He talks around the issue . . .
“Sanctions” are not the issue. Rather, the issues are preventing scandal and sacrilege.
Neither is “Changing people’s minds” the issue. He can’t let it go at that, “as if that satisfies his duty in the matter . . . any more than a father can excuse sitting by while members of his household act against the common good, by saying, “Well, I told them what was right and wrong.”
via Pro Life Warrior Fined $195,000 | Fr. Dwight Longenecker
Among the Dems, Kamala Harris involved in unprecedented prosecution:
In a recent statement [hidden camera producer David] Daleiden points out, “Not a single other undercover journalist has ever been prosecuted under the California video recording law, and they record and publish hidden camera stings on a weekly basis. My case is the first and only one, because it is Kamala Harris’s politically-motivated attack on my First Amendment rights to benefit her friends and donors at Planned Parenthood.”
Lots more here on the situation, plus at his Center for Medical Progress site.
via The Pope Francis Little Book of Insults
He has a way with words. No doubt about it. For instance:
Such a mouth on him.
The Chicago cardinal agrees that the abortion legislation is a hellish thing — “it says that the unborn child has absolutely no claim on rights” — but is considerably less clear as to what he thinks of Communion, saying
. . . he thought it would be “counterproductive” to deny Holy Communion in his archdiocese to the legislators who championed the law.
“I think it would be counterproductive to impose sanctions, simply because they don’t change anybody’s minds, but it also takes away from the fact that an elected official has to deal with the judgment seat of God, not just the judgment seat of a bishop. I think that’s much more powerful,” Cupich told CNA.
“I have always approached the issue saying that the bishop’s primary responsibility is to teach, and I will continue to do that.”
Well teach what in this case? Not, apparently, what Bishop Paprocki of Springfield said:
He added that “to be clear and say ‘no, you can’t be promoting abortion legislation and be a Catholic in good standing,’ it also protects the integrity of the sacraments, saying that receiving Holy Communion is a very sacred thing to do.”
Cupich talks as if he were a prominent lecturer with points to make, Paprocki as if he has a cause to promote that goes far beyond persuading people, namely to protecting “the integrity of the sacraments,” whose reality hovers over the whole controversy.
via Cupich: ‘Counterproductive’ to deny Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians | Catholic Herald
via RORATE CÆLI: The Spectator: “. . . You have to wonder.”
. . . In the old days, a pope’s remit was modest: infallible, but only in the vanishingly rare cases when he pronounced on matters of faith and morals concerning the whole Church.
But even at their most bombastic and badly behaved, earlier popes would have hesitated to do what nice Pope Francis has done, which is to approve changes in the liturgy which amount to rewriting the Lord’s Prayer.
Howzat?
That bit that says ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’ is, for Pope Francis, a bad translation. ‘It speaks of a God who induces temptation,’ he told Italian TV. ‘I am the one who falls. It’s not him pushing me into temptation to then see how I have fallen. A father doesn’t do that; A father helps you to get up immediately.’
Homespun wisdom. Stuff you might hear at the 19th hole, quaffing a cold one. But
. . . [it] sounds as if it’s not the translation he doesn’t like, it’s the sentiment — Christ not being Christian enough. And so, he’s approved changes by the Italian bishops to the Italian translation of the Roman Missal.
The original Latin Vulgate version reads: ‘et ne nos inducas in tentationem’ which is pretty well exactly the same as the familiar English one. The Italian translation, ‘e non ci indurre in tentazione’, is now being replaced with ‘e non abbandonarci alla tentazione’, or ‘and do not abandon us to temptation’.
That’s nice. But, but but . . .
. . . the Lord’s Prayer is common to Christians of all denominations. It’s part of our languages and our culture. We say it at weddings, funerals [find it in movie titles]; the unreligious remember it from school. It’s a common prayer which binds us together. Why change the words? Especially since, as Greek scholars will tell you that the root verb, eisphero means bring or carry in, and hence, lead; nothing about ‘allow’.
Well, too bad for the (original) Greek, apparently. Henry VIII had the same idea. The two “don’t have much in common but they did see eye to eye on this. Henry wanted ‘lead us not…’ to be translated as ‘Suffer us not to be led into temptation’, only to be seen off [resisted in the matter] by Archbishop Cranmer…”
Blog author differs in one point:
Actually, Francis and Henry share exactly the same kind of personality, and, except for the womanizing, Francis only differs from Henry in the great restraints posed by current mores on how to get rid of adversaries…
But he has destroyed orders (Franciscans of the Immaculate, and others), organized coups (Knights of Malta), changed teachings of immemorial Tradition (on marriage and adultery, and others), acting exactly as the “Renaissance Prince” he is, even though he loathes the title…
Well said.
via Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith on the Liturgy and its Abuses
Can’t say enough for this long, extended collection of commentary and critique by the one-time Vatican hand,
. . . a Sri Lankan . . . ninth and current Archbishop of Colombo, serving since 2009. He was elevated to the cardinalate in 2010. He previously served as Secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (2001–2004), and Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (2005–2009).
. . . and no mean leader of his people in his native land:
. . . the Sri Lankan cardinal has been unusually blunt in the aftermath of the Easter bombings which hit two Catholic churches on the South Asian island, as well as an Evangelical church and three hotels.
Ranjith has complained about the government’s response to the attack, and closing the churches to Sunday worship drives the point home that he doesn’t think the security forces are up to the task of protecting the country’s Christian minority.
