Category: Blithe Spirit

Saints

Deny Christ or die:

CBN aired a report on the murdered Christians–two Turkish converts who left Islam and one German national–over the summer. Watch and remember what true religious martyrs look like:

Here’s a You Tube video.

In Iraq another story completely:

“I came here to show the unity of the Iraqi people,” said the black- turbaned imam, Jassim al-Jazairi. “We are happy with the cardinal. We are very proud of any person, whether Christian or Muslim, who raises the name of Iraq in the international arena.”

This after mass said by new Iraqi cardinal at which:

“We are of one family, everyone should work for the progress of this country,” he said during his sermon. “We pray today for the sake of each other and to forgive each other, as well to be directed to do good deeds. That is my demand for the Iraqis, moreover I urge the return home for displaced people and immigrants to their ancestral land.”

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Speaking no evil

Cardinal Mahony of LA was attacked in front of church last summer but never told police and does not now intend to file a report:

Cardinal Mahoney told the police by telephone that he had been dressed in a sports shirt and slacks on an evening in July when a man walked toward him outside Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral downtown, asking in a threatening tone if he was the cardinal. Cardinal Mahony, 71, told the police that the man pushed him to the ground and kicked him before running away.

Only in October, at a priests’ meeting, did he announce it publicly, even though he had been

so badly beaten that he was hospitalized and it took him several weeks to recover.

I definitely question his reticence in the matter.  The law was broken, and he kept it to himself?

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Living With Sins Of The Fathers

In Connecticut this priest adjusts:

When he is training new altar servers, he asks parents to stay for the lessons. If he is measuring young people for robes, he enlists mothers to help him. If there is a church- or school-sponsored field trip, everyone goes on a bus, never alone with him in his vehicle.

“It’s frustrating, I had nothing to do with this, but I just have to face it,” he says. “This is what happened and this is what we will do about it.”

What happened we know about.  How a priest manages things these days we may not know about.

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Southern exposure

We knew Catholics aren’t the only ones with abuse problems, but here’s a blog about Southern Baptists:

For faith groups that proactively try to address clergy sex abuse, prevention and compassion go hand in hand.

After all, how will people find out about clergy child molesters if victims are turned away and intimidated when they try to report their abuse?

For Southern Baptists, their leaders are still way behind the curve compared to the leaders of other faith groups.

Southern Baptists don’t even provide a safe place to which victims may report abuse. So most victims don’t try.

It’s worse among them, according to Christa Brown, “the national outreach director for SNAP-Baptist and maintains the StopBaptistPredators.org website. She is a wife, mother, attorney, jazz-lover, slow-runner, and a Southern Baptist abuse survivor”:

Why should anyone believe that Southern Baptist leaders will be able to prevent abuse by clergy child molesters they don’t yet know about when, day in and day out, they do nothing about the clergy child molesters they’re specifically told about?

In addition, Stop Baptist Predators dot org is “the voice of SNAP Baptist.”

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The mouse roared

The Mary McCarthy-Flannery O’Connor exchange is worth remembering, in which the sophisticated McC, lapsed as to her Catholicity, tells O’C, a believer, that the sacramental host is great symbolism, to which O’C., quiet as a church mouse toward the end of a long evening’s conversation, made her “most famous” remark, “an economical swipe at the reductive, liberalizing view of religion,” wrote Paul Elie, senior editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux and author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003). 

O’Connor told a friend about it: 

We went at eight, and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing in such company for me to say.  . . . .  Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

Well, toward the morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most ‘portable’ person of the Trinity.  Now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.

I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘”Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”  That was all the defense I was capable of. 

While we stop with Flannery O’Connor, let us consider her comment about her mother and naming a dog Spot:

[She] once told a friend, “I always thought that if [my mother] had a dog she’d name him Spot — without irony. If I had a dog I’d name him Spot, with irony. But for all practical purposes no one would know the difference.”

“By its nature, irony is the most ephemeral of literary devices, and the wit, or malice, or affection it encrypts is inherently fugitive,” continues Paul Mankowski, S.J., in First Things (March 2003).

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Hard times ahead?

Tom Roeser offers an arresting, apocalyptic view of what would happen if Dems win the WH in ‘08.  Context is answering why Giuliani has social conservative support:

[They] may have some questions about Giuliani but they know for positive certain that no matter what Democratic president gets in, the goals of the movement will be certifiably ended-especially with appointments to the Court. There’s not even a question about that. The courts would go Left, national security would go passive, the Islamo-fascists would take heart at seeing the country repudiate the Bush legacy. Domestic terrorist strikes would increase. And something which is quite hard for the Catholic in me to rationalize-the future of Israel which is so close to the evangelical heart would be jeopardized while an ambivalent Hillary or worse yet Hamlet-like Obama would allow things to happen.

Is that grim enough for you?

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Greedy, he wrote

Cardinal George not only considers financial gain the motive force behind proposed state legislation that would widen opening for suing about sexual abuse, he said so in a letter of apology to parents of a victim of two priests, Sun-Times reports tomorrow.

“This is irresponsible, is not about the safety of children as the sponsor claims, and is clearly, to me at least, about money,” he wrote.

