Adventures in Catholic cognitive dissonance: Sainted Pope J2P2 in 2001 gave the red hat to McCarrick, now charged with sex crimes from the '70s

Ex-Cardinal McCarrick charged with sexually assaulting teen

 

Two things are true here.

 

Pope John Paul II indeed made mistakes in these matters. He "covered up" predatory homosexuality in the Roman Catholic Church, and he elevated monsters like McCarrick.

 

Pope Francis, who defrocked McCarrick in 2019, is also out to sully the reputation of the traditionalism and conservatism J2P2 resurrected in the church in response to the liberalism of Vatican II, which Francis supports, most recently shown by his re-imposition of restrictions on the Latin Mass. 

 

The biggest problem for Catholics in our time has been the clash between the sexual revolution and the asceticism required of clergy, which, however, has been a problem since it became required over a thousand years ago.

 

Tradition which ignores the font of it is worthless, and ultimately destructive. The church needs priests who make love to women instead of who fake love with little boys.

 

Do we not have the right to the company of a believing wife, like the other apostles and the Lord's brothers and Cephas?

  

-- I Corinthians 9:5

The man of the formula "True God and True Man" is a poor man

 

Man is God's image; but a poor man is

Christ's stamp to boot: both images regard.

-- George Herbert (1593-1633)

With vote on separation delayed until Aug 2022, 89 Methodist congregations have paid hefty fees to leave early in 2020-21 to date

Though the disaffiliations represent a sliver of the more than 31,000 United Methodist churches nationwide, they show that some churches are willing to take the hard way out of the UMC. ...

To depart with property, churches can use a provision added by the 2019 special session of the General Conference, allowing churches to disaffiliate for “reasons of conscience” related to human sexuality. This addendum is sometimes called Section 2553.

Even under Section 2553 disaffiliation requires churches to pay hefty financial obligations to their conferences: several years of contributions to the pension and payment of two years of aportionments, money local churches give to support the conference and denomination. Though not specified in Section 2553, some conferences also require churches to pay a percentage of the church’s total assets. The annual conferences must also vote to release a church. But if churches waited until the protocol ’s approval, they could walk away with their buildings and no major fees.

More.

 

Top administrator for US Conference of Catholic Bishops resigns after Monsignor linked to gay bars and dating app

Pink as the day is long.

Story.

You'd think these people would be more circumspect when they're already being inundated with criticism from all sides.

 

Canada churches set ablaze by hysterical anti-Christian fanatics and racists

US media shamefully justified a string of Canadian church burnings:

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015 that at least 3,200 students died, later revising that figure to 4,100. The No. 1 cause of death was tuberculosis; influenza hit hard, too. Far from home, children were often buried on site, their graves marked with wooden crosses, most of which deteriorated and disappeared.

So this year’s “discoveries” are better called “confirmations.” As Assembly of First Nations national chief Perry Bellegarde declared, “While it is not new to find graves at former residential schools in Canada, it’s always crushing to have that chapter’s wounds exposed.”

Yet the US press treated the news as if Canada had been hiding genocidal death camps. ...

Those headlines were false — according to all three chiefs who made the discoveries. “This is not a mass grave site, this is just unmarked graves,” Cowessess First Nation chief Cadmus Delorme said of the biggest site. Indeed, the remains aren’t even believed to be all of children. A band leader said the site was a community cemetery, including graves of nonindigenous people — unmarked because wooden markers had decomposed.

Church critics used that framing to justify, and even encourage, the rash of arsons. “Burn it all down,” tweeted the head of the BC Civil Liberties Association and the chair of the Newfoundland Canadian Bar Association Branch. “It’s very dangerous to conflate the string of church fires with violence against mosques,” activist Nora Loreto said, insisting they weren’t “hate crimes” — in other words, the Catholic Church had it coming. ...

Natives don’t believe the arsonists are their fellow indigenous. The attackers “must have no feelings or respect for elders or ancestors” who built the churches, said 90-year-old Carrie Allison.

