J. D. Vance succeeds where others have failed, finally makes Easter a religious holiday again

 

Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah joins Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory who named Joe Biden a cafeteria Catholic on Easter Sunday

 

Cardinal Wilton Gregory

Cardinal Robert Sarah

Cardinal Robert Sarah, who formerly served as the Catholic Church’s Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, gave a lecture titled “The Catholic Church’s Enduring Answer to the Practical Atheism of Our Age” at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., last week. During his remarks, Sarah echoed the analysis of Cardinal Wilton Gregory of the Archdiocese of Washington by describing Biden as a “self-identified Catholic president” who amounts to a “cafeteria Catholic.”

Sarah, a Guinean prelate who has emerged as one of the more outspoken conservative voices within Catholic Church leadership, suggested that the phenomenon of “cafeteria Catholics” extends beyond the president and applies to many other “Catholic public officials.”

More.

Centuries before the East-West Schism, the schismatic Roman Pope Victor I broke with the Christians of Asia Minor over celebrating Easter on Nisan 14

 

 Aka the Quartodecimans, the fourteenthers.

Victor [died 199 A. D.], who presided over the church at Rome, immediately attempted to cut off from the common unity the parishes of all Asia, with the churches that agreed with them, as heterodox; and he wrote letters and declared all the brethren there wholly excommunicate.

-- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, V.XXIV.9.

 

Orthodox Easter 2024 is Sunday, May 5th, five weeks after Easter in the West:

Orthodox Pascha often occurs later in the spring ... especially out of sync with the actual astronomical phenomena linked to an accurate calculation of the Paschal date. ... During the 21st century, the Orthodox and Western Churches will share a common celebration of Pascha only 31 times.

 

Victor's unbrother-like heat towards the Eastern churches, in the controversy about Easter, fomented that difference into a schism.                                                                           

-- The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety  

The stated goal of Rachel Crandall-Crocker's Transgender Day of Visibility is power

Rachel Crandall-Crocker says several times in a 2020 interview, if you can manage to get through the whole thing, that the goal of organizing their day in the first place was to obtain power.

Just turn the sound off and turn on the closed captions and you'll see for yourself.

Comments to the YouTube video, by the way, have been turned off overnight, which is exactly what you would expect from people who want power, which to them means they have a say and you don't.

The success of this gay man's effort, originally organized on Facebook in 2009, elicited the Oy vey! he exclaimed about four minutes in. This attention-seeking larper must be even more thrilled now.

This was April 21, 2020, not quite a year before Joe Biden became the first American president to recognize the day officially, which in retrospect seems indicative not so much of Joe Biden's thinking on the matter but of the unseen activists in his administration who drive his policies behind the scenes because Joe is too feeble of body and mind to exercise executive function.

Americans didn't notice at the time in March 2021 for good reasons.

Their attention was consumed by the COVID-19 hysteria, by the Trump defeat, by the roll-out of the new vaccines, uptake of which peaked in April because of sudden deaths for some Johnson and Johnson vaccine recipients which in turn launched the seemingly interminable vaccine controversy, and in the summer by the Afghanistan debacle.

But now that the day happened to coincide with Easter three years later, Americans have noticed, which has had the unintended effect of making their day more visible and powerful than it might have been. We have taken the bait and given them the attention which they wanted, which is the basis of their power. Their success may be measured by how the conversation of the country was dominated by their day, not by ours.

Note that when confronted with what he had done, Joe Biden denied that he had declared Easter Sunday the Transgender Day of Visibility. But of course he did. He brought the Trojan Horse of Transgenderism into the government and now we awaken from a long sleep and find that Troy has already fallen.

Since their goal is power, we may imagine that it won't be long now before America has its own attention-seeking Emperor Nero, who played the bride to a man he had married, consummating it on a couch in full public view. Or before we have a transgender woman Elagabalus, the Roman Emperor who said "I am a lady". 

The freaks will be thrilled.

What will you be?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Biden, the most perverse anti-Christian president in American history, proclaims Easter 2024 The Transgender Day of Visibility

 It couldn't have been today, it couldn't have been Monday, it had to be Easter.

Joe has applesauce for brains and can't remember what he had for breakfast, so I'm sure when he signed this on Friday he wasn't thinking about Sunday being Easter. 

