Punditry

I was glad to see after the Vice Presidential debate last week that the USCCB had immediately come out with a statement on the total falsity of Joe Biden’s claims about the HHS mandate. Even if it didn’t even mention his name. It is not as if people reading the statement would not know the answer to that.

Still I would like to have seen another statement released regarding what was the “elephant in the room” or really the “infant in the womb.” Joe Biden pulled out the ole “personally opposed” Kennedy chestnut and added about not being able to impose his faith on others. This tortured reasoning has been pulled out again and again and it really should be answered by the USCCB when used in this circumstance before an audience of some fifty million people.

The bishops have spoken on this before both individually and via the USCCB such as in the document “Living the Gospel of Life”

Since the entry of Catholics into the U.S. political mainstream, believers have struggled to balance their faith with the perceived demands of democratic pluralism. As a result, some Catholic elected officials have adopted the argument that, while they personally oppose evils like abortion, they cannot force their religious views onto the wider society. This is seriously mistaken on several key counts. First, regarding abortion, the point when human life begins is not a religious belief but a scientific fact — a fact on which there is clear agreement even among leading abortion advocates. Second, the sanctity of human life is not merely Catholic doctrine but part of humanity’s global ethical heritage, and our nation’s founding principle. Finally, democracy is not served by silence. Most Americans would recognize the contradiction in the statement, “While I am personally opposed to slavery or racism or sexism I cannot force my personal view on the rest of society.” Real pluralism depends on people of conviction struggling vigorously to advance their beliefs by every ethical and legal means at their disposal.

Which is great for the 100 or so Catholics that might have actually seen this document.

Now fact-checking Catholic politicians who distort the Church’s teaching is not really their purview. Really you would need a full-time staff just for Rep. Nancy Pelosi. You also have to pick your battles. Issuing a statement every time some Catholic politician says something theologically stupid would be an easy way for the media to ignore you – or ignore you more than they already do. Still the USSCB statement after the debate certainly did get some coverage.

Archbishop Chaput did comment on this as the “latest outrageous example” of the phony divide between belief and action. At the same time he also said “I call you as a Catholic, to forget about the labels, be a liberal sometimes, a conservative sometimes, but a Catholic first.” This is of course exactly right. Really I think the USCCB should have corrected VP Joe Biden on the “impose my faith” aspect and corrected Rep. Paul Ryan on supporting the abortion exemptions.

Now if you were to try to take Biden’s argument seriously on not being able to impose one’s belief than his career has a legislature is rather odd. It is not as if he only voted on legislation that was supported by 100% of his constituents. Every act of the legislature imposes something on others that they don’t like. Plus you just can’t take the argument seriously at all while they are imposing the HHS mandate on Catholics and others and then bragging about it.

Possibly I am falling in the trap of wanting the USCCB to do things. Well actually I have fallen into that trap. When really what I should be wanting is individual bishops to be vocal when such outrageous statements are made. Some of them certainly have been vocal on this. Or really a both/and approach would be quite fine with me. The line that Biden used should be slapped down and as the media loves to say “slammed” so that the next pro-abortion politician might just think a little bit before using it.

Last month Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith wrote up a list of ten Church buzzwords he would like to eliminate.  An interesting list  and one I mostly agree with.  Some of the buzzwords listed were not ones I had thought much about, but can see that they are indeed buzzwords.

So this got me thinking about my own list of buzzwords and phrases I could do without.  Now I would admit that some of the ones I am going to list might just be perfectly acceptable and even be used correctly in faithful circles.  I am going by mostly my own reactions to them and the negative connotations they have for me.  So that should be enough of a disclaimer.

