Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1239
September 27, 2011
Fr. James Schall...
...on how our elites are preparing to persecute the Church.
Our entire culture is becoming oriented to the worship of Mammon, Eros, and Power. It is a jealous trinity and will not tolerate a transcendent God forever. Happily, the real God is not mocked forever.
Our entire culture is becoming oriented to the worship of Mammon, Eros, and Power. It is a jealous trinity and will not tolerate a transcendent God forever. Happily, the real God is not mocked forever.
Latest British Chattering Class Sneer
at the Catholic Church is dissected by William Doino. You'd think that after six centuries the English elite would tire of this dreary pastime.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Country that Used to be England, the Gay Brownshirts are showing the persecuting zeal to invade privacy and stamp out free speech that will soon be on our shores and revealing the hypocritical spectacle of the "anti-bullying" bushwah for what it is:
[image error]
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Country that Used to be England, the Gay Brownshirts are showing the persecuting zeal to invade privacy and stamp out free speech that will soon be on our shores and revealing the hypocritical spectacle of the "anti-bullying" bushwah for what it is:
[image error]
On Wall Street, Laissez Faire Capitalism and Rugged Individualism
are only for when the Market is up. All that self-made metallic Randian crap vanishes when the blue chips are down.
Fr. Pavone Seriously Needs to Back Down
A reader writes:
Jury was still out for me re; the Pavone debacle. Now I get this via his Facebook:Agreed. He's destroying all the good work he has done by fanning the flames of this stuff. It's stopped being about the unborn and begun being about him. Gerard Nadal is right. And so is Ed Peters.The despicable campaign to terrorize kids with gory pictures and intimidate ordinary Catholics is wrong and is not of God. He needs to call off the dogs. He also needs to stop treating his priesthood like a jail sentence and a nuisance.
"On the phone w many leaders re how to raise hell for the abortion industry. If they think they will slow me down one iota, they're wrong."
Who's "they" here? The Catholic Church? I suppose one might read it to mean "the abortion industry" is trying to slow him down (no news there, surely) but I can't help think the wording is deliberately ambiguous.
This on top of yesterday's little gem comparing the Bishops to the Pharisees:
Fruitful meetings here in TX today re prolife work. Remember, its lawful to save lives on the Sabbath (see Mark 3:4)."
Meanwhile, no "stand down" order to his picketing fans, no protests when they compare him to the BS Dawg. Red flags, all.
More of Our Proud Death Penalty Heritage
Our youngest death penalty victim. And another tale to break your heart. Disgraceful and disgusting stories. But this is what a nation signs on for when it wants to maximize the death penalty and cheer for the maximum number of people put to death. I spoke the other day of Christian *zeal* for the death penalty. Arguments for the death penalty seem to me, in the end, to always boil down to saying, "We are willing to say yes to the disgusting executions of these people so that we get to kill Lawrence Brewer, Ted Bundy, and Timothy McVeigh. We *love* killing those guys (hence the cheers for Rick "Maximum Death" Perry) and are willing to kill a few victims like this as human sacrifices to that love. Oh sure, we don't have insanely racist verdicts like these so much today. But we still have police, judges and juries who make bad calls for whatever reason (and governors without a single qualm of conscience who brag about their kill counts). That's the statistical deal that's being cut: better the innocent should perish than that the guilty survive.
The Church's basic argument is, if you try minimalize killing unless absolutely necessary, you will not have to make up rationalizations for why killing George Stinney, Jr. was "justice" and you will not have to explain why a Christian is longing for a chance to kill somebody.
The Church's basic argument is, if you try minimalize killing unless absolutely necessary, you will not have to make up rationalizations for why killing George Stinney, Jr. was "justice" and you will not have to explain why a Christian is longing for a chance to kill somebody.
September 23, 2011
Apologies and Some Clarifications Re: Death Penalty
I got het up yesterday about the execution of Troy Davis and spoke out of turn about his "innocence" when what I really was protesting was the dodginess of the evidence against him, dodginess that seemed to me to introduce an element of reasonable doubt concerning his guilt for the crime for which he was executed.