But it makes no difference. Joe is the first American president to insist on the transgender agenda in his official capacity as president.

 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/03/29/a-proclamation-on-transgender-day-of-visibility-2024/

The heterodox Mormon Vision of the Redemption of the Dead of October 3, 1918 expands religious identity to the point of Universalism

The "vision" is notable for the way the Second Coming of the Son of Man as judge is minimized and rationalized away in favor of a now all-consuming Universalism.

Such rationalization is a feature of religion, not a bug.

The Pharisees were liberal democritizers of Judaism with their synagogue system, expanding the availability of the holiness of the Temple priests to the hinterlands of Israel and to the Diaspora. Paul for Christianity expanded membership in the lost sheep of the house of Israel saved by Christ to the Greek-speaking Gentile world of the Mediterranean. Even Muhammad for the Arabs gave them their very own Book which rewrote the erroneous Jewish and Christian Bible in their own language. The Protestant Reformers of hierarchical Catholicism created a  priesthood of all believers transmitted in the vernacular thanks to Gutenberg.

But Mormons would flat out save the entire human race, expanding the availability of salvation even to the dead. The specific impetus is the belief that the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel were scattered globally, multiplied, and are basically unknown even to themselves, and that the Mormon mission is to gather them in to the House of Joseph in America, the twin of the House of Judah in Israel.

It's not unlike the Muslim view of its own legitimacy asserted through Ishmael, not Isaac. Mormonism is to American Protestantism, particularly nonconformist Protestantism of the Second Great Awakening in Western New York, as Islam is to Eastern Orthodoxy, particularly Nestorianism.

It's as ingenious as it is unconvincing.  

The Whole Earth Shall Be in Commotion

It was just a few weeks before his own death when President Smith was in the depths of sorrow over the sudden death of his oldest son when he received the crowning heavenly revelation known as “the vision of the redemption of the dead.” In this vision, he not only saw his father in the Spirit World but the great gathering of millions of the righteous who had died into the arms of Christ. He also saw the offering of redemption to those who had done wickedly on the earth on the condition of their repentance in the Spirit World. This was Christ’s visit to the Spirit World during the 3 days His body was in the tomb, fulfilling His promise recorded in 1 Peter: 3, 4 . . .

 

While yes, Christ’s Second Coming will cleanse the wicked from the earth, after death, He offers healing to all who will accept it. He wants us to come home.  This gathering overcomes all the “separateness” and chaos that evil inflicts upon us. It not only gathers us into the arms of Christ but into the arms of each other. Even as we approach the Apocalypse and the center stops holding on earth, it does hold in eternity. I rejoice to know that, in the end, all things in heaven and earth will be gathered together as one in Christ.

Creepy connubial Christ talk at First Things and the Book of Revelation

Loving with Mary :

Mary, the Shulammite, turns around to Jesus. In his voice and face, she recognizes her husband, her Lord. Jesus is the groom; we ourselves are Mary, the Shulammite. Her grief is our grief, her tears our tears, and her despair our despair. ...

We, his bride, hold on to him, united to him in faith. Every Eighth Day, he comes to us in the preaching of the gospel; every Sunday morning in the breaking of the bread.

When we walk into church and the doors close behind us, we enter into heaven. Eastertide begins; time and space are reconfigured. It is the Eighth Day; we are in Paradise. Eve, the Shulammite, Mary Magdalene—we all join Jesus at the altar. Bread and wine show up. It’s a marriage supper. Our groom, our Lord, unites himself to us, his bride.

Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.

Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory,

for the marriage of the Lamb has come,

and his Bride has made herself ready;

it was granted her to be clothed

with fine linen, bright and pure—

for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints (Rev. 19:6–8)

And you thought gender confusion was so . . . fringe.

The day after Easter

 

Rachel Held Evans, 37-year old mother of two, died yesterday; I prefer to remember Aaron D. Wolf, 45-year old father of six, who died on Easter

The LCMS Calls a Post a Post:

Liberal onlookers will never understand or accept the public and decisive condemnation of [same sex] heresy, because they hate Christian doctrine with the zeal of a fundamentalist.  It is not enough for them to mock the Bible and its teachings; they cannot fathom the continued existence of a millennia-old religion that, when pressed, refuses to embrace everything it has always opposed.  They clutch their pearls and express surprised horror whenever a conservative church body like the Missouri Synod expels someone for repeatedly and openly violating its clearly stated beliefs. ... [T]he liberals are winning in the public square.  But they can never win in our churches, so long as faithful clergy and laity stand up to them boldly, decisively—and swiftly, before damage is done.

