Celebrate June - Sacred Heart of Jesus

Just remember: he has been open and forthright about what he said he would do and he is doing it. The majority of America voted him into office. So it should come as no surprise that he has proclaimed June to be dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

No. Wait. Check that.

Out You Go

A good reason to engage in legitimate defense, to protect our bishops, priests, and religious, and have able-bodied men ready for the bums rush and old heave-ho here.

The neo-pagan, like its primitive sacred predecessor, looks for new victims while feeling exceedingly self righteous in doing so. This Pentecost Sunday plot is nothing other than an endeavor to destroy the faith, reason, and morals of the revealed truth vouchsafed in the Catholic Church by fallen, depraved, and satanically-influenced humans gone to seed.

Show 'em the door and don't be gentle about it.

Insincerity

Now let's get this straight (no pun intended): the MSM hounds of hell unremitting attacks on the Catholic Church and the Holy Father for allowing predatory priests to sate their carnal appetites on minors see nothing wrong with the promulgation of intergenerational sexuality when it comes under social justice headings and/or the knocking down of the few remaining standards of traditional morality.

It was just this kind of insincerity that drove Chesterton to begin looking in earnest at the Christian faith's consistency of reason, faith, and morals.

Developed Here Means Bonkers

This should say reams to anyone with any anthropological sensibilities. As Gil Bailie recently noted, that western society tries to reconstruct itself with twenty years of sexual experimentation while rejecting five-ten thousand years of collective wisdom about being human should tell you what and who is truly "developed".

Chaput - Cans and Can't of Catholic Education

Archbishop Charles Chaput delineates the reasoning of the Church and Catholic education about a recent fiery issue facing a Denver school:

The Church does not claim that people with a homosexual orientation are “bad,” or that their children are less loved by God. Quite the opposite. But what the Church does teach is that sexual intimacy by anyone outside marriage is wrong; that marriage is a sacramental covenant; and that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman. These beliefs are central to a Catholic understanding of human nature, family and happiness, and the organization of society. The Church cannot change these teachings because, in the faith of Catholics, they are the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The policies of our Catholic school system exist to protect all parties involved, including the children of homosexual couples and the couples themselves. Our schools are meant to be “partners in faith” with parents. If parents don’t respect the beliefs of the Church, or live in a manner that openly rejects those beliefs, then partnering with those parents becomes very difficult, if not impossible. It also places unfair stress on the children, who find themselves caught in the middle, and on their teachers, who have an obligation to teach the authentic faith of the Church.

Most parents who send their children to Catholic schools want an environment where the Catholic faith is fully taught and practiced. That simply can’t be done if teachers need to worry about wounding the feelings of their students or about alienating students from their parents. That isn’t fair to anyone—including the wider school community. Persons who have an understanding of marriage and family life sharply different from Catholic belief are often people of sincerity and good will. They have other, excellent options for education and should see in them the better course for their children..More>>

WaPo - A Study in Contrasts

Compare and contrast: the print version of the WasPo's Metro section has this as a front-page story. Yet it totally dismissed this when it happened under its office windows in January.

On the one hand: 1,000 "irate" students emailing and sending vitriol to Facebook. On the other hand: half a million marchers on the streets of Washington, D. C. The former gets plaudits, back-slaps, and affirmation from the WaPo. The latter - nothing.

Methinks the WaPo is in the business of creating news (and reality?), guiding public opinion, and swaying persons in a non-heavenward direction, all to the drum beat of the spirit of the age and the prince of this world.

Making Way for Satan, Mimetically Speaking

Monsignor Charles Pope has an important notion. We need a "new" word for marriage, given the atrocity taking place in our nation's capitol. He suggests, Holy Matrimony.

Oh, and by the by, if you think that this is the end-point, the terminus, of the collapse of social mores that is anthropologically as predictable as fleas on a dog, think again. Those who believe they are engaged in breaking down "unjust" prohibitions of society will not be satisfied until they kick out of the road many, many more. This is to say, if their "alternative lifestyles" feel in any way pinched by these ancestral prohibitions, they will not rest until all hell, literally, breaks loose.

Anthropologically speaking, this break-down of cultural prohibitions is called "sacrificial preparation" (cf. Girard - Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World).

Accusing the Creator

Another reason why grabbing the microphone and speaking your mind will make you look like a fool, particularly when your earthly priorities look pretty stupid at life's end.

MSM - Whipping Up Frenzy

Mark Steyn writes: (ht: Jill Fallon)

At some point we will come to see that the developed world’s massive expansion of personal sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shrivelling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty and the right to self-defence are under continuous assault by Big Government. But who cares when Big Government lets you shag anything that moves and every city in North America hosts a grand parade to celebrate your right to do so? It’s an oddly reductive notion of individual liberty. The noisier grow the novelties of our ever more banal individualism, the more the overall societal aesthetic seems drearily homogenized—like closing time in a karaoke bar with the last sad drunks bellowing off the prompter “I did it My Way!”

