (on this, more later in a piece I'm writing today)

If the Government is forced to nationalise RBS and perhaps Barclays with their vast exposure in dollars, euros, and yen, it risks being submerged. It is one thing for a sovereign state to let its national debt jump in a crisis -- or a war -- perhaps even to 100pc of GDP. It is another to take on foreign debts on such a scale with no reserves. Yes, the banks have foreign assets as well to match the debts. But how much are these assets really worth?

This is the moment when the "rubber hits the road" -- to borrow from American argot -- the moment when the reckless debt experiment of our economic and political leaders comes back to haunt.

We cannot even do what Iceland did to save its skin. Reykjavik refused to honour the foreign debts of its buccaneering banks. It let them default, parking the losses in Resolution Committees. Small islands can do that. Iceland has fish instead, and lots of metals.

Britain cannot follow suit. The debts are too big. If London takes such disastrous action it will set off global panic and lead to an asset death spiral, drawing the entire world into deep depression.

What have our leaders wrought? The reckless conduct of City, the fiscal incontinence of Gordon Brown (3pc deficit at the top of the cycle), and the pitiful regulation of the UK housing boom have all combined to bring the country to the brink of disaster.

England has not defaulted since the Middle Ages. There is a real risk it may do so now.

And no -- just so there is no misuderstanding -- it would not have been any better if Britain had joined the euro ten years ago. The bubble would have been just as bad, or worse, as Ireland and Spain can attest. We have our disaster. They have their disaster. When the dust has settled in five years we can make a proper judgement on the sterling-EMU issue. Not now.

The Baby Boomers have had their moment in power. The most spoilt generation in history has handled affairs with its characteristic hedonism. The results are coming in.

The blithering idiots.

Well said. Doom becomes us.

Let Them Eat California

The California government is in bad trouble. As usual, the prodigal son wants to be bailed out by the responsible brothers. Except this prodigal son wants to continue his lavish lifestyle. It is suggested that California solve its problems by dividing into five states. As usual, the suggestion is selfish and very short-sighted. I am perfectly willing to see California independent or joining Mexico. It would be a great boon to the United States to get rid of it. But we don’t need eight more Pelosis and Boxers in the Senate to outvote the dwindling decent states.

Misplaced Subsidies and Obese Children

The Edible Schoolyard Program may take a long while to catch on in every corner of the country. In the meantime, the present ailing economy will likely induce most school districts - and, indeed, most consumers - to make poor food choices in the interest of maximizing their food dollar. Our exceedingly strange system of agricultural subsidies (corporate welfare) supports just those poor choices, favoring producers of such things as processed grain, corn syrup, and livestock while discouraging producers of fresh produce and fruits, such that the more "energy dense" a food is - the more laden with sugars and fats, that is - the cheaper it will be per calorie on the supermarket shelf. It is possible, at least in the short term, for an adult American to get his required calories for under a dollar per day, consuming a diet of, say, prepared cereal or canned chili, whereas a diet that delivers the same calories in a moire healthful and various form can cost orders of magnitude more. As one report notes, for instance, the sugar in fresh raspberries costs nearly 100 times more than refined sugar cane - but imagine the savings in long-term health care costs.

Do yourself some good: read this.

Fallacies in Biblical Interpretation

In a forthcoming Newsweek cover article already online, Lisa Miller, religion editor for Newsweek, offers “the religious case for gay marriage.” Not content to argue that the Bible doesn’t condemn same-sex marriage, Miller tries to turn the tables and present a case for gay marriage from biblical principles: “Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side.”

It is probably too much to hope that Miller’s article will end, at least for a while, the incessant chirping of those who advocate same-sex marriage that the Bible ought to be left out of the discussion. If it is legitimate for advocates to cite the Bible to support their position, surely it is legitimate for opponents to do the same thing.

A thorough, point-by-point rebuttal to Miller’s article is beyond the scope of this post. I will content myself with documenting some of the common fallacies in biblical interpretation and theological argumentation that crop up constantly in the debate over same-sex unions and that the article exemplifies.

Loophole Exegesis

According to Miller, “while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman.” That word explicitly gives away the whole game. Somehow contemporary interpreters imagine that if the Bible failed to anticipate their creative interpretations and to deny them explicitly, then the traditional interpretation is not justified. The Bible does not come with a theological lexicon and rarely offers formal definitions of its terms. Then again, neither does Newsweek. But this lack doesn’t mean that we cannot derive clear conclusions from what it does say.

The story is told that a lady once caught W. C. Fields reading a Bible. When she asked him why, Fields replied, “Just looking for loopholes my dear, just looking for loopholes.” I’m afraid this is the way many people read the Bible. Rather than accept what the Bible says in its context, they look for loopholes to justify their alternate opinions. Any possible or conceivable way out supposedly proves that the Bible does not support the traditional view.

Continue reading this excellent article here.

A Little Thought Experiment

Suppose you were a professional physicist. Suppose further that that you came across the writings of someone whose knowledge of quantum mechanics derived entirely from discussions with high school science students. She had picked up from them some of the jargon – “collapse of the wave function,” “Schrödinger’s cat,” “wave-particle duality,” and so forth – but because their explanations were amateurish at best – always oversimplified, usually at least partially mistaken, and sometimes even grotesquely off-base – they failed to convey to her anything close to an accurate picture of the subject. Bizarrely, though, she used the bad information she’d picked up from them as the basis for an attack on the intellectual respectability of quantum mechanics, presenting it as clear evidence of the irrationality of contemporary physicists. “These physics oddballs claim they have a cat in a lab somewhere that is both alive and dead at the same time! And they also believe in little magic particles floating on foamy cosmic waves, or some such thing. Oogedy-boogedy, as my friend Kathleen would say.”

So what are we to make of those whose pronouncements and/or writings on religion and faith are little more than warmed-over high-school gibberish?

The Ugly Truth About Wall Street

Read it here. It ain't pretty.

Just Sayin'

If a football coach tells parents their son needs to memorize plays to be on the team, the parents agree. If a priest tells parents their child needs to memorize prayers or facts about their faith to be a better Catholic, the parents argue.

If a soccer coach tells parents they need to get their child to team practices three times a week, the parents change work schedules and arrange carpools. If a priest tells parents they need to get their child to a practice before a big liturgy, the parents complain.

If a cheerleading coach tells parents that they need to raise money so the team can go to a competition at Disney World, the parents sell candy bars and wash cars. If a priest tells parents that they need to raise money so the altar servers can get new robes, the parents remark that "It's always about money".

If a school teacher isn't pushing his/her students to read and do math beyond their grade level, then he/she isn't thought to be doing their job. If a religious education program pushes students to know and understand their faith beyond their grade level, then the program is thought to be "unrealistic".

What has happened to us?

Thanks to Fr. Jay Toborowsky.

The Gnostic Cult of Christmas Gift Giving

Showing a devotion to man not otherwise shown to God.

If You Must Shop . . .

. . . for Christmas this year, shop locally:

Visit the AMIBA to learn more.

Family Friday: Chronicles of Culture

February

Chesterbelloc Rock