So he’s a plain speaker in re: both liturgy and political foot-dragging.
William A. Jacobson for Legal Insurrection:
“Oberlin College tried to sacrifice a beloved 5th-generation bakery, its owners, and its employees, at the alter of political correctness in order to appease the campus ‘social justice warfare’ mob.
The jury sent a clear message that the truth matters, and so do the reputations and lives of people targeted by false accusations, particularly when those false accusations are spread by powerful institutions.
Throughout the trial the Oberlin College defense was tone-deaf and demeaning towards the bakery and its owners, calling the bakery nearly worthless. The jury sent a message that all lives matter, including the lives of ordinary working people who did nothing wrong other than stop people from stealing.”
Black students had been caught stealing, warriors demanded college overlook it.
Final from the defense lawyer, Lee Plakas ended by reading to the jury the poem “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by John Donne.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
Defense attorney Rachelle Kuznicki argued:
“We cannot change the past, we can learn from it.”
“This will impact people who had nothing to do with the protest …, it also means less students who are not able to afford a college education will be able to do so.”
Legal Insurrection was alone in covering the trial, missing not any of it.
Skipping past the Endeavour piece. And don’t get me wrong, I am not that kind of phobic, but don’t those folks know when saturation is reached. I mean, we get it, ok?
About a book about a magazine, within which is talk about distributism and its well known proponents, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc .
The Bookman is pleased to present this excerpt from a forthcoming book, Land & Liberty: The Best of ‘Free America’, which is edited and introduced by Allan C. Carlson, with a preface by Sir Roger Scruton. It will be published by the Wethersfield Institute.
First, an intro to a Southern U.S. back-to-the-land movement:
The Agrarian revival of the 1930s is most commonly associated with the Twelve Southerners linked to Vanderbilt University, who produced I’ll Take My Stand at the beginning of the decade. For the most part, their project was literary and theoretical: an intellectual defense and revitalization of an agricultural civilization in the Old South. The “Northern” response came from the circle of writers and activists who launched the journal Free America in 1937.
One of the twelve,
. . . Herbert Sebastian Agar, descended from an old Louisiana family. After prep school, he gained a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton, the latter in English. After teaching in a private school in New Jersey, he left for London, England, in 1928, where he became literary editor of The English Review and a correspondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal. He took still another editorial post at G. K.’s Weekly,the journal owned and edited by the novelist, poet, essayist, and Christian apologist Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Here he found answers to his question in the Distributism of Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
Its “basic idea” . . .
. . . was simple. As Agar frequently stated, “power follows property.” Political democracy could function well only within a system of economic democracy, where productive property—homesteads, land, tools, and natural resources—was widely distributed among families. Put another way, true liberty could only exist within a nation where the great majority of citizens were holders of real property.
Belloc and Chesterton drew their initial inspiration for these matters from the 1891 Papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII examined the growing “social question.” In this new age, Leo observed, liberal or capitalist economies saw ever more property being concentrated in ever fewer hands, along with a surging number of families left trapped in a new form of poverty—what Belloc later called “the servile state.”
The solution to this crisis offered in Rerum Novarum was that the law “should favor ownership [of land and homestead], and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” It was in this way that “the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty [might] be bridged over.” The means to this end included land reform that transformed tenants into farm owners, the promotion of productive homesteads, limits on retail chain stores, the decentralization of industry, and worker participation in the ownership and control of necessarily big enterprises.
This task, Agar explained, was as much a moral challenge as a political and economic one. Where contemporary Liberalism tried to find some way to reconcile restricted ownership with political freedom, without any prospect for success, this new Conservatism “offers risks and responsibilities rather than bread and circuses.” The instinctive desire for property ownership was still alive in America, Agar argued; “it is the task for conservatives to foster it.”
Enough for now. But so far the argument limps badly, too idealistic, bordering on if not melting into utopianism and in any event a general guide pointing a largely agreed-on goal — agreed on by non-socialists anyhow.
The “as much a moral challenge as a political and economic one” part raises a flag, to be sure, in that it’s looking for a degree of morality that probably is more than a nation can expect form most of its citizens.
Mainly, however, the problem lies with the alleged preferential option (uh-uh) of Pope Leo for “land reform that transformed tenants into farm owners, the promotion of productive homesteads, limits on retail chain stores, the decentralization of industry, and worker participation in the ownership and control of necessarily big enterprises,” is a pretty fair description of New Deal and outright socialist options.
GK was a lovable man who fought a good fight for common sense and Christianity as a quite readable journalist and Belloc a more interesting but probably less lovable but immensely stimulating writer. As social philosophers, however, ah dunno.
“Criminal” architects and their journalistic supporters, called to answer for their abominations visible for all to be offended by in the City of Light:
Nor is this visual hell [in Paris] the consequence of the need to build cheaply. Where money is no object, contemporary architects, like the sleep of reason in Goya’s etching, bring forth monsters.
The Tour Montparnasse (said to be the most hated building in Paris), the Centre Pompidou, the Opéra Bastille, the Musée du quai Branly, the new Philharmonie, do not owe their preternatural ugliness to lack of funds, but rather to the incapacity, one might say the ferocious unwillingness, of architects to build anything beautiful, and to their determination to leave their mark on the city as a dog leaves its mark on a tree.
The perspicacious polymath Dalrymple reviews a book much to his taste in First Things.
Blithe Spirit 