Punditry

WASHINGTON (CNS) — Leaders representing 59,000 women religious are questioning what they say is a lack of full disclosure about what is motivating the Vatican’s apostolic visitation that will study the contemporary practices of U.S. women’s religious orders.

In an Aug. 17 press statement, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious also said the leaders “object to the fact that their orders will not be permitted to see the investigative reports about them” when they are submitted in 2011 to the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and its prefect, Cardinal Franc Rode.

In addition, the women religious expressed concern about secrecy they say is surrounding the funding of the study, said Sister Annmarie Sanders, director of communications for LCWR.[reference]

Yeah what could possible be the reason for such a visitations. Scratching my head trying to figure this one out. Could it be rampant dissent to the magisterium? Can’t be that. How about widespread support of women’s ordination? Couldn’t be. How about the massive destruction in religious life over the last four decades with so many orders having few if any novices? Surely not that. How about the web pages for most religious orders looking more like a page for some left wing advocacy group than a Catholic religious order? No, just because they seem to pay a lot of attention to the United Nations and none to the Vatican surely could not be a reason. Maybe it is the range of wacky ideas ranging from radical feminism to eco-theology? No, that couldn’t be it. Well, what about the fact that there is zero interest in the pro-life cause by so many orders. No, just

– that doesn’t mean anything.
This is certainly a case of someone in the Vatican holding a grudge for some unknown reason and initiated an Apostolic Visitation.

Actually though the LCWR saying this is like a guy driving 130 mph, getting pulled over and asking “Is there something I can do for you officer?”

Even more annoying is Catholic News Service basically passing on the LCWR’s news release with no discernment whatsoever.

The president of a small Catholic college said Friday he would rather close the school’s doors than violate the church’s teachings on contraception should the college lose the latest battle involving health-insurance laws and religious freedom.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has determined that Belmont Abbey College violated discrimination laws because the school’s employee health insurance plan does not cover contraception, according to a letter the EEOC sent to the school.
“I hope it would never get this far,” college President William K. Thierfelder told The Washington Times, “but if it came down to it we would close the college before we ever provided that.”

I listened to an interview with President Thierfelde this week on Al Kresta’s show and it was quite nice hearing him defend the truth the Catholic Church teaches and to take a hard stance on the encroachment of the government into a Catholic college. He was even quoting Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Catholic college presidents who quote this document are rarer than hens teeth. I am sure there is some mutant hens out there with teeth.

“By denying prescription contraceptive drugs, [the college] is discriminating based on gender because only females take oral prescription contraceptives,” the EEOC wrote in a letter to the North Carolina college. “By denying coverage, men are not affected, only women.”

Yes this is the same tactic they always use – make it a case of gender inequality, even if it makes no sense. Liberal groups who hate the Catholic Church are quite willing to use the government to enforce their will on the small number of holdouts who still believe what the Church teaches. This is just on the state level, imagine the red tape they would try to strangle the Church with as a Federal manner.

… Mr. Thierfelder wrote at the time that “it is the clear, consistent, incontrovertible, public, official and authoritative teaching of the Roman Catholic Church that abortion, contraception and voluntary sterilization are actions which are intrinsically wrong and should not be undertaken because of their very nature.”
The college, which has about 1,500 students, no longer covers contraceptive services as part of its employee health coverage.
“As a Roman Catholic institution, Belmont Abbey College is not able to and will not offer nor subsidize medical services that contradict the clear teaching of the Catholic Church,” Mr. Thierfelder wrote in a letter explaining the changes.

Belmont Abbey College is one of the schools that is taking back its Catholic identity just as the University of Stuebenville did in the past. Unfortunately this case came about because of eight current and former faculty members. I guess they don’t make enough to be able to buy their own contraceptives. As if this was a significant expense in any way except on the moral calculator. Well any stick to beat the Church.

[reference]

I previously posted a story about vandalism of a Bible as art. The Telegraph reports under the headline “Pope condemns Bible ‘vandalism’ exhibition”.

The subsequent complaints have led to the organisers of the exhibit putting the holy book on show in a locked case and inviting visitors to write their comments on blank sheets of paper instead.

But it was too late to appease the Pope.

The adviser to the head of the Catholic Church said the project was “disgusting and offensive”.

With no actual quote from the Pope and a quote from unnamed advisor I call BS on this story. Plus it does not sound like how he would phrase the reaction in the first place.

Good article on Alfred Kinsley the scientific fraud behind the sexual revolution. Good overview of how his fraudulent research changed the culture – none to the good. Though it does not cover the aspects of Kinsey the man who was a pervert’s pervert. Yet of course Hollywood made a movie about the man that of course didn’t mention that he masturbated babies as part of his research.

