Day: October 1, 2018

Wealthy Catholics to target Cardinals with ‘Red Hat Report’

They will publish a dossier on every cardinal young enough to vote on a new pope, intend to be ready on ongoing basis because as one of the top staff said, “We always have to be ready for a conclave.”

The Red Hat Report, dubbed as the group’s “flagship project,” is designed to audit all 124 current papal electors. Organizers say it will be conducted by a team of, to date, nearly 100 researchers, academics, investigators, and journalists, with the aim “to hold the hierarchy of the Catholic Church accountable for abuse and corruption, and to develop and support honesty, clarity, and fidelity in Church governance.”

Sex issues, of course, but also fiscal, and with reference to the Vigano report, which named names, as has been widely published. See also his more recent “testimony.”

via Wealthy Catholics to target Cardinals with ‘Red Hat Report’

Georgetown Professor: ‘Castrate’ White Men’s Corpses And ‘Feed Them To Swine’

Eloquence of a very angry person:

Georgetown Professor C. Christine Fair tweeted over the weekend that “entitled white men” should have their corpses castrated and then fed to pigs.

Fair, an associate professor in Georgetown’s Security Studies program, tweeted, “Look at thus [sic] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement.”

Fair linked to a video of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham defending Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh from allegations of sexual assault from when the judge was in high school.

“All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps,” Fair wrote. “Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

Ain’t she sweet?

via The Daily Caller

A polymath defends Western culture and the Judaeo-Christian tradition — Rene Girard (1923-2015

From review of Cynthia L. Haven’s Evolution of Desire: A life of Rene Girard, Catholic historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science, in Times Literary Supplement.

Scapegoating demoted.

The Evangelists asserted Jesus’s innocence and exposed the lies of his murderers. They thus unmasked the entire immemorial deception whereby scapegoating had made possible the social order. This is what Jesus meant when he said that he would utter “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:35)

Even Nietzsche got it about Christianity.

Girard’s reading of the Gospels has appealed to many theologians, replacing the idea of a wrathful God who demands propitiation [with] an insistence on the absolute necessity of non-violence and forgiveness, the “imitation of Christ” as enjoined in theological tradition. Nietzsche, despite his perversity in favouring the strong at the expense of the weak, had, according to Girard, grasped the true revolution of Christianity, its sympathy with victimhood.

Girard’s friends and non-friends.

One American colleague interviewed by [the author] Haven told her that Girard “goes around baptizing everyone he likes . . . . That’s one of the reasons I love him”. [I love that too.] The Paris intellectual cafés were not so friendly, and he felt ostracized. But Haven finds that the anti-communist resistance in Eastern Europe, at a time when Christianity was under attack, were inspired by his books, which were sometimes shared in samizdat editions.

A non-friend is clearly not impressed:

As one of Girard’s sharpest critics, the historian Hayden White, observed, “the obscurity of the data is essential to its status as evidence”.

Depends on what he means by obscurity, I guess.

A key element in cafe intellectuals’ opposition, by the way, would be his celebration of Western culture.

He saw the unmasking of ethnocentrism as an essential element in the Western intellectual tradition over the past five centuries, dating back to Montaigne and to early world travellers – and this critique had no equivalent in other civilizations.

The “hive mentality.”

He came to see the non-violent message of the Gospels as threatened by Satan, by which he meant the contagion that spreads between individuals to activate a hive mentality.

N.B. Italics mine throughout.

Makes me want to know about him. Toward which goal I present:

Four of his almost 30 books:

Violence and the Sacred
1972

Deceit, Desire and the Novel
1961

Things Hidden Since the…
1978

A theater of envy
1991