Blog to discuss the book "The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter: A Literary Analysis of the Book of Revelation" and current events that point to the events described therein.
The Apocalypse describes a "war in the heaven" between Michael and his angels and the Dragon and his. - Apoc. Chapter 12.
In this scene, the Dragon is "cast out" and Michael and his angels "go down" to the earth to continue the battle. In a spiritual sense, this means the Church is cleansed from within and now the battle becomes those outside the Church vs. those inside, at least in the spiritual sense.
We may just have seen a preview of this worldwide battle in the conflict at Notre Dame this past weekend. The liberals inside the Church have cast aside the teaching of the bishops and the pope, that life is sacred from the moment of conception to natural death, that marriage is the lifelong bond between one man and one woman, and embraced a charismatic leader who stands for all the Church opposes.
Those who dared to speak out against the honor bestowed on President Obama were marginalized and even arrested leading to the ironic headline "...Catholics Arrested for Being Catholic at Catholic University."
Vision America President Pastor Rick Scarborough said he was sickened by what he saw when those protesting Obama's speech at Notre Dame were arrested on the campus.
"I wept when I saw my friends arrested and taken to jail," Scarborough disclosed. "They almost broke the arm of a priest who appeared to be in his 80s, by dragging him on the ground."
Is this just a precursor of what we can expect in the near future? Has Satan become so strong as to control the Colleges and Universities inside the Church? Reading the articles at Cardinal Newman Society and IvoryTowerHeretics, one must wonder if the heads of these institutions have gone mad.
Even more disconcerting is the response from the shepherds, from the pope down to the bishops. While 70 American bishops and a few from the Vatican did speak out, there are over 300 bishops in America and most remained silent as did the pope himself. This passivity in the face of evil green-lighted Notre Dame President Father Jenkins and his supporters to do as they please. But this was all foretold long ago. That SATAN IS INSIDE THE CHURCH is obvious and serves as a temporal guidepost as to the exact time we are in.
In chapter 12, Satan is cast out. So up to that time, he is inside and gaining strength until the pope and the college of cardinals finally and decisively act. In the meantime, the faithful, those who truly believe the Gospel of Christ and work in the trenches to serve only Him, will have to suffer. It is necessary for justice. Just as the martyrs were a sign for their time so must the pro-lifers, and the defenders of natural marriage be a sign of Christ for these times.
Those who arrest, beat and otherwise persecute them do so at great peril to their own souls. The new martyrs must not lose heart, must not be discouraged. Their time will come as promised. But they must wait a little longer and persevere. The Apocalypse provides great encouragement for those who suffer with patient endurance.
After the year 1900, toward the middle of the 20th century, the people of that time will become unrecognizable. When the time for the Advent of the Antichrist approaches, people's minds will grow cloudy from carnal passions, and dishonor and lawlessness will grow stronger. Then the world will become unrecognizable.
People's appearances will change, and it will be impossible to distinguish men from women due to their shamelessness in dress and style of hair. These people will be cruel and will be like wild animals because of the temptations of the Antichrist. There will be no respect for parents and elders, love will disappear, and Christian pastors, Bishops and priests will become vain men, completely failing to distinguish the right-hand way from the left.
At that time, the morals and traditions of Christians and of the Church will change. People will abandon modesty, and dissipation will reign. Falsehood and greed will attain great proportions, and woe to those who pile up treasures. Lust, adultery, homosexuality, secret deeds and murder will rule in society.
Apostasy
At that future time, due to the power of such great crimes and licentiousness, people will be deprived of the grace of the Holy Spirit, which they received in Holy Baptism and equally of remorse.
The Churches of God will be deprived of God-fearing and pious pastors, and woe to the Christians remaining in the world at that time; they will completely lose their faith because they will lack the opportunity of seeing the light of knowledge from anyone at all. Then they will separate themselves out of the world in holy refuges in search of lightening their spiritual sufferings, but everywhere they will meet obstacles and constraints. And all this will result from the fact that the Antichrist wants to be Lord over everything and become the ruler of the whole universe, and he will produce miracles and fantastic signs.
Telephones, airplanes, submarines
He will also give depraved wisdom to an unhappy man so that he will discover a way by which one man can carry on a conversation with another from one end of the earth to the other. At that time men will also fly through the air like birds and descend to the bottom of the sea like fish. And when they have achieved all this, these unhappy people will spend their lives in comfort without knowing, poor souls, that it is deceit of the Antichrist. And, the impious one! - he will so complete science with vanity that it will go off the right path and lead people to lose faith in the existence of God in three hypostases.
The coming chastisement
Then the All-good God will see the downfall of the human race and will shorten the days for the sake of those few who are being saved, because the enemy wants to lead even the chosen into temptation, if that is possible... then the sword of chastisement will suddenly appear and kill the Perverter and his servants.
Note: There aren't words suitable for the disgust and disappointment that this continues year after year. One has to wonder if the movie reviews are written on behalf of the bishops or for their entertainment. If homosexuality is of no moral concern to the bishops, we probably need new bishops to shepherd the Catholic flock. Movie Reviewer for Catholic Bishops' Conference Praises Homosexualist Film - Again Despite movie's scenes of males kissing each other, nudity, and promotion of gay "lifestyle", movie not rated "Morally Offensive"
By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman WASHINGTON, D.C., December 2, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Harry Forbes, the head movie and television reviewer for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), has issued a review praising the movie "Milk." (See text of the review at http://www.usccb.org/movies/m/milk.shtml)
The movie, which exalts the first openly homosexual man elected to public office in U.S. history, Harvey Milk, contains scenes of "male kissing and nongraphic encounters, rear male nudity, murder, suicide, and some rough language, crude expressions and profanity" by Forbes' own admission.
Despite such material, and despite the movie's blatant glorification of the homosexual rights agenda, it is not rated "Morally Offensive" (O), but only receives a rating of "L", for "Limited Adult Audience." Furthermore, in his review Forbes in no way objects to or cautions viewers about the content of the film, instead offering nothing but words of praise.
Harvey Milk, a homosexual rights activist who ran a camera shop with his male lover in San Francisco's Castro District, was elected to San Francisco's city council as a supervisor in 1977. He was assassinated shortly thereafter, along with the city's mayor, by another supervisor who was enraged that several supervisors were blocking his reappointment by the mayor. The murders had no apparent relationship with Milk's homosexual proclivities.
Milk soon became a folk hero among the Castro District's growing population of sodomites and a symbol of San Francisco’s successful homosexualist movement. A little over thirty years later, San Francisco is the scene of public nudity and sex acts in the open air during its annual "gay pride" parade, one of the largest such parades in the world.
Forbes, who heads the USCCB's Office for Film and Broadcasting, calls the movie "a solid biographical drama about San Francisco supervisor and gay rights activist Harvey Milk." He also speaks approvingly of the movie's strong emphasis on the Catholic faith of Milk's assassin, Dan White. "Penn is especially fine, and Brolin is scarily intense as the Catholic White. (We're shown a lengthy baptism of White's baby, with Milk ironically the only invited outsider.)," writes Forbes.
Forbes has written other reviews praising films that promote and glorify homosexual behavior and attack the Catholic faith, including "Brokeback Mountain," which is about a sodomite relationship between two cowboys, and "The Golden Compass," which is atheistic and vilifies Christianity.
The official website of the USCCB Office of Film and Broadcasting (http://www.usccb.org/movies/current.shtml) contains numerous reviews praising movies that portray sexual immorality, nudity, and dirty jokes, and rarely deems such films "Morally Offensive" or cautions viewers about the content.
Despite repeated protests from Catholic laity, the USCCB continues to allow Forbes to write reviews on the organization's behalf.
In a written statement to LifeSiteNews, Human Life International President Fr. Thomas Euteneuer angrily denounced Forbes' latest pro-homosexualist review.
"Moral outrage is the only response to someone like Harry Forbes who consistently trashes Catholic values in his movie reviews and gets away with it," wrote Euteneuer. "We are accustomed to pagans celebrating their values and letting lots of immorality slide with a wink and a nod, but when the official movie reviewer for the US Catholic Bishops Conference does it time and time again with no consequences, we have no credible moral compass with which to evaluate the content of movies any more."
"In his recent review of the homosexual promo flick, Milk, Forbes seems to think that 'male kissing…rear male nudity, murder, suicide, some rough language, crude expressions and profanity' merit something less than total condemnation from our Catholic point of view. Let’s face it: Forbes is simply an icon of the false Catholics in America who are accelerating the degradation of our civilization because they refuse to be 'salt and light' to preserve us from this very same darkness."
Contact Information:
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 3211 4th Street, N.E. Washington DC 20017-1194 (202) 541-3000
Cardinal Francis George, President of the USCCB Archdiocese of Chicago 155 East Superior Street Chicago, Illinois, 60611 312-751-5382 Fax: 312-751-5381
USCCB Office for Film and Broadcasting 1011 First Avenue, 13th Floor New York, NY 10022 (212) 644-1880
December 1, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - I couldn't believe the e-mail that I recently received from a pro-life friend living in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She told me about a letter written by a nun to the archdiocese.
My friend told me she was "disturbed" to read this letter. She said, "I cannot fathom how a religious sister could not only advocate abortion, but also place her pathetic, misguided ideas into print! What a disgrace! And why would our archdiocesan newspaper even print such garbage?" The Milwaukee archdiocese published this letter in its newspaper, The Catholic Herald http://www.chnonline.org/:
"GOD IS PRO-CHOICE
"Even though Catholic bishops are already pressing President-elect Barack Obama on the issue of abortion, it is time they begin to realize that 54% of Catholics who voted for him do not agree with the bishops telling people how to vote.
"Obama may be pro-choice, but so is God. God gave everyone a free will and he does not pressure people into using that free will to do what is right. Obama promised to do what he can to prevent abortion. What more need he do when so many other pressures to make changes are upon him?
"Yes, abortion is the killing of an innocent life. So is war and violent killing on the street. I have often seen many starving babies in hospitals in Honduras and witnessed their pain. In these cases, abortion might have been the lesser of two evils, and even the most merciful alternative.
"I challenge our bishops to dwell more on unjust economic issues that both create and perpetuate the need for children to die of starvation, and for women to choose abortion. It would be better to aim at eliminating poverty rather than focus only on abortion. Poverty in our country and the world at large is a disgrace that cries to heaven for vengeance.
"Sr. Arlene Welding, SSSF; Campellsport, WI"
Well, I am as upset by this as anyone who reads it should be, and, on several levels, it contributes to the ongoing confusion that reigns within Catholic circles across this nation. The first and perhaps most obvious problem with this nun's letter is that she is clearly not only pro-abortion but feels fine attributing her views to God, the Author of Life!
To suggest to the readers of a Catholic newspaper that the Catholic bishops are out of line for standing up for the innocent preborn child is ludicrous. But it certainly is not as ludicrous as her comments about the number of Catholics who voted for Barack Obama, as opposed to the opinions bishops might have on the direct murder of preborn children by abortion!
To equate the direct murder of a preborn baby with the "lesser of two evils," thus suggesting that some preborn children would be better off dead than to have to be born into poverty, is about as misguided and ill-conceived a notion as I have ever seen in print. It tops many of the comments I have seen from pro-abortion leaders.
It is astounding to me that a Catholic newspaper would print such garbage and expect silence from all those in the Catholic community who know the truth, defend the truth, and expect to read the truth in a newspaper labeled Catholic! So here is an assignment for you.
First: contact Sister Arlene Welding's religious congregation and demand an apology from them for her public dissent from the truth of Catholic magisterial teaching.
School Sisters of St. Francis http://www.sssf.org/ Central Offices of the U.S. Province 1501 S. Layton Boulevard Milwaukee, WI 53215
You can also e-mail, though I think letters are best.
The e-mail address is generalate@sssf.org. The phone number is (414) 384-4105
Second, please contact the Executive Editor/General Manager of the archdiocesan newspaper and let him know how shocked you were to read this screed in his newspaper.
Brian T. Olszewski The Catholic Herald 3501 S. Lake Dr. Milwaukee, WI 53235-0913 The phone number is (414) 769-3466 Mr. Olszewski's e-mail address is olszewskib@archmil.org.
Finally, it would be a very good idea to send copies of your e-mails and/or your letters to the archbishop of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, whom I honestly believe would be as shocked as you and I about what was published in his newspaper.
Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan 3501 S. Lake Dr. P.O. Box 070912 Milwaukee, WI 53207-0912 Phone: (414) 769-3497 Email: archbishopdolan@archmil.org
May you find peace of mind and joy of soul by writing your messages, and feel comfort in knowing that no matter how clearly wrong some things are, even when labeled Catholic, they are all a part of living in a world steeped in the culture of death. Be of good heart, for we are assured of God's love, regardless of the muck in our midst.
Note: If true, this is indeed an ominous sign. What "hateful" language has a Roman Catholic Priest ever used against homosexuality? By hateful is the article referring to the teaching of the Holy Roman Catholic Church? And what exactly are these English bishops up to? Have they succumbed to the neo-pagan culture around them or are they so far gone they are referring to themselves? The Church in the U.K. is in worse shape than most elsewhere from recent accounts. It's about time for Rome to step in. We are not a Church of political correcttness. The Bride of Christ speaks the truth at all times. She is not homophobic or in fear of anything. And she will not be bullied by modernist fads like homosexuality.
Be careful not to offend gay worshippers, Catholic priests warned
Roman Catholic priests have been banned from using 'heterosexist' language in their churches in case they offend gay worshippers.
They have been told by their bishops not to assume that every churchgoer is a heterosexual and to reflect this 'in language and conversation'.
'Remember that homophobic jokes and asides can be cruel and hurtful - a careless word can mean another experience of rejection and pain,' say the bishops in a leaflet advising priests and worshippers how to be more welcoming to gay people.
Activists say any moves by the Catholic Church to be more tolerant of homosexuality are undermined by Pope Benedict XVI's opposition to gay marriage
Priests are also encouraged to put up posters advertising 'support services' for homosexuals, a move bound to infuriate many Catholics who believe gay sexual activity to be sinful.
The advice was welcomed by gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell as a 'positive initiative which will bring great comfort to gay Catholics and their families'.
He said: 'Its sympathetic, understanding message is a big improvement on the past homophobia of some Catholic pronouncements on homosexuality.'
