Friday, August 31, 2012
The Catholic Vote 2012
Let us remember that Catholics must always follow their properly formed consciences in rendering unto Caesar what is his.... A rumination on the Romney candidacy here.
"Insincerity is the Mark of the Devil" B16
Libido Redux
Many Catholic and Christian men struggle with an ever increasing addiction these days, and the Church would do well not to shy away from using the pulpit to address the issues. Here is a piece offering sage advice to curates.....
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Pornography Redux
Peter Kreeft
Peter Kreeft has turned a prescient phrase concerning a certain color and the reality that "wide is the gate, and broad is
the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there are who go in thereat." Here is a fine read giving Catholic teaching on pornography, and advice on how to enter the narrow gate....
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Have Nothing To Do With the Dragon!
In Chapter three, I wrote the following: "If one is worldly and
hedonistic, Satan enters with temptations of the flesh. One hears often that
the “liberation” of the human libido began in earnest in the United States in
the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. Americans, troubled over repressive
attitudes toward human sexuality, hoped for a revolution that would free them
from outdated moral and social constraints. The ensuing revolution resulted not
in liberation but in license and a host of societal sexual crises. One has only
to think of the tremendous increase in the number of post-1960s illegitimate
births and abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, opposition to censorship
of pornography (especially on the Internet), and the resulting sexual addiction
(in some extreme instances resulting in murder). Consider too the tremendous
blows to marriage and the family done by adultery, the battle over the
homosexual lifestyle in the United States, Canada and Europe (now to the point
of the redefinition of marriage under the law); the increasing incidences of
sexual harassment, child pornography on the Internet, Internet predators, date
rape, and of course, the divorce rate".
And of late, it seems we must add public nudity, as evidenced here....
Sunday, August 19, 2012
People Sinning Less These Days!?
In The Smoke of Satan I discuss at length the Church's teaching that division within the Body of Christ is the result of sin, pure and simple.With that in mind, perhaps this piece from The Tablet will enlighten us as to why there is such division in the Church!.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Holy Sacrifice or Community Meal?
In my book Chapter4 discusses the loss of a sense of the transcendent at Mass, as neomodernist liturgists under the influence of Enlightenment thinkers were swindled into playing up the Mass as a community meal at the table of the Lord..... Here is an interesting poll question to take on the subject... For a look at the Scriptural and Patristic sources for the Holy sacrifice of the Mass, look here.
Friday, August 17, 2012
A Washington Insider speaks of Ryan's Catholic Faith.
When JFK ran for President in 1960, many Protestants were concerned that if elected Pope John XXIII might have a direct line to the Oval Office. This Jackie could not understand: "[paraphrasing] Why are they worried? Jack is such a lousy Catholic!' What follows here is a reflection from a Washington insider on the Catholic faith of Mitt Romney's choice for Veep.
Bishops, NOT Episcopal Conferences!
From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God:
….many
a bishop in the face of the neomodernist threat have proven incapable of
willingness to lay down his life for his sheep. The bureaucracies operating on
all levels in the Church were staffed with neomodernist activists and
intellectuals who established an entrenched elite committed to the “spirit of
Vatican II’ in advancing their agenda of radical change. A noted orthodox
Thomist and scholar [Ralph McInerney] has written, “Today it is the rare bishop
who is in charge of the bureaucracy that has metastasized around him.” That
this presented a major obstacle to furthering Vatican II’s call to individual
holiness is also evident in John Paul II’s response to this phenomenon in his
Apostolic Letter of May, 1998, Apostolos
Suos. Here the Pope urgently reminded
the Church of the limited authority of the national episcopal conferences and
their bureaucracies, which were to be run by, and speak only for the bishops
and not their staffs and commissions. He
also instructed bishops that the purpose of each national conference
“require[s] that an excessively bureaucratic development of offices and
commissions operating between plenary sessions be avoided,” and that
“commissions and offices exist to be of help to bishops and not a substitute
for them.”
Here is a recent example from the campaign of 2012 of how the conferences can distort Catholic teaching! You might also wish to read the president of the USCCB on Congressman Ryan here.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Bishops Bishoping!
In Chapter Six of my soon-to-be published The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God., I recount how bishops were given the message from Rome not to admonish Catholics who chose to contracept after neomodernist theologians hoodwinked them into believing that it was morally permissible, this so as not to create division in the Church. This of course resulted in division in the Church. It is heart warming on this the feast of the Assumption to see Catholic bishops fulfilling their role as set down in thje teaching of Vatican II!