1. Presider.  The announcement at the start of so many Masses that Fr. so-and-so will be the presider. This has the Mass as meeting connotation where instead of a priest as In persona Christi  we have  heading this meeting is. Now the term “presides” and “presider” does show up in English translations of Vatican documents.  I just think the use of this just before Mass starts is not helpful.  Though really the Mass needs no introduction such as this. Heck if they are going to go ahead and do this I would almost prefer a Soap Opera substitution phrasing such as “The part of Jesus is now being played by Fr. so-and so” — well not really.  Celebrant doesn’t annoy me as much, but let’s just skip the introductions.
2. Worship Space. I like how the term shows a proper orientation towards  God.  But what is wrong with the world “church”? Why substitute “worship space” which seems much more abstract?  “Honey it is time to wake up the kids so we can go to worship space.”
3. Faith Community. Again a fairly accurate term, but I pretty much only find the word used in more liberal environs.  Welcome to our faith community is another part of the introduction I hear from time to time.  Just use “parish” instead of going with more wordy phrases.
4. Sending forth hymn.  This one grates on me whenever I hear it which just shows how irrational pet-peeves can be.  Maybe though it is because when at the end of Mass the Cantor announces a “Sending forth hymn” it is usually a hymn that really sends me forth to escape the sounds attacking my ear drums. It is rather amazing how many times a “Sending forth hymn” is accompanied with castanets. Now Peter was called to cast a net, but not the choir.  Besides “Recessional hymn” is good enough for me.  Though the whole 4-hymn or 5-hymn sandwich for Mass I could also easily rant on.
5. Prophetic voice. It is pretty much a certainty when somebody says they are speaking with a prophetic voice they are doing anything but that.  Just the problem with the pride of calling yourself a prophet or the group you associate with is enough to set off warning signals.  Those who proclaim a prophetic voice seem to know nothing about the prophets.  The prophets were persecuted and martyred because they called Israel back to the faith and proclaimed against their errors. The self-proclaimed prophets are more pathetic than prophetic.  They call people away from the faith and then proclaim errors as truth.  They say the Church will change her teachings — just add time.
6. Healing Mass. Technically there is no specific category of a Healing Mass, generally though all Masses involve healing.  What is usually meant by this term is Mass followed by some kind of healing prayer service.  Sometimes you even see the Sacrament of Anointing given out like a blessing where people just stand in line and receive the sacrament.  When I have encountered this there was no discernment regarding danger of death or any other caveats about when it is appropriate to receive this sacrament of healing.  When prayers for healing in a liturgical or non-liturgical occur in context of the norms of the Church I of course have no objection.  I just prefer accurate terms.
7. Progressive.  Chesterton said enough about this in Heretics that I will not attempt to improve on him.
8. Seamless Garment. I am not critiquing Cardinal Bernadin’s original use of this  which certainly reflects a truth.  Rather I critique what it has morphed into.  In the modern use I call it the “Shameless Garment” since it is used rather shamelessly to be an excuse to vote for pro-abortion politicians or be involved with pro-abortion groups just as long as they also do some objective good.  The hierarchy of truths which the Seamless Garment should reflect has been flattened down to make all issues equal.
9. Catholic Identity. Used mostly by those who should be sued for Catholic Identity Fraud.  Usually is a term used as a veneer to apply a Catholic patina to an institution that has mostly lost it’s Catholic faith.
10. Eucharistic Minister. Part of the flattening out of the clergy and the laity. It is not just for ease of use that the actual title “Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion” is replaced.  I don’t have to rant about how ordinary the extraordinary is at Masses since that has been well-covered in the Catholic blogosphere.  Really though this one was just easy pickings to round off my list to ten.

What are your least favorite Catholic buzzwords/phrases.

Ah so nice to see so many lies packed into a campaign ecard. First off it is not the misnamed “Affordable Care Act” that pays for birth control but the HHS Mandate as currently codified.  The HHS used Obamacare as an excuse to ram this down.

The $18,000 figure also seems rather extravagant implying  $1500 a month while at school.  The figure actually comes from Planned Parenthood (no surprise there) for lifetime costs of hormonal birth control which they estimate as running from $5,400 TO $18,000.  So this e-card would then imply that parents are suppose to pay for a lifetime of contraceptive use if the taxpayers don’t – really?  What about food costs since that seems a bit more fundamental?  Though considering Food Stamps use is rising maybe that is where we are heading.

This ad is also descriptive of the entitlement philosophy.  Someone makes the decision to contracept and the responsibility for paying for it is somebody other than the person contracepting.

As if this ecard wasn’t creepy enough.

So much for human dignity, lets reduce people to their genitals because surely nothing could go wrong with that idea.

Via “Creative Minority Report“

Sometimes when odd or complex news stories regarding the Church come around I pretty much wait for Jimmy Akin to weigh in on the subject. One of those stories grabbing headlines in the last week regarded denial of the sacraments for Catholics in Germany who did not pay the tax.

Jimmy with the information at hand so far does weigh in and provides the background of this seemingly odd story.

As he mentions “You have people denying the faith before Caesar so that they can have more take-home pay. That’s a problem.” Certainly anything the German bishops decided in responding to this was going to be a PR difficulty in how it would be spun. But in contrast having people deny their faith is a much more serious problem than something minor such as how any response was going to be perceived. Really the underlying situation in Germany regarding this tax is what should be addressed.

What I am curious about is exactly how they would enforce this in the first place?

Looking through my RSS feeds I spotted the headline “Was There a Mrs. Christ? Probably Not”.

Then I saw the article was from Father James Martin S.J. at America Magazine.  My first charitable thought was that maybe this was headline editing and didn’t match the story.  No in his article he states:

But does this mean that Jesus was married? Probably not.

Though maybe a “probably not” is as strong of a defense we can expect from some quarters.  He follows this up with another muscular statement:

It is more likely that Jesus was celibate.