However, he said the 'laudable change of tone' was undermined by the 'homophobic content of the Catholic Catechism' and by Pope Benedict XVI's opposition to gay marriage.
The advice was criticised by Lynette Burrows, a Catholic commentator, as 'pitiful'.
She said it was ridiculous that Church leaders appeared to be ' grovelling' to a secular agenda. 'It is things like this that are enfeebling the Church at the moment - the concentration on things that don't matter and missing the things that do,' she said.
'What is pitiful as well as demeaning is that the Church is running after homosexual opinion but nothing is going to make homosexuals like the Catholic Church.
'This is because the Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality is a disorder
From Apocalypse - Letter by Letter: A Literary Analysis of The Book of Revelation
In 9:13-16, John begins informing the reader that the objective of the second major phase is indeed the whole world. Then, there can be only one reason why the faithful of the religious orders tell unanimously and universally the "sixth angel" to loose the "four angels" bound at the Euphrates: not that the Church is making very slow progress; not that the Church is temporarily making no progress at all, either merely in a particular region or in the entire world; but that the Church is losing ground everywhere, that evil has grown so great as to have become alarmingly advanced, even in the Church, in its highest ranks.
The faithful of the religious orders will not meet and vote on the matter, obviously; rather, they will desire in their hearts and think in their minds, that God should begin the painful process of removing the many evils on earth and in "heaven," the Church. Even the faithful among the laity will sincerely pray: "...thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." When the salt is no longer preserving, when corruption is consuming so many, then, it will be time.
God knows all, and He has marked the exact hour and day and month and year for the "four angels" bound at the Euphrates to be loosed upon mankind. No one is more exact than God is. No one. Watch the religious orders: they will be the signal. Already their ranks are thin. So amazed at the number of "cavalry" was John, that he did not put the connective "kai" after it, but only a comma. To make it clear to the reader that the number is to be understood as literal [but approximate, of course], John added: "I heard the number of them."
In John's day, the population of the entire Roman Empire was about 125 million; and one out of every ten could be trained and maintained in the military. The 200 Million Horsemen, therefore, according to the ancient ratio, which has changed little in modern times, suggest a population of TWO BILLION.
John, by human sagacity alone, would have known that the vision was about an event very far in the future. Those who confine the Apocalypse to the Roman Empire are quite in egregious error.
6 And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she had a place prepared by God, that there they should feed her a thousand two hundred sixty days. 7 And there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels: 8 And they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. 9 And that great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who seduceth the whole world; and he was cast unto the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. [Apoc. 12:6-9]
According to Steven Paul in his book, The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter, the above passage from Chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation describes a conflict in the Church between those on the side of Christ and those who have apostatized and follow the False Prophet, and by extension Satan, the dragon.
While Michael and his angels may well be real angels, the term "angel" is used throughout the Apocalypse to indicate bishops. This passage tells of a battle inside the Church that results in those bishops who follow Satan finally being cast out "unto the earth". That is to say they no longer have the grace of being members in the visible organization.
In today's news, linked above, the Vatican has warned that passage of the so-called Freedom of Choice Act, removing all laws protecting the unborn, is a direct attack on the Church, an act of war. As is often the case in today's Church, such pronouncements are made by high Vatican officials, bishops, and usually contradicted, modified or ignored by many other bishops. The lines for the battle inside the Church are being drawn.
If FOCA is passed, what will the response of the US bishops be? They have made their warning but what is their history of backing up warnings in the past? In each of the last several election cycles, the prospect of excommunication for pro-abortion Catholic politicians has come up and in each cycle, prominent Catholic politicians have continued to receive communion even from prominent bishops. Now, a pro-abortion Catholic is Vice President and another is HHS Secretary. What will the hierarchy do? It depends on what time we're in in regard to the Apocalypse.
All the New Testament writings on the end times agree, before the cumulative battle between good and evil, the apostasy must come first. In the past election cycle a higher percentage of Catholics voted for the pro-abortion, pro-homosexual candidate than the population at large. This is a reflection on the efficacy of the teaching of the catechism by the current crop of US bishops, many of whom will be swept up in the war and "fall to earth" which means lose their spiritual position in the Church.
Rather than scold a good parish priest for his standing up for life, you should examine your own conscience and ask yourself if you've done enough to stop the slaughter of the unborn or if you've become the typical pragmatic administrator caught up in his own position and privilege. He said nothing wrong, only what the Vatican itself has stated. It's only the cowards in the U.S. hierarchy that fail time and again to put teeth into their lofty pronouncements. You could have showed some guts and stood up for this man but you chose to sell out. Sad...
In Christ,
Steve
P.S. I invite you to view this video and refelct on how strongly this evil needs to be opposed:
After the event of the 200 million horsemen and just preceding the second woe we have this verse in the Book of Revelation:
"And they did not repent of their murders nor of their sorceries nor of their fornications nor of their thefts." Apoc. 9:21
Pharmakeia is a Greek word found in the New Testament that means medication, pharmacy, magic, sorcery and witchcraft. The verse seems to point to an increase of the use of drugs (as well as astrology and witchcraft perhaps) in the time leading up to the second woe.
Fornications can mean sexual licentiousness but can also refer to apostasy from the true faith. When the Bible speaks of adultery and fornication it often refers to a communal act of falling away from God's law.
In the article above, Mexico City, one of the largest Roman Catholic cities in the world, even in world history, has decided to give pharmaceuticals, Viagra, to older men to "make them feel better". In schools throughout the western world, the percentage of children on psychological medications is exploding. Pills are prescribed for depression, fat reduction, sexual deficiencies, and every real or imagined malady one can come up with. And of course there is "the pill" for preventing procreation, one of the greatest insults to one's Creator that man could devise.
As for murder, the slaughter of the unborn across the globe is unprecedented in human history. Not only does man not repent of this murderous plague, they exalt it as a right and as health care and force it even upon the faithful. The recent election of Barack Obama is a case in point as a key part of his platform is the abolition of any restriction on abortion on demand and the sexualization of public school children.
Lastly, it says men did not repent of their thefts. What is the greatest theft in history if not the recent transfer of trillions of dollars of retirees and working people's savings and investments to international bankers? Is there any repentance for the mismanagement of loans that led to this thievery? By all appearances, the announcement of the financial "crisis" was timed to elect Obama to the presidency, once his platform of ending the Iraq war fell flat due to recent successes in reducing the violence there undercut him.
All this evidence has to lead one to the conclusion that the time mentioned in the Apocalypse verse above has come. We are about to be plunged into the greatest crisis of faith in human history and how it comes out has already been written.
And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered; that, when she should be delivered, he might devour her son. [Apoc. 12:4]
It is explained in The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter by Steven Paul that this scene depicts the apostasy of one third of the college of cardinals. They are drawn to the False Prophet by his irresistible force. He has a charism that they are unable to resist and are willing to turn their backs on the Holy Pontiff, The Pope, in order to follow him.
In our own times, we see how easily the faithful are willing to cast aside the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ in order to follow their own desires. In the linked article, it says there is a new way of looking at the abortion issue in light of the overall Catholic teaching that allows Catholics to vote for a candidate who is "pro-choice".
This story is false on many levels, not the least of which is that the theory is not new at all. The idea of the "seamless garment" was used by Catholics 30 years ago for the same reason - they wanted to vote pro-abortion because the pro-abortion candidate reflected their ideals more closely.
The second big lie in this article is the idea that the pro-abortion candidate's policies would actually reduce the number of abortions. Can he defy gravity as well? In fact, his policies include support for the Freedom of Choice Act, which rescinds all restrictions on abortion-on-demand including parental notification, late term abortion, born alive act, and interstate restrictions.
The third big lie is that all pro-life Catholics want to is outlaw abortion but won't help young women with prevention of unwanted pregnancies or with prenatal and post natal care. In fact traditional, church-going Catholics have been feeding the poor, placing children for adoption, opening crisis pregnancy centers like Spring House, Visitation House and Birthright for years. While primary political emphasis is placed on voting pro-life, it is wholly consistent with everything the Church teaches that to care for the poor and to work against violence and social justice starts with the right to life.
Catholic teaching and pronouncements from the leadership also condemn the death penalty and war so long as there is a just alternative. No political party perfectly embodies Catholic moral teaching but certainly there is open hostility to the unborn, traditional marriage, abstinence programs, adoption with traditional families, and conscience protection for Catholic physicians and businesses in one party.
Catholics are free to vote for whomever they choose. But to claim that the pro-abortion candidate better fits Catholic moral teaching is just plain false. Since the people making this claim seem sincere, there is a possible reason for this. They have been pulled away from the Church by an irresistible force, a charism so strong they could not do otherwise. They were too weak to overcome it. This charism comes from a fresh, well spoken politician who has learned the power of his trade. Some have even asked if he is the Antichrist himself. That is not likely, but the ease with which he has swept Catholics away from their Church should be a dire warning.
It seems a day doesn't go by that either someone sends me an article or I read on a Catholic site about a war, impending war, natural disaster, economic collapse or other man made calamity that the author claims foretells the end times.
To put stock in such things is to ignore the obvious and to ignore prophetic writings. In the Bible, the actions of God's people, in the Old Testament Israel, and in the Book of Revelation, the Church, indicate when events of significant change will occur.
In our time we have seen the influence of the Church in the western world slide precipitously towards irrelevance as a secular humanist wave has swept over mankind. Why? Look closely INSIDE the Church. We have witnessed the greatest apostasy in history as priests and religious threw of the bonds of authority after Vatican II, engaged in the most disgusting sexual abuse of their charges, enabled and covered up by their bishops.
To make it worse, the bishops continue to this day to deflect attention away from themselves and towards their own priests and the victims they were supposed to be dispensing the sacraments to. They were supposed to help us get to heaven!
No earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, stock market crash, apparition or war compares to the complete devastation wrought by faithless members of the episcopate on the Church. Indeed, all those other natural and unnatural disasters usually have the effect of driving the faithful to SEEK God, to return to piety. These bishops have driven the largest exodus out of the Church in history!
But when the teaching members of the Church say one thing and do another, proclaim justice but avoid blame, cover up and divert attention, condemn abortion but fail to enforce canon law against those who enable it, claim homosexuality is gravely immoral and disordered but refuse to remove homosexuals from their midst, proclaim the True Presence but give communion to public and obstinate sinners, who is left to believe?
Remember ExcordeEcclesae, the bishops statement on Catholic colleges and universities? The idea was that these institutions should reflect and teach the Catholic faith, a novel idea. Instead they have foisted the most anti-Catholic doctrines imaginable on young people. One such college, Holy Cross in Worcester, MA actually sponsored a family planning conference featuring Planned Parenthood! The bishop first warned the college president and then went back to his hole when he was ignored. Is this what Jesus meant by his admonition not to "separate the wheat from the weeds" or is this just institutional cowardice and accommodation?
1 Woe to the pastors, that destroy and tear the sheep of my pasture, saith the Lord. Jer. 23
We have seen a priesthood devastated first by the sexual revolution that saw family sizes shrink and materialism grow and then by homosexuality that has gripped the seminaries and discouraged authentic vocations. Bishops have been compromised and blackmailed by their own failings, moving molesters from parish to parish to continue their reign of terror.
Now, as a political system veers out of control codifying sin as privilege, the bishops are too self-absorbed and lacking in credibility to speak out effectively and rally the faithful who are less educated in the faith and more confused than ever due to the infiltration of pagans and secularist authors in religious education programs.
At times like these, God has always acted. But He also promised that one day there would be a final battle, and that in that battle, the devastation of souls would be unprecedented. God's mercy is that He will spare some of the faithful. But His justice is that the day will come.
Don't look to the sky for signs, or to geopolitical events or Wall Street. One need look no further than the local parish, if it hasn't been sold off, to figure out that something cataclysmic is about to happen. The Church has become "like a scroll rolled up." The "sun is darkened and the moon will not give its light."
Note: For those who believe the scandal has passed and all is well in the Archdiocese of Boston, read this closely. A Catholic institution is promoting immoral counterfeit arrangements between homosexuals and the Church leaders are hiding and doing nothing.
Catholic Boston College Sponsors Panel Focusing on Homosexual Couples
BOSTON, MA, June 16, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts today criticized Jesuit administered Boston College for sponsoring and hosting Love Across Boundaries, which is being advertised as "a panel conversation with Boston couples who focus on their own interracial, interfaith and same-sex Love Across Boundaries". Featured participants will include Paul McLaughlin, Assistant Dean of Harvard College and his homosexual partner Jason Shumaker, Assistant Director of Financial Aid at MIT.
The event, sponsored by the New Center for Arts and Culture and Boston College's Office of the Provost, will be held this afternoon and this evening at BC's Bapst Library as part of Bloomsday Boston, the annual celebration of James Joyce and his novel Ulysses. Among those reading excerpts from the book will be former Lieutenant Governor Thomas P. O'Neill III, who is a longstanding supporter of legal abortion.
The Catholic Action League has called the event "another shameless betrayal of Catholic principles by the leadership of Boston College and its parent religious order, the Jesuits".
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle stated: "No reasonable person could be expected to believe that the Catholic Church is serious in its opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage as long as Catholic institutions publicly affirm homosexual relationships and prominently showcase pro-abortion political figures. Boston College, with the complicity of the New England Province of the Society of Jesus, continues to flaunt its infidelity to Catholic moral teaching and callously compromise what is left of its Catholic identity, while the Archdiocese of Boston, through its silence and inaction, functions as its enabler".
"This disgraceful episode is one more example of the systemic collapse of Catholic loyalties in the very leadership of the Church in the United States"LifeSiteNews attempted to contact the Archdiocese of Boston, but they were not immediately available for comment.
Note: Contraception is the greatest evil of our time. It's acceptance by Catholics against Church teaching drives a wedge between the faithful and the clergy and causes the clergy to be in grave danger of apostasy. It naturally leads to all other evils of the flesh - abortion, adultery, pre- and extra- marital sex. And once the sex act is divorced from procreation, homosexuality and all other perversions quickly increase. This is nothing new. But it is on the rise and is insidious.
