Some Interesting News About President Bush
Over at Battle Born Politics.
2 comments June 17th, 2008
Posts with the tag 'Catholic Church'
Catholic Church Weighs in on California’s Gay Marriage Ruling
The news story:
In a pastoral letter responding to the California Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage, Bishop of Oakland Allen Vingeron said that Catholics must respond to this “profoundly significant” issue by bringing a proper understanding of marriage into public life. The failure to do so, he said, would result in a difficult situation where Christianity becomes a counter-cultural way of life.
Writing in a May 16 letter, Bishop Vingeron said the “most fundamental point” is that “marriage is a reality authored by God in his very act of creating the human race.” A marital relationship is only possible between one man and one woman for the purposes of “mutual loving support” between them and for their “loving service of life” by bringing children into the world.
All Catholics implicitly affirm this conviction when they profess to share the Church‘s faith in their baptismal promises, the bishop said.
However, he said, this conviction about marriage can be known from reason. Therefore, its position in society is not an ideological imposition but an aspect of the common good.
“This wisdom about the nature of marriage is not a form of discrimination, but undergirds our freedom to live according to God’s plan for us,” Bishop Vigneron said. “No government has the power to change the order which God has inscribed in our nature.”
Bishop Vigneron said future challenges related to same-sex unions can be divided into short term and long term categories.
In the short term, Catholics are called to bring marriage laws into conformity with their knowledge about the nature of marriage.
In Catholic teaching, a marriage is until death do they part - while modern realities have forced the Church to make some practical adjustments, it is still Church teaching that divorce is not allowed. An annullment of a marriage is something which states, in effect, that the marriage never took place - there are varied grounds for such a thing (as a for-instance: if a man pressures his intended into signing a pre-nuptial agreement, it means that he is marrying her under false pretences - a marriage must be a 100% giving of the self to the spouse, nothing held back - and thus the marriage never existed), but divorce - the breaking of a valid marriage - is against Catholic teaching. What the bishop is stating is that the first step - or, at least, one of the first steps - is to bring marriage, as an institution, back into accord with Christian teaching. And, yes, this means we must work for an end to divorce.
When the concept of divorce was first brought into the public square, it was asserted that such a thing was only for the extreme cases - the hard exceptions to the rule. After all, who could say that a woman mercilessly beaten by her husband should not be able to divorce him? The trouble was - and the Church pointed this out right at the start, and was called foolish and old fashioned for so doing - that the exception becomes the rule. Back in the day, the rare bad marriage had to stay together because nothing happening in it invalidated the marriage, itself…in the modern world, all sorts of marriages are terminated for the most trivial of reasons, even for something as meaningless as “irreconcilable differences”, which really means “we don’t want to reconcile our differences becase that might be hard and we’re moderns, and don’t like hard things”. It it way past time that we recognise divorce as a complete failure, and get rid of it.
If we were to do so, we’d probably end the entire gay marriage debate right there - and that is why the bishop brings it up now. You see, as long as society is just playing make-believe about marriage, then everyone wants a piece of it…but if marriage becomes the very real thing it used to be - a shared, life long sacrifice one to the other, and to any resultant children - then I’ll bet that most homosexuals, most of the time, will eschew the very idea. It is in the full restoration of marriage that we’ll make the institution not only strong again, but make it impervious to those who wish to use it merely as a means of advancing a particular political agenda.
21 comments May 23rd, 2008
Calling the Sinner to Repentance
The Archbishop and the Governor of Kansas. Details over at Battle Born Politics.
18 comments May 10th, 2008
Reverand Hagee Praises Benedict XVI
Rev. John Hagee, the controversial pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, has lauded Pope Benedict XVI in a Washington Times essay and thanked him for the speeches he made during his U.S. visit. Hagee praised what he called Pope Benedict’s “moral vision for America,” especially the Pope’s affirmation of Christian participation in the public square.
In his Washington Times essay, Rev. Hagee also repeated his denial of accusations he has made anti-Catholic statements. Hagee insisted he has been “quite zealous” about condemning what he said was the “past anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church.” However, he claimed his view of the Catholic Church had been caricatured.
Hagee praised Pope Benedict’s many public statements about the role that “our Judeo-Christian faith” can play in contemporary life.
“As an evangelical Protestant I happen to disagree with Pope Benedict on many issues of Christian doctrine and ritual,” Hagee wrote. “But when it comes to his moral vision for America and the world I have one thing to say in response to the Pope’s visit: Amen.”
Hagee said that evangelical leaders believe faith must not be confined to “churches on Sunday morning.” Rather, Christian values can help build a more just and humane society. Hagee said the Pope “speaks for all of us” when he said “any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted” and called for Christian participation “in the exchange of ideas in the public square.”