This in turn led to understandable confusion among some readers given the fact that, innocent or guilty, I oppose the infliction of the death penalty. Some people assumed (wrongly) that I was trying to say anything just to stop infliction of the death penalty, which was not my intent. You don't (as I have been at pains to say for some time to Liars for Jesus) achieve good ends by evil means. And lying that somebody is innocent when they are not is an example of that. So I would not lie to achieve that end.
What really happened was this: I had an emotional outburst and, as is my custom, indulged hyperbole. That was wrong.
Permit me, however, to talk about what provoked the outburst. It was provoked by a number of things, or rather one thing that keeps manifesting itself in lots of different ways. That one thing is Christian *zeal* for death. That zeal for death expresses itself in numerous ways, such as Rick Perry's conscience-free cock-a-whoop swaggering and boasting over being the most efficient executioner in Texas history and his cloudless lack of concern over the question of executing people who may be innocent. It manifests in treatment of Just War theory, not as an attempt to minimize killing, but as a sort of maze to be navigated with the hope and promise that we will *get* to start killing if we just outwit the Church's ivory tower restrictions on "real world" brutality. It manifests in the utterly appalling and embarrassing sophistry of Catholic torture advocates over the past decade. It manifests in the zealous Christian defenses of the slaughter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki every August. It manifests in the open and naked contempt heaped on Evangelium Vitae, the Catechism, Popes JPII and Benedict (and virtually every bishop in the world), when the Church's very clear desire to abolish the death penalty is bruited. Minimum Daily Adult Requirement Catholicism is rife on this question. The argument is perpetually made that because the death penalty is not intrinsically immoral, opposition to it is obviously stupid, the abolitionist is somehow mysteriously supporting abortion, and the whole thing can be blown off as "liberal". So I get mail from embarrassing "witnesses" to the compassion of Jesus like this:
I've even seen appeals to the glories of the death penalty like this:
The bottom line is and remains this: The Church does not say the death penalty is intrinsically immoral. So what? The Church is on the side of saving and redeeming human life, not snuffing it out for the sake of cost efficiency. So the Magisterium--that would be the teaching office of the Church founded by Jesus Christ to conserve and articulate the Tradition--urges minimal use of the death penalty with an eye toward abolishing wherever possible. That is the teaching of the Church and those who are at war with this teaching are, in fact, dissenting Catholic every bit as much as those who are at war with the Church's teaching on contraception. Something does not have to be dogma (as, for instance, Humanae Vitae, like Evangelium Vitae, is not dogma) for it to be normative teaching of the Magisterium to which we owe our obedience and not our weasel-worded dissent and contempt.
So: Watching this spectacle of *eagerness* to kill and the (as I took it) reluctance to take a look at the reasonable doubt about Davis, I got ticked. What bugged me was not that I was certain he was innocent, but the apparent disinterest in finding out. If I'm wrong about the facts in Davis' case, I can live with that. I'm opposed to the DP nonetheless (per Evangelium Vitae). But cases where there's a reasonable doubt that we are even executing the guilty just exacerbate the issue, because so many Christians are willing to fight for the death penalty, to be *zealous* for death, despite the fact that they *know* this means a certain percentage of the victims are going to be innocent. That's because our legal system is not perfect. To embrace the DP is, at the end of the day, to say "Better the innocent should perish than the guilty survive." I don't buy that "Kill all! God will know his own!" moral reasoning. Neither do two Popes and virtually all of the world's bishops. There are other reasons I oppose the DP too, but that's not a small one.[image error]
This in turn led to understandable confusion among some readers given the fact that, innocent or guilty, I oppose the infliction of the death penalty. Some people assumed (wrongly) that I was trying to say anything just to stop infliction of the death penalty, which was not my intent. You don't (as I have been at pains to say for some time to Liars for Jesus) achieve good ends by evil means. And lying that somebody is innocent when they are not is an example of that. So I would not lie to achieve that end.
What really happened was this: I had an emotional outburst and, as is my custom, indulged hyperbole. That was wrong.