The Challenges Faced by Humanae Vitae Priests and the Resultant 'Clergy Problem'
5/18/2008 8:27:00 AM By John Mallon -Human Life International e-Newsletter When priests lose the nerve to preach over concern for money, are they following after Peter, or Judas?First of all, I want to thank all of you priests, deacons and seminarians who signed on to this mailing list. It is very encouraging to see the humility and willingness to gain knowledge that will help you in your service to God's people. If this seems a strange statement, let me tell you that in the first 48 hours that this site was up we received emails from about 130 priests demanding to be removed from the mailing list. Some were quite nasty. Some took offense that someone sent in their email as though it were a personal affront.
It is no secret that orthodox priests who think with the Church often receive cold shoulders and outright hostility from their brother priests. Those who don't go along with the "CYA club" or the clerical mafia and preach Christ instead of the status quo, thus rocking the boat, soon know they are persona non grata. All too often a faithful priest who makes a mistake is much more likely to be called on the carpet and chewed out much more severely by the bishop than a dissident cleric whose errors are deliberate and treated with kid gloves.
A priest friend of mine, ordained within the last 12 years or so, told me that during his first parish assignment he dutifully preached on contraception, but immediately afterwards was "spoken to" by the pastor. The pastor ordered him "not to do that again," and muttered, "just watch the collection receipts go down."
Huh?
If this is what we are about, then we are no better than a governmental bureaucracy that self-perpetuates after having lost its purpose for existing. I should add that the pastor was not a wild-eyed radical or dissenter, but one of the stalwarts of the diocese, the type to whom bishops like to send the newly ordained to learn the ropes. He was the type that another priest friend of mine referred to as "a company man." In frustration he cried out to me, "John, they're company men!" By the company, he was not referring to the Magisterium, but the local diocesan system. They knew how to play the game, advance their careers, manipulate or get around the bishop when necessary, and keep their own backsides covered.
The Gospel? What Gospel?
If they only knew the true danger their backsides were in.
Christ didn't land on the Cross by playing it safe with the high priests of His day. In view of the corrupt system outlined above, when people ask about the sex abuse crisis, "How could this have happened?" the only answer is, "How could it not have happened?" when whistle-blowers were punished and abusers honored or at least coddled. The only response is "Thank God it happened!" Not thank God children were abused, but thank God the corrupt system that allowed it to continue was blown sky high. It is only the beginning, but it may well be the deliverance so many of us have been praying for. Recalling the famous vision of Pope Leo XIII where he saw God grant Satan's request of 100 years to destroy the Church, and chose the 20th century, was it an accident that this particular stronghold collapsed two years into the 21st century? Judgment begins with the House of God (1 Peter 4:17). Thank God.
What does this all have to do with contraception? Contraception was the epicenter of the "sexual revolution." Contraception was also the epicenter of the movement for dissent against Church teaching, Humanae Vitae in particular, and the center of most of the fiercest battles in the Church today.
Contraception, abortion and homosexuality are the three legs of the stool upon which the Culture of Death sits. (We will have more on the contraception/homosexuality link in a future column.) Thank God for you priests in our midst who know the Gospel has always been preached at personal risk and that Humanae Vitae is part of that Gospel and an expression of God's love and protection for His people.
Texas Pastor Connected with Prominent Gay Porn Website By Michael BaggotMCKINNEY, TX,
May 13, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Texas residents are alarmed that Bishop Kevin Farrell has appointed Fr. Arthur Mallinson, a priest associated with a prominent website for actively homosexual priests and religious, pastor of the newly renovated St. Michael's parish in McKinney, Texas.
Fr. Arthur Mallinson's picture has appeared on the St. Sebastian's Angels (SSA) website, a now defunct online network for actively homosexual priests and religious that featured pornographic images, sexually explicit comments, and derogatory remarks about Vatican churchmen, particularly against then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
In 1999, the reform organization Roman Catholic Faithful (RCF) exposed SSA and the fifty-three priests involved in the site. South African Bishop Reginald Cawcutt resigned after his activity on the site was revealed.
Barbara Kralis, concerned ex-parishioner of St. Michael, encouraged readers to take action in a Sunday column for CatholicCitizens.org.
"He is a priest who put his photo on a gay priest's website so that he could make contact with other like-minded priests," Kralis wrote of Fr. Mallinson. "If anyone on this email list has family who are in this diocese of Dallas, who are worried about them being exposed to the machinations of such a perverted priest, please consider writing a letter Dallas Bishop Kevin Farrell and express your concern regarding this priest"
When she spoke with LifeSiteNews.com, Kralis had a series of questions."Why would our bishop promote a priest like this, what good is this going to do the people? Why wouldn't he [Bishop Farrell] read all of the priests' files very carefully? Why would he [Fr. Mallinson] be moved to a big, glorious parish?"
A spokeswoman for Bishop Farrell told LifeSiteNews.com that Fr. Mallinson is not supportive of any of the crude images or words found on the SSA site. She noted that the SSA site was initially "not a site meant to provide an arena to find sexual partners." Instead, it was meant to give participants "prayer and spiritual support to maintain and live a celibate lifestyle."
According to the Bishop's spokeswoman, Fr. Mallinson ceased activity with SSA in 2001 when it became involved in immoral activity. "When it strayed from its original mission, he no longer wanted to be involved. He did not agree or condone comments about the Pope on the website. He ceased participation when pornography went on the website"
Stephen Brady, founder of RCF, told LifeSiteNews.com that his group first exposed SSA's lewd activities in September 1999, more than a year before Fr. Mallinson's departure from the group. "We never caught him sending pornography," Brady said of Fr. Mallinson. Nonetheless, Brady expressed concern that a priest would seek help to live celibacy from a pornographic site recounting male homosexual exploits.
"If he has to run to a website-that speaks volumes for flaws in his diocese."
To politely express concerns: Bishop Kevin Farrell Bishop of Diocese of Dallas PO Box 190507 Dallas, TX 75219 214-528-2240
Note: What a powerful and direct public repudiation of a public official. The archbishop is right , of course, and we should all pray that the governor amends her life and begins to understand how her actions scandalize the entire body of Christ. In the meantime, this statement serves as a wonderful model for other bishops facing the scandal of politicians in their jurisdictions who openly defy Church teaching and scandalize the faithful.
Governor's Veto Prompts Pastoral Action
On the day of my return (Monday, April 21) from the exhilarating experience of participating in Pope Benedict's pastoral visit to the United States, I learned that Governor Kathleen Sebelius had vetoed the Comprehensive Abortion Reform Act (HS SB 389), which had been passed by significant majorities in both chambers of the Kansas Legislature. Last week, an attempt to override the governor's veto failed in the Senate by two votes.Governor Sebelius in her veto message claimed: "For years, the people of Kansas have asked their elected officials to move beyond legislative debates on issues like abortion." From her veto message, I received the impression the governor considered it a waste of the Legislature’s time to pass a statute that attempts to protect some women by making certain they have the opportunity to be well-informed: 1) about the development of their unborn child; and 2) about abortion alternatives available to them. Evidently, the governor does not approve of legislators devoting energy to protecting children and women by making it possible to enforce existing Kansas laws regulating late-term abortions.
The governor's veto message demonstrated a lack of respect to the members of the Kansas General Assembly who had carefully crafted and resoundingly passed the Comprehensive Abortion Reform Act, as well as to the many Kansans who find it more than an embarrassment, in no small part due to several previous vetoes by Governor Sebelius of earlier legislative efforts to regulate abortion clinics, that Kansas has become infamous for being the late-term abortion center for the Midwest.
What makes the governor's rhetoric and actions even more troubling has been her acceptance of campaign contributions from Wichita's Dr. George Tiller, perhaps the most notorious late-term abortionist in the nation. In addition to Dr. Tiller's direct donations to her campaign, the governor has benefited from the Political Action Committees funded by Dr. Tiller to support pro-abortion candidates in Kansas.
In her veto message, the governor took credit for lower abortion rates in Kansas, citing her support for "adoption incentives, extended health services for pregnant women, providing sex education and offering a variety of support services for families." Indeed, the governor and her administration should be commended for supporting adoption incentives and health services for pregnant women.
However, the governor overreaches by assuming credit for declining abortion rates in Kansas. Actually, lower abortion rates are part of a national trend. Our neighboring state of Missouri has actually had a steeper and longer decline in its abortion rate.
Governor Sebelius' inclusion of public school sex education programs as a factor in the abortion rate decline is absurd. Actually, valueless sex education programs in public schools have been around for years, coinciding with increased sexual activity among adolescents, as well as increases in teen pregnancy and abortion. On the other hand, the governor does not acknowledge the significant impact of mass media education programs, such as those sponsored by the Vitae Caring Foundation, or the remarkable practical assistance provided by Crisis Pregnancy Centers which are funded through the generosity of pro-life Kansans.
What makes the governor's actions and advocacy for legalized abortion, throughout her public career, even more painful for me is that she is Catholic. Sadly, Governor Sebelius is not unique in being a Catholic politician supporting legalized abortion.
Since becoming archbishop, I have met with Governor Sebelius several times over many months to discuss with her the grave spiritual and moral consequences of her public actions by which she has cooperated in the procurement of abortions performed in Kansas. My concern has been, as a pastor, both for the spiritual well-being of the governor but also for those who have been misled (scandalized) by her very public support for legalized abortion.
It has been my hope that through this dialogue the governor would come to understand her obligation: 1) to take the difficult political step, but necessary moral step, of repudiating her past actions in support of legalized abortion; and 2) in the future would use her exceptional leadership abilities to develop public policies extending the maximum legal protection possible to the unborn children of Kansas. Having made every effort to inform and to persuade Governor Sebelius and after consultation with Bishop Ron Gilmore (Dodge City), Bishop Paul Coakley (Salina) and Bishop Michael Jackels (Wichita), I wrote the governor last August requesting that she refrain from presenting herself for reception of the Eucharist until she had acknowledged the error of her past positions, made a worthy sacramental confession and taken the necessary steps for amendment of her life which would include a public repudiation of her previous efforts and actions in support of laws and policies sanctioning abortion.
Recently, it came to my attention that the governor had received holy Communion at one of our parishes. I have written to her again, asking her to respect my previous request and not require from me any additional pastoral actions.
The governor has spoken to me on more than one occasion about her obligation to uphold state and federal laws and court decisions. I have asked her to show a similar sense of obligation to honor divine law and the laws, teaching and legitimate authority within the church.
I have not made lightly this request of Governor Sebelius, but only after much prayer and reflection. The spiritually lethal message, communicated by our governor, as well as many other high profile Catholics in public life, has been in effect: "The church's teaching on abortion is optional!" I reissue my request of the faithful of the archdiocese to pray for Governor Sebelius. I hope that my request of the governor, not to present herself for holy Communion, will provoke her to reconsider the serious spiritual and moral consequences of her past and present actions. At the same time, I pray this pastoral action on my part will help alert other Catholics to the moral gravity of participating in and/or cooperating with the performance of abortions.
Note: I don't mean to be alarmist about the movement of large numbers of Muslims to the U.S. or event their attempts at political activism. What is more alarming is the drift away from the Catholic faith by Christians and the inactivity or even activism against Catholic faith and morals by nominal Catholics. 90% of Catholics in the U.S. practice birth control and 50% approve of abortion. Divorce rates are lower for "practicing" Catholics, but almost the same as the general population when all baptized Catholics are counted as Catholic. It will be in another generation when Muslims have assimilated to the degree that they also no longer adhere to their faith according to "The Enemy at Home" by Dinesh D'Souza. The question is whether or not Catholics we'll still be here. The best defense against having to adopt another culture's customs and values is to strengthen your own. To do so requires that you practice and value them. Has that train left the station for good in the west?
Amerabia: The Islamicization of the U.S. By: Center for Security Policy
Even Americans knowledgeable about Europe's growing accommodation to the totalitarian ideology, known alternatively as Islamism, jihadism or Islamofascism, tend smugly to believe the same thing can't happen here. Think again.
Every day, new evidence appears of similar acts of submission — the Islamists call it "dhimmitude" — on the part of the U.S. government, judges, the press and leading corporations.
Eurabia, meet the United States of Amerabia.
The Agenda, Loud and Clear
On May 4, an ominous alarm was sounded in a Pajamas Media column by Youssef Ibrahim, a former New York Times reporter. Ibrahim is an astute critic of the Islamists' steady, tireless and increasingly effective efforts to impose, on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the repressive theo-political-legal agenda they call Shariah law.
He warned that "In the very real war on terror, a noisy squabble over 'fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here' clouds a simple truth: namely, that 'they' are here already. Indeed, Islamists are busy constructing a wing of jihad in America's backyard."
Among the most worrisome of the "they" now operating inside the United States are various front organizations systematically established by the Islamist organization known as the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood. During last year's federal trial of the Holy Land Foundation on terrorism-financing charges, the government introduced into evidence the names of many scores of such Ikhwan fronts.
Identified also as unindicted co-conspirators were virtually every one of the most prominent Muslim-American organizations, including notably the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
Prosecutors also presented what amounts to a Brotherhood mission statement. According to a memorandum produced by the group in 1991: "The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers."
To be clear, this is not the agenda of all Muslims, certainly not all American Muslims. Yet, we cannot safely ignore the fact that followers of the Muslim Brotherhood are among those who do have such an outcome as their goal — let alone allow our "hands" to contribute to its realization.
Writing about this Brotherhood manifesto in the Dallas Morning News last September, columnist Rod Dreher observed: "The entire 18-page platform outlines a plan for the long haul. It prescribes the Muslim Brotherhood's comprehensive plan to set down roots in civil society. It begins by both founding and taking control of American Muslim organizations, for the sake of unifying and educating the U.S. Muslim community — this to prepare it for the establishment of a global Islamic state governed by Shariah."
Inside the Gates
Unfortunately, in the past 17 years, the Ikhwan has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. Groups like CAIR, ISNA and MPAC not only made great strides in what Ibrahim calls "the common task [of] instill[ing] the notion among Arab-Americans or European immigrant communities of Muslim countries that they are not part of secular multicultural societies." Brotherhood fronts have also penetrated and exercised enormous influence over U.S. government agencies responsible for understanding and countering the Islamist threat.