One fire destroyed six stained-glass windows created to show indigenous culture can coexist with Catholicism. For mainstream media, though, the “genocide” story was too good to check: They could attack the Roman church and whites in one fell swoop. Yet it’s Canada’s natives who are being traumatized yet again.

The entire story about the native graves in Canada is made up

The Meaning of the Native Graves:

It is very important to note that the entire story is made up. First, we have always known that many children died in the residential schools, which were active through the 19th and 20th centuries. Child mortality was relatively high during that period to begin with; Indian mortality overall was astronomically high; and the Church-run schools for native children were systemically underfunded by the government, resulting in subpar facilities and inadequate medical care. Second, the sites almost certainly include the graves of Christian adults from the neighboring communities, as Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation admitted with respect to the Marieval Indian Residential School, where an estimated 751 burials were detected by radar last month. The “mass graves” of public hysteria are, in fact, the ordered and intentional burial sites of people we always knew were dead, and who died of more or less natural causes. In more literate times, we might have called that a cemetery. 

In the popular imagination at Shakespeare's time, the religious Separatist is about as low as the scurvy politician

And 't be any way, it must be with valour;

for policy I hate: I had as lief be a Brownist

as a politician.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 2

There is no need of censorship in a Christian society, because its citizens censor themselves

There is but one way I know of conversing safely with all men, that is, not by concealing what we say or do, but by saying or doing nothing that deserves to be concealed.

-- Alexander Pope

Pope Francis, Vatican II reactionary, reinstates restrictions on Old Latin Mass, echoing reactionary Biden administration

The old symbolism of the priest facing the altar with the congregation, emphasizing the unity of priest and congregants, is completely lost on these people:

In 2007, [Pope] Benedict removed a rule requiring a local bishop’s permission to celebrate the old Latin Mass. Francis not only reinstated that rule but added other restrictions.  

In dioceses where groups celebrate the old rite, also known as the Tridentine Mass, bishops must also work to determine that the celebrants “do not deny the validity and the legitimacy” of the Second Vatican Council, which helped shape many church reforms. Among those changes were the popularization of Mass in the vernacular, making worship more accessible to regular Catholics.

In a letter accompanying his decision, Francis said he was “saddened” that the use of the old Latin Mass often doubles as a rejection of the Second Vatican Council, under the argument that its reforms “betrayed” the church’s true traditions. But Francis said that to doubt the council is to “doubt the Holy Spirit himself.”

“The great issue for the Catholic Church has always been the question of change,” said David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture. The old Latin Mass had become “a wedge issue, to divide, to elevate one part of the church as superior to other parts of the church,” Gibson said. “And that is intolerable.”  

In the Latin Mass, the priest often faces away from the congregation. The rite also includes the use of particular — often elaborate — vestments.

More.

 

Meanwhile the Biden administration, which has deliberately ceded control of the US southern border with Mexico where tens of thousands of illegals now routinely cross seeking "asylum", has put its foot down and publicly warned Cubans fleeing communist tyranny that they are not welcome in the United States, resurrecting the intransigence of the late Clinton administration made infamous in the affair of Elian Gonzalez, who was forcibly repatriated to Cuba.

Cuban refugees do not make reliable Democrat voters.

 

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Imagine how unreliable "eyewitness" accounts from antiquity must be when normal vision not requiring correction is such a rarity anyway

 

 

 

Reported here: 

In 2016, approximately 76 percent of adults in the U.S. stated they wore some form of vision correction.  

Widespread use of eyeglasses is an outgrowth of their late invention, during the Italian Renaissance, with ubiquitous production with plastic lenses dating only from the 1980s. Before that, things looked, well, kind of grim for an overwhelming majority of people.

St. Paul, who probably had very bad eyes from birth, yet boasted that he had seen the Lord.

Am I not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? are not ye my work in the Lord? 

-- 1 Corinthians 9:1

Paul's conversion, however, bespeaks a probably lifelong preoccupation with his poor eyesight. It specifically involves being blinded, and then scales falling from his eyes when he recovers his sight well enough to be considered normal again, and this again miraculously (Acts 9:8f., 18, 27).