My erring brother, Hagee, has made a gracious gesture in keeping with the true Christian spirit - and while I retain many differences of opinion with Hagee, I choose to accept this olive branch and let bygones be bygones. At a time when religion, as a thing, is under full scale assault, those of us who believe must remain as united as possible, and I’m not going to gnaw a bone of resentment just for the sake of keeping angry.
54 comments May 5th, 2008
President Bush Talks About Benedict XVI
Noted over at Battle Born Politics.
9 comments April 12th, 2008
What Media Bias? Part 114
Actually, we’re just anticipating the media bias vis a vis Benedict XVI’s upcoming visit:
With a papal visit less than two weeks away, American readers can anticipate a spate of “analysis” stories, assessing the health of US Catholicism and predicting the content of the Pope’s message to America. Be forewarned: most of this coverage will be grossly inaccurate.
Writing for National Review Online, George Weigel cites a tendentious Washington Post piece as the early favorite for what he calls the Father Richard McBrien Prize in Really Inept Vaticanology. Weigel makes a strong case; the Post piece is definitely a contender. But there will be others, equally wrongheaded, before Pope Benedict’s visit is finished. The Boston Globe has not yet weighed in with its editorial opinion, and Father McBrien himself can never be counted out. This competition will be fierce.
The most popular theme for simplistic journalists is the contrast between the blithe spirit of American cafeteria Catholics and the inflexible dogma of the Roman Pontiff. (If you see the term “Panzerkardinal” in what purports to be a news story, you’re probably reading another entry in Weigel’s competition.) It’s easy to see the papal visit as a confrontation: the Vatican enforcer coming to town to bring order to American chaos.
We can expect the MSM to trot out the usual suspects - the Catholic theologian who stands athwart Catholic teaching; the pro-abortion Catholic; pro-female priest Catholic…heck, one of these days I’m sure we’ll come across the differently-abled, transgendered person of color Catholic (who wants to be a priest and nun, at the same time), just to make certain all bases are covered. The general line of these stories is to demonstrate that the Church is out of step with its membership and this is the reason why the Church in America shed so many members over the past few decades…such a line makes for, perhaps, a nifty narrative for an ignorant editor, but it doesn’t even touch upon the truth.
The Catholic Church is not, however, a democracy - truth cannot be decided by popular vote. It doesn’t matter if the MSM could demonstrate that every single Catholic in America is opposed to a particular item of Catholic doctrine - it wouldn’t change. Doctrine is something that comes from God and to determine just what shall be obligatory on believers is something only discovered after very careful - and, usually, very long - deliberation all up and down the line in the Catholic Church. You’ll never hear such phrases as “lightening fast” and “lickety split” applied to the way the Church considers matters of faith and morals. So, the crtitics will hammer away - female priests! Married priests! Birth control! Abortion! Such matters have been settled, and won’t be unsettled unless something extraordinary happens…and that thing won’t be the carping and complaining of certain people who really wish Truth could bend to their desires.
As for me, Ive decided that I’m going to keep track of “Panzerkardinal” during the Pope’s visit - for my own amusement (and for a future “What Media Bias?”), I want to see how many times it is used over the next month.
9 comments April 6th, 2008
Catholics and 2008
Interesting report on a Pew Survey:
In a profile of America’s Catholic population, released in advance of Pope Benedict’s visit to the US, the Pew Forum calls attention to a demographic shift, with younger Catholics less likely to remain active in the Church, while Hispanic immigrants replace many of the “cradle Catholics” who no longer practice the faith.
“No other major faith in the U.S. has experienced greater net losses over the last few decades as a result of changes in religious affiliation than the Catholic Church,” the Pew report notes. Citing the extensive survey undertaken for the “Religious Landscape Survey” that was released earlier this month, the Pew Forum explains that “roughly one-third of those who were raised Catholic have left the church, and approximately one-in-ten American adults are former Catholics.”
Only 41% of self-identified adult Catholics attend Mass each week, the Pew study found. That number is lowest among young adults, with just 30% of Catholics aged 18- 29 attending Mass weekly (by comparison, the figure is 63% among those over the age of 65)– a figure that suggests still greater decline in the number of active Catholics in coming years.
Despite the wholesale exodus of “cradle Catholics,” the Catholic proportion of America’s overall population has remains constant, thanks to the large number of Catholic immigrants, primarily from Mexico. Hispanics now account for 29% of the Catholics in the US, and nearly half of those under the age of 40.