Space limitations preclude more than a handful of examples: The FBI allows CAIR to provide "sensitivity training" for its agents. U.S. intelligence actively recruits at ISNA and other Ikhwan front conferences. One of ISNA's highly placed admirers, Pentagon deputy chief Gordon England's consigliere Hisham Islam, was allowed to purge the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Islamist expert, Steven Coughlin, for warning against such practices. Most recently, two key federal agencies, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, encouraged American officials to eschew, when describing our enemies, the use of such terms as jihadist, mujahedeen, Islamic terrorist, Islamist, holy warrior and Islamofascism. According to an Associated Press report, the government is supposed instead to "use the terms 'violent extremist' or 'terrorist.'
Both are widely understood terms that define our enemies appropriately and simultaneously deny them any level of legitimacy." (Evidently, President Bush has not gotten the word as he used what Andy McCarthy calls the "J-word" in his press conference last week.)
The Bottom Line
This astounding act of dhimmitude confirms Steve Coughlin's thesis: The enemy has so thoroughly gotten inside our decision-making as to preclude us from understanding his true nature and threat doctrine. By affording the Ikhwan such an opportunity, we have rendered this country, as a practical matter, incapable of countering our Islamist foes abroad — let alone here at home.
Fortunately, a courageous legislator, Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., has come forward to challenge the emerging Amerabia. She has unveiled a 10-point program that calls for, among other things: investigations of Ikhwan penetrations of our prison and military chaplain corps; an inquiry into the legitimacy of CAIR's tax-exempt status; corrective actions with respect to numerous ill-advised policies vis a vis Saudi Arabia; and addressing the seditious nature of Islamist threats to our government and people.
For her exemplary leadership and determination to resist national dhimmitude, this column recognizes Congresswoman Myrick with its coveted "Horatius (or, for the first time Horatia) at the Bridge" award, for her willingness, like the legendary Roman, to take on singlehandedly the enemy hordes and try to save her country.
We hope she will add to her list and secure the broadest possible support for her efforts.
It is suspicious timing to say the least that Bob Novak comes out with a column claiming that prominent US Cardinals Wuerl and Egan invited pro-choice politicians to Holy Mass and at the same time Cardinal Egan is saying he "warned Rudy Giuliani" not to receive communion. Either Novak is in error or Egan is employing that well-honed skill that the Bishops have perfected - damage control.
Either way, it is a fact that while the Church hierarchy has clearly enunciated that canon law prohibits a public and persistent sinner from Communion, the U.S. Bishops have waffled in their enforcement and once again this year have deferred a definitive statement on the matter until "after the election" as they did four years ago. In doing so, they bring scandal on the faithful, especially those who have toiled for the unborn for a generation, often against powerful interests in government and industry.
The sin of the bishops reminds me of the sin of David who for lust for a woman exposed his own general in battle. The pro-life warriors like Judy Brown of American Life League, Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests For Life, and Fr. Enteneuer of Human Life International, while tirelessly working for the unborn are continually undercut by bishops who are more interested in cozying up to political power and enjoying the trappings of their office than speaking the truth.
The two Cardinals mentioned have questionable pasts themselves as Egan has been linked to the shuttling of sex abusive priests while a bishop in Connecticut and Wuerl likewise while in Pennsylvania was known as "gay-friendly". That such morally weak pastors are less likely to confront the sin of abortion committed by the powerful is no surprise. That the Pope can't seem to persuade them otherwise is the puzzling paradox of our time.
Note: You can expect a slew of articles like this one during the pope's visit timed to dampen any enthusiasm for Catholicism his visit might spur. With that said, the data was collected by the US Bishops and does reflect a lax attitude towards the core teachings of the Church, especially the sacraments.
Study Finds American Catholics Embrace Their Faith, But Not Mass Sunday , April 13, 2008
NEW YORK - American Catholics said in a new survey they were pleased with the leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, ahead of his first visit to the U.S. since he was elected. The study also found intense interest in faith among some young people.
Yet, few parishioners overall said they go to confession, and most believed they could be good Roman Catholics without going to Mass.
The poll, released Sunday, was commissioned by the nation's bishops and conducted in February by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer, head of the bishops' communications committee, was encouraged by the openness to faith in the survey but said it highlighted the need for better religious instruction.
"The challenge for church leaders," he said, "is to help them see what Catholicism really means." Strengthening Catholic identity and observance are central themes of Benedict's papacy, and topics he is expected to address when he travels to Washington and New York starting Tuesday.
In the survey, eight of 10 Catholics said they were somewhat or very satisfied with his leadership. Nearly half a million people sought tickets to his public events in both cities.
The poll found that Catholics born before 1960 — among the most faithful parishioners — and those born since the 1980s have similar outlooks.
For Catholics who attend Mass at least once a month, an overwhelming majority of the young and older generation believe Christ is present in the Eucharist.
Even more, the younger, regular Mass-goers surpass their elders in observing Lent, with nearly all saying they abstain from meat on Fridays and receive ashes on Ash Wednesday. The young people are also more likely to consider devotion to saints very important to their faith.
However, the study found that only 36 percent of the younger Catholics attend Mass at least once a month, compared with 64 percent of the older generation.
Sixty-eight percent of all Catholics surveyed said they agreed that they believed they could be in good standing with the church without going to weekly Mass.
The poll, "Sacraments Today: Belief and Practice Among U.S. Catholics," found that nearly one-third of the nation's 64 million Catholics attend Mass in any given week. That figure has remained the same in the last five years, according to the report.
Thirty percent of the respondents said they go to confession less than once a year and 45 percent said they never go.
Regarding the church's social justice teaching, two-thirds of Catholics said helping those in need is a moral duty for Catholics.
The survey also measured satisfaction with the American church hierarchy. Seventy-two percent of Catholics said they were somewhat or very satisfied with the bishops' leadership, a 14-point jump since 2004, when the clergy sex abuse crisis was still roiling the church.
Note: It seems more and more that the US Bishops have become totally untethered from Rome and central Catholic teachings. In this instance, this bishop is even opposed to the statements of his own conference when it comes to honoring those who publicly oppose Church teaching. "In defiance of our fundamental principles"
Archbishop George Niederauer to pay tribute to "philanthropist" backer of Planned Parenthood and embryonic stem cell research
San Francisco's Archbishop George Niederauer tomorrow night will honor a "philanthropist" who, in recent years, has opposed parental notification for underage girls before they have an abortion and supported public funding for embryonic stem cell research. Niederauer will present George M. Marcus with Catholic Charities CYO's Loaves and Fishes Award at a dinner and "gala" to be held at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
This year's honorees - which include Levi Strauss & Co. and "football great" Ronnie Lott - have "through their genuine concern for and effective action in improving the lives of those in need in our community and beyond... epitomize[d] the spirit of the faith traditions of charity and generosity," said Niederauer, according to Catholic San Francisco, the archdiocesan newspaper.
Marcus, the founder and chairman of the real estate investment firm, Marcus & Millchap Co., will receive the "outstanding philanthropic works honor... " In supporting International Orthodox Christian Charities, Avenidas, and the John Burton Foundation for Children without Homes, Marcus has shown his "concern for enhancing the overall lives of local children and the elderly," said a CCCYO press release.
Did Marcus' "concern" for children, include an Oct. 6, 2005 gift of $25,000 to "No on Proposition 73 Campaign for Teen Safety"? Proposition 73, which received support from the California Conference of Catholic Bishops, would have required that parents of an underage girl be notified before she has an abortion. Proposition 85 was a similar notification measure, which Marcus opposed by giving the "No on 85" campaign $25,000 on Sept. 26, 2006. Less than two weeks later, Marcus gave the same organization another $75,000.
Marcus supported another ballot measure opposed by California's Catholic bishops. On Aug. 16, 2004, he gave $50,000 to the "Yes on 71" campaign - which pushed a ballot measure authorizing $3.5 billion for embryonic stem cell research.
Marcus' other gifts include $3,600 given in 2007 to "Mark Leno for Senate" (Leno has sponsored bills in the state legislature to legalize homosexual marriage) and, in 2006, $2,500 to Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte, the political action arm of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte.
Information about Marcus' contributions comes from the "Campaign Finance" page of the California Secretary of State's web site.
In the days preceding this Friday's Loaves and Fishes Awards Dinner and Gala, the San Francisco chancery office received much of the above information about Marcus. Archbishop Niederauer was urged to demand another honoree or refuse to attend the dinner.
In 2004, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement, saying "the Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions."
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco One Peter Yorke Way San Francisco, CA 94109 (415) 614 5500 E-mail: info@sfarchdiocese.org PLEASE BE POLITE AND RESPECTFUL IN YOUR COMMUNICATIONS!
Note: I couldn't even bring myself to post the real title in my post. The words "erotic" and "Jesus" do not belong in the same article. that a Cardinal can't find anything wrong with this situation speaks volumes about how far gone Europe and the highest reaches of the Church have become. It absolutely disgusts me that supposed Catholic officials can't see how wrong this is. There are many non-Catholics and atheists who would respect our faith more than these people including the Cardinal. This is a sign of grave apostasy and if something isn't done soon, bloody persecution is sure to follow. While the world recoils in horror over the film made by a non-Muslim depicting Islam as having violent tendencies, our own Bishop defends this blasphemy as being artistic expression!
Erotic Jesus sparks art debate in Austria Mon Apr 7, 2008 3:21am EDT By Sylvia Westall
VIENNA (Reuters) - They knew it would be risky to exhibit a homoerotic version of Christ's Last Supper, but curators at museum of Vienna's Roman Catholic Cathedral weren't ready for a barrage of angry messages and calls to be shut down.
The source of the dispute, which Austrian media has dubbed Vienna's version of the Mohammad caricature row, is a retrospective honoring Austria's cherished artist Alfred Hrdlicka, who turned 80 earlier this year.
But not everyone has been wishing Hrdlicka a Happy Birthday. And the Cathedral Museum's director and Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, the archbishop of Vienna, have both come under fire from some museum visitors and Catholic websites.
The Church hastily removed the main picture, "a homosexual orgy" of the Apostles as Hrdlicka describes it.
But the protest has continued, much to the surprise of the small Cathedral Museum which is nestled down a narrow street in Vienna's historic Gothic quarter.
The museum's director defends both Hrdlicka's work and his decision to host the artist's controversial versions of biblical imagery in a museum tied to the Catholic Church.
Click on the post link to read the rest if you have the stomach for it.
Note: This is yet another departure of the US Bishops from the Vatican. This group, for whom the practice of accommodation and pragmatism is an art form, are well described in the Letter to Laodicea in the Apocalypse and in the book "Apocalypse - Letter by Letter," by Steven Paul.
For Rome it is Very Clear - Pro-Abortion Politicians 'Must' be Denied Communion By John-Henry Westen and Hilary White
ROME, March 5, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Some Catholic Bishops in North America seem to be on a different page from the Vatican when it comes to reception of Communion for Catholic politicians who support abortion. Since the controversy came to a head in the 2004 US federal election, most Catholic bishops in the US have either remained silent on the issue, or have made softer statements than the authoritative word from Rome: a word that has been re-affirmed many times and continues to be reasserted regularly.
Most recently, Francis Cardinal Arinze, speaking at a Catholic family conference in Ohio last November, referred to a letter on the subject sent by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, who said that such politicians "must" be "refused" Communion.
Video footage, posted recently by the conference organisers and made available on YouTube, shows Cardinal Arinze, the head of Vatican office of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, replying to the question of pro-abortion politicians and the inaction of their bishops. He said "You may have heard about the letter which the present Holy Father, as prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, sent to American bishops on that issue, so the matter is very clear."
He told those in attendance that the question is not one of Church teaching, but of the immutable divine law of God. "It isn't just that they [the politicians in question] have gone against church teaching, but they have gone against divine law; thou shalt not kill."
But since the insistence of Rome has failed to induce positive action from most bishops in the North American hierarchy and abroad, reporters continue to ask the same questions.
Romans in the know, however, repeat that the Pope's letter on the matter has solved the issue. LifeSiteNews.com spoke last month about the issue with Msgr. Andrew R. Baker a professor at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum) in Rome, one of Rome's major historic institutions.
Professor Baker told LifeSiteNews.com, "Certainly you'd have to apply that famous canon of 915 that says one who persists in manifest grave sin should not be admitted to Holy Communion."
"And I think the possibility of looking at the moral principles outlined in the letter attributed to Cardinal Ratzinger that came a number of years ago - those are good moral principles to apply that canon 915."
Professor Baker's opinion is a repetition of that given in Ohio by Cardinal Arinze, who told conferees that he agrees action ought to be taken against bishops who refuse to enforce Canon 915.
Arinze elicited much laughter and applause when he made the analogy, "To the person who says, 'Personally I'm against abortion, but if people what to do it, I'll leave them free', you could say, 'You are a member of the senate or the congress, personally I'm not in favour of shooting the whole lot of you, but if somebody else wants to shoot all of you in the Senate, or all of you in Congress, it's just pro-choice for that person, but personally, I'm not in favour.'
"That is what he is saying. He's saying he's personally not in favour of killing these millions of children in the womb, but if others want to do it, that's pro-choice. That's what he is saying. "And then you ask, what does the Holy See do? Why doesn't the Pope send 12 Swiss Guards to arrest them all?"
Arinze said that he is regularly asked if a person who votes for abortion can receive Holy Communion. He replies, "Do you really need a cardinal from the Vatican to answer that?
"Get the children for first Communion and say to them, 'Somebody votes for the killing of unborn babies, and says, I voted for that, I will vote for that every time.' And these babies are killed not one or two, but in millions, and that person says, 'I'm a practising Catholic', should that person receive Communion next Sunday? The children will answer that at the drop of a hat. You don't need a cardinal to answer that."
Here are a few key excerpts from this article. I encourage readers to check out Dr. Kreeft's website and buy his books and recordings at http://www.peterkreeft.com/home.htm
Dr. Peter Kreeft: "We are living in a spiritual Hiroshima"
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
By Notes By Joe Wemhoff - The Annual Parish Respect Life Coordinator Conference, Archdiocese of Chicago
How to Win the Culture War
Dr. Peter Kreeft (pronounced "kreft") is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. He is an orthodox Roman Catholic, who has written over 45 books, and who contributes regularly to various Christian publications. Dr. Kreeft is one of the most eloquent voices for the Faith in America. This summary of Dr. Kreeft's remarks was prepared on March 9, 2008, by Joseph A. Wemhoff, from memory and from extensive notes taken during the talk. Dr. Kreeft has his own website at www.peterkreeft.com.
