Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 87

The Strange Need for Ash Wednesday

My latest over at the Catholic Weekly. Here’s a taste: One of the paradoxes of life in liturgical Churches is the odd popularity of Ash Wednesday. People who resent the very idea of Holy Days of Obligation come in droves to the liturgy of Ash Wednesday, even though it is not a Holy Day. Indeed, […]

Had a wonderful chat with Br. Guy Consolmagno…

the Director of the Vatican Observatory. The man is a hoot! You gotta hear this one!

Consistent Life Ethic Means Listening to Saints, Not Politicians

Charlie Camosy interviews Jessica Keating of the Office of Human Dignity and Life Initiatives in the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame: The story of how you came to the pro-life movement is an interesting one. Can you share a bit of it? I really stumbled into the pro-life movement. I received […]

Now this is using your charism for the least of these!

One of the greatest chefs in the world wants to feed the hungry: For chefs, worldwide renown often leads to lucrative expansion deals: Restaurants in tourism capitals like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Vegas, and Dubai are almost a given. That’s one reason why it’s so surprising that Massimo Bottura, the chef at Modena’s Osteria Francescana — one of […]

The Trick

Rev. William Barber is absolutely right: Most pastors say they preach the truth. The Rev. William Barber also delivers sermons on another topic: “the trick.” The trick is Barber’s term for something that he describes as a weapon of mass distraction. It stymied the leaders of the populist movement in late 19th century. It vexed union leaders who promoted […]

Christianism and its Legacy of Heresy and Phony Hagiography

Franklin Graham declares Trump sin-free since receiving the Sacrament of Inauguration: Franklin Graham: Trump stopped sinning when he became President. pic.twitter.com/5zpT4lu4ou — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 24, 2018 The last we heard from the Apostle to the Rich White Males, he was declaring Trump forgiven for sleeping with a porn star while Melania recovered from […]

Photos of the Kids Killed in Parkland…

…are here. And below, summarizing the “prolife” Christianist rebuttal, is Joe the Plumber: Those heartless, soul-dead words were spoken to the parent of a gun slaughter victim and summarize the absolute life-denying callousness and selfishness of Christianism. I now await the complaints in my combox over how “mean” I am to butchers and their enablers.

If you want vocations, make disciples

Sherry Weddell wrote this a couple of years ago.  It’s more pertinent than ever: I know that many of us have had the wind knocked out of our sails a bit by the fairly grim news about the state of American Catholicism revealed in the Pew Forum’s 2014 US Religious Study which was made public […]

The good news is that we belong to a Teaching Church

And that Church has already put it’s very considerable brain to the question of gun violence and already has made proposals on some concrete ways of addressing it. We can act now, if we are willing.  It really is that simple.  It comes down to a binary choice.  If, when a slaughter occurs, your first, […]

The Accomplice-in-Chief

This picture of the butcher of Parkland… is absolutely related to Trump’s choice to cut millions from a gun background check system. And his choice to cut funding to dealing with right wing domestic terrorism.  And his choice to make sure that guns were easily available to the mentally ill. He and his party are […]