Archive for the ‘catholic’ Category

An Unexpected Vatican “Yoo Hoo, Bible” (and Catechism) Update

Posted: October 11, 2020 by datechguy in catholic, Uncategorized
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You might remember a few years ago (July 14th 2017 to be exact) I was rather shocked to find that the Bible had been pulled from the Vatican Site.

Here is the text if you can’t read the screen shot:

“The Holy Bible is available in almost every language on earth: the Episcopal Conferences take care of the continuous updating of the translations. In order to have access to the latest Bible version, kindly consult the website of your Episcopal Conference. ”

Seriously you’re the vatican and you TOOK THE &(#$(@(% BIBLE OFF YOUR WEB SITE! You actually think it’s more important to carry a 13-year-old document by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace available for visitors than the Bible?

What on earth is going on in Rome?

And about a week later I noted that the Vatican had restored the Bible to their web site but did not make it visible to people looking for the Scripture:

So the question on the floor is this:  What on earth is going on?  If you are still referring people to the local sites and not providing a link to the Bible, why put sacred scripture back up if you’re going to make it tough to find?

Two logical answers come to mind

A charitable suggestion would be that people realized that even though they wanted people to go to local sites for scripture, every single document on the Vatican site since it went up that had existing links to the former online scripture became dead once it was pulled.  Fixing all those links would be an expensive, time consuming and frankly herculean task. So given the choice between fixing those links or putting scripture back up without a direct link to it they choose the latter.  If I had been their tech advisor that’s certainly the advice I’d have given to fix the problem.

A much less charitable explanation would be that the Vatican didn’t like the blowback from pulling the Bible but didn’t want to link to it, so they put it back up without a direct link to allow a spokesman to say “Of COURSE sacred scripture is available at our site, we just prefer you to use our local sites translation.” or in other words: “Beware of the Leopard!”

Here is the screen shot from that date of the page in question

Well there has been a development.

Yesterday I was reading my daily scripture from the Vatican site I ended up clicking not on the back button to get to the reference page of the bible but on the keys of Peter which took me to the front page of the Vatican Web site which I haven’t visited in the three years since those posts.

I thought I’d poke around as I was curious if there had been any change to operation “hide the bible”. You will note that on the front page there is no link to the Bible so most people who might visit looking for it might use the search function

And of course if you did a search for the bible using the Vatican search engine it would to my complete and utter lack of shock, avail you naught.

However I remembered that the Bible had been kept under Archive under Francis rather than linked on the home page as it once was. So on the front page of the Vatican Site I clicked on Archive.

On the Archive page there was a link at the top that said “bible” which was a good sign but there were to other things that jumped out at me.

w of course I remembered that the Bible was on the Archive site if you were going to the Vatican site and didn’t know it was there you might have to do a search for it.

Before we click on the bible link I want to note the addition to the Catechism of the Catholic church link which based on wayback machine searches was added between July 17th and Aug 11th of 2018 meaning that from that date people going to the Vatican site wanting to find that official church positions on various subjects by checking the actual Catechism of the church were dissuaded from doing so at least if you are a person who speaks English because if you read Italian.

or Spanish

Or French, Portuguese , German or even Latin the Vatican Catechism has no such disclaimer. Why it’s almost as if there is a direct effort to keep English speaking folk in general and American in particular unsure of the actual teachings of the church if they wanted to find it online.

Not that they would have found the Catechism anyways as you can see from this result from the Vatican Search engine anyways, but we digress..

Well once we are on the page we can now click on the Bible link and lo and behold we have a different page than before!

While we still have the disclaimer that we had before asking you to look elsewhere we also have a direct link to the Bible online were a person can actually click on it and read it at the Vatican site.

Yeah you still won’t find it in the search engine and yeah you have to know to click on the “archive” link to get there but this still a vast improvement on the whole “Yoo Hoo Bible” game that the Vatican was playing before.

But I still miss the days when we these words from Christ…

Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one.

Matthew 5:37

…were unambiguously at least the public policy of the Holy See.

I’m old enough to remember when Democrats would be worried about Having Devil Worshipers Throwing Satanic Curses at an Ill POTUS Openly on their side

Posted: October 4, 2020 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, catholic, Church doctrine, culture, News/opinion
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Via CS Lewis Doodle on Youtube

We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all he pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The “Life Force”, the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work-the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”-then the end of the war will be in sight. 

CS Lewis The Screwtape Letters #7

You know it would be a lot easier to talk all those people who absolutely insist that you can’t be a Christian in general or a Catholic in particular and be for Trump if you didn’t have a bunch of devil worshipers openly trying to hex him.

Some users, however, took things well beyond the sarcastic remark or celebration of the diagnosis, directing foreign language curses and images of Satan toward the president in his sickness.

and frankly that’s the mild stuff.

Others broke the template, forwarding similar comments and curses in a variety of other languages publicly asking for the “Lord Satan” to empower them to “vanquish the enemies of our freedom and well-being!”

“This curse carries the power of a thousand witches you will never find peace or happiness you will be cursed for centuries,” one user wrote, attaching images that appeared to be of a voodoo puppet doll burning. “The ancestors of each witch will follow you until the end of time old man.”

Now remember this is being done openly on a public platform for all the world to see.

Frankly anyone who is surprised by this hasn’t been paying attention. I submit and suggest this has been the left for a very long time.

Closing thoughts. These best counter to this stuff is of course prayer. There will be a public Rosary at my parish that I’ll be a part of next Saturday at noon and on the 24th we will be having a special mass Saturday at noon to pray for the country ending with a Eucharistic Procession I would suggest the