Jerome Murat - Illusionist

[ht: Maggie's Farm]

Gospel of Life - Chaput

"MANY SOCIAL ISSUES ARE important," writes Archbishop Charles Chaput in his important little book, Render Unto Caesar. "Many require our attention. But some issues have more weight than others. Deliberately killing innocent human life, or standing by and allowing it, dwarfs all other social issues ... the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin warned against the misuse of his 'seamless garment' imagery to falsely invest different social issues with the same moral gravity" [211]. Chaput quotes:

Adopting a consistent ethic of life, the Catholic Church promotes a broad spectrum of issues ... Opposition to abortion and euthanasia does not excuse indifference to those who suffer from poverty, violence and injustice. Any politics of human life must work to resist the violence of war and scandal of capital punishment. Any politics of human dignity must seriously address issues of racism, poverty, hunger, employment, education, housing and health care. Therefore, Catholics should eagerly involve themselves as advocates for the weak and marginalized in all those areas.

Catholic public officials are obliged to address each of these issues as they seek to build consistent policies which promote respect for the human person at all stages. But being "right" in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding direct attacks on innocent human life {emphasis in original}.

Indeed, the failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable stages renders suspect any claims to the "rightness" of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community. If we understand the human person as "the temple of the Holy Spirit" - the living house of God - then these latter issues fall logically into place as the crossbeams and walls of that house. All direct attacks on innocent human life, such as abortion and euthanasia strike at the house's foundation {emphasis in original}. These directly and immediately violate the human person's most fundamental right - the right to life. Neglect of these issues is the equivalent of building our house on sand. Such attacks cannot help but lull the social conscience in ways ultimately destructive of other human rights.

- U. S. Catholic Bishops, Living the Gospel of Life,
quoted in Render Unto Caesar

Defensa de la Catedral de Neuquén

A pro-abortion rally meets a determined band of Catholic men protecting a cathedral while praying the Rosary. And this is what happens: [h/t: New Advent]

For the Record - Diane West

For the record, Townhall's Diane West writes, We Are Losing Europe to the Scimitar.

You Go, Too - Cantalamessa

Gospel Commentary for 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

By Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap

ROME, SEPT. 19, 2008 (Zenit.org).- The parable about the workers sent out at different times to work in the vineyard has always caused big problems for readers of the Gospel. Is it right for the owner of the vineyard to pay the same wage to those who have worked for only an hour and those who have worked the whole day? Does this not violate the principle of just recompense? Today workers' unions would rise up together to denounce any owner of a company who did this.

The difficulty we are experiencing here stems from a certain equivocation. One thinks of the problem of recompense in the abstract and in general or in reference to eternal recompense in heaven. Seen in this way, it would effectively contradict the principle according to which God "will repay each one as his work deserves" (Romans 2:6). But Jesus is talking about a specific situation, a very precise case. The only wage that is given to everyone is the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus has brought to the earth; it is the possibility of entering into the messianic salvation to be a part of it. The parable begins by saying that "the Kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who went out at dawn ..."

Read all of You Go Into the Vineyard, Too.

Rossetti - PRB

The Passover in the Holy Family (1856) - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Scimitar Colonists - Wilders

Sometimes the depth of an insight opens out in front of you and leaves you a bit sweaty in the palms of your hands: “I prefer to call them ‘colonists’. Muslim colonists. Because they have not come here to integrate, but to take over the lot, to make us submit.”

Beer Hall Tactics?

Get ‘In Their Face’ - American Putsch? A snarling Barack Hussein Obama tries to move his masses to less-than-American tacts. Not a pretty sight.

Let me predict: a 'Young O League' that will report to party officers if parents speak ill of the mighty O ...

Lev - The Cross Scorned and Revered

Dream of Constantine

Elizabeth Lev gives a moving account of the History of the Feast of the Exaltation (Zenit).

Bobos - Shaken Not Stirred

If you wanted to make an entire nation feel off balance, anxious, and insecure, what would you do: this? or this? or both?

Let's face it. Bobo's ("bourgeois bohemians" - upper-middle-class meritocrats who root themselves simultaneously in the countercultural 60's and greedy 80's) are easy pickings for anybody who shakes their financial-security trees. These are turbulent days for them.

I'm blessed to have had operable cancer within the last five months, and an appendectomy within the last seventy-two hours, so I feel I carry some credibility here. Security isn't found in a great portfolio.

Let me pass on a little advice to any Bobo who may be reading this (I know, I know - not bloody likely):

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroys, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroy, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be."

- Jesus, Matt. 6:19-21

Otherwise, you too will be easy pickings with the whole Wall Street meltdown thing ... not to mention terrorists, politicians right and left, or any other kind of con artist.

Financial Crisis

What Our Lord has to say about the present panic on Wall Street can be found here.

Rescue and Deliverance

From the journals of James Hartline comes a message of hope and courage for those who suffer from same sex attraction:

My journals will reveal the hope of deliverance from homosexuality that is available to every human being that seeks the power to be set free. Where there was once so little hope in our society, God is now saying through me, that there is a new wind blowing across these United States, a wind that brings refreshment to the thirsty souls who are bound up in sexual depravity. Things are now changing in our nation. We are not of the same old stale religion that was willing to sacrifice a generation to the deviancy of unfulfilling sexual urges. No, we are so much more than what has been seen in previous generations. The fires of deliverance have begun to burn in our nation and these awesome flames shall not be extinguished.