But evidently this was not a full restoration of his sight.

According to Acts 23:1ff. Paul still could not spot the high priest in a crowd of people he was addressing. He says the Galatians would have given him their own eyes if they could have (Galatians 4:15), admitting that he is infirm (Galatians 4:13), and that he must write to them using "large letters" (Galatians 6:11). The Galatians knew the man and the truth about the man.

By the time he is dictating Romans, he is now older and his eyes have grown so bad that he requires an assistant to write the epistle. This person even makes an appearance at the end of it in order to explain why the penmanship doesn't match Paul's (I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord. -- Romans 16:22).

We are to believe Paul was granted a miracle of an appearance of Jesus, but not a complete healing.

Like so much else outside the miracles recounted in the Synoptic tradition performed by the historical Jesus, one cannot help but feel let down by these details involving the achievements of the risen Saviour.

And a post-conversion St. Paul who could not see well enough to recognize the high priest may reasonably be doubted to have been able to recognize Jesus pre-conversion, risen or otherwise.

Isn't that obvious from Paul's own testimony?

Who art thou, Lord? -- Acts 9:5

Who art thou, Lord? -- Acts 22:8

Who art thou, Lord? -- Acts 26:15

War, what is it good for?

Heraclitus sits apart from the other philosophers in Raphael's School of Athens

War is the father of all and king of all; and some he shows as gods, others as men, some he makes slaves, others free.

-- Heraclitus, Diels-Kranz, 22B53

The vortex of death has swallowed 109 billion and counting

 

https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/

The gath'ring number, as it moves along,

Involves a vast involuntary throng;

Who gently drawn, and struggling less and less,

Roll in her vortex, and her power confess.

 

-- Alexander Pope

"Huge majorities" of the Presbyterian Church in America twice "voted to uphold the Christian sexual morality of the last two millennia"

But its elites "are out of touch with the denomination's grass roots."

More. 

Not to be confused with the pro-gay PCUSA, which had 3.1 million members in 1984 (now down 60% in the 35 years to 2020).

 

1.24 million members

0.38 million members

Jesus was no Calvinist, and neither was Hooker: No one prays for God's will to be done, if it already is and ever will be

Our Saviour himself, being to set down the perfect idea of that which we are to pray and wish for on earth, did not teach to pray or wish for more than only that here it might be with us, as with them it is in heaven.

 

-- Richard Hooker

 

Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven (γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς). 

 

-- Matthew 6:10

 

 

Fashion is as unpredictable as the weather

And sooner may a gulling weather-spy, 

By drawing forth heav'n's scheme, tell certainly

What fashion'd hats, or ruffs, or suits, next year

Our giddy-headed antique youth will wear. 

-- John Donne

Not so august antiquity

There is nothing so contemptible, but antiquity can render it august and excellent.

-- Joseph Glanvill

The wise Author of all things

The consideration of our understanding, which is an incorporeal substance independent from matter; and the contemplation of our own bodies, which have all the stamps and characters of excellent contrivance; these alone do very easily guide us to the wise Author of all things.

-- Richard Bentley

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

-- Psalm 139:14

A US Supreme Court of Judas Iscariots: All Catholics and Jews, not a Protestant among them, stick it to a Southern Baptist

Conservative SCOTUS Betrays Barronelle :

Rod Dreher:

. . . Where were you, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett? These two, by the way, also were among the majority that refused to hear the Gavin Grimm case, handing a big victory to transgender bathroom-invaders. [UPDATE: Bret Kavanaugh also left Stutzman in the lurch.] . . .   

Comments

Achilles Rienzi:

This so wrong—another stab in the back. I am angered by it. If this wasn’t a stab in the back, then what was it?

This is why people hate establishment Republicans and conservatives. Roberts has sided with the liberals in every split decision since Kennedy retired.

I honestly don’t know how this collection of Judas Iscariots sleep at night. It takes a certain type to backstab like this then sleep like a baby. They are where they are because of people who support religious liberty, then they turn around and stab us in the back.