In the 1960s, the term "culture war" meant the conflict between the Establishment and the Counter Culture. Later, it came to mean the conflict between Science and the Humanities. The term became formalized with the publication of the book Culture Wars by James Hunter in the 1990s.
Pope John Paul II fueled the idea by drawing the distinction between the "Culture of Life" and the "Culture of Death." The term "Culture War" is simply a euphemism for the conflict between Christ and the Antichrist, with the stakes being the fate of the universe.
Sadly, today, the Antichrist controls all of the formal and informal means of education and information in America, including the media, news reporting, publishing, music, movies (Hollywood), etc. Today, pornography generates more revenue in America than any other industry except gambling.
This is not a new struggle-it has been going on since the Middle Ages. The Christian religion is now in decline, and the Antichrist is now winning, because he has convinced most people to bypass that simple word: reason. Most people today "feel;" they no longer "think."
We are living in a "spiritual Hiroshima." The Catholic Church is full of psychobabble. Our bishops have all the courage and behavior of rabbits. Since Vatican II, three-quarters of our nuns are gone. Sunday Mass attendance has declined from 75% to 25%. Belief in the Real Presence has dropped from nearly 100% to about 30%. The Catholic Church has lost the power to arrest the decline of our culture.
Properly said, ours is not a "Culture of Death," but a "Culture of Murder." There is the murder of marriage (divorce). There is the murder of the unborn (abortion). There is the murder of reason by militant feminists and by militant homosexuals. The cloning of humans promises to turn the "I am" of God into the "it is" of humanism. Science is promising eternal life by working to eliminate from humankind the "age and die" gene, which supposedly is not found in non-sexual species and in cancer cells.
Our words cannot defeat the Culture of Death, but God's words can.
Eucharistic adoration can conquer the Culture of Death.
Pope John Paul II spoke of a New Evangelization, which means not the preaching of new words, but the preaching God's timeless words to new generations of people. It's easy to be busy; it's far more difficult to be holy. We need to start by being holy. We need to join God's jihad.
There is a tendency today to substitute "spirituality" for "religion." In the Bible, the Tower of Babel represents "spirituality," while Noah's ark-with all its sights and smells and inconveniences-represents "religion." It is not easy being a Catholic.
Consider that only God, angels, and human beings are persons. God did not become angelic to redeem them, but He became man to redeem humankind.
Human life is sacred for three reasons:
1. Men and women are created in the image and likeness of God Himself. 2. Human life is linked to God's life. 3. Human beings are destined to share in eternal life with God.
As portrayed in the book Christ and the University, the Humanities are ground zero in the current Culture War, in the battle between Christ and the Antichrist. This is because college professors now have the power over young minds that priests and saints and kings once had.
The dark, black spot at the center of intellectual thought these past decades is a deconstructionism which says that truth is nothing more than "the hypocritical mask on the face of power." We are lead to believe that there is no objective truth, and that all is relative. It used to be that Science was the source of deconstructionist ideas, but, scientists must deal in facts, and facts tend to be real. Now the Humanities are the major source of deconstructionism.
The only two moments of peace in history are in Genesis (before history) and in the Apocalypse (after history). All of human history in between is full of war and of spirits thirsty for the blood of children.
Pro-choice people will not-indeed, cannot-listen to reason. Pro-choice people are insane and will not convert to reason-they will attempt to convert reason. Dr. Kreeft cited several cases. In one of his books-which, he bemoaned, are read only by pro-lifers-he made an airtight, logical argument that tolerating abortion is tantamount to tolerating infanticide. Confronted with this logic, pro-choicers said, yes, Dr. Kreeft, you just showed us how infanticide is now OK.
During World War II, I.G. Farben GmbH of Germany made Zyklon B, the gas used to kill so many in the gas chambers. Today, a French successor company to I.G. Farben makes the abortifacient RU-486. Either the face of evil has changed little, or the devil has a limited range of business contacts.
There are five aspects of the Culture War to be considered.
History of the Jihad
Since the Middle Ages, humanity has been on a slow, ever-ascending upward slope of becoming smarter, healthier, and more technologically advanced, while, at the same time, being on a slow, ever-descending slope of becoming weaker morally.
God's grace will save us, but on two conditions:
1. We ask for it, which means that we must value wisdom and holiness more than cleverness and worldly riches. 2. We believe that God will deliver (not to believe is to call God a liar).
These past centuries, mankind has fluctuated between the sins of despair and presumption. Despair is represented by Camus and other Existentialists. Presumption is exemplified by Rousseau, the Enlightenment, and by New Age ideas and practices.
We are entering an apocalyptic age, which might be described as Brave New World or as The Abolition of Man-each of which, ironically, is also the title of a book by Aldous Huxley and by C. S. Lewis, respectively. We should recall that the Bible predicts that the Great Tribulation of the end times will be so bad that no flesh would survive if God did not shorten the days.
In the First Millenium after Christ, the Church won the world. But then, she became fat and weak. The Second Millenium has belonged to the Antichrist. We are now in the Third Millenium, and the outcome these next thousand years is anything but clear.
We need to remember that this world is not our home; heaven is.
Came across this video and hoped it was an Anglican but unfortunately this is a Roman Catholic Priest. I may be a bit old fashioned but I was led to believe that my own presence at a protestant "church" was considered scandalous and to be discouraged. So I don't go even when the wedding there is a close relative.
This is ecumenism run amok, an extreme example of the false teaching directly resulting from the "reforms' of Vatican II that distorted the meaning of brotherly love to include realtivism. The priest calls Rev. Wright a "prophet". Really, I thought we were taught that the line of prpohets ended with John the Baptist. Since Christ is the revelation of God, there is no need for more prophecy.
I think you have to read and reflect on the posting I made before about the Sixth Trumpet and the first of the three woes to appreciate how many have been deceived and who is doing the deceiving.
Does this Priest have a Bishop? I'd like to hear from the Archbishop of Chicago concerning this man. What seminary produces this?
Proverbs 30 27 The locust hath no king, yet they all go out by their bands.
Apocalypse 9 3 And from the smoke of the pit there came out locusts upon the earth. And power was given to them, as the scorpions of the earth have power
7 And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle: and on their heads were, as it were, crowns like gold: and their faces were as the faces of men.8 And they had hair as the hair of women; and their teeth were as lions: 9 And they had breastplates as breastplates of iron, and the noise of their wings was as the noise of chariots and many horses running to battle. 10 And they had tails like to scorpions, and there were stings in their tails; and their power was to hurt men five months. And they had over them 11 A king, the angel of the bottomless pit; whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek Apollyon; in Latin Exterminans,
My brother-in-law, Steven Paul, explained that the first woe was the falling star, a holy bishop who apostatized from the faith. Indeed he identified him as Martin Luther and the woe as protestantism in general.
So the "locusts" relate to that time and that event. Steven did not go into much depth about them. He mentioned a couple of their characteristics - that breastplates of iron signified "a will hardened against all natural reason."
In the passages above, I am pointing out that in Proverbs, a characteristic of locusts is that they "have no king". They do not follow a single leader but rather they swarm together.
A major objection of protestantism is the primacy of the pope. They rejected central authority. As a result, they are untethered from the traditions and teachings of any body or person, the Church and Her pope specifically. So they are "free" to change traditional teachings at their whim or to satisfy current trends and fads, like women priests, gay marriage, gay bishops, etc.
But in Chapter 9 of the Apocalypse, they now have a king, the king of the abyss, Satan. Up until the time of the second woe, they are perfectly comfortable rejecting Christ's Vicar on earth. Instead, they opt for a more powerful and charismatic leader, an angel.
In his book, The Book of Destiny, Rev. Herman Bernard Kramer writes:
"These locusts obey him and do his work. He aims at the destruction of the Church, of the faith of his poor victims and of heir souls forever in hell. The promoters of heresy, error and immorality, are the subjects of Satan and bring irremediable and final ruin to all his followers."
Kramer goes on to give the history of opinions regarding when and whom these locusts are. My update is that we are seeing them in the persons like the current Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, folks like Eugene Robinson, and many evangelical "Christians" who rail against the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
There are also locusts inside the Church because they have not yet been cast out. We are indeed in the days of the end of the first woe and right before the second. Consider these passages carefully and don't be deceived.
Note: Emphasis in bold mine. "A devastating and catastrophic mistake"
Priests praise return of traditional Latin Mass; say discouraging its use for so long was an error
Priests in the Bay Area are speaking out in favor of the traditional Latin Mass, telling a secular newspaper the old rite has several virtues nearly lost by the Church.
"For a long time, I have felt that the Mass we're doing today is not as reverent," Fr. Lawrence Goode told the March 13 Oakland Tribune. Fr. Goode offers the traditional Latin Mass at 7 p.m. every first Friday of the month at St. Francis of Assisi Church in East Palo Alto.
Goode has been celebrating the Mass according to Pope John XXIII's 1963 Roman Missal for six months at St. Francis. He told the Tribune that he wants eventually to celebrate the old rite on more occasions. "It helps in my devotion," Goode said. "It makes me conscious of the meaning of what I'm doing. (But) I'm just beginning to get the hang of it." More than 40 people assisted at the Mass on March 7.
The Second Vatican Council, noted the Tribune, never banned the old rite of the Mass outright, "but it was gradually phased out."
"We felt it was wrong to suppress it (the old Latin Mass)," Fr. William Young, who resides at Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco's Castro district, told the Tribune. Fr. Young says the traditional Latin Mass at the Chapel of the Most Holy Rosary in San Rafael. The chapel is located on the grounds of the St. Vincent School for Boys, a residential treatment center for emotionally troubled young men. Fr. Young told the newspaper that suppressing the rite "was a devastating and catastrophic mistake."
"We were determined to do all we could to keep it from becoming something for antiquarians to study," said Fr. Young.
The San Rafael Mass is, currently, the only regular Sunday celebration of the traditional Mass in the archdiocese, which includes San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties, with an estimated 425,000 Catholics.
Fr. Young, who was ordained in 1976, said that before Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio last July freeing up the celebration of the old rite, "to celebrate it would constitute disobedience and disloyalty. Rome allowed the impression that the Mass was forbidden to continue."
"The old Mass attempts to create a sense of the transcendent and the sacred," Fr. Young told the newspaper. "It attempts to create an experience that is totally discontinuous of ordinary experience."
Another priest interviewed by the Tribune, Msgr. Bruno Peschiera, celebrated the traditional Mass in Rome for ten years. "There is a great devotion," he said. "You see the respect for the Eucharist and for the things that happen at the altar."
Sixty-four-year-old Joan Favero of Santa Cruz told the Tribune the Mass is "just part of life. I don't think it's important to actually be part of the Mass as far as answering in English. Worshipping God is why we are there. Any other type of community or social activity can be after Mass."
Our take: The following articles only confirm what we already sensed - that Europe has lost its faith and that the resulting vacuum is being filled by Islam. What Islam failed to capture by conquest it now takes by procreation and the apathy of the formerly Christian lands it has spread to without resistance. All that remains is for the tipping point to be reached when the remaining faithful are persecuted and put to the sword.
Madrid, Mar. 26, 2008 (CWNews.com) - The Union of Muslim Communities in Spain (UCIDE) claims that 1.13 million Spaniards, or 2.5% of the country's residents, are Muslim, Vatican Radio reports.
Moroccan immigrants, numbering approximately 565,000, constitute the largest Muslim group in Spain. Also, almost 35,000 native Spaniards have converted to Islam.
UCIDE is demanding Islamic religion classes in public schools in the four Spanish regions with the highest concentration of Muslims: Catalonia, with 279,000; Madrid, with 197,000; Andalusia, with 185,000; and Valencia, with 131,000.
British Muslims to outnumber Christians? London, Mar. 26, 2008 (CWNews.com) - Muslims may outnumber practicing Catholics in England and Wales by the year 2020, according to a forthcoming study.
A Christian Research study on estimates that the number of Catholics attending Sunday Mass regularly will fall to 679,000 in the next 12 years. Over the same period, the "Religious Trends" forecast says, the number of Muslims praying at English mosques will rise to 683,000.
Catholics already outnumber Anglicans attending Sunday services in England. The "Religious Trends" survey, which will be published in April, will suggest that by the year 2050, the number of practicing Muslims will exceed the number of Christians attending all Sunday church services in England.
I apologize to my frequent visitors for not posting or writing much the last few days. I've had a bit of writer's block. Or rather, the ideas and news articles have come so fast and furious lately that I haven't had time to thoroughly read them all and pick the ones most relevant to the Apocalypse.
But what has really been on my mind is the complete collapse of the Catholic way of life as seen through the prism of the local parish. I was contemplating that during the Triduum when we are at our supposedly most solemn. On Holy Thursday, a cell phone was vibrating in someones pocket behind me. It belonged to someone in the choir. On Good Friday, the Missal says to leave Church silently. But instead, I heard the usual chatter about every meaningless topic people could think of.
As a child, both before and shortly after the "reforms" a Church was a holy place, a sacred place. When you entered, even as a child, you knew to be quiet and respectful. You wore decent clothes there, especially on holy days. And you reverenced the priest, never questioning his holiness.
Now, the priest is treated like one of the gang. The building is almost constantly abuzz with chatter. The genuflect is hardly ever seen. The altar service is almost completely female now. Once reserved for young men who could later hear a call to the priesthood, now it's a social club for girls and boys have no interest. The same holds true for the foot washing on Holy Thursday, the initiation to the priesthood that Christ performed for his apostles. Now it's some sort of social status, missing the whole point of "the greatest among you must serve the least".
The pews are emptier now. So are the seminaries. Birth control is no longer enumerated as a sin in public. It has taken its toll. Homosexuality has compromised the priesthood even though only a small minority of priests practice it.
I went to confession on a Saturday in Lent at a fairly large parish. My wife and two of my seven children went with me. We were the only people there at first. As we left a very elderly couple arrived. That was it. As a child I remember long lines for confession on almost any Saturday. I remember a missal with words in Latin on one page and in English on the next so you could follow along. I remember an altar rail that we knelt at as an altar boy held a patten under our chins and the priest placed the host on out tongues.