Permit me, however, to talk about what provoked the outburst. It was provoked by a number of things, or rather one thing that keeps manifesting itself in lots of different ways. That one thing is Christian *zeal* for death. That zeal for death expresses itself in numerous ways, such as Rick Perry's conscience-free cock-a-whoop swaggering and boasting over being the most efficient executioner in Texas history and his cloudless lack of concern over the question of executing people who may be innocent. It manifests in treatment of Just War theory, not as an attempt to minimize killing, but as a sort of maze to be navigated with the hope and promise that we will *get* to start killing if we just outwit the Church's ivory tower restrictions on "real world" brutality. It manifests in the utterly appalling and embarrassing sophistry of Catholic torture advocates over the past decade. It manifests in the zealous Christian defenses of the slaughter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki every August. It manifests in the open and naked contempt heaped on Evangelium Vitae, the Catechism, Popes JPII and Benedict (and virtually every bishop in the world), when the Church's very clear desire to abolish the death penalty is bruited. Minimum Daily Adult Requirement Catholicism is rife on this question. The argument is perpetually made that because the death penalty is not intrinsically immoral, opposition to it is obviously stupid, the abolitionist is somehow mysteriously supporting abortion, and the whole thing can be blown off as "liberal". So I get mail from embarrassing "witnesses" to the compassion of Jesus like this:
The Judeo-Christian DEATH PENALTY!!!!Then the King will say to them, "I was in prison and you thirsted for my blood, because I was expensive." And people wonder why Christianity is repellent to many people.
Jesus told us that IN OUR PERSONAL LIVES, we should forgive the people who wrong us, 7 times 70 times. However, Jesus NEVER told the GOVERNMENT to forgive murderers and rapists and terrorists 7 times 70 times.
On the contrary, God, who is absolutely PRO-LIFE and who knows the full value of each human life, told Moses that the GOVERNMENT should promptly execute anyone duly convicted a HEINOUS CRIME.
CAUTION: Today we have APOSTATES who consider themselves ... HOLY THAN GOD ... WISER THAN GOD ... MORE LOVING THAN GOD ... , who think hard-working taxpayers should reward duly convicted heinous criminals with a lifetime of ... FREE housing and meals and medical care and education and recreation ... .
PS: The LIFE-IN-PRISON SENTENCE often costs taxpayers more than $1 Million ... !!!!!!!!!
I've even seen appeals to the glories of the death penalty like this:
Don't any of you self-righteous death penalty opponents ever read the Bible? As he was hanging on the cross Jesus promised Paradise to the felon who confessed the justice of the death penalty (cf. Luke 23: 39-43).The strange conflation of dogmatic death penalty maximalism with some sort of core doctrine of Catholic faith is a classic illustration of how a tribal shibboleth can get fuddled with the heart of the faith. For, of course, the actual biblical teaching is that Jesus promises paradise to the one who placed his faith in Him, not to those who place their faith in the death penalty. Such enthusiasts for killing never seem to get around to acknowledging the corollary to their argument: namely, that not just the death penalty, but crucifixion is, by their twisted logic, sanctioned as legitimate.
The bottom line is and remains this: The Church does not say the death penalty is intrinsically immoral. So what? The Church is on the side of saving and redeeming human life, not snuffing it out for the sake of cost efficiency. So the Magisterium--that would be the teaching office of the Church founded by Jesus Christ to conserve and articulate the Tradition--urges minimal use of the death penalty with an eye toward abolishing wherever possible. That is the teaching of the Church and those who are at war with this teaching are, in fact, dissenting Catholic every bit as much as those who are at war with the Church's teaching on contraception. Something does not have to be dogma (as, for instance, Humanae Vitae, like Evangelium Vitae, is not dogma) for it to be normative teaching of the Magisterium to which we owe our obedience and not our weasel-worded dissent and contempt.