The Pew profile confirm that Catholics compose a crucial political constituency. But the survey also shows a sharp distinction between the Catholics who attend Mass regularly and those who are not active. Thus for example, among Catholics who attend Mass weekly, 60% say that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances; among those who do not go to Mass regularly the figure is 29%.
From my experience as a Catholic, that would all be correct - that there has been a major loss in the number of Catholics and that there is a major split between devout Catholics and more nominal Catholics (humorously, but also quite seriously, our Pastor reminded the extra large congregation on Easter Sunday that we do, indeed, do this every week and everyone is welcome to attend on a regular basis).
As for American politics, this makes for a tricky task for the parties- Catholics are a major voting bloc but there are Catholics, and then there are Catholics, as it were. In some areas, Catholics are not too different from the dying, mainline Protestant denominations - weak in theology and thus liberal/left in viewpoint. Elsewhere, Catholics are as enthused as one can wish for the faith. So, which Catholics to you want? You can run as a lefty and gain Catholic votes; you can run as a conservative and gain Catholic votes. Not only that, you can run as a lefty and even get some consevative Catholic votes - mostly in the hispanic community…but, even then, it depends on just how you run your lefty campaign (hint: don’t emphasize lefty views on gay marriage and abortion when you are speaking to the congregation at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church in Albuquerque, NM…not that they won’t love you and be nice, but it might not be the best means of getting an enthusiastic voting response). For both parties, it will be a question of how to maximise Catholic turnout in their favor.
As it stands, the GOP holds the advantage here - but not entirely. Hispanic voters are likely to vote Democrat on economic issues, as poor immigrants and their immediate descendents have done since time out of mind in America, but they can also be poached by a well run GOP outreach program. Hispanic Catholics aside, the divisions between Catholics, left and right, give each party a shot at the prize, but even the most liberal Catholic can listen favorably to a conservative message, and vice versa (Catholics are hard to pin down…most simply will not vote for a pro-abortion candidate, but quite a few will vote for an otherwise big spending liberal who is either nominally pro-life, or very much downplays his pro-choice views; meanwhile, most Catholics are not thrilled with rich, corporate boss-types, but will listen to a message from such if that person emphasizes his desire for an end to abortion plus, say, tuition tax credits for primary education). It will be interesting to see how each party squares the circle, and which one comes out with the majority of Catholic votes - and thus, very likely, the White House.
15 comments March 30th, 2008
British Government to Investigate Catholic Church for Being Catholic
Just astounding:
London, Feb 26, 2008 (CNA).- A committee in the British House of Commons will investigate Catholic schools following the Bishop of Lancaster’s instructions to schools to place crucifixes in every classroom and stop “safe sex” education, the Independent reports.
Patrick O’Donoghue, Bishop of Lancaster, had circulated a 66-page booklet instructing Catholic schools to stop “safe sex” education. Bishop O’Donoghue wrote, “The secular view on sex outside marriage, artificial contraception, sexually transmitted disease, including HIV and AIDS, and abortion, may not be presented as neutral information.”
Additionally, he told the schools not to support charities that support abortion. He singled out Amnesty International, which recently renounced its neutrality on abortion and now favors the abortion of children whose mothers were raped in war zones.
The government’s investigating committee is chaired by Labour Party member Barry Sheerman, who is reportedly concerned the Church is adopting a “fundamentalist” line.
“A lot of taxpayers’ money is going into church schools and I think we should tease out what is happening here,” he added. “We seem to have a shift in emphasis on the ground despite what the reasonable voices of the leadership are saying,” Sheerman said.
Why does Sheerman get to decide who is reasonable? This is the thing which is really bothersome about this - a politician is going to bring pressure on a religious body to toe the government line because the politician has arrogated to himself the right to decide what is reasonable, and what isn’t. Now, if Mr. Sheerman thinks the Church wrong; that is fine. If Mr. Sheerman thinks that the Church is so wrong that it should not receive any government funding in Britain, then he may move a bill in Parlaiment to do just that. But to use a government committee as an attempt to browbeat the Church into doing the secularists’ will, that is an abominable infringement upon the rights of the people.
Chesterton said a very long time ago that, in the end, there is the Church, and her enemies - and Mr. Sheerman is demonstrating this to us in very stark terms. It isn’t enough for the Sheermans of the world to have all sorts of taxpayer funded programs to promote the leftist agenda - arrogantly self assured about their moral superiority, lefists insist that no one be allowed to dissent from their worldview. Britain, like the rest of Europe, is far gone down the road to socialist slavery - but this is the sort of world that the left wants to bring to the United States; a government controlled world of enforced political correctness. You want it, you can have it - all you have to do is “hope for change” in 2008, rather than learn and think.
50 comments February 27th, 2008