I feel like I switched to a strange religion somewhere along the way, a protestant one. I long for the one from my childhood, the one where everything was sacred. Will I ever see it again?
I have to believe with all my heart that we are in a time when "the Sun is darkened and the moon does not give its light". Divine truth is no longer being taught. Strange doctrines have replaced it - radical feminism, environmentalism and relativism. Man has become his own God.
I also remember how full the churches were right after September 11, 2001. Catholic churches. People know the truth deep down. It is written on our nature. But we are being mislead and deceived. The time is drawing near when a false prophet, The False Prophet, will lead many away from the Church of Peter. And a leader will unite most of the world in a kingdom opposed to all the Church has taught for two millenia. And the only obstacle left will be the pope. And he will be assassinated shortly after his difficult election.
It's all in the book. And it seems more true today than when it was given to me a few years ago.
Note: Strange times we're in when the lay people of a country rebut the dissenting views of their own bishops' conference. With clear hindsight and heavy consciences, the Canadian people are waking up to the damage done by their bishops' divergence from Vatican teaching on human sexuality. Will the bishops heed their call?
Canadian Catholics Ask Bishops to Retract Winnipeg Statement - Recomit to Humanae Vitae By John-Henry Westen
OTTAWA, March 18, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - As the 40th anniversary of the publication of Pope Paul VI's July 25, 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae approaches, a group of Catholics is challenging Canada's Catholic bishops to revisit their official position on the document as it pertains to contraception. The encyclical, which wrote of the Church's prohibition on contraception, predicting accurately that it would lead to treatment of women as objects of use, was at the time rejected by many within the Catholic Church.
In 1990 the Philippine Bishops issued an apology to the nation's Catholics for having failed to encourage their flock to adhere to Humanae Vitae. They wrote: "Afflicted with doubts about alternatives to contraceptive technology, we abandoned you to your confused and lonely consciences with a lame excuse: 'follow what your conscience tells you.' How little we realized that it was our consciences that needed to be formed first."
The Rosarium of the Blessed Virgin Mary has collected approximately 1000 signatures on a petition to formally ask the Canadian Catholic Bishops to retract the pastoral document written nearly 40 years ago on September 27, 1968 - the Winnipeg Statement.
The letter accompanying the petition challenges the bishops to reflect on their own role in the complete moral and social collapse that has befallen Canada. It states in part: "Once contraceptive sex was accepted in principle, it led the way to all of the other sexual abominations our country is currently experiencing, not the least of which is same-sex 'marriage' - which, at its core, is merely contraception in its final form. Contraception blurred the distinction between men and women by robbing women of their femininity and subverting their fertility. The psychological effects of this over 40 years came to fruition with the normalization of same-sex unions. A sterilized woman is, in one fundamental respect, another man."
The letter adds: "We can no longer sit idly by as a Church and pretend that our actions - or lack of them - in word or in deed have not contributed to this situation. For forty years we have walked the desert of this culture of death because for forty years, we have refused to submit to the entire truth of Humanae Vitae. As faithful Catholics, therefore, we are humbly asking the bishops of Canada to reflect on how their teaching (or lack thereof) regarding contraception these past 40 years has contributed to Canada's social and moral collapse. In particular, we are once again drawing your attention to the Winnipeg Statement, one of the most destructive documents ever to be released on the subject of contraception."
The controversial document in question, commonly referred to as the Winnipeg Statement, has been long considered a dissent against Rome's absolute prohibition on contraceptive acts. The most controversial section of the document states: "Counsellors may meet others who, accepting the teaching of the Holy Father, find that because of particular circumstances they are involved in what seems to them a clear conflict of duties, e.g., the reconciling of conjugal love and responsible parenthood with the education of children already born or with the health of the mother. In accord with the accepted principles of moral theology, if these persons have tried sincerely but without success to pursue a line of conduct in keeping with the given directives, they may be safely assured that, whoever honestly chooses that course which seems right to him does so in good conscience."
John Pacheco, a director of The Rosarium and a Catholic political and social activist, remarked that the time has come for the Bishops to reconsider the Winnipeg Statement.
"We are approaching the 40 year anniversary of the legalization of both contraception and abortion in Canada in 2009," Pacheco told LifeSiteNews.com. "We can no longer fool ourselves into thinking that contraception has not played an enormous role in the break down of the family unit these past forty years. It's not a coincidence that once contraception was legalized with abortion in May 1969, the precipitous fall of the family followed thereafter. It's time for all Catholics to reflect on how the Church was right and the Culture was wrong. For lay Catholics, that means tossing the condoms and the pills and for the Canadian bishops it means repenting of a treacherous document."
In addition to calling for the retraction of the Winnipeg Statement, the group is asking the Bishops to strongly re-affirm Humanae Vitae, the papal encyclical prohibiting abortion and contraception, on the 40th anniversary of its publication on July 27. It is also encouraging the bishops to become more involved in active opposition to abortion.
"We will never defeat abortion in Canada until the question of contraception is addressed. And contraception in Canada will never be addressed sufficiently until the bishops acknowledge the great harm that the Winnipeg Statement has caused. It's time for all of us to repent and move on. Canada needs a new beginning. That starts with the retraction of the Winnipeg Statement", Pacheco said.
Note: This plea reminds me of the cry from the martyrs under the altar in the Apocalypse. Patience is wearing thin for sure. But according to Apocalypse - Letter by Letter, Satan is in the Church, even the highest levels, and will not be cast out until the time of the "Great Sign." Until then, much suffering will continue.
MEMO TO THE POPE: PLEASE YOUR HOLINESS, ADDRESS CRISIS OF FAITH WITH THE BISHOPS
Holy Father, as everyone knows, you'll soon be among us! In April -- just a couple months away -- you will be visiting the U.S. Thank God for that! No doubt you'll handle this with your characteristic insight, prayerfulness, courage, and aplomb. We look forward to it. Thank you for being prayerful. Thank you for being faithful to the legacy of John Paul. Thank you so much for nudging our Church back to the right kind of music. Thank you for the call for protection of God's Creation. Thank you for not folding in to pressure when it came to the Good Friday prayer for Jews (in the Latin Rite). Thank you for both loving and communicating with but also standing up to Muslims. Thank you so much, Your Holiness, for gradually bringing back old Latin-style mysticism.
These are times of purification (and spiritual warfare) and of course your name is Benedict! You told us just the other day to confront evil. Our Church is going through a purification, and perhaps the beginning of recovering its lost treasures (or at least some of them). It is this, Your Holiness, that we would like to address.
May we be so bold, when it comes to your trip, as to offer a few recommendations? Please, Holy Father, speak even more on music during your trip. In some churches, it all but obscures the liturgy. There is that drumbeat. There is the sugar-sweet modernistic music -- as we try to pray. Surely there are no clashing cymbals in Heaven!
Meanwhile, homilies are often too intellectual, focused almost exclusively on the past. How about the present? How about the future? It is the dryness of religion that creates the desert. Please tell our good shepherds to speak about the miraculous! Please tell them to relate personally to us. There are miracles in our chapels. There are healings. These are largely ignored. Remember the miraculous Christian origin?
Holy Father, there is a real crisis of belief among our good bishops. You must speak to them as you never have -- with both love and urgency. There is a fear among U.S. clerics to believe in the supernatural because of what you so rightly have called the distortions of science. Please reorient our priests, our dioceses, away from scientism and back toward toward the deliverance of Jesus. Let them come into our midst in their miters and cast out spirits! Please speak on Adoration, Holy Father. Urge bishops on the importance. This alone will bring vocations and inspiration and exorcism.
There are many good, holy priests left. They live almost a white martyrdom. Often, they are cast away into the outlying parishes. But they are there. They are the backbone. They must be defended. Our Church will survive. No doubt -- even despite the crushing reality of church closings. But please tell our dear priests, Holy Father -- Our Lady's special sons -- to return to the mystical roots of the Faith. Please tell the nuns and priests and brothers and everyone else to stay clear of alternate beliefs. Holy Father, there is an epidemic here of the New Age. It has infiltrated dozens of Catholic retreat centers. Almost a majority. Many convents are less centers of prayer than ashrams. We're not sure you have been informed of the extent. Crystals, psychobabble, labyrinths. The same ones who allow all that disdain the devout and dismiss blessed salt as a superstition.
So it is, Holy Father, that naked we stand, as the enemy advances. Many clerics don't even seem to believe in the existence of the devil as he runs rampant around them (and especially in our seminaries). There is a planned "exorcism center" for Poland. How about North America? It is very serious. It must be approached as a mystical crisis, not one that can be addressed at an annual meeting. They must be pushed into a sense of battle. They must see your trip as the thunderous approach of reinforcements, of the larger battalion.
Perhaps it is time to ask the bishops and cardinals to put the tabernacle back in the center and the chairs that priests use off to the side. Perhaps this will start to humble us. Perhaps this will bring the right thing at the center. Please urge bishops who are closing churches to turn them into oratories (instead of selling them to realtors). Please address the Catholic colleges that not only ignore Catholicism but negate it. (They have a play called the Vagina Monologues at Notre Dame!)
Please, please, Holy Father: address the crisis of Catholic schools. Scold this nation for not allowing vouchers -- for not even allowing the deduction of tuition from taxes! Desperately, we need you to speak, as you have the ear of the nation, of Congress, about the incredible unfairness. Our Catholic schools can not be allowed to die. We hope we are not being pretentious but in many ways our society and our Church (at least in the West) are at a tipping point. Often, the only orthodox priests are foreign ones. As much as it hurts to say, Holy Father, many faithful have lost faith in their bishops. There are the majority who are so good and have fought the odds to be where they are -- despite the culture around them. Dear bishops indeed!
But in far too many instances -- Holy Father -- the spirit of bureaucracy has overcome the Holy Spirit. We have many good men who are not allowed into seminaries -- who are turned away because they are devout -- and priests who were never even taught how to bless a house (or Holy Water)!
Please tell your bishops to go out among the people. Please tell them to forget the annual Alfred E. Smith dinner. Please urge them to forgo the opulence. Please urge far more prayer (than administration). John Paul II prayed seven hours a day!
This we hate to discuss, but there is the abuse crisis. Holy Father, much has been purged (many abusers have been exposed), but there is still the niggling feeling that the general issue of homosexuality in the priesthood has not been fully confronted. There are churches in the U.S. that rent out to blasphemous transvestite groups but won't allow a talk on Fatima.
Holy Father, it may be a bit too critical and suspicious and ardent but it has gotten to the point where one Catholic writer in the beleaguered archdiocese of Boston has hinted (in a new book) that the slow response and at times cover-up in abuse cases was due to homosexual blackmail -- that certain bishops themselves have been compromised and thus neutralized. Is this true? Notes one reviewer: "The account offered is devastating and the blame is clearly laid at the door of the American bishops. 'The thesis of this book,' writes [author Phil] Lawler, 'is that the sex abuse scandal in American Catholicism was not only aggravated but actually caused by the willingness of church leaders to sacrifice the essential for the inessential; to build up the human institution even to the detriment of the Divine mandate.' Bishops again and again responded to the crisis as institutional managers, employing public relations stratagems to evade, deceive, and distract attention from their own responsibility.
"Lawler adds: 'Homosexual influence within the American clergy was not in itself the cause of the sex abuse crisis. The corruption wrought by that influence was a more important factor.' He very gingerly addresses a theory proposed by a number of commentators on the crisis, namely, that bishops engaged in cover-ups and other deceptions because they were threatened with homosexual blackmail. He cites a number of instances in which this appears to be the case and bishops were permitted to resign when their misdeeds could no longer be denied. 'The blackmail hypothesis,' he writes, 'provides a logical explanation for behavior that is otherwise inexplicable: the bishops’ willingness to risk the welfare of the faithful and their own reputations in order to protect abusive priests.'"
These are not our words. But you see our point; you see the bitterness. You see the suspicions. We need to purge any homosexuals who have positions of any sort of prominence. There was a real and serious infiltration.
Three years ago, during the first Holy Week of your papacy, you spoke of the "filth" in the priesthood. Perhaps, when you are in New York, that language needs to be repeated. We don't like to stray so far into such territory, but you can see the mindset of many dedicated Catholics. A priest or bishop will in some cases bless a Mardi Gras or even a "gay-pride" event and do so with pleasure at the same time that he turns down Adoration.
Why, for example, would a priest wear a vestment like that to the right? How are we to react? Please call on our bishops to evangelize. Please call on them to be holy. Please call on them to evoke the Holy Spirit. He will cleanse! He will resurrect! Perhaps the best way of urging evangelization is to do so yourself during your trip -- laying on hands, exercising charisms, letting our great Church leaders know the way to evoke the Holy Spirit.
It is the Holy Spirit Who will fill the pews again -- not intellectual language. We do not so much need terms like "Mulieris Dignitatem" or "humanum" as simply, "Praise God!" (or "Get thee hence, Satan!"). A Benedict you are! Like your namesake, you fight evil. And now, you will be stepping on the devil's turf. Do you not always step on the devil's turf?
And in your courage, do you not always confront evil and win?
Note: I don't know why people seem so surprised. Williams long ago departed from sound Christian leadership by promoting homosexual relations in the Anglican Church, causing a unrepairable schism. That he is now advocating Sharia law is only a further symtom of his deep psychosis. He said he was only for a "partial" implementation of Sharia, as though that were possible. He cited for example the relativley benign divorce laws - ones where only the husband has rights and the wife is treated as property, for example. And he said he wasn't for severe punishments (I assume he means beheading or amputation for stealing) That local Muslim leaders said they weren't even seeking such an accomdation shows how off his rocker this man is. To some extent, this works in favor of the separated brothers in the Anglican communion. The more wacky their leadership shows themselves to be, the more Anglicans return home to the true faith. If Williams wants to find common ground with Muslims, perhaps he should try enforcing Christian doctrine in the areas of divorce and human sexuality. Muslims are typically for chastity, against abortion and frown on prnography, for example.
Archbishop of Canterbury argues for Islamic law in Britain
The Archbishop of Canterbury came under fierce attack last night from the Government, his own Church and other religions after he advocated the adoption of parts of Sharia, or Islamic law, in Britain.
