Imagine the National Catholic Reporter running a story urging Catholics to be on Hitler's side in World War II

 

In Israel-Hamas War, Christians Should Be on Every Side

T. Roberts, NCReporter

 

 We know that people of many religious stripes, Catholics included, are involved in various ways on every side of the current dispute. Maybe that's where we should be, on every side, not to exacerbate or further inflame but to do what we can to tamp down the ancient hatreds and the inclinations to violence.

 

 

Sounds all too familiar.

 

Scholars Are Learning More About What the Catholic Church Did—and Didn't Do—to Save Jews During the Holocaust

 

At the same time Catholic rescuers were helping Jews, some of those same people were also helping Nazis. The Catholic Church worked to win clemency for convicted Nazi war criminals after the war. “The justification given for aid to Nazi war criminals was Christian love and mercy,” says Brown-Fleming, whose research focuses on this effort.

Anti-Christian Pope Francis rebuked by fellow Catholics for his same sex civil unions recommendations recently made public

Catholic leaders condemn Pope Francis’ endorsement of same-sex unions   :

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a frequent critic of Francis, said the pope’s comments should be “rightly interpreted as simple private opinions of the person who made them.” “Such declarations generate great bewilderment and cause confusion and error among Catholic faithful,” Burke, a member of the Vatican’s highest court, said in a statement Thursday on his website. He added that Francis’ views were contrary to Catholic teachings.

Bishop Thomas Tobin, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, also agreed with Burke that the pope’s statement “clearly contradicts what has been the long-standing teaching of the Church about same-sex unions.” “The Church cannot support the acceptance of objectively immoral relationships,” Tobin said in a statement. “Individuals with same-sex attraction are beloved children of God and must have their personal human rights and civil rights recognized and protected by law. However, the legalization of their civil unions, which seek to simulate holy matrimony, is not admissible.”

Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, went even further, calling the pope’s gay support “confusing and very dangerous,” according to the National Catholic Reporter.

Catholic social ethicist advocates that white people become vulnerable to people of color, and to rocks, minnows, and wind

And also believes the fantasy of 54-60 million indigenous people living in the Americas in 1492, reduced to 6 million in 1650 by white colonization, all without the aid of gas chambers and crematoria!

20th century whitey clearly has nothing on 16th century whitey.

The National Catholic Reporter may be kookier than America Magazine:

Indigenous scholars invite decolonization of the Anthropocene

Can't wait for the headline:

"Catholic social ethicist ignored warning signs, crushed to death in Rocky Mountain National Park rockslide: Autopsy reveals last meal of brook trout"

If Hillary can delete 30K emails and wipe her servers after subpoena, German Roman Catholic Church can destroy files involving thousands of sex crimes

Cardinal admits to Vatican summit that Catholic Church destroyed abuse files:

In a frank speech to the 190 cardinals, bishops and heads of religious orders taking part in the four-day summit, German Cardinal Reinhard Marx said the church's administration had left victims' rights "trampled underfoot" and "made it impossible" for the worldwide institution to fulfill its mission. "Files that could have documented the terrible deeds and named those responsible were destroyed, or not even created," said Marx, beginning a list of a number of practices that survivors have documented for years but church officials have long kept under secret. ...

Marx's admission to the church's destruction of files may have special significance in his native Germany, where an exhaustive September 2018 report on abuse in the country detailed cases involving 3,677 children but said files in at least two dioceses had been changed or destroyed. ... At a press briefing after his address Feb. 23, Marx clarified that he was referring in his speech to the September 2018 German report on the destruction of files. "I have absolutely no information as to other cases," said the cardinal.

 

National Catholic Reporter attacks its conservative luminaries and First Things, denies Catholic abuse scandal is primarily homosexual in origin

This snooty editorial demanding deep self-examination is itself blind to the sin of homosexuality which has metastisized in the Catholic priesthood. The church's view that God has created people homosexual is the little leaven that has leavened the whole lump.

Here:

Those who worked so ardently in the past to enable you — the faithful, so betrayed, who just couldn't believe you would engage in such a deliberate cover up; the likes of George Weigel and his blind, uncritical hagiography of Pope John Paul II; Dr. Mary Ann Glendon and the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and their naive celebration and defense of Maciel; the rest of the chorus at First Things and like publications; the telling silence of so many other Catholic outlets; the absurdity of charlatan William Donohue and his silly "Catholic" League — they helped sustain your weak narrative as many of them denigrated those who raised the tough questions and pursued the truth.

It's over.

None of them any longer has a persuasive case to make. Some of them now try to blame the crisis on gay priests. You might be tempted to latch onto that diversion, but it will only prolong the already intolerably long agony.

Gay priests and bishops are certainly among us — probably a greater percentage of gays in the Catholic clergy, if anecdotal evidence and the private chatter of seminary rectors and heads of orders is to be believed, than one would find in the general population. ...

Unless the preponderance of credible experts has suddenly flipped its understanding of things, however, sexual orientation is not one of the topics that match with sexual abuse.

Bishop Robert Morlino: Catholic homosexual subculture to blame for abuse crisis, homosexuals unfit to be priests

Quoted here:

"It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord," wrote Bishop Robert Morlino in an Aug. 18 letter to Catholics in the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin. ... 

"We are talking about acts and actions which are not only in violation of the sacred promises made by some, in short, sacrilege, but also are in violation of the natural moral law for all. To call it anything else would be deceitful and would only ignore the problem further," Morlino said.