 

The residuum of the introspective conscience of the West shows up in narcissism study

Once the religion is stripped away, the self-absorption lives on in another form.  

From the story here:

"Narcissists aren't afraid to tell you they're narcissists," said study co-author Brad Bushman, a communications and psychology professor at The Ohio State University. "They're not embarrassed about it at all."

People with a classic narcissistic personality tend to have an overinflated sense of self, an exhibitionist streak, a sense of entitlement and little empathy for others. People in Western countries rate higher on narcissistic traits than do those in Eastern nations, and millennials— people born between the early 1980s and early 2000s — are more likely to be self-centered than previous generations, at least in the United States, Bushman said.

"The self-esteem movement, I think, is a big part of that," Bushman said. "Also, I think social media provides a venue for people to project themselves to very large audiences."

My, how the country, and even NYC, has changed in the last 61 years

Rod Dreher isn't orthodox about prayer anymore than anyone else is

Instead of praying in secret according to the teaching of Jesus, Rod Dreher broadcasts the news about his praying, makes a show of his praying even before it happens, and uses his praying almost like a weapon, a cudgel, with which to threaten, nay promise, confrontation with the enemy, solidarity with the like-minded, and "witness" generally against the godless West, as if there were no godless East. But if the witness is contrary to the basic soul of the faith, what good is it?

Dreher fancies himself a refugee from the religious right, but what follows below just proves once again that you can take the man out of the politicized religion, but you can't take the politicizing out of the religious man. The reason, of course, is that man is a political animal by nature, as Aristotle taught us long ago, and Paul accepted and taught in his peculiarly Christian way.

If the true faith of Jesus were practised anywhere, however, you would be hard-pressed to know much about it, by definition. What is "the widespread practice of the faith" when we are to pray in secret, give in secret, fast in secret? The public face of the church is not known by these things. The true orthodox are invisible in these matters or they are not orthodox. When they pray, you do not know it. They pray like David to be hidden, not revealed:

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings, From the wicked that oppress me, from my deadly enemies, who compass me about.

 

-- Psalm 17:8f.

Here is Dreher, featured this day at Real Clear Religion:

As most readers know, I am an Orthodox Christian. My deep concern over the relationship between Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church is not that the ROC will exercise undue influence over the Russian state, but that the ROC will become Russian nationalism at prayer. I am extremely sympathetic to the ROC critique of the West, and see things like the opening of the new Russian Orthodox cathedral in Paris to be a blessing. On my next trip to Paris, after I make my pilgrimage to pray before the relics of St. Genevieve, the city’s patron, I will make a visit to this Russian cathedral, pray there, and give thanks to God for its witness in that magnificent Christian (or once-Christian) city. It is my prayer — really, it is — that the Russian cathedral will in some real sense bring believing Eastern and Western Christians closer together, and strengthen our common witness against the post-Christian West — such that one day, Europe may return to the widespread practice of the faith. 

Sometimes I wonder if Rod Dreher thinks more highly of himself than he ought to think.

Rod Dreher imagining he's Karl Barth

Karl Barth imagining what's for dinner

If you're severely introverted, just hire someone to go to church FOR YOU instead of going yourself

There's precedent for it, sort of, in American history. In times of war long ago one could hire a proxy to volunteer on your behalf instead of going yourself.

And if you really reflect on it for a little while, you'll realize Christians who believe in infant baptism practice this already in a way, having the sponsors, aka the godparents, answer for the child in renouncing the devil and all his works and all his ways, etc. in the baptismal liturgy.

So the satirical scenario here in the style of The Onion is not only humorous but plausible, but I think it made the mistake of having the hired rep accompany the introverted Ms. Ivory to her church. 

It would have been funnier if the rep were simply paid more and "Ms. Ivory" remained safe at home. The truly liberated introverted Christian, after all, can probably get away with that in these times.