Leaders of all the main political parties made clear that they did not accept Dr Rowan Williams's assertion that the incorporation of some aspects of Sharia was "unavoidable".
Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, condemned his comments as "muddled and unhelpful" and one senior bishop said that he was "surprised and concerned" by Dr Williams’s remarks.
Even the Muslim Council of Britain insisted that most members of the community did not want Sharia and emphasised that it had not discussed the issue.
Dr Williams argued, in a speech at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, for a "plural jurisdiction" that would allow Muslims to choose whether some legal disputes were resolved in secular or Sharia courts. He called for "constructive accommodation" over such issues as resolving marriage disputes.
Earlier, he told BBC Radio 4 that people should approach Islamic law with an open mind. Although emphasising that there was no place for "extreme punishments" and discrimination against women, Dr Williams stressed the importance of making all communities "part of the public process" in order to limit any oppression.
There are nearly 1.6 million Muslims in Britain, representing 2.7 per cent of the total population. Sharia courts do exist, but they have no legal standing and their decisions are not binding. Dr Williams said: "It seems unavoidable and, as a matter of fact, certain conditions of Sharia are already recognised in our society."
However, a spokesman for the Prime Minister said that British law must be based on British values. "Sharia cannot be used as a justification for committing breaches of English law, nor should the principles of Sharia be included in a civil court for resolving contractual disputes," he said.
Gordon Brown's spokesman added that concessions had been made in specific instances - such as a relaxation of the law on stamp duty to avoid it being paid twice when Sharia-compliant mortgages were used by Muslims.
They involve two transfers of property, so in theory stamp duty would be payable twice, but is in fact paid only once.
The Conservative response was even stronger. Baroness Warsi, Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action said: "The Archbishop's comments are unhelpful and may add to the confusion that already exists in our communities... All British citizens must be subject to British laws developed through Parliament and the courts."
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said: "Equality before the law is part of the glue that binds our society together. We cannot have a situation where there is one law for one person and different laws for another."
The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, who claimed recently that parts of Britain were no-go areas for non-Muslims, was one of the first to criticise Dr Williams. Dr Nazir-Ali, the country's only Asian bishop, said: "English law is rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and our notions of human freedoms derive from that tradition. It would be impossible to introduce a tradition like Sharia into this corpus without fundamentally affecting its integrity."
Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, a Leicester imam and an expert in interfaith issues for the Muslim Council of Britain, said his fear was that Islamophobic and racist groups would use the Archbishop's remarks to attack Islam.
He added: "I welcome debate on this issue but my personal feeling is that the vast majority of Muslims do not want to see a parallel or separate system for Muslims in our society."
Rabbi Danny Rich, chief executive of Liberal Judaism, said: "I am staggered he has said this. The Jewish community has learnt the value both of participating in the British legal system but at the same time, in certain matters where the State gives it the right, to sort out those matters with its own rabbinic authorities. But we accept that British law has priority."
The Archbishop's lecture was one in in a series of discussions Islam in English Law, part of the Temple Festival.
Note: The book spoke about the decline in membership in the religious orders, especially the missions as a kind of trigger for the Church to act in bringing about the final phase of God's judgment. This report, repeated in many other circles, shows what we in the west already knew, that new vocations to religious life are in steep decline and even with the increase in membership in the third world are barely keeping pace. A tipping point may soon be upon us as retirements and deaths soon overtake the remaining few.
Vatican Sees Decline in Religious Orders
VATICAN CITY (AP) - The number of men and women belonging to Roman Catholic religious orders worldwide has continued to decline but there has been an increase in priests assigned to dioceses, the Vatican said Tuesday.
The Vatican's statistics office said the total number of priests worldwide - those belonging to religious orders and those assigned to dioceses - stood at 405,000, with an increase of 600 diocesan clerics in 2006 over the previous year.
The total number of men and women in Catholic religious orders - mainly priests and nuns who belong to such orders as the Jesuits, Carmelites and the Franciscans - stood at 945,210 in 2006 - 7,230 fewer than the previous year, said a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini. He said an article Monday in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, had overstated the decrease.
The overwhelming majority of people in religious orders, 753,400, are women. The Vatican has long lamented a decrease in the number of priestly vocations in Europe and elsewhere in recent years, while the number of priests has increased in Africa and Asia. The Osservatore Romano report did not give a reason for the recent figures.
Pope Benedict XVI said in a 2005 speech to Italian priests that the West was "a world that is tired of its own culture, a world that has arrived at a time in which there's no more evidence of the need for God, much less Christ, and in which it seems that man alone can make himself." Mentioning Australia, Europe and the United States, the pontiff said in that speech that "one sees that the great churches appear to be dying."
Note: This "crisis" among the Bishops and clergy is one of the most striking examples of how the Church can be derailed from its mission by sin. The premise of the book is that the underlying cause of the "crisis", homosexuality, has not been dealt with and remains ready to continue its slaughter of souls through deceit and lying until the faithful no longer trust anyone in the Church hierarchy at all. This is an apostacy of immense proportions!
Paved with the Skulls of Bishops
By Richard John Neuhaus Friday, February 1, 2008, 6:54 AM
That's a grim metaphor, maybe too grim. It's from an endorsement of Philip F. Lawler's book, to be published next week, The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture (Encounter). The endorsement is by Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, who says: "Lawler's masterful analysis is sobering and provides an urgent incentive for authentic renewal. If St. John Chrysostom is correct when he says that the road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops, it would be a mistake for any bishop or priest to miss this book." Bishop Bruskewitz and Philip Lawler obviously think that Chrysostom was correct.
One might suggest that the book is really two books, one about what has happened to Catholicism in Boston and the other about the sex abuse scandal in the Church in America. Boston is the synecdoche for the telling of the much larger story. It is admittedly a very big synecdoche, but much of the book takes leave of Boston altogether in order to examine what happened and is still happening in dioceses around the country.
The account offered is devastating and the blame is clearly laid at the door of the American bishops. Lawler is outraged, but, to his credit, his outrage is controlled. His judgments are sometimes harsh, but, in view of the evidence, they could hardly be otherwise. Throughout, one senses his palpable love for the Church, his solid orthodoxy, and his yearning for spiritual and moral renewal. Lawler was long the editor of Catholic World Report and for several years, under Bernard Cardinal Law, editor of the archdiocesan newspaper The Pilot. His treatment of Law, who was compelled to resign as Archbishop of Boston in December 2002, strikes one as an exemplary exercise in trying to put the best possible construction on the indisputably indefensible.
"The thesis of this book," writes Lawler, "is that the sex abuse scandal in American Catholicism was not only aggravated but actually caused by the willingness of church leaders to sacrifice the essential for the inessential; to build up the human institution even to the detriment of the divine mandate." Bishops again and again responded to the crisis as institutional managers, employing public relations stratagems to evade, deceive, and distract attention from their own responsibility. Lawler several times invokes the terse observation of St. Augustine, "God does not need my lie." The bishops lied, says Lawler, and many of them are still lying. This is offered not as an accusation but as a conclusion that he believes is compelled by the evidence.
"The first aspect of the scandal, the sexual abuse of children, has been acknowledged and addressed," Lawler writes. "The second aspect, the rampant homosexuality among Catholic priests, has been acknowledged but not addressed, and later even denied... The third aspect of the scandal has never even been acknowledged by American church leaders." The third aspect, the malfeasance of bishops, "is today the most serious of all."
Over 80 percent of reported cases of abuse were with teenage boys. That does not include, of course, uncounted instances of sex with men who are of age, since those cases, as several bishops have opined, constitute no problem for the Church, meaning no legal or financial problem. Spiritual and moral problems apparently do not enter the equation. The name for this is corruption. Lawler quotes at length an article, published in 2000, before the scandal in Boston made national headlines, by Father Paul Shaughnessy:
If we examine any trust-invested agency at any given point in its history, whether that agency be a police force, a military unit, or a religious community, we might find that, say, out of every hundred men, five are scoundrels, five are heroes, and the rest are neither one nor the other: ordinarily upright men who live with a mixture of moral timidity and moral courage. When the institution is healthy, the gutsier few set the overall tone, and the less courageous but tractable majority works along with these men to minimize misbehavior; more importantly, the healthy institution is able to identify its own rotten apples and remove them before the institution itself is enfeebled. However, when an institution becomes corrupt, its guiding spirit mysteriously shifts away from the morally intrepid few, and with that shift the institution becomes more interested in protecting itself against outside critics than in tackling the problem members that subvert its mission. For example, when we say a certain police force is corrupt, we don’t usually mean that every policeman is on the take-perhaps only five out of a hundred actually accept bribes-rather we mean that this police force can no longer diagnose and cure its own problems, and consequently, if reform is to take place, an outside agency has to be brought in to make the changes.
Lawler adds: "Homosexual influence within the American clergy was not in itself the cause of the sex abuse crisis. The corruption wrought by that influence was a more important factor." He very gingerly addresses a theory proposed by a number of commentators on the crisis, namely, that bishops engaged in cover-ups and other deceptions because they were threatened with homosexual blackmail. He cites a number of instances in which this appears to be the case and bishops were permitted to resign when their misdeeds could no longer be denied. "The blackmail hypothesis," he writes, "provides a logical explanation for behavior that is otherwise inexplicable: the bishops' willingness to risk the welfare of the faithful and their own reputations in order to protect abusive priests."
The subject of the sex abuse crisis lends itself to sensationalism, but Lawler strives to resist that temptation. His is a generally sober account of a crisis that brought to light a larger pattern of episcopal fecklessness in the Church's accommodation to, and complicity in, the forces of cultural decadence. As readers know, the sex abuse crisis-its sources and ramifications-is a subject regularly addressed in First Things. And I will likely be returning to The Faithful Departed in the magazine.
I differ with Philip Lawler on a number of points in his telling of the story. For instance, his treatment of the 1940's conflict between Father Leonard Feeney and Cardinal Cushing is, I think, too uncritical of Father Feeney. Feeney was out of line in the way he pressed the claim that only Catholics can be saved. And, despite his critique of cultural accommodationism, Lawler betrays a nostalgia for the old Boston Catholicism that has "collapsed," even though it was, in its way, a massive instance of cultural accommodation, albeit an institutionally successful instance.
Those and other caveats aside, The Faithful Departed is the best book-length treatment of the sex abuse crisis, its origins and larger implications, published to date.
Our Take: Even in primitive cultures, the idea of a Mass and a sacrifice required a Priest. In fact, that is what defines the term, "priest". The theologians would be better serving the faithful, if you can call them that still, by pointing out the underlying reason why there aren't enough Priests in the first place. When you use contraception and practice abortion, as is prevalent now in western society, you may not be as likely to encourage the one son you had to be a Priest.
Dominican leaders rebuke Dutch theologians
Rome, Jan. 24, 2008 (CWNews.com) - World leaders of the Dominican order have issued a correction to three Dutch Dominican theologians who issued a popular pamphlet arguing that parish communities could celebrate the Eucharist without a priest, the French newspaper La Croix reporters.
The Dominican officials criticize the Dutch theologians for promoting views that contradict fundamental Church doctrines, according to La Croix. But the report issued from Rome stops short of disciplinary action against the theologians involved in the Dutch pamphlet.
Last June, three Dominican theologians in the Netherlands issued a pamphlet entitled Kerk en Ambt ("Church and Ministry"), which was fashioned as a response to severe shortage of priests in that country. The pamphlet, which was circulated widely among Dutch parishes, argued that in the absence of an ordained priest, any Catholic-- male or female, married or unmarried, homosexual or heterosexual-- could preside at the Eucharist. That role, the pamphlet said, "is not a prerogative reserved to the priest." The pamphlet was circulated with the approval of Dominican provincial leaders in the Netherlands.
The Dutch pamphlet drew calls for a response from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which in turn asked the leaders of the Dominican order in Rome to address the matter. The resulting report from Rome-- of which La Croix has obtained a copy-- is frankly critical of the Dutch pamphlet, saying that the authors distort the teachings of the Church and particularly the documents of Vatican II.
The report from Rome, dated January 23, does not call for disciplinary action against the Dominicans responsible for the pamphlet. But it directs the Dutch Dominicans to publicize the response in all the parishes where the original pamphlet was circulated last year-- as many as 1,500 parishes.
The Roman response acknowledges the severity of the shortage of priests in the Netherlands, and the need to make plans to serve the pastoral needs of parishes without priests. However, the document remarks, any such pastoral plans must be made with an eye to the teachings of the Church and the need for unity among the faithful.
The author of the Roman response, the French Dominican Herve Legrand, does express some sympathy for the Dutch Dominican theologians on one issue: the question of priestly celibacy. On that issue "there must be a debate," the document says, noting that "the current situation for priests is not the only one possible."
Note: Sometimes you just can't believe what you read about the leadership of the Catholic Church, especially in America. Here we have a case where the bishops are not backing an amendment to a state constitution that would make abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and cloning illegal because they think there is a better approach. Their circular reasoning is unfortunately common these days. If one more conservative Supreme Court Justice were to somehow be appointed, and a challenge case to Roe vs. Wade winds its way to them, then a reversal of Roe would return to the states the power to decide abortion laws for themselves. So the Georgia constitutional amendment looks forward to that day. The bishops are not only displaying an arrogance about the means to outlaw abortion, but also a lack of leadership and courage. Do you really want to wait and see what they decide if a constitutional amendment is in the works? They'd probably tell you it should not be supported because of some obscure language they don't like. Georgia Catholic Bishops Won't Work for State "Human Life" Constitutional Amendment
By Hilary White
ATLANTA, Georgia, January 23, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The two Catholic bishops of the state of Georgia have refused to support efforts to implement a "human life" amendment to the state constitution. Supporters of the effort, however, say that a constitutional amendment would protect the unborn, the disabled, the elderly and vulnerable patients and "guarantee their constitutional right to life" and offer a step towards overturning Roe v. Wade.
"We do not support the passage of [House Resolution] 536" said a written statement signed by Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory, Archdiocese of Atlanta and Bishop J. Kevin Boland, Diocese of Savannah. The bishops continue, "We have come to the conclusion that the approach taken by HR 536 to amend the state constitution does not provide a realistic opportunity for ending or reducing abortion in Georgia."