He continued: "There has been a great deal of effort to keep separate acts which fall under the category of now-culturally-acceptable acts of homosexuality from the publically-deplorable acts of pedophilia. That is to say, until recently the problems of the Church have been painted purely as problems of pedophilia — this despite clear evidence to the contrary. It is time to be honest that the problems are both and they are more." ... 

Morlino added in his letter that church teaching does not deem homosexual inclination sinful in itself, "but it is intrinsically disordered in a way that renders any man stably afflicted by it unfit to be a priest." ...

The 2011 John Jay report found 81 percent of abuse victims were male, but did not link that to a homosexual orientation among abusive priests; instead, the authors suggest greater access to young boys as a more likely factor.

Sure, sure.

Lawyer to bank robber: "Why do you rob banks?"

Bank robber to lawyer: "Because that's where they keep the money."

Pope Francis decrees universal feast for Mary, "Mother of the Church", about which St. Paul knew NOTHING

You will search in vain in the New Testament for the sure basis for this Roman Catholic obsession with Mary the mother of Jesus.

Had St. Paul, for example, the slightest knowledge of this notion of contemporary Marianism, one might have expected him to have alluded to it in the straightforward way the Mary mystics do, especially whenever he discussed the related topics of virginity, fatherhood and motherhood, and the church.

It never happens.

Paul esteems virginity, for example, at considerable length in 1 Corinthians 7 (while acquiescing to marriage), however not on the grounds of Mary's supposed perpetual virginity, which he does not know. To Paul virginity was preferable not because of the example of Mary but only because of the pressures of the eschatological moment.

What's more, in Paul's theological imagination the father of us all is Abraham, and for two reasons: because of circumcision to which Abraham submitted as the first Jew; but also because of Abraham's faith in respect of Isaac, the child of the promise, through which same faith the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ now incorporates the Gentiles who similarly believe into the people of God, of whom the Jews were the first. Paul makes these arguments about the "father" at considerable length in Galatians and Romans, but there is hardly a word about the "mother". 

The only time it occurs to Paul to speak of spiritual motherhood at all, it is not to Mary to whom he refers, but to the source of faith, the heavenly Jerusalem:

 

But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

 

-- Galatians 4:26

Paul's countless opportunities in his works to introduce the mundane conceptions of Marianism characteristically are passed by, doubtlessly because they never occurred to him and he probably did not know them, even from others in the church. Whatever proto-Marianism one might think to find in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke is for this reason self-evidently quite late compared with the date of the Pauline corpus.    

The basis for contemporary Marianism is sheer casuistry, which notably raises its ugly head in the story here:

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has decreed that Latin-rite Catholics around the world will mark the feast of "the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church" on the Monday after Pentecost each year.

The Gospel reading for the feast, which technically is called a "memorial," is John 19:25-31, which recounts how from the cross Jesus entrusted Mary to his disciples as their mother and entrusted his disciples to Mary as her children. ...

Francis approved the decree after "having attentively considered how greatly the promotion of this devotion might encourage the growth of the maternal sense of the church in the pastors, religious and faithful, as well as a growth of genuine Marian piety," the decree said. /end

Of course John 19 says no such thing about "his disciples", only about the disciple whom Jesus loved,  "who from that hour took her into his own home" because Jesus in his final words on the cross had said to Mary "behold thy son" and to the disciple "behold thy mother", and promptly died.

Jesus had abandoned his mother and sisters and brothers to fend for themselves when he had embarked upon his itinerant career of preaching a similar repentance. Presumably as the carpenter's son and the carpenter, which are both attested in the evidence, Jesus had been apprentice to his father and took over as the breadwinner when Joseph was no longer in the picture. When this ne'er-do-well of a first born son left it all behind it had to hurt, for all sorts of reasons, but not the least of which was pecuniary.

In this light John's account of the final arrangements for Mary from the cross are pathetic in the extreme, Jesus' concession to his mother and friend that it hadn't turned out quite as he had expected.

If anyone had lacked the maternal sense, it had been Mary's own infamous son . . . by design. 

Catholic Columnist Notices Libertarianism Was The Target Of Pope Francis' Exhortation

Michael Sean Winters, here:

The most interesting criticisms of Pope Francis's apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, have come from libertarians who are closest to the economic views the pope denounced. ... John Carr, who now heads the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, thinks both parties are now essentially defined by their commitment to economic or lifestyle libertarianism. "These libertarian tendencies are reinforced by large campaign contributors and powerful interest groups on the left and right (e.g., Emily's List and the Koch Brothers, Planned Parenthood and the Club for Growth). Who died and left Arianna Huffington and Grover Norquist in charge? Is there any room left for compassionate conservatives and pro-life Democrats?" The ideological incoherence of both parties, adopting libertarian ideas on some issues and communitarian ideas on other issues, is unstable.

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I don't mind saying I beat him to it, here:

The pope's message, after all is said and done, is really quite simple, as all ideologies are, the difference being that his is a heavenly one, not a terrestrial. He's obviously uncomfortable with American Catholics of the conservative persuasion who have been allying themselves with what is commonly called libertarian ideology, the devotees of which Russell Kirk famously named the "chirping sectarians" of the conservative movement, Rep. Paul Ryan being a prominent contemporary example thereof. For Kirk, it was their ideological habit of mind which marked them out as outsiders of the movement because they could not abide the persistent lack of conformity to principle which is endemic to fallen, human nature in need of salvation, and substituted for it a bastardized, immanentized eschaton of infinite freedom . . ..