She could probably read the newsletter online, listen to the sermon by podcast, and tender her offering through PayPal, without ever having to suffer the trauma of human contact or the long recovery period required afterwards.

And just think. For the Christmas and Easter Christian, she saves a lot of dough because she only has to hire the proxy for two days, and the proxy gets the added bonus of breakfast on Easter included!

The Sacramental Monster of popular Roman Catholicism: Christ remains present through the Eucharist, not through the Spirit

So David Warren, here:

At Mass yesterday, after the singing of Mark’s Gospel, the Paschal Candle was quietly extinguished. Christ has ascended into Heaven, and the flame in the Sanctuary, which through the forty days since Easter had symbolized the presence of the Resurrected Lord upon this earth, itself “ascends.”

We would now be on our own — were it not that Christ remains throughout the Church He gave us, in the Sacrifice of the Mass, until His coming again.

This is the teaching, from the highest source, and it must never be confused or toyed with.

What the Bible teaches seems irrelevant to your average Catholic devotee, that Christ is present by the Spirit after the ascension, constituting the church by an indwelling, not by a rite. Take it or leave it, but that is the plain teaching from the highest source, and it must never be confused or toyed with if we are to remain faithful to the sources. Hence Protestantism.

And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

-- John 14:16ff.

The Baby Boomers are just sucking this world dry

That's part of the not very welcoming message I heard in the Easter Sunday sermon, the sort of thinking appropriate perhaps to a high schooler just becoming aware of issues of justice and injustice in a world of which he has little experience, but not to an adult delivering the homily on the holiest day in the Christian calendar. If the guy had any brains whatsoever he'd at least have blamed my generation for his stupidity, but obviously we did our infernal work on his like better than we could have ever imagined!

Democrat Socialist Harold Meyerson's empirical offenses against the Gospel of Matthew and Leviticus

Here:

'They were refugees, fleeing for their lives from one Middle Eastern country to the next. As Matthew tells the tale, Joseph, fearing that the government had marked his newborn son for death, gathered up his wife and child and stole away by night across the Judean border into Egypt. And just in time: Unsure who, exactly, to kill, that government — a king named Herod, who’d heard some kid would one day become a rival king — proceeded to slaughter every remaining child in Bethlehem under the age of 2.

'This isn’t a chapter of the Christmas story that has made it into the general celebration, but it’s there in the gospel, for those who give the gospels credence and for those who don’t. For both groups, it’s clear that the authors of the New Testament intended to recount (for the believers) or compose (for the nons) a story that echoed the Old Testament’s concern for strangers, foreigners and refugees (“The stranger among you shall be as one born among you,” says Leviticus, “and you shall love him as yourself”), that foreshadowed Jesus’ teachings to care for castaways and the least among us, and that laid the foundation for institutional Christianity’s transnationalism.'

--------------------------------------------

On Meyerson's reading, Leviticus might as well be a proto-Sermon-on-the-Mount, except that Leviticus details nearly a score of offenses for which death is prescribed, including blasphemy and not keeping the Sabbath, two key charges against Jesus of Nazareth. The Judaism of Leviticus is a religion steeped in violence by Jews against Jews, violence which is routinized against offenders against God's law, not to mention against countless animals slaughtered eventually in a Temple to appease an angry God and feed an idle clerisy.

In true liberal fashion, only the one element of this book which is convenient to the present liberal narrative is featured. All the inconvenient facts of the rest of it are omitted, the ones which cannot be pressed into the service of the liberal project, indeed which argue against it, which in this case is to shame those who reject refugees. Does it really need to be pointed out that according to Matthew Jesus and his family were rejected by the Jews, and became refugees from Judaism, not to it?

Meyerson similarly paints the Matthew story of the Slaughter of the Innocents as if it were a matter of government oppressing the people, when in fact Matthew is at pains to tell us a different story in which "all Jerusalem with him" was involved, not just Herod by himself, "troubled" as they both were by the news from the wise men about a new king "of the Jews" coming to replace Herod, and upset their profitable applecart.

'"Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him." When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.' -- Matthew 2:2f.