Fr. McBrien in The Tidings:

Religious communities of women have been responsible for many of the good things that the Catholic Church in the United States has achieved, both before and after the Second Vatican Council.

It is all the more distressing, therefore, that two Vatican agencies — the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) — have targeted these communities and their principal leadership organization for a “visitation” and “doctrinal assessment” respectively.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the “visitation” is the requirement that each of the visitors will be required to make a public profession of faith and an oath of fidelity to the Apostolic See.

This requirement will discourage a number of potential visitors from volunteering their services in this study, and thereby skew the visitation teams in a particular ideological direction.

Matthew at Creative Minority Report responds:

Did you get that? An oath of fidelity to the Apostolic See skews you in a particular ideological direction, ie conservative.

Fr. McBrien, it’s called being faithful. It’s not ideological.

But using logic would lead one to an inescapable conclusion. If being a conservative Catholic is defined as being faithful to the Apostolic See, then how must a liberal Catholic be defined?

Tsk Tsk Fr. McBrien. The first rule of Heresy club is you don’t talk about Heresy club. And you never ever say what you really mean.

Yes having an religious order actually taking an oath to the Apostolic See is too much. What to they think they are authentically Catholic or something? Actually the whole refusal of taking the oath of fidelity seems a hard one to understand. I remember when Bishop Baker when he was installed as Bishop had everybody working for the Diocese take it and there was some anger about this. Seems a good idea to me for a new Bishop to find the tares among the wheat. Every time I started a new enlistment in the Navy I had to take an oath. An oath is a serious thing and their is a good reason for the military to have one. The same goes for religious orders which comes under the control of the Holy See. I appreciate the honesty of those who refuse such an oath, but those that do should not be in a Catholic religious order.

Visitors to a gallery in Scotland have been defacing the Bible in the name of art.

The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow has invited art lovers to write their thoughts down in an open Bible on display as part of its Made in God’s Image exhibition.

Next to the Bible lie several pens with a note saying: “If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it”.

Several visitors have already taken up the offer, choosing to leave messages of abuse and obscenity rather than support for the words of God.

“This is all sexist pish, so disregard it all,” one message read.

Another scrawled over the first page of Genesis: “I am Bi, Female & Proud. I want no god who is disappointed in this”.

Others wrote: “The Gospel According to Luke Skywalker”, “F*** the Bible” and “Facist God”.

The exhibition, which also includes a woman ripping pages from a Bible and stuffing them into her underwear, has outraged the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Scotland.

This has got to be the perfect illustration of the progressive mindset. Stuffing scripture pages into your underwear – because you know it is the Church that is obsessed by sex. The other day I heard Fr. Peter Stravinskas talk about his many visits to the Larry King show. He was being interviewed on “Al Kresta in the Afternoon” where he talked about how it is the Church that is obsessed by sex, yet he was always invited on the Larry King show in relation to some sex scandal.

But the gallery’s artist in residence, Anthony Schrag, is unrepentant.

“Any offensive things that have been written are not the point of the work,” Schrag told The Times newspaper.

“It was an open gesture. Are those who say they are upset offended by the things that people write, or just by the very notion that someone should write on a Bible?

People are not offended that people might write in a Bible, we do in all the time taking notes in the margin. It does seem more and more to me that “artists in residence” is one of the most amazing con jobs ever. It is like the Emperor News Clothes, but with people afraid to say “Thats’ junk.” For example I give you this artists “The Beer Tree” – you must read the description and watch the video.

“If we are to open up the Bible for discussion, surely we have to invite people to speak out.”

The Metropolitan Community Church originally proposed the exhibition as a way of reclaiming the Bible as a sacred text.

No surprise that this church is “inclusive Christian ministry to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.” Inclusive that is if you fit in the category they want. Not very inclusive to those of us who take Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition seriously.

However, some of its members have been shocked by the insults written in the Bible on display.

“The Bible should never be used like that,” church minister Jane Clarke said.

“It was our intention to reclaim it as a sacred text.”

Yes the “write yourself in” really pushes the sacred aspect. They did not advance past what Mark Shea calls “What can it hurt?” Funny how so many “prophetic ministries” can’t seems to get a grasp on predicting predictable results.

A Catholic Church spokesman said: “One wonders whether the organisers would have been quite as willing to have the Koran defaced”. [reference]

In a type of mock ceremony that’s now been performed in at least four states, a robed “priest” used a hairdryer marked “reason” in an apparent bid to blow away the waters of baptism once and for all. Several dozen participants then fed on a “de-sacrament” (crackers with peanut butter) and received certificates assuring they had “freely renounced a previous mistake, and accepted Reason over Superstition.”