And in the end even the sex doesn’t do it. In the Netherlands, the most progressive nation in Europe, the land where whatever’s your bag is cool, where naked women beckon from storefront windows, a certain ennui is palpable. Last week, the ANP news agency released a poll showing that the Dutch now derive more pleasure from going to the bathroom than from sex. It wasn’t a close-run thing: eighty per cent identified a trip to the toilet as the activity “they enjoy the most”—or, as the South African newspaper the Witness put it, “The Bog’s Better Than Bonking.” To modify Eliot, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a flush..More>>

What will precipitate legislation to protect "heteronormativity" in the concupiescent West? You recall it, don't you? You know, that whole "male and female He created them" thing that populated the planet so successfully for soo long, before sperm donors, surrogate mothers, and fertility doctors with petri dishes? Will we live to see the day of sanity in place of 'I am defined by whatever I want to excite my genitalia with, AND I get to put it to those dastardly "breeders" and monogamists?'

Personally, gentle reader, I would happily hear as of a far away shipwreck news of Hollywood's demise, the mainstream media's atrophy, and all liberal rags like the WaPo and NYT being swallowed up by the earth.

Chesterton said it long ago: news is the bizarre. It's what sells advertising. The demise of the spreading of the strange and aberrant would not hurt my feelings at all. Then, the true, good, and beautiful might have a chance once again.

Now, Try to Close It

"They should have seen this coming," said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who had opposed extending benefits to gays. "It's a Pandora's box."

Screaming Against the Truth

With more and more persecution of Mother Church by what Mark Shea calls "gay brown shirts on the march," we should listen carefully to what Archbishop Carson says in a well-worded response to homosexual advocates protesting outside the Saint Louis cathedral. Father John Zuhlsdorf reports and add his "red" comments here.

DC - Swirling Down to Paganism

The District of Columbia continues its downward spiral into self-defined liberation (read: rejection of the Judeo-Christian ethos) into paganism with "progress" of this bill. And in the hard copy of today's WaPo, a full-page ad for this sad organization appears on p. A13.

How apt. Father James Schall, S.J., explains why.

Washington, DC and Gomorrah

November 21, 2009

Sodom in the Nation's Capital

Star Parker

At a time when our country is sick, it shouldn't surprise that one our sickest places is our nation's capital.

The poverty rate of Washington, DC, almost 20 percent, is one of the highest in the nation. Its child poverty rate is the nation's highest. DC's public school system, with a graduation rate of less than 50 percent, is one of the worst in the country.

According to DC's HIV/AIDS

office, three percent of the local population has HIV or AIDS. The Administrator of this office notes that this HIV/AIDS incidence is "...higher than West Africa...on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya." And the principal way that HIV is transmitted continues to be through male homosexual activity.

Amidst this dismal picture, the DC City Council, perhaps on the theory that serving up another glass of wine is the way to help a drunk, is scheduled to vote on December 1 to legalize same sex marriage in America's capital city.

Looking at realities in Washington, DC should make clear why George Washington said "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." But the America that our first president had in mind was very different from the vision of our DC government officials.

More>>

DC vs. the Archdiocese

From the Washington Post:

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn't change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.

Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.

"If the city requires this, we can't do it," Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. "The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem"..MORE>>

"Studies Show"

There are lies, damned lies, and phony science, and the homosexual movement and its fellow travelers in the media are quite shameless in promoting them. Americans are a profoundly fair people and they want to be fair to homosexuals. And so the typical American will latch onto almost any assertion that seems broadminded especially those dressed up as science.

(But) here is the really bad news. After their assertions of phony scientific evidence and after your new and purely scientific riposte, your interlocutor will likely say something like, “I don't care whether the studies are true or not, it's what I believe.” At the end of the day, with proponents of the homosexual agenda, even unwitting ones..., it comes down not to science but to the thing that is the hardest to argue with, faith...MORE>>

NOT

This should make you more than a little slightly ill. Now we are seeing the squirm meter well into the red. NAMBLA - North American Association for Man-Boy Love Association - is not simply about queering. It is advocacy for the normalization of pedophilia.

And thus his royal I Wun-ness takes the country farther down the spiralling vortex of cultural meltdown. Well done, sir. Well done.

This Should Be Interesting

The new United Nations General Assembly president, Ali Abdussalam Treki, a veteran diplomat from Libya, says that homosexuality is "not really acceptable."

What kind of bedfellows (pun sorta intended) will be created from this development?

Maggie Gallagher

Austin Ruse at The Catholic Thing on the invaluable Maggie Gallagher.

Thumos Leads to Thuous

The thing is, there is no reason why such attempts at social engineering won't happen. Think of the "workers' paradise" (enforced; barbed wire to keep workers in, not to protect from outsiders); think North Korea today (citizens still believe they won the 1950s); think Papa Doc - François Duvalier - and the prison-camp of Haiti.

As the current health care debate in particular and economic debacle in general show, cultural shifts can and often do take place without any formal legislative or judicial leadership. When the culture's centripetal force becomes sufficiently weak, the nearest or most fascinating influence often accrues enough prestige to start large societal shifts.

What René Girard's mimetic theory shows, however, is the direction the gradient of the cultural swirl is taking us. It is the exact same place that Saint Paul astutely discerns as the ending place of sin; namely, sacrifice (Gr. thuous). For a longer explication of these anthropological realities see Paganism I, II, III.

Ending Political Correctness?

The beginning of the end? Yeah, right. Maybe, as Winny said, it is the end of the beginning (of battling boneheaded political correctness). Recently elected mayor of Doncaster, in South Yorkshire, announced "I'm not a homophobe," he said, "but I don't see why council taxpayers should pay to celebrate anyone's sexuality."