Only a mass movement led by credible anti-conservative far right leaders will solve our problems. A far right solution but one that is not conservative is the only solution.

Honorable exceptions like Thomas and Alito aside, no group has done more to impose and solidify leftist policies than Republican-appointed SCOTUS judges.

Hysteria rears its ugly head over discovery of bodies buried in unmarked graves of defunct church schools in Canada

I'm not even going to link to the stories, they are that stupid, especially the ones about the religious representatives' cowering response to the ridiculous claims being made by the Injuns.

 

Canada is a stupid place anyway.

 

I watched a guy on YouTube this week try to go camping on the longest daylight day of the year, June 20th, in The Northwest Territories but was blocked from entry because COVID-19 rules in Canada have closed the border.

 

Cases per million in the US (where it's Katy, Bar The Door against July 4th holiday makers) are running at a rate 2.7 times higher than in Canada, but in Canada you can't travel from province to province because of the "pandemic", not even to one with a population of . . . wait for it . . . 44,736.

 

Where do people think most burials occurred before North America became a godless hellscape? People were buried on church properties everywhere. Visit an old one sometime and you will find lots of unmarked graves because no one is left to tend them. Close a church or school and the thing runs down quite quickly.

 

Nowadays when the number of children not surviving beyond the age of five is 7 out of 1,000, it might be useful to remember that in 1900 in the US 238 didn't.

 

238.

 

Up in The Great White North, I'm sure things were much worse given the climate.

 

Countless men, women, and children succumbed to all manner of things in the past who don't today, but "Indigenous" peoples want you to believe they were all murdered by the evil White Man and his evil religion.

 

It's all BS. Ignorant, politicized, racist BS.

 

 

Frequent or daily reception of the Eucharist is a complete novelty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As with priestly celibacy from 1139, the Immaculate Conception of Mary from 1854, papal infallibility from 1870, the Assumption of Mary from 1950, frequent reception of the Eucharist is a complete novelty.

Lutheran practice among conservative German-Americans in the United States in the early 20th Century was quarterly, and you had to register in advance AND meet with the pastor beforehand as if going to confession.  

The Roman Catholic Decree on Frequent & Daily Reception of Holy Communion dates merely from 1905.

It was designed to address a recent perceived historical development of religious decline, not some defect or missing element of revealed religion. The Eucharist was being ginned up to gin up flagging faith. And perhaps the decree's most ridiculous claim is that "Give us this day our daily bread" from the Lord's Prayer refers to daily reception of the Eucharist, when everything we know about early Christian practice is that the Eucharist was celebrated when Christians gathered together, at most on the first day of the week, not "often" but "as oft", i.e. "when":

Moreover, we are bidden in the Lord's Prayer to ask for "our daily bread" by which words, the holy Fathers of the Church all but unanimously teach, must be understood not so much that material bread which is the support of the body as the Eucharistic bread which ought to be our daily food. 

What's more, the Catholic conception from 1905 is completely upside down. The point of the Eucharist isn't that it is "pleasing to God", as if human beings do something, but rather that God does something. In the Eucharist, God serves up salvation, as in "Divine Service" or Gottesdienst.

Needless to say, none of this bears any relation to the historical Jesus, who to begin with never imagined a church would come into being, let alone where sacraments would be offered. The history of the church is a farce wherein the players have majored in the minors, or shall we say, in mere trifles and extra-curricular activities which are completely beside the point and often amount to nothing but superstition and idolatry.

. . . so that this practice, so salutary and so pleasing to God, not only might suffer no decrease among the faithful, but rather that it increase and everywhere be promoted, especially in these days when religion and the Catholic faith are attacked on all sides, and the true love of God and piety are so frequently lacking. ...

6. But since it is plain that by the frequent or daily reception of the Holy Eucharist union with Christ is strengthened, the spiritual life more abundantly sustained, the soul more richly endowed with virtues, and the pledge of everlasting happiness more securely bestowed on the recipient, therefore, parish priests, confessors and preachers, according to the approved teaching of the Roman Catechism should exhort the faithful frequently and with great zeal to this devout and salutary practice.