For Gray, the lighthearted spirit of last summer’s Atheist Coming Out Party and De-Baptism Bash in suburban Westerville, Ohio, served a higher purpose than merely spoofing a Christian rite.

“It was very therapeutic,” Gray said in an interview. “It was a chance to laugh at the silly things I used to believe as a child. It helped me admit that it was OK to think the way I think and to not have any religious beliefs.”

…Atheist Gary Mueller recently mailed his de-baptism certificate to St. Bonaventure Catholic Church in Concord, Calif., and asked to be dropped from its baptismal record. The church told him, in effect, that he was all wet.

“While we do not remove a name/person from a Baptism register, we can note alongside your name that ‘you have left the Roman Catholic Church,’ ” the Rev. Richard Mangini replied in an e-mail. “I hope that God surprises you one day and lets you know that He is quite well.” [reference]

As a former atheist I would like to debunk what they are saying, but since I can only rely on superstition and not reason I am unable to. When I became Catholic I had to sign one of those documents about promising to abstain from reason and other bad habits I had picked up in a lifetime of atheism. In the last ten years I have been much happier now that religion is a crutch and life is easier now also since I don’t have to think anymore and can just blindly follow some foreign guy in a robe! I embrace my sheepleness.

Besides reason is not what it is cracked up to be. Just what had it done for St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas. Pascal, or even our present Pope? Remember that encyclical Pope John Paul II wrote “Faith and Superstition”? Oh wait.

Now if these people were serious about giving up Christianity and the fruits of Christendom, they should also denounce hospitals, universities, and even modern science, and of course acts of charity. They want to denounce Christianity while at the same time enjoying the fruits of it.

I am so glad that this man showed us how to use reason! Forming judgments by a process of logic always leads you to sticking a piece of paper with REASON on it to a hair dryer. Mocking Christians with phony rituals that have not ability to cancel out an ontological change screams reason. Though ‘Reason itself is a matter of faith,” G. K. Chesterton wrote. ”It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth–in a word, to know himself–so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves. – Pope John Paul II Fides et Ratio.

The Catholic Key blog titled the post on this “Atheists Need Better liturgists” Actually a stunt as silly as this sounds just like something a liturgist would recommend. Rocks in baptismal fonts and blow-dryers marked reason kind of go together.

I have been slow to getting around to responding to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Newsweek piece calling Obama more Catholic than the Pope. It is so laughably bad that I first felt responding to it was overkill since it is such a target rich environment for stupidity.

But there they part ways. Politics requires the ability to listen to different points of view, to step into others’ shoes. Obama might call it empathy. While the pope preaches love, listening to the other has been a particular stumbling block for the Catholic hierarchy (as it is for many in power). The hierarchy ignores women’s equality and gays’ cry for justice because to heed them would require that it admit error and acknowledge that the self-satisfied edifice constructed around sex and gender has been grievously wrong. Before he became John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla had a telling all-or-nothing formulation: “If it should be decided that contraception is not an evil in itself then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit is on the side of the Protestant Churches.”

It is rather evident that Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has not read any of the Pope’s books and knows next to nothing about him. One of the Pope’s hallmarks is that he is a deep listener and fully engages people. As a theologian and scripture scholar he spends much time in reading those who he has a lot to disagree with. Yet as in his book “Jesus of Nazareth” he takes what is good from their writings into his own thought. He has the all to rare talent to not read into others, but to actually read others. His significant time as prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith had very little time spent to addressing dissenting theologians and even in those cases the conversations with them went on for years resulting in only a couple disciplinary actions. This is a man who will actually listens to different points of view and will take the truth from wherever it is found. But of course since he is not accepting of evils the culture promotes than he is not listening according to them.

I can’t say I am all to impressed with President Obama’s ability as a listener. He makes noises about respecting your opinion while not changing his in any way. With the majority of American being pro-life, how much listening has he done in that direction? As for him admitting error, when faced with the proof of his vote for infanticide that the text of the bill was identical to the one unanimously passed – he said that the NRLC was lying.

Actually that supplied quote is reported to be from a minority report written by two men which included Karol Wojtyla and defended the Church’s truth on contraception. I can’t find any actual copies of the text for the minority report for the Humanae Vitae commission and the text is only cited by dubious sources as far as I could see. Of course it also does not mean what she thinks it means if accurate. The minority report as reported was guided by then-Cardinal Wojtyla thoughts and was totally in support of this truth of the Church. When it comes to the truth it is often an all or nothing prospect. Either the Church teaches the truth and is guided by the Holy Spirit or she is not. If the Church can teach that a good intended by God is a grave sin then she is not the Church of Christ – thus no reason to be Catholic in the first place.

That attitude has resulted in some heinous decisions. Most famously, in the lead up to the encyclical “Humanae Vitae” in 1968, an advisory body of theologians and laity empaneled by the pope advised that the church should reverse its position on birth control and concede that the issue should be a question for morality and for science. But authority–not truth, not love–prevailed: Pope Paul VI, listening to the advice of Wojtyla, disagreed with the majority of these advisers, who had voted 69 to 10 for change, fretting that to change this position would weaken his authority.

The purpose of the commission was not to determine if teaching on contraception was true. This teaching was already infallible by the ordinary magisterium. The purpose was to determine if the pill was morally different from other methods of contraception. While it appears the majority of the people involved in this thought that it was not, that actual report has never been released – only some appendices leaked to the press. Theology is not a democratic action. When Jesus asked the Apostles who people said he was, all but Peter got the answer wrong. Plus Peter had help from the Holy Spirit in this case. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend calls the support of Church teaching a heinous decision. Hey remember all the promises by supporters of the pill – none that have come true. We have an abortafacient chemical that has resulted in evils upon evils in its destruction of society. The left likes to speak of being prophetic, yet ignore true prophecy contained in Humanae Vitae.

In the same vein, American bishops in the 1970s struggled to produce a paper that would address the concerns of women. After nine years of effort, they gave up. Why? According to Bishop P. Francis Murphy, bishops see themselves as “teachers, not learners: truth can not emerge through consultation.” Pope Benedict, having lived in the safety and security of the Vatican for much of his professional life, is part of this culture that silences dissent. (His last job was as the enforcer of doctrine.)

Pretty funny for a Kennedy talking about somebody living in “safety and security”. As if she has ever lived apart from the echo chamber of Kennedy liberalism. Cardinal Ratzinger was really good on “silencing dissent” that is why we never hear any dissent – oh wait.

In 1979, Sister Theresa Kane, the head of the Sisters of Mercy and the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, greeted Pope John Paul II on his first visit to the United States by proposing that the Church provide “for the possibility of women as persons being included in all ministries of our Church,” including the priesthood. This was greeted with revulsion at the Vatican, which insists that the only people who can represent God in the priestly role are those with male sex organs.

Yes the same leadership conference currently undergoing a visitation by the Vatican because of their doctrinal and obedience problems. The last line is so stupid and offensive in that it takes in no account why the Church reserves the priesthood for men. I wish supporters of women’s ordination would spend at least half their time trying to understand this truth instead of whining about it. They never address any real theology or the fact that this is simply the will of Christ and the Church can’t change it. But yeah make some snarky remarks about “male sex organs” instead will do.

Yet polls bear out that American Catholics do not want to be told by the Vatican how to think. Despite the rhetoric of love and truth, the Vatican shows disdain (if not disgust) toward gays. But 54 percent of American Catholics find gay relationships to be morally acceptable, according to a 2009 Gallup poll. Meanwhile, against all scientific evidence and protestations from clergy on the ground, the pope claims that condoms aggravate the spread of AIDS. Seventy-nine percent of American Catholics disagree, according to a 2007 poll by Catholics for Choice.

No we want to be told by Kennedy’s how to think. It is rather obvious that she has not read one Church document that addresses those who suffer with same-sex attraction. The document written by then-Cardinal Ratzinger shows not disdain or disgust in any way. But she must set up her strawmen, in fact she seems to be grasping at strawmen. When you have to resort to a group that advocates murder of the innocent, you pretty much give up the right to say that the Church is not listening to the Holy Spirit.

Notre Dame awarded the president an honorary degree because it saw the need to highlight the best of Catholic teaching as applied to politics: the ability to open the eyes of those who would prefer to keep them closed, and to open the hearts of those who would prefer not to know the pain that their actions cause. The pope has a lot to learn about Catholic politics in America. Barack Obama can teach him.

It is the supporters of abortion who need to heed “open the hearts of those who would prefer not to know the pain that their actions cause.” The President can certainly teach the President about many Catholics in America. The President does represent many American Catholics, though this is not to his good. Too many Catholics do not know their faith and they betray it for some pottage of promises. The title of the Newsweek piece is “Why Barack Obama represents American Catholics better than the pope does.” Again the President does represent those Catholics who see themselves as American’s first or that “American Catholic” is some flavor of the Catholic Church. Americanism is not a knew thing as Pope Leo XII well knew.