He then engages in a little scriptural apologetics in regards to the question.

And what do the Gospels say? For one thing, the Gospel of Mark describes Jesus, who had settled in the town of Capernaum, on the Sea of Galilee, as receiving a surprise visit from his family, who had come from his hometown, Nazareth. “A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.’ ” Why no mention of a wife?

Not bad, but it isn’t like this is the only example you could give.  The total lack of a mention of a wife in the New Testament or any subsequent mention in historical texts from the Church Fathers and others just might be a clue. Please Father put the Dan Brown novel down and come up with a defense for this ridiculous assertion stronger than “probably not.”

Now I am no hater of Fr. Martin as I actually enjoyed a couple of his books, but this is not even his first apologetic fail.  An article he did last year on Five myths of Christmas also was a weak-tea defense of the faith and even stated that it was a myth that Jesus was an only child. While you could nuance that statement to some extent relying on Joseph having been previously married – he only added to the  confusion.

NPR has a story “College Course Lumps Homosexuality, Rape, Murder”

GetReligion posts on the one-sided nature of the story and asks “Is this a smear job or simply bad journalism?” Well as a Catholic I say “both/and”.

Tim Drake of the National Catholic Register has a solid piece on the story which includes the fact that the complaining group didn’t even contact the University first to complain before taking the story to the press along with other relevant details.

This type of conflation to portray things in the worst light possible is nothing new for opponents of the Church. Not that long ago when the revised norms (Normae de Gravioribus Delictis) issued by the Holy See included women’s ordination. Headlines shouted how the Church viewed women’s ordination as the same thing as child sexual abuse.  Funny how journalist can’t make the simplest distinctions when it doesn’t fit their agenda.

Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry, “We will not be dictated to,” and proceeded to become stenographers – G.K. Chesterton

I was reminded of this quote do to the recent trend of S&M porn for women. It seems I can hardly get away from the book “50 Shades of Gray” which shows up in searches at Audible, Amazon, and appears on shelves in warehouse stores such as Costco. Recently I started seeing advertisement for a book of the same sick genre at Goodreads on their main page. This disturbing trend has hardly had any outcry from the professional feminist and some people even see it as female sexual emancipation. So we went from women who didn’t want to be tied down at home to women that want to be tied up at home – to update Chesterton’s phrase.

In related news of the perverse Mark Shea posts another example of sexual perversion moving from the “just a taboo stage” to arguments for acceptance.

Being part of the Amazon Vine program I eagerly scan through the books and other merchandise available for review when they send out their emails.

Recently one book I saw was called Breaking Through: Catholic Women Speak for Themselves.  Seeing that title the thought that came to me was if there was one book that had about zero chance of catching my interest this was one.  Sounds just like a title given to a typical Catholic dissent-fest.  Later the same day on EWTN I heard the same book referenced in a positive manner, so I dug up the email from the trash and had them send it to me.

Considering all the media coverage and the  phony “war on women” meme  and the fact that Catholic women who are dissenters are constantly being presented to us this book is quite timely.  This book is partly a response to the attacks on religious freedom and how the narrative was shaped concerning Catholic women and the use of contraceptives.

This book in some ways could have been called “Surprised by the truth of the Church’s teachings on sexual morality” as it is partly a “Surprised by Truth”-like format of conversion stories.  Not the common Protestant-to-Catholic conversion stories but mostly concerning Catholic women who were in opposition to Church teaching and who came to see the wisdom and the truth of her teaching.  These women from a variety of backgrounds and professional experience not only provide the genesis for how they came to accept Church teaching, but explain those teachings in a very accessible way.  All of these chapters were very well written and had me quite captivated by their personal stories. Along with these stories are also a couple of essays that go with the subject at hand.

Seeing how God worked in these women’s lives was a joy to see and a couple of the stories related really had me praising God – which unfortunately is not something I do as much as I should.  The story of one women’s affect on another headed to get an abortion is worth the price of the book – just so awesome! This book covers a lot of topics including: fear of children, contraception, same-sex attraction, beauty, the ends of dating, the sexual abuse crisis, stable marriages and family life, etc.

Even as a man I could relate to some of the background of the stories on how secular feminism had shaped their lives.  Being raised in a house that subscribed to Ms. Magazine and Psychology Today and where Alan Alda was the pinnacle of what a man should be — it is not just women who get subverted by this message.

This book is a great antidote to so much of what we hear and it presents faithful Catholic women who can fully articulate their faith and who have had the same struggles as so many others.  Maybe the title that confused me is a positive thing and I sincerely hope that those who struggle with the truth of what the Church teaches will pick this book up.  They might be seriously challenged by what this book presents, but they won’t be talked down to or feel attacked by it.