A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Atlanta told LifeSiteNews.com that after consultation with constitutional legal experts, the bishops decided that only an amendment to the federal constitution would succeed in "saving lives."
"We will be monitoring the legislation during the session to see if there are any changes, but the bishops have done a great deal of legal research and the decision is that this isn't going to be a bill we’re going to support, although we're not opposed to it in any way," she said.
Richard Thompson President & Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center disagreed with the bishops, saying HR 536 provides Georgia with the legal means of "overturning the central holding of Roe v Wade."
"For too long the pro-life movement has been dominated by a strategy of 'wait' - too fearful of losing to risk winning".
Rep. Martin Scott is sponsoring the bill that has the support of Democrats and Republicans in the Georgia Legislature. "The Human Life Amendment is the next logical step for defenders of liberty," said Scott. "With advances in science such as cloning to our society's movement toward a culture of death including euthanasia and endless abortions, Georgia is the place to enact this policy."
The text of HR 536 reads, "The rights of every person shall be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life. The right to life is the paramount and most fundamental right of a person."
"With respect to the fundamental and inalienable rights of all persons guaranteed in this Constitution, the word 'person' applies to all human beings, irrespective of age, race, sex, health, function, or condition of dependency, including unborn children at every state of their biological development, including fertilization."
HR 536 requires a two-thirds vote of the Georgia House and the state Senate to appear on the ballot in the November 2008 election.
One More Thing for AMCHURCH To Ignore from Rome: Vatican Newspaper Article Says Catholics Should Receive Communion Kneeling and on the Tongue
1/9/2008 7:27:00 PM
By John-Henry Westen -LifeSiteNews.com Although it may seem a little strange, there is a definite battle being waged within the Catholic Church. It is the same "culture war" being waged by secular moderns against those who uphold traditional morality, it is pro-life vs. pro-choice.
But within the Catholic Church the same battle is fought along liturgical lines, and the publication in the Vatican newspaper of an article calling for Catholics to receive Holy Communion kneeling and on the tongue is telling.
"If some nonbeliever arrived and observed such an act of adoration perhaps he, too, would 'fall down and worship God, declaring, God is really in your midst,'" explained Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Karaganda, Kazakhstan in the pages of L'Osservatore Romano. The Catholic News Service reports that in the January 8 edition of the Vatican paper, Bishop Schneider noted that the reverence and awe of Catholics who truly believe they are receiving Jesus in the Eucharist should lead them to kneel and receive Communion on their tongues. "The awareness of the greatness of the eucharistic mystery is demonstrated in a special way by the manner in which the body of the Lord is distributed and received," the bishop wrote.
Although in all likelihood most Catholics are oblivious to it, the decision to receive communion on the tongue, versus in the hand and the decision to receive communion standing rather than kneeling is a significant fault line in the culture war.
Modernizers who relentlessly work to have the Catholic Church move away from so-called 'archaic' positions on sexuality, (forbidding contraception, pre-marital sexual activity, homosexuality etc.) also rail against 'archaic' piety in worship.
However, the culture war at least in terms of liturgical issues was nearly lost in the West until the advent of Pope Benedict.
In the United States for instance, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on the Liturgy wrote in its July 2002 newsletter: "Kneeling is not a licit posture for receiving Holy Communion in the dioceses of the United States of America unless the bishop of a particular diocese has derogated from this norm in an individual and extraordinary circumstance."
The majority of the faithful have since adopted the practice of standing and receiving communion on the hand.
However, some traditional Catholics, often derisively referred to as "pre-Vatican II" Catholics have held to the practice of communion kneeling and on the tongue. Those same Catholics are often the most vociferous defenders of life and family within and without the Church.
While many valiant Catholic activists who work in the pro-life and pro-family battles receive communion in the common fashion, they nonetheless respect the right of those who wish to receive communion kneeling and on the tongue.
Not so for those within the Church seeking to get the Church in line with the times. Certain Church leaders, priests and even bishops who are zealous in their attempts to modernize the Church have gone so far as to attempt to enforce modernism by refusing communion to those who kneel for communion.
One prominent example of such was Orange County Florida Bishop Tod Brown who was caught on video last year refusing communion to a woman who was kneeling. Brown is also known for refusing in 1994 to back an Idaho measure to deny homosexuals special privileges. Explaining his actions he said the law "would contribute to attitudes of intolerance and hostility in Idaho directed at homosexual citizens and is potentially discriminatory." In Brown's diocese there has been considerable intolerance toward Catholics who kneel for communion and some traditional Catholics have been asked to leave the diocese. Another prominent example was the denial of communion to Virginia House of Delegate member Richard Black by Arlington's St. Thomas More Cathedral Rector, Fr. Dominic Irace in 2002. Black was one of the strongest defenders of life in the legislature. As Delegate Black left the Cathedral, Fr. Irace loudly called him a "conservative idiot." (see coverage: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2002/oct/02101001.html )
These types of situations caused the Vatican to react rather strongly in 2002. Jorge A. Cardinal Medina Estevez, the head of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, which addresses liturgical matters, wrote a bishop about reports received of a priest denying communion to faithful because they were kneeling.
The Cardinal called such denial "a grave violation of one of the most basic rights of the Christian faithful," and directed the bishop to investigate the case. The letter said that the Vatican regards such abuses of the faithful as very grave. The letter said, the Congregation, if such actions are verified, "will regard future complaints of this nature with great seriousness, and if they are verified, it intends to seek disciplinary action consonant with the gravity of the pastoral abuse." (see the letter: http://www.adoremus.org/Notitiae-kneeling.html )
Note: this article might better be titled "Cardinal O'Connor Versus the Church". The Poles are simply devout Catholics trying to witness to their faith as their Bishops taught them. Around the world, increasingly it is the Bishops who have lost faith and are opposing those trying to practice the faith. As I have written previously, this apostasy is increasing in strength. All the evil one needs is a head to make the break complete. In Apocalypse - Letter by Letter, Steven Paul describes how this will come about.
Cardinal Murphy O'Connor Versus the Poles
Editorial by Hilary White
It has been a busy Advent and Christmas season for the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. He has, in a space of a few months, outraged, shocked and disgusted a surprisingly broad cross section of his flock. Polish immigrants, noted for the vibrancy of their Catholic faith; Catholic pro-lifers who have held the line for decades in the fight with little help from the hierarchy; and Catholic traditionalists who have spent decades living in near-exile from their own Church, have felt the back of Cormac Cardinal Murphy O'Connor's hand recently.
He started the season early with his official rejection in November of Pope Benedict's document removing the power of bishops to block the celebration of the pre-Vatican II rite of the Mass, an issue that has broad connections to acceptance of Catholic doctrine in a variety of areas, including moral issues.
Traditionalist Catholics are almost universally pro-life and pro-family, whereas many of those who have actively fought against the re-instatement of the ancient liturgical practices have also consistently championed a "progressive" Catholicism that rejects the moral law, particularly in sexual morality.
By the end of December, a week after his Christmas homily in which he urged Britons to be more accepting of immigrants, Murphy O'Connor had blasted Polish immigrants who are pouring into Britain in search of work.
In a homily, the Cardinal who heads the Catholic Church of England and Wales, urged the Polish community to learn English and integrate into local parishes. He claimed the Catholic Church in the UK was in danger of dividing along ethnic lines. The comments shocked both the Polish Catholic community and Catholic observers who have seen the influx of devout Poles as a desperately needed boost to sagging attendance and the increasingly grim outlook for the future of the Catholic Church in this country.
With photos appearing in the Telegraph of Poles kneeling devoutly on the sidewalk to hear Mass broadcast outside an overcrowded church, it is perhaps unsurprising that Polish leaders responded to the Cardinal's comments saying they felt "violated" and "spiritually raped". The comments made many Catholic commentators wonder aloud just what kind of Catholic immigrant the Cardinal would prefer.
But Britain learned just before Christmas what kind of Catholic their Cardinal does think is suitable. His real coup de grace, and perhaps his largest insult to the most faithful Catholics in the country, came at his unconditional reception into the Church of the man SPUC head John Smeaton identified as the major "architect of the Culture of Death" in this country: Tony Blair.
Cardinal O'Connor received Blair in a "private" ceremony in the Cardinal's own residential chapel. Neither the Cardinal's office, nor Blair's offered any explanation or retraction of the former Prime Minister's long record of anti-Catholic and anti-life policies.
To add insult to injury, an unnamed "Church source" presumed to be close to the Cardinal's office, had even chastised critics in the Daily Mail for daring to question the Cardinal's Christmas-week generosity. The Mail's source said, "Whatever he previously believed or did is a matter for individual conscience."
But the pro-life community, particularly its Catholic contingent, are so wearied by the decades of flaccidity, compromising and temporising and outright irreligion of its religious leadership, it hardly bothered to give a collective sigh of disgust. Among the pro-life Catholics of my acquaintance, the response was largely a quick shake of the head and a sickened laugh. In Britain's Catholic Church this latest outrage from its leadership was nothing more than business as usual.
At the same time, the odd news that Catholic attendance at weekly church services had, for the first time since the Reformation, outstripped that of Anglicans brought forward headlines like "Britain has become a 'Catholic country'" from the Telegraph. But the notion brought only sour and grim amusement to many British Catholic bloggers who have faithfully chronicled the growth of secularist anti-Christian hostility in British society, heavily abetted by the BBC's virtual monopoly on broadcast media. Despite the wild suppositions in the mainstream media, those who have been keeping track know that the news reflected only the continuing general collapse of British religious adherence.
The truth is simply that the native British have abandoned Christianity. It is easy to see what has alarmed Cardinal Cormac. The Poles are, quite simply, making him, and the Church he leads, look bad.
The robust, generous and stalwart faith of these people, tested through generations of brutal Communist suppression, has given them an ability to see through the fog of nonsense that has emanated out of British chanceries since the 1960's. And the Cardinal knows it. It is clear that the divide between the faith of the Poles and the dreary, watery, and half-hearted British Catholicism, content to allow the last dregs of its faith and devotion slowly to evaporate, is greater than one of language.
It is evident that whatever the Catholic leadership of this country has been doing for the last four decades, it has not been a boon to British Catholic faith or practice. If Cormac Murphy O'Connor is aware of the condition of his Church, he has chosen an odd way of expressing his concern by chastising the new Polish faithful for their very faithfulness.
Maybe the Cardinal should try a different tack, and take his own advice and accept the contribution of these people.
My take: The Bishop can gloss over the removal of the Priest all he wants. And to the Priest's credit, he won't criticize or even question the Bishop. But I will. Bishops like this one are responsible for the emptying of the pews and the seminaries. They have presided over an historical apostasy that has left the faithful in a state of grave and mortal sin by no longer teaching divine truth publicly. This Bishop would expel Christ himself for teaching divine truth. It is he who needs to be removed, if not by Apostolic authority, then by God Almighty Himself.
Homily on NFP provokes congregation member to stand up and shout at priest "When are you going to stop?"
By John Jalsevac ROCKFORD, Illinois, January 4, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - This past December 9, at St. James' parish in Rockford Illinois, a very normal Mass suddenly became a very unusual Mass when a parishioner stood up in the middle of the homily, interrupted the priest, shouting at him "When are you going to stop?", and then left, with her homosexual partner in tow. A few other parishioners also stood up and left the church. A few days later, the priest was dismissed from his duties at the parish by his bishop.
Catholics know that there are some things that you just don't hear preached from the pulpit any more. The most conspicuous of these unpreachables is sexual ethics, especially the idea that using contraception might be immoral, and contrary to a Culture of Life. Most priests know that these are unpopular subjects, and emphatically avoid them. But Fr. Tom Bartolomeo, who until several weeks ago was the associate pastor at St. James parish, is not your typical priest.
To begin with, Fr. Bartolomeo was ordained only just over a year ago. This, of course, is not exactly extraordinary in itself, except for the fact that he is now seventy years old. At an age when many other priests are retiring, therefore, he is only getting his feet wet.
Perhaps, says the elderly priest in an interview with LifeSiteNews.com, his newness to the ministry and late vocation explains his almost youth-like zeal for his priestly duties. "I'm going to die with my boots on," he says. "Who knows how many years I have left? That kind of puts pressure on me to preach the Gospel message. My days are numbered."
About a month ago, however, Fr. Bartolomeo's enthusiasm for the Gospel message brought an unexpected turn into his life, when he gave what he thought was a normal Advent homily. The homily was the second of a projected series of four homilies dealing with life and family issues, designed to coincide with the four Sundays of Advent - the season leading up to the birth of Jesus. This particular homily had to do with contraception and natural family planning.
The Catholic Church teaches that the use of contraception is intrinsically and gravely immoral. Church teaching does, however, allow married couples to use the natural rhythms of the female body to knowingly space children, if there is a sufficiently grave reason to do so. These fundamental moral teachings formed the basis of Fr. Bartolomeo's homily."New births, anniversaries and funerals, separations of any kind, a photograph from the past - give us pause and remind us whom we are bound to," he said in his homily, a copy of which he provided for LifeSiteNews. "Our human sexuality - father, mother, brother, sister - reveals our deepest relationships. We call God our father, and his Son our brother."
"Contraception, contra-conception, trivializes the sacred value of human sexuality - a danger humanity did not have to face a century ago before the advent of modern chemistry and technology, the pill (before or after) and a host of plastic devices."
"Contracept, take God's plan off the table, and you have mayhem," he said. "The most important thing in your lives, bearing children, is no longer discussed. It has been permanently removed from the conversation. Done deal. The pill, the IUD, the diaphragm, the sponge, the condom - who is making money here? - have shut down not only the body but the brain. And wives and husbands wonder why they grow apart? When a man and woman, a husband and wife, share daily this most wonderful mystery of their human sexuality they are bonding as nature and God intended."
In the middle of this homily however, say witnesses, one congregation member stood up and began to argue with the priest, yelling "When are you going to stop?" Gerald Weber, who has been a parishioner at St. James for 47 years, was at that Mass. "It was embarrassing, the noticeable argumentative tone with which she stopped him in his homily," he told LifeSiteNews. "Father treated her nicely for the way she was acting, but she continued yelling. She finally sat down, but then stood up again, and took her friend with her and made a show of leaving the church. With that there were some other people who objected to the subject matter."