The victim, who is not suing, “called the letter outrageous,” Sun-Times reported.

“Victims sue for justice, not for fabulous houses,” said the man, who . . . is negotiating a settlement. “Nobody wants to live in a fabulous house that reminds you that you were molested by two priests as a boy.”

This is George at his blunt best.  He has a knack for the sharp comment that should make his coming term as bishops’ conference president interesting, if not disastrous.

The bill’s introducer, State Sen. Terry Link, a Lake County Democrat, has heard the cardinal talk this way before and has told him it’s offensive.

This is not likely to slow the cardinal down, and his no-holds-barred commentary has echoes in how auxiliary bishop Thomas Paprocki characterized increasing financial pressures from victims.

“This attack is particularly directed against bishops and priests,” he said in a recent speech, adding that the principal force behind the attacks “is none other than the devil.”

Somehow, you’d think he would reserve diabolism for a number of other heinous things.

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Bishops again

This pops up in the middle of a Chi Trib story about relieving financial worries of sued dioceses:

“Many of the bishops basically abandoned their responsibilities to their flock, and why should we now have confidence in them that they will not do so in the future?” said Robert Bennett, a Washington lawyer and former head of the bishops’ National Review Board. “Enough time has not gone by yet.”

He is brother of Bill, by the way, and former lawyer for then-Pres. Clinton.  Well-connected, that is, and presumably very sharp guy.  He and Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke have similar tales to tell, I’m sure, of the irresponsibility of bishops, she having headed the same committee and learned more than she wanted to know about those shepherds — as Tom Roeser reported for The Wanderer:

Anne Burke will always remember one session out-of-town with a nationally famous bishop who gave her complete assurance that all instances of sexual hanky-panky were brought to a dead halt in his diocese. The next morning she opened a newspaper and found that the bishop was on the front page, having welcomed a priest-sexual predator as a house guest. She called the bishop. “Yesterday you assured me that all matters involving the diocese had been cleaned up,” she said. “You know, you lied to me, didn’t you?” He said the priest was being used for a theological research job. She continued, “You lied to me, didn’t you.” “No, I didn’t.” “Well, the priest you hired was convicted.” “No he wasn’t.” “Really?” “He pled guilty. That’s what happened.” “Same thing.” “Well, not exactly-pleading guilty is not the same as being tried and found guilty.”

Burke smiled at that effort at the futile attempt to apply theological hair-splitting to the law. It may make it in a university theological seminar but not in a courtroom. “Why did he try to snow me?” she said to this reporter. “Did he think he could get away with it because-well, he didn’t.” Later she received a denunciatory letter from a bishop who said she was rude in some of her discussions with his colleagues. Then it became clear that she would never be given the title of Chairman but would continue as “interim Chairman.”

A delicate rebuke. One must not be rude to bishops for any reason. When reminded that she never graduated from the interim title, Burke just smiles. Rude or just following the mandate the bishops gave her, Anne Burke sat at her Supreme Court desk in Chicago last week and showed this Wanderer reporter another angry letter-like an earlier one, also from the Archbishop of Hartford, Henry J. Mansell which ripped the Board for “expanding their competence, responsibilities, activities and studies in a dynamic of autonomy.” A very tough letter. It concluded “Be assured of our continued rayers and best wishes.”

Anne Burke smiled quietly and said, “Continued prayers. How touching.”


Blogged with Flock

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Common sense

It’s been this kind of talk from Giuliani that has had me on his side from the start, tentatively of course, and tentatively still, but less and less so.  It’s the Islamo-fascist threat, stupid.  That and Democrat tax-and-spend-ism:

Giuliani said [Thursday in Las Vegas] the “threat of Islamic terrorism” was “something that we just have to face and be realistic about, and the reality is that many of the Democrats are not being realistic.”

He accused Democratic candidates of not being able to utter the phrase “Islamic terrorism” for fear of appearing politically incorrect.

“I’m not suggesting that any religion is bad,” he said. “We’re intelligent enough to understand that. We’re intelligent enough to make that distinction and not turn it into some kind of prejudice.”

Giuliani said it was better to err on the side of caution. “This country has never, ever, I believe, gotten in trouble by exaggerating a threat,” he said. “We’ve gotten ourselves more into trouble when we underestimate a threat.”

The Democrats, he said, are exhibiting an “almost embarrassing” eagerness to negotiate with America’s enemies.

From Reader D:

I’m open to Giuliani — for the reasons you are, plus he will not be afraid to be in Hilary’s face. I do not want a “Gentle-man” to pussy-foot around her.

I wish Mrs. Romney was married to Rudy! I heard her the other night, and she deserves to be first lady. I hope Rudy’s Mrs. is not a bimbo. I haven’t heard her say a word so it’s all subjective.

The bishops are coming out with some voting blah blah that makes me think they will again twist gullible Catholics into staying home. I want to hear that [Pope] Benedict quote from a couple years ago about — if there are 2 pro-choice candidates, you have to vote for the one that has the better platform aside from abortion.

My bumper sticker will be: “It’s pragmatism, stupid!”

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