So: Watching this spectacle of *eagerness* to kill and the (as I took it) reluctance to take a look at the reasonable doubt about Davis, I got ticked. What bugged me was not that I was certain he was innocent, but the apparent disinterest in finding out. If I'm wrong about the facts in Davis' case, I can live with that. I'm opposed to the DP nonetheless (per Evangelium Vitae). But cases where there's a reasonable doubt that we are even executing the guilty just exacerbate the issue, because so many Christians are willing to fight for the death penalty, to be *zealous* for death, despite the fact that they *know* this means a certain percentage of the victims are going to be innocent. That's because our legal system is not perfect. To embrace the DP is, at the end of the day, to say "Better the innocent should perish than the guilty survive." I don't buy that "Kill all! God will know his own!" moral reasoning. Neither do two Popes and virtually all of the world's bishops. There are other reasons I oppose the DP too, but that's not a small one.[image error]
Prayer Request and Praise Report
A reader writes:
A while back, I lost my job, and came to this community of readers for prayers that I might find employment. Well, the good news is that I did, in fact, get a job a couple of weeks ago. The bad news is that last night my girlfriend lost hers. She just got a new apartment that she won't be able to afford, and she is justifiably freaking out. She's extraordinarily lucky in that her termination doesn't kick in until the middle of October, so she has a cushion, but this is very distressing nonetheless. She's an eminently qualified young woman with tons of office management experience, and I'm pretty sure she should have no difficulty finding work, but with the economy being what it is, who can really say at this point other than the Lord?Father, we thank you for hearing our prayer for your servant and giving him a job. We ask that you would do the same for your daughter, and that you would sow peace between her and her parents and in her heart. Mother Mary and St. Joseph the Worker, pray for her and all concerned here.[image error]
We took some time and prayed about it, and I've been trying to encourage her and help her find some hope. I've told her she needs to trust God's going to provide and that she should approach him, not with pleading and fear, but the way a daughter might ask her father for something.
She's also extremely worried about telling her parents. I don't know her family *that* well, but she expects her parents to react extremely negatively rather than with the care and support I think most of us could reasonably expect from ours.
Anyway, long story short, I would appreciate prayers for her quick re-employment, for her peace of mind, and for her family to find some compassion for her difficulties.
I also would like to know if anyone has any leads on potential employment for an intelligent, organized young woman with five years of experience in reception and office administration.
Matt Labash has disappointing news...
...for people who hate Obama so bad they were hoping he was the antichrist.
It is a curious thing, by the way, that phenomenon (confined entirely to certain apocalyptic Christian circles) of *hoping* that somebody is the antichrist. It's a recurring Team Sport that is sort of like doing crossword puzzles to fill up time for that particular subculture. It's not really serious typically, since so many antichrist candidates have come and gone over the years without that subculture stocking up on munitions, food, water, bomb shelters, and chip implant removal kits. It's sort of like the Left's routine backchat about Bush being Hitler. As Kathy Shaidle used to point out to critics who enjoyed indulging in such bored gossip, "If Bush is Hitler, why aren't you lampshade?" It was unserious. A sort of polite in-group code language for establishing one's bona fides. In the same way, some Christians chat idly over their morning cuppa about Obama the Antichrist, not because they really believe it, but because it's What You Say to telegraph your political and tribal allegiance in a sort of shorthand. A few years ago, Clinton (Hillary and/or Bill) was Antichrist. So was Saddam. Khomeini, Gorbachev (Eek! He has a mark on his forehead!) and numerous others have done their turn. Meanwhile, antichrist speculators go on working, saving for retirement, rooting for their favorite ball club, and sleeping like babies each night. It's a sort of odd hobby, not a real theological commitment.
It is a curious thing, by the way, that phenomenon (confined entirely to certain apocalyptic Christian circles) of *hoping* that somebody is the antichrist. It's a recurring Team Sport that is sort of like doing crossword puzzles to fill up time for that particular subculture. It's not really serious typically, since so many antichrist candidates have come and gone over the years without that subculture stocking up on munitions, food, water, bomb shelters, and chip implant removal kits. It's sort of like the Left's routine backchat about Bush being Hitler. As Kathy Shaidle used to point out to critics who enjoyed indulging in such bored gossip, "If Bush is Hitler, why aren't you lampshade?" It was unserious. A sort of polite in-group code language for establishing one's bona fides. In the same way, some Christians chat idly over their morning cuppa about Obama the Antichrist, not because they really believe it, but because it's What You Say to telegraph your political and tribal allegiance in a sort of shorthand. A few years ago, Clinton (Hillary and/or Bill) was Antichrist. So was Saddam. Khomeini, Gorbachev (Eek! He has a mark on his forehead!) and numerous others have done their turn. Meanwhile, antichrist speculators go on working, saving for retirement, rooting for their favorite ball club, and sleeping like babies each night. It's a sort of odd hobby, not a real theological commitment.
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