This is but the beginning of Matthew's message that Jerusalem was unalterably opposed to Jesus. By the end of that story Jesus himself is saying, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" -- Matthew 23:37

Indeed, when it comes to anti-Judaism in the gospels it is most singularly expressed by Matthew, in the account of Jesus' trial before Pilate where all the Jews become willingly complicit in Jesus' death:

'Pilate saith unto them, "What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?" They all say unto him, "Let him be crucified." ... Then answered all the people, and said, "His blood be on us, and on our children."' -- Matthew 27: 22, 25

If Harold Meyerson is seen to be a tendentious hack intentionally misrepresenting Leviticus and Matthew, in the end he does turn out to be right about one thing:

'A sharp rise in the number of adherents to alternative realities in a world otherwise governed by empiricism is not without unhappy precedent in modern history. It has sundered nations and brought fascists — with their characteristic disdain for rationalism — to power.'

In our time they all seem to type for the Democrats at The Washington Post.

Abortion just in the US approaches 60 million but Christians still wring their hands over Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Here.

If I didn't know better I'd say all these children killed in the United States since 1973 have been a guilt offering for the horrors of World War II in which we participated.

What morality can there possibly be in war, Christian or otherwise? All such thinking is a rationalization of war. All's fair in it. Who cares that millions of lives were spared by the atomic bombings? Certainly not Americans, who have gone on to kill millions of their own whose only crime was to have the temerity to begin existing as a consequence of someone else's pleasure-seeking.

In truth all such thinking about just war is actually an attempt at rationalizing Christianity itself, not simply war. It is an attempt to reconcile good and evil on the grand scale instead of on the puny stage we all occupy, where a beautiful life is tragically ended by a criminal, an accident, or a disease, and there's no explaining it.

The message of Jesus made perfect sense until it didn't, when the kingdom of God did not come as he thought it would, when God's justice failed to appear on earth as it is in heaven.

God's justice. The scoffers among us ridicule him for being wrong about this when we should be honoring him for showing us how far we are from it, the more now than in 1945 over Japan.    

Wingnut Princeton professor blames 'tens of millions' of deaths on Protestants during 30 Years' War, compares them to ISIS

The best estimates put total losses on all sides from all causes in all venues at 8 million. 

Bernard Haykel, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, knows a thing or two about sloppy, exaggerated, scholarship, and politically correct slurs, quoted here:

'If there are any lessons about ISIS that can be drawn from what happened during the Protestant Reformation, Bernard Haykel said, those lessons are "terrifying."

'"If we're embarking or are actually already in something like the Reformation in the Muslim world, then, you know, hold on because we're in for a really wild ride with lots of violence," he added. ...

'"Christianity was a violent religion at times, extremely violent, in fact, much more violent than what we're seeing with the Islamists today. If you think of the 30 Years War, something like 30 percent of Germany's population was killed, tens of millions of people," he said.

'Haykel also noted that ISIS is similar to the Protestant Reformation in its emphasis on individualism.

'"The individual is at the core of this [ISIS] movement, the autonomy of the individual, the decision of the individual to make decisions despite, and even against one's own family, which flies in the face of Arab and Muslim tradition," he said. ...

'"Calvin was a really nasty guy. Okay? I mean, read up about him — and there's a huge, a big statue of him in Geneva today — but people forget actually what the city he led was like under him."'

Haykel is the son of a Lebanese Christian and a Polish Jew.

Brevity is the soul of wit also in religion

A Jewish friend of mine once said his idea of the perfect [Passover] Haggadah would be: “They tried to kill us. They didn’t kill us. Let’s eat.” ... My parents particularly liked our Easter Sunday dinners after church and the Easter egg hunts were over. We had country ham with all the trimmings, curried eggs, grits, collard greens, biscuits, lemon meringue pie and, of course, all the chocolates from the Easter baskets. Most importantly, it was the time for my father to break out the Bloody Marys and my mother to pour herself a glass of Champagne. The WASP version of my Jewish friend’s description of the holiday might well have been: “They tried to kill him. They didn’t kill him. Let’s drink.”

-- Sally Quinn, here

"But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking."

-- Matthew 6:7

Does your theology have room for people who don't celebrate "Easter"?

One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it. He that eateth, eateth to the Lord, for he giveth God thanks; and he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not, and giveth God thanks.

-- Romans 14:5f.

But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.

-- Galatians 4:9ff.

The (First) Council of Nicaea (325) established that the date of Easter would be the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox.