Vatican issues new norms to try to keep phenomena like Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina from getting out of hand again

Christopher R. Altieri for The Catholic World Report tends to think "Our Lady" made no appearance in Medjugorje in 1981, but will believe it if the church ever says he must.

 

He notes that the (phony) miracle is a hard case, which has, however, helped millions become better Catholics. (No word is offered on how many millions the superstition has driven away from the faith).

Altieri doesn't tell you that by 1983 the local bishop had decided that the apparitions were Franciscan fabrications, but by then it was too late because the hysteria for the site had already become a worldwide phenomenon.

On the new Vatican norms for the discernment of supernatural phenomena :

Much of the talk last week was about the new Vatican norms for the discernment of supernatural phenomena—apparitions especially, but not exclusively—presented at a press conference in Rome on Friday. ...

Under the old norms, local bishops had to talk with Rome but were free to make their own determinations. Also, and more importantly, the locals had to keep mum about their consultations. Local bishops, in other words, couldn’t say what Rome said to them about the thing(s) the locals were examining.

Local bishops, in other words, bore all of the public responsibility for judgments that were theirs only in part (if they were really the locals’ judgments at all). ...

Under the old disposition, a local bishop could issue a judgment: Constat de supernaturalitate. A judgment of constat de supernaturalitate does not quite say that a phenomenon is certainly of supernatural origin, but only that “it [clearly] evinces [signs of the] supernatural.”

The opposite of constat under the old scheme was—you guessed it—non constat (de supernaturalitate), which simply meant that there were lacking sufficient grounds for agreement on the origin of the phenomenon.

A judgment of constat de supernaturalitate did not compel an assent of faith, in other words, but only proposed its object as worthy of belief. The point is that it did propose something.

The new norms, on the other hand, borrow from bureaucratic argot to create a new category: Nihil obstat, which does not propose anything as worthy of belief but only says that there is nothing standing in the way of believing in the supernatural origin of a given phenomenon. That’s nice to know, but it really only tells us something about what isn’t there. ...

On the one hand, it is now unmistakably clear that the Vatican not only gets the final word but is involved in the investigation and adjudication of purportedly supernatural phenomena from the start. On the other hand, the Vatican will henceforth refrain from proposing even thoroughly vetted phenomena as worthy of belief and will limit itself to saying that nothing stands in the way of believing a given phenomenon to be of supernatural origin.

Pope Chicken Little

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Pope Francis warns planet ‘is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point’ :

The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.

The climate apocalypse predicted by high school dropout Greta Thunberg has failed, just like the religious apocalypse predicted by the Gospels

She has deleted this

 

 For his part Jesus at least stuck to his guns to the bitter end, though even he kept adjusting the timeline incrementally forward. It was his followers who did most of the covering up for him. In deleting her tweet prediction back in March of this year, Greta resembles them.

The deletion of the prediction, and of ~54 other such predictions, is the subject of some well-deserved derision here and here.

The merriment aside, it is safe to say that faith in the ever-coming, ever-delayed climate apocalypse will continue despite all being lost, now that we have reached the five-year-point of no return.

More and more the climate hysterics look like the already/not yet Kingdom of God enthusiasts among the world's Christians. The latter have their cake and eat it too as their answer to the problem of Jesus' expected in-breaking of the kingdom before the end of the mission of The Twelve in Matthew 10. As no Christian will concede that Jesus was mistaken about this, no climate fanatic will concede that their predictions have been false.

Like Christians in every age since, climate ideologues in academe, in organizations, and in the press routinely conflate instances of extreme weather with climate as signs of the predicted imminent catastrophe. The steady drumbeat of boy crying wolf is meant to whip up expectation and devotion, and above all money, which give the movement coherence and hope as the coming end is delayed again and again and again. You might even say that the Christian apocalyptic delusion, embedded into the very thinking of the West over the long centuries, prepared the way for the victory of the Climate delusion.

It is a useful meditation in how the original "apocalyptic" message of Jesus really wasn't apocalyptic at all, predicting signs and wonders in the heavens above and in the earth below. It only became so in the hands of the Gospel authors after its failure. As Vincent Taylor matter-of-factly pointed out decades ago, the Gospels were primarily composed in response to the delay of the parousia. The Gospels make Jesus predict a second coming, but its delay too was no less of problem than the failure of the first coming.

Jesus' original message was truly, dare we say merely, thorough-goingly eschatological, as Albert Schweitzer had said over 100 years ago. It was not apocalyptic.

Jesus said there would be no sign of the coming of the Son of Man (Mark 8:12). He would come quickly, like a thief in the night, leading the reaper angels who would pluck out from the world everything which offendeth. Two would be in a field, one would be taken and the other left. Two in a bed, one taken, one left. The taken would be bundled up together and burned. The kingdom of God would descend from heaven above. Its heavenly temple would descend and crush its earthly counterpart. The Twelve would rule over the Twelve Tribes of Israel as God made his will done on earth as it is in heaven. Everything in Jesus' generation would continue briefly just as it is, as in the days of Noah, people buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, and then . . . Bam!

All would be calm and normal before the great and terrible day of the Lord.

This message is still embedded in the Gospel data, but its timeline and details were all recast in specifically apocalyptic terms of a second coming, the delay of which the Gospels are meant to address as a cope. Apocalyptic and eschatology have been hopelessly conflated ever since, with Christians forever preoccupied with the signs of the times.

People who marvel at how Christianity ever achieved its status as a universal religion which has endured through the ages and commanded the assent of billions over two millennia despite the on-going delay of the parousia rarely reflect on the power fanaticism has to delude thoroughly, and on a grand scale.

They have the climate hysteria now before their very eyes. They are actually living it. And yet they cannot see it.

The climate delusion has reached astounding proportions since its laughable prophet Al Gore, divinity school dropout (what a coincidence, right?), first began his climate ministry in 1993. The whole world is feeling its grip, banking on so-called green electricity when its capacity to generate enough of it to replace fossil fuel and nuclear sources is nothing but a pipe-dream.

And to think America almost made him president.

Nothing good has come out of Carthage, Tennessee.

Hysteria characterizes academic literature on Christian nationalism today

 From the story here:

If a conservative Presbyterian who has long argued that the church should stay out of politics tests positive for Christian nationalism, someone could wonder if sociologists need an equivalent to what epidemiologists have in asymptomatic carriers of COVID. Can a class of Christian nationalists exist who have no strong symptoms of this political virus? If so, do they need to be in political isolation? 

We are plagued by a plague of vaccine hysteria

People are stormed out of their reason, plagued into a compliance, and forced to yield in their own defence.

-- Jeremy Collier

When it comes to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy by religion, nones are the most hesitant, not Evangelicals

The Young And Secular Are Least Vaccinated, Not Evangelicals:

In fact, I find that those without any religious affiliation were the least likely to have received at least one dose of any COVID-19 vaccine. ... By May, 70% of non-evangelical Protestants had gotten at least one dose. Sixty-two percent of both evangelical Protestants and Catholics reported the same. However, it was the “nones” (no religious affiliation) who were lagging farther behind. By May 11, only 47% of nones had reported receiving at least one dose.

One can observe the hesitancy phenomenon among the young (who are the majority of the nones) without screening for religion from the CDC data by comparing the percent 18-49 who get flu vaccination on average with the percent getting full COVID-19 vaccination. On average over the last ten years 32.25% of those aged 18-49 get flu vaccines every year compared to just 25.48% getting full COVID-19 vaccination through May 22 (10.047 million aged 18-29 + 25.177 million aged 30-49 = 35.224 million out of 138.216 million).

People aged 50-64 get full COVID-19 vaccination at almost the same rate they get flu vaccine on average, and those aged 65+ get full COVID-19 vaccination at a much higher rate than flu vax, which one would expect given that it kills that population in the highest numbers, and that the media whips up the hysteria about it 24/7 despite the fact that in the first year of the outbreak barely 3% of confirmed cases across all age groups were ever hospitalized and only 1.8% of confirmed cases died.

We shouldn't blame young people for not getting vaccinated, however, given that myocarditis among the young is a known side-effect of COVID-19 vaccination. Word gets around.

It's one of the few instances where the young may be wiser than their elders.

 

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. 

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.

 

 

David Bentley Hart manages to find the only airport in America where he's not forced to listen to CNN

Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’?:

To be trapped in the boarding area of a smallish airport in the upper Midwest is, as often as not, to be subjected to that bestial din of fricatives, gutturals, plosives and shrieks of hysterical alarm that constitutes political discussion on Fox News . . .. The experience is especially nasty if one’s wait coincides with the prime-time shows hosted by those two almost indistinguishable fellows with the suety faces . . .. [O]nly in America, as they say. Only here is the word “socialism” freighted with so much perceived menace. I take this to be a symptom of our unique national genius for stupidity.

The disdain for what's left of the backbone of this country has grown strong and palpable in this blind snob, who, fittingly, has gained a lot of weight over the years as he dines out on his Christian, cultural criticism. Talk about a suety face.

I say blind because while Mr. Hart thinks he's proving the "everyday" merits of European "democratic socialism" in this New York Times op-ed he never once confronts the phony arithmetic which never subtracts the costs of European defense from their Treasuries but from ours. Remove their largely freely provided military umbrella and see how long healthcare remains "affordable" in those places, or those places remain politically free.

This pompous gasbag gets one thing nearly right, however: "Democratic socialism is, briefly put, . . . grounded in deep Christian convictions." Yes, in the deep Christian convictions of Americans who decade in and decade out keep thinking for some strange reason that defending the European civilization from which we sprang has been a worthwhile, indeed, Christian obligation. America, briefly put, makes the "success" of European "socialism" possible.

Maybe it's time we abandoned this sense of obligation and spent the money on ourselves instead. Mr. Hart can move over there and stay over there since he likes it so much and thinks it so superior, until he needs a cow or pig valve procedure like Mick Jagger.

Pig valve, I think, for Mr. David Pudding Head. We'll keep one ready. It's the Christian thing to do.

On the astonishment of the spectators

 

 

 

In hysterick women the rarity of symptoms doth oft strike an astonishment into spectators.

-- Gideon Harvey (c. 1640-c. 1700)

Pensacola Christian College terminates General Lee statue sentry

The hysteria spreads.

I guess this means no date either, huh?

Transmigration of souls, according to Dilbert

Hysterical.

Here:

Dilbert: I couldn't find any evidence that I have a soul, so I built an artificial one and put it in a drone. When my physical body dies, the drone will upload my memories and personality to the cloud to live forever. Woman: Your soul will be trapped in a server? Dilbert: No, I wrapped it in a virus so I can travel.

-- Tuesday, November 8, 2016 "The Virus Afterlife"

Same sex marriage: yet another extraordinary popular delusion and example of the madness of crowds

herd behavior

 

Erick Erickson, here:

History is riddled with episodes of mass hysteria. Sometimes those episodes of mass hysteria lead to evil. Sometimes they lead to merely bizarre stories. But society, on occasion, has fits of hysteria and insanity burning like wildfire through it. The wildfire eventually burns out, but it often leaves destruction in its wake.

The United States of America and much of the West are currently in a fit of hysteria. A wildfire is burning through it. Up is down. Down is up. Good is evil. Evil is good. Wrong is right, and right is wrong. Boys can suddenly be girls. Sex and gender are suddenly different things. And Justice Anthony Kennedy believes that because someone may look at the horizon and find loneliness, the Constitution guarantees him the right to marry another man.

Leave aside the fact that any judge who can redefine a multi-thousand-year-old institution on a whim has more power than our Founders would want. Our society is going through a round of hysteria.

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Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false . . ..

-- 2 Thessalonians 2:11