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Friar Roderic tell us all about airmaria.com
I’ve never seen a Friar who’s look more shouts “Friar” than him. Other than the gray robe of the order of Maximilian Kobe (Feast day Saturday) doesn’t he just look like he could walk right on the set of the 1950’s series The Adventures of Robin Hood and fit right in. Yet here he is at the Catholic New Media Convention. The medium may change but the message of Christ remains the same.
A locked door and drawn shades
This was about 12:30 a.m on August 6th. Only a few of the protesters had showed up in the parking lot to this point. They were awaiting the others preparing for their day. I crossed the street to start my interviews when I noticed a gentleman in an Islamic cap heading toward the Mosque that had been on Main Street for many years.
As I never had been inside I wanted to get the views of the local Islamic community, as Catholic and protestant communities had already joined various protests. He invited me in and I ended up viewing the Islamic service and interviewing the Imam.
I’ve already told the story of that encounter but I will add after the service we talked for 45 minutes and I asked him the opinion of Islam on Abortion in general and of planned parenthood in particular.
According to Imam Bashir Uddin Mehmud Islam forbids abortion unless the choice is between the death of the mother and the death of the child.
He was unwilling to make a pronouncement on the behalf of the community but was willing to talk on behalf of himself. He talked about the changes in Fitchburg, the lack of modesty, the increase of drugs in the city and the coming of the gangs. He pointed to the strip club (the other side) on water street, and the fact that a lot of the services that the center will be offering are offered in schools and the colleges and readily available.
His point was Planned Parenthood was not so much the problem but a symptom of the bigger problem of our walk away from morality.
I left the mosque a bit after 2 p.m. and the protest was in full swing. Many familiar faces were already on the line, but the face that jumped out at me was my own pastor, Fr. Robert Bruso.
Fr Bruso of St. Anthony of Padua church picketing with the protestors
Fr. Bruso has issues with his legs but that didn’t stop him from marching for two hours in the hot sun. I greeted him and mentioned the Iman’s remark. He remarked that it really goes back to the Reformation where it was decided that Eternal Truth could be individually defined. From that point we have reached a state where people are unwilling to admit the existence of simple truth (let alone eternal ones).
Nothing slowed him down and he only paused twice when different gentlemen passing by stopped and spoke with some surprise to see a Catholic priest marching. It doesn’t seem odd to me, but it got me thinking that this is the real casualty of the scandals; that people expect and many a priest has, retreated from proclaiming truths to the world. Fr. Bob is not among them.
During the entire time I witnessed the protest new people came and other left, while the owner of the building looked on nervously from the second floor of the building. Only one or two people actually entered or exited the office itself.
After taking care of a personal errand I returned for the last hour of protest. Some had come and some had gone but a core group remained and new people came to join them continuing the vigil in front of the office and making their presence known.
Planned Parenthood on main street Fitchburg is now a fact. The imprimatur of the City Council and the cash of the federal government had made it so. What remains to be seen is if the protests against them and regular picketing by those who support life will also be a fact, if today and the regular smaller protests are any measure I would say they will be.
But I keep going back to the words of the Imam and the Pastor on how we as a society have reached this point. The answer comes from something I read today from columnist and classical author Victor Davis Hanson. Commenting on the state of the country he wrote:
If one were to survey the elite campuses around 1975 and talk to those in law school, poly sci, or the humanities, then imagine them 35 years later as our elite leaders in government, the media, the universities, the foundations, and the arts, one could pretty much expect what we now have.
The answer seems to be what it always is, we get the country, the society and the culture that we deserve.
Update: Fixed some grammatical mistakes.
…doesn’t get the tea party movement.
The strength of the movement isn’t a national organization fund-raising, it is hundreds upon hundreds of local tea party groups running shoestring budgets.
Maybe they should consider embedding a reporter into a small local tea party group or two and just watch how it works. Maybe they would learn something.
Part of the Tea Party’s charm has been its eschewing of traditional political forms, including fundraising. The “suspicion” that some cast on elements within the movement is directed towards those who may have intentions of co-opting the grassroots for traditional party power. Its bootstrap quality attracts people to the rallies even if it does leave question about the movement’s ability to survive.
Besides, there is a basic conundrum in this question. While there have been many motivations and provocations that have pushed the movement’s growth, the poor economy and the top-down policies of Democrats that have created stagnation are the most powerful. That leaves people with not much discretionary cash to donate, making it ironically a bad time to launch a massive new political organization based on grassroots fundraising.
The bottom up organization is not a bug, it’s a feature.
memeorandum thread here
It just might be a guess but I’ll wager Mike Lupica before today has written about Rep Bob Ingles nearly once
Rep. Bob Inglis, a voice of reason at a dumb, unreasonable time in American politics, is one of them. Inglis (R-S.C.) will be out of a job soon for not hating Barack Obama nearly enough. The irony, he says, is that he disagrees with Obama on almost everything.
Inglis, a conservative Republican from a state so red you worry it might set itself on fire, used to go after Bill Clinton with everything he had. But these days he comes up an even better American than a Republican, speaking his own mind, refusing to join a chorus of idiots and call Obama his enemy, or an enemy of the state. Inglis’ state or anybody else’s.
Nothing proves the tea parties ejection of Inglis more than his sudden deification by the liberal media. Read the column, it is a love letter to Ingles, if they were in Massachusetts they’d be booking a hall. All because he has been rejected by Conservative Republicans and the tea party and has been crying to the media ever since as if he had a divine right to the nomination.
I think Mr. Lupica has caught Scarborough Syndrome. Like Joe who will forever think that there are only 50 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan Mike Lupica will always think that president Obama has the approval rating he did on Jan 21 2009 and republicans should act accordingly
Memeorandum thread here.
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