Blithe Spirit

Gay-acceptance advocate James Martin SJ says he “cannot imagine a more homophobic act, short of beating up an LGBT person . . . What the pastor and some of his parishioners did shows the kind of hatred that LGBT Catholics still face — in their own church.”

The pressure is on.

via Sun-Times

More more more on this story, here at The Hill, in addition to Sun-Times.

From Sun-Times, in story headlined above:

[The pastor, Fr] Kalchik led seven parishioners in a prayer of exorcism Friday, and the flag was burned inside a portable fire pit placed the schoolyard next to the church. The ashes of the flag now rest in a church compost heap.

“That banner and what it stood for doesn’t belong to the Archdiocese or Cardinal Cupich. It belongs to the people of this parish who paid for it,” Kalchik said. “What have we done wrong other than destroy a piece of propaganda that was used to put out a message other than what the church is about?”

Spokeswoman Anne Maselli:

. . .  the archdiocese was “unaware” that the flag-burning occurred, “and we are following up on the situation. As Catholics we affirm the dignity of all persons.”

Out of the playbook she spoke.

Gay group Dignity USA president Chris Pett:

“He’s hijacking the parish and trampling on core Catholic values . . .  The archdiocese needs to denounce this in the strongest possible terms.”

Some history and more from Fr. K.:

Kalchik, 56, claims he was preceded by three “bad priests” who were “big in promoting the gay lifestyle” before he was ordained as pastor of Resurrection by Cardinal Francis George in 2007.

The flag was first displayed prominently at the church’s altar in 1991 to welcome LGBTQ worshippers to the faith, according to Kalchik, but it was later taken down and put into storage — along with priestly vestments and candles emblazoned with rainbow colors.

Kalchik said he found the vestments and destroyed them when he arrived in 2007, but somehow missed the flag until another cleaning session last month.

“The people of this parish have been pretty resilient and put up with a lot of B.S.” Kalchik said in an interview in his office Tuesday night. “And it was just by accident that this banner that was made to celebrate all things gay … did not get destroyed when I first got here.”

K. touches the third rail of progressive sensitivity:

Kalchik — who says he was sexually abused by a neighbor as a child, and again by a priest when he began working for the church at 19 — says the sex-abuse crisis plaguing the church is “definitely a gay thing.”

Indeed. Cardinal C., however,

. . . has rejected a connection between the scandal and gay priests but has drawn criticism in recent weeks for comments claiming the church should focus on other priorities instead of being “distracted” by the sex-abuse crisis.

C. wants it to go away. K. doesn’t.

“I can’t sit well with people like Cardinal Cupich, who minimizes all of this,” Kalchik said. “Excuse me, but almost all of the [abuse] cases are, with respect to priests, bishops and whatnot, taking and using other young men sexually. It’s definitely a gay thing.”

Of gays in the church, Kalchik says “scripture is crystal-clear. It’s against God’s law.

Or so says the church, including Pope Francis, apparently, though he is hard to chart in the matter, as in others, reportedly telling Italian bishops not to admit practicing gays to the seminary  but to at to the disappointment of at least one gay advocate still holding to the Catholic line,.

One thing, he’s cagy on the subject and says a lot to make him seem very gay-friendly. Like his Chicago appointee, Cardinal Cupich.

Finally, another explanation by Fr. K., in The Hill, where he’s quoted from NBC News,

. . . the flag, which had the image of the cross intertwined with a rainbow, was a “profane” depiction of the cross and a “sacrilege.”

“We did [the burning] in a private way, a quiet way, so as not to bring the ire of the gay community down upon this parish,” [he] said. “It’s our full right to destroy it, and we did so privately because the archdiocese was breathing on our back.”

. . . . .

“We took matters into our own hands and said a prayer of exorcism over this thing,” Kalchik said. “It was cut into seven pieces, so it was burned over stages in the same fire pit that we used for the Easter vigil mass.”

Depends what you mean by desecration, says another LGBTQ spokesperson:

“Those involved in this desecration [of the flag] are violating the core values of the Catholic faith,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA. “They are hijacking the parish to further an extremist agenda, and damaging the community in doing so.”

She has the language, we must admit. “So’s your old man” never did mouth-fighting better.

With wit, humor, and a salutary sense of what’s what and what’s not.

In the mid-1980s, I [economist Richard M. Ebeling] had the good fortune to be teaching at the University of Dallas with Professor William H. Hutt as a colleague. By that time he was already in his mid-80s and held the title of “emeritus.” Though stricken with an increasingly debilitating case of arthritis, Professor Hutt would be in his office most days of the week working on some article or reading the latest literature on economic theory and policy.

I would ask him to deliver one or two guest lectures in some of my classes each semester, and he almost always graciously consented. In one class I recall Hutt’s starting his remarks, in a slightly stammering voice, “Most economists have their works forgotten after they’re dead. I’ve the unique distinction in having had all my works forgotten while I’m still alive.”

Bingo.

In the same vein, the “angelic doctor” Thomas Aquinas:

All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.

• Remarks on being requested to resume writing, after a mystical experience while saying mass on or around 6 December 1273, as quoted in A Taste of Water : Christianity through Taoist-Buddhist Eyes (1990) by Chwen Jiuan Agnes Lee and Thomas G. Hand
• Variant translations:
• All that I have written seems like straw to me.
  • As quoted in The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (1993), by Brian Davies, p. 9
• Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.
  • As quoted in Sacred Games : A History of Christian Worship (1997) by Bernhard Lang, p. 323

The wise man has nothing to add to that.

See: William H. Hutt: A Centenary Appreciation – Foundation for Economic Education

The indefatigable Cafe (Francis) Hayek engages here in a bit of amazing moral equivalence.

To treat foreign-governments’ trade restrictions as illegitimate is to assume that foreign governments do not carry out the will of their citizens. This assumption is surely valid. But given this fact, we cannot then, with any legitimacy, casually assume that the U.S.  government carries out the will of the American people.

The wise people who read this blog have spotted it immediately. For the others it’s a matter of China’s ignoring citizens’ wishes = U.S. doing the same to its citizens, as if China’s ruling class can be voted out of office.

Then Cafe H. insists on U.S. tariff imposition — a risky business, granted — as a simple question of tit-for-tat (which historically was probably never true of tariffs by whomever), ignoring the decades-long issue of patent infringement and intellectual property theft.

Thus:

I thus see no good reason to excuse Uncle Sam’s use of force to prevent us Americans from trading as we choose just because other governments use force to prevent non-Americans from trading as they choose.

Just because? Really?

via Cafe Hayek