It is, perhaps, the most evil of all of the devil's assignments, that an arrangement has been made to allow members of the clergy to stand in pulpits under the sacrificial cross of Jesus Christ while such clergy proceed to tell their congregations that being involved in homosexuality is not a sin, but rather the act of two people who love and care for each other. This deception must be challenged by the true servants of the Lord because the eternal destiny of souls is on the line. With the Lord's help, I fully intend to battle against this deception and to contend for every lost soul trapped in the snare of sexual depravity ...

Read all of How I Overcame 30 Years of Homosexuality -- From The Journal of James Hartline. [h/t: Spirit Daily]

Sanctity of Life vs. Pagan Politics

In our day, sanctity-of-life issues are foundational - not because of anyone's "religious" views about abortion, although these are important; but because the act of dehumanizing and killing the unborn child attacks human dignity in a uniquely grave way. Deliberately killing the innocent is always, inexcusably wrong. It sets a pattern of contempt for every other aspect of human dignity. In redefining when human life begins and what is and isn't a human person, the logic behind permissive abortion makes all human rights politically contingent.

- Archbishop Charles Chaput, Render Unto Caesar [207]

From a mimetic theory point of view, seeking the chief executive office of the land while calling oneself in Orwellian doublespeak a "Christian" and consistently voting against the most innocent, voiceless victims of the abortuaries of the land can mean only one thing: one wants the power that "makes all human rights politically contingent."

Of course, one will do so as proponents of the primitive sacred always do today, by claiming to stand up for "change" and for the victims of intolerance. But, as Archbishop Chaput continues:

Today's Herodians are better dressed, better fed, better educated, and usually have better public relations counsel, but their message really hasn't changed much. In their mistreatment of the innocent - beginning with the unborn child - they tell us they must deal in the politics of realism; that this is the way of the world. And in a sense, they're right. But the task of the Christian is to change that. [206]

So, Lord, An Appendix is for ... What?

Just when my Principal thought it was safe to put me back in a classroom: Appendicitis!

Perhaps the only reason for creating humans with an appendix is to provide yet another opportunity for happy Catholics to offer it up.

Interiority & Metaphysical Realism

(I)t is by ethical acts that persons become good - or, through unethical actions, evil. Yet it is hard to see how persons could become morally realised - qualified in a new way in their own reality - unless the being of the good became synthesised with themselves in a new mode. Metaphysical realism is needful if human beings are to take nobility as their natural goal. In a morally debilitated age (one only has to think of the often reported absence of a moral dimension from much State education), a Christian philosophy has to put such nobility - the natural analogue of sanctity - before people with all the persuasiveness it can command.

[ ... ]

In the economy of the saving revelation centred on Jesus Christ, the triune God God deepens our human interiority by opening it to himself. 'In the communion of grace with the Trinity, man's "living area" is broadened and lifted up to the supernatural level of divine life' (John Paul II). In this, a special place is held in the Catholic understanding by the Mother of God who, thanks to her unique receptivity to the triune God's gracing man in Christ, formed the locus of these changed dimensions. By her faith 'first at the Annunciation and then fully at the foot of the Cross, an interior space was opened up with humanity which the eternal Father can fill "with every spiritual blessing" (Eph 1:3)' (JPII).

- Aidan Nichols, Christendom Awake!

Jibing Against the Goad - NYT & WP

Fearful that the sheen is off the candidate in their pockets, the New York Times holds a smear pep rally, while the Washington Post plays a peppy condescending atheism rag on the inside-the-beltway honky-tonk about Sarah Palin's belief and dependence upon God.

The question they should be asking is: Who is going to believe them?

Corpus Christianum

It is nice to know that the concept and concern of chivalry, however generally and out of context, is being lauded today.

Consider, if you feel so called, chivalry from a Marian perspective and under the protectorate of Mother Church. Corpus Christianum may not lay on your shoulders a vocation to slay dragons (other than those in your heart), but you will find ample opportunity to ride forth each day praying and working for the renewal of Christendom by striving to fulfill the Two Great Commandments of Our Lord and His Lady. Trust and obedience in them; humility and charity before all.

Deo gratias - Ad majorem Dei gloriam

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Channel 4 Scimitar Bias

Britain's Channel 4 accused by several Catholic priests of being unfair in its treatment of different faiths.

They claim it recently showed a whole season of broadly positive programmes on Islam while a "Da Vinci Code-style" documentary on Christianity cast doubt on the validity of the Pope.

In addition, they say the Channel 4 website treats the history and beliefs of Islam more reverently than it does Christianity.

It comes just days after the BBC was accused of pandering to Muslims by Hindu and Sikh leaders, who claimed the corporation makes a disproportionately large number of programmes about Islam.

Fr Ray Blake, a leading Catholic blogger who is a parish priest in Brighton, said: "I don't think it's fair towards Christianity. There seems to be a rather supine attitude to Islam and a trivialising attitude to Catholicism. I find it worrying.

"Channel 4 has shown quite serious discussions about Islam but nothing that treats Christianity in the same way."

But not to worry. A spokesman for Channel 4 denied it favoured Islam over other religions. He said: "Channel 4's Commissioning Editor for Religion, Aaqil Ahmed, commissions programmes on the basis of their merit, and our output reflect a wide range of beliefs and faiths."

See? No worries, mate.