Monday, August 13, 2012
I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.
Now that the London Olympics have concluded, and recalling my blog of Aug 4 on the Olympians attending the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, I thought it apropos to add this story on Christian Olympians unafraid to give reason for the hope within them....
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Neomodernism vs. Religious Life (conclusion)
That’s a credit to him, that he at
least had pangs of conscience; whereas these other orders, like the Jesuits,
even when they saw that the IHMs were almost extinct, nevertheless they
invited the same team in.
Oh,
yes. Well, actually we started with the Jesuits before we started with the
nuns. We did our first Jesuit workshop in ‘65. Rogers got two honorary
doctorates from Jesuit universities…. A good book to read on this whole
question is Fr. Joseph Becker’s The Re-FormedJesuits. It reviews the collapse of Jesuit training between 1965 and 1975.
Jesuit formation virtually fell apart; and Father Becker knows the influence
of the Rogerians pretty well. He cites a number of Jesuit novice masters who
claimed that the authority for what they did—and didn’t do—was Carl Rogers.
Later on when the Jesuits gave Rogers those honorary doctorates, I think that
they wanted to credit him with his influence on the Jesuit way of life.
But do you think there were any
short-term beneficial effects? Did it seem as if you were getting somewhere in
the good sense?
Well,
priests and nuns became more available to the people that they worked with;
they were less remote.... But we didn’t have a doctrine of evil. As I’ve said,
Maslow saw that we failed to understand the reality of evil in human life. When
we implied to people that they could trust their impulses, they also understood
us to mean that they could trust their evil impulses, that they weren’t really
evil. But they were really evil. This hit home again for Rogers in the 1970s,
when rumors began to circulate about a group that had spun off from ours. By
then we had become the Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla, having
spun off from WBSI; and at the same time there spun off another group called
the Center for Feeling Therapy in Hollywood. Well, charges were brought against
the guys at the Center for Feeling Therapy—one of three founders of that, by
the way, being a Jesuit who had left the order—and among the things that the
State of California was perceptive enough to charge them with was killing
babies. Eleven times, women who became pregnant while they were in the
compound, the Center for Feeling Therapy, were forced to abort their babies.
The State of California charged them with this crime—
Was this before Roe v. Wade?
No,
this happened after Roe, but the State Medical Board held that it was unethical
for those men to force the women to have abortions, because those women wanted
their babies.
And this is a result of psychological
feeling therapy?
Yes….Humanistic
psychotherapy, the kind that has virtually taken over the Church in America,
and dominates so many forms of aberrant education like sex education, and drug
education, holds that the most important source of authority is within you,
that you must listen to yourself. Well, if you have a baby you’re carrying
under your heart, get rid of it. Women who came into the Center for Feeling
Therapy with I children were forced to put them up for adoption….
Is there an assumption in humanistic
psychology, a modernist, Teilhardish kind of assumption, that human nature has
altered, and therefore old values, old models, don’t apply?
I
don’t think that humanistic psychology assumes any alteration of human nature,
but rather John Dewey’s idea that because we live in times of rapid social
change, what we’ve always done is precisely what we should no longer do.
Sure.
Now
the odd thing is, we’ve been living in terms of Dewey’s theory for almost a
hundred years now. We’re living in Dewey’s past, and not in our own present.
That’s what makes a movement like Roger McCaffrey’s and Bill Marra’s so
progressive: it doesn’t pretend that the last fifty years have worked out very
well.244
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Super Saturday Masses!
I am impressed with the spiritual as well as physical prowess of many Olympic athletes of the JP II generation, as evidenced here! Clearly JP II would be proud of the rowers no doubt (no Olympic kayaking), but sorry Holy Father, no skiing here!
Friday, August 3, 2012
Evangelization Comebacks for Dummies
Often when trying to share the Catholic faith we are called to give reasons for the hope that we have in Our Lord, but may have encountered erroneous "gotcha statements" and finger-point moments such as the ones enumerated here, responses to which are easy to master! Master them, and plant the mustard seed!
Thursday, August 2, 2012
B 16 Trilogy (Trumps Shades of Garbage Trilogy)
Good News. The Holy Father has completed his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy. I made extensive use of volume one in composing my Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God, due out this fall. If you have ever been confused about what to believe about Jesus, these three works written by the planet's preeminent biblical theologian will set you straight!
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