Archive for the ‘catholic’ Category

Today is All Souls day

Posted: November 2, 2009 by datechguy in catholic
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This is one of the most solemn days in the Catholic Calendar. Unlike yesterdays celebration of All Saints Day, where we celebrate those who have gone through the great trial and succeeded. All Souls is when we pray for and with the souls in purgatory to help them along their path to heaven. Although they are destined for heaven and are part of the communion of saints as they have not yet achieved heaven they would not be considered Saints in the colloquial usage of the term to wit:

When we talk about Saints in terms of the communion of saints we refer to all souls in heaven. Any soul in heaven is by definition a saint. The only difference between canonized saints and all the others is the Church’s direct acknowledgment of their presence in heaven.

It should be mentioned that in the list of saints there are also some that may never have existed. When the initial lists of saints was compiled centuries ago they included names from various traditions and area. In the current lists such saints are marked as such.

Souls in purgatory are all destined for heaven and “sainthood” but are in the state of purification necessary for the presence of God, Isaiah gives a quick biblical example:

Then I said, “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” Then one of the seraphim flew to me, holding an ember which he had taken with tongs from the altar. He touched my mouth with it. “See,” he said, “now that this has touched your lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” “Here I am,” I said; “send me!” Isaiah 6:5-8

They combined with us on earth equal the Communion of Saints. Our combined prayers are a powerful resource for all. The Saints in heaven get no direct benefit other than the joy of helping those toward God, the souls in purgatory get the benefit of shortening the time to their destination and we on earth get the benefit of helping to find the way along that path.

The prayers and sacrifices of the canonized saints, uncanonized saints and the holy souls in purgatory are yet another example of the many tools available to Christians in general and Catholics in particular to steer one on the road to the salvation of Christ.

In my opinion the divorcing of so many Christians from the Church in general and these aids in particular constitutes one of the greatest victories by Satan over the last 500 years. Through the grace of Christ many have found salvation even without them, but how many more have been stolen away for the want of that extra help that was simply there for the taking?

As usual the anchoress puts it better than me.

Q: Why does Larry David have no problem pissing on Christ and Christians?

Posted: October 29, 2009 by datechguy in catholic, internet/free speech, opinion/news
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A: Because he knows we won’t kill him for it.

In fact there is only upside professionally for him among the people who call Roman Polanski the victim of a “young hooker“.

He has the right to do what he wants but if anyone tries to tell you it is “courageous” then they are either fools or liars.

Why invistigate the nuns? Oh I don’t know maybe this?

Posted: October 27, 2009 by datechguy in catholic
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Outrage continues over the Vatican investigation of Nuns in America

“We can’t figure out why this is happening,” said Flannery, director of the Jesuit retreat house in Parma. “We’re just doing our jobs.”

The New York Times Maureen Dowd:

Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.

Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

And the letters backed her up:

I came away amazed and profoundly touched by the sisters’ faithfulness to tradition as well as by their spirituality, community, ministry and joy in vowed lives devoted entirely to the church’s mission. No Catholics on earth are more faithful to the Catholic Church.

I agree, nuns are the rock of the church in America, it’s not as if they were out there supporting Abortion publicly. Oh wait:

A Dominican nun has been seen frequenting an abortion facility in Illinois recently – but not, as one might expect, to pray for an end to abortion or to counsel women seeking abortions, but to volunteer as a clinic escort.

Local pro-life activists say that they recognized the escort at the ACU Health Center as Sr. Donna Quinn, a nun outspokenly in favor of legalized abortion, after seeing her photo in a Chicago Tribune article.

Well it’s not as if her Prioress was backing her, oh wait:

And what about the pertinent Dominican religious superior? Why, she’s going to bat for Sister Donna’s right to choose the choice she has chosen:

Sr. Patricia Mulcahey, OP, Quinn’s Prioress at the Sinsinawa Dominican community, said in an email response to LSN that the nun sees her volunteer activity as “accompanying women who are verbally abused by protestors. Her stance is that if the protestors were not abusive, she would not be there.” Though Sr. Mulcahey claimed that her sisters “support the teachings of the Catholic Church,” she declined to comment on Quinn’s public protest of Catholic Church teaching.

See a contradiction here? Well you’re wrong. It might look a little odd at first glance, but in reality this is an example of the healthy and fully renewed religious life called for by the Second Vatican Council.

Well it’s not as if this was a violation of Canon law, now that you mention it:

1. Canon 695 calls for the mandatory dismissal of a religious guilty of the delict of abortion described in Canon 1398. A case can be made, I think, that Sr. Donna is an accomplice to abortion under Canon 1329, which, in turn, might bring her within the scope of the dismissal provision of Canon 695. The novelty of nuns serving as murder mistresses at abortion clinics means that there is not much jurisprudence for such cases, I grant, but it is still a theory worth exploring.

If, however, a more direct process is desired, Canon 696 seems a better place to start.

2. Under Canon 696, dismissal from religious life can be imposed against one who gives “grave scandal arising from culpable behavior”. This unusually broad language allows superiors to move against a religious whose specific conduct could not have been predicted when the revised Code was being drafted (perhaps, like Sr. Donna’s, it could scarcely have been imagined!), but which we now know can be both imagined and committed. So, to the extent that conducting babies to their death is scandalous behavior for a religious woman, Sr. Donna deserves dismissal.

3. Various provisions of penal law, for example Canon 1369 (authorizing a “just penalty” against those who use the means of social communication to gravely injure good morals or to excite contempt against religion or the Church) are applicable, I suggest, in response to the kind of verbiage that Sr. Donna directs from time to time against religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. But again, all of this seems self-evident.

Hey ya know maybe there is something to this Vatican investigation after all?

As I’ve said before Catholicism is a voluntary activity. If sister Quinn wants to push Abortion and aid at abortion clinics, it’s a free country, she just shouldn’t do it as a Catholic nun. If she insists on doing it as a Catholic Nun and her superiors do nothing then they ought not to be whining about the Vatican investigating them. It’s a variation of the murder your parents cry as an orphan business.

In the end Sr. Quinn will do what she wants and the media will fawn on her and she and her superiors will be celebrated for the rest of their lives…

…after that they’re on their own.

I wonder if Mika would be quoting Peter Singer op-ed so approvingly…

Posted: October 26, 2009 by datechguy in catholic, opinion/news
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…if the Catholic Mika knew about his stand concerning ALREADY BORN human life?

Singer says, “If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant.”

When Singer came to teach at Princeton, he was protested by Not Dead Yet, a disabilities rights group. They took offense at Singer’s books, which say it should be legal to kill disabled infants, as well as children and adults with severe cognitive disabilities.

Singer suggests that individual human worth is based on its usefulness to others

Funny that’s just how slaveholders considered the value of their slaves, not because of their humanity but by what they could be used to do.

If Mika doesn’t know who this guy is that’s a point against her for ignorance. If she does then she should be damn ashamed of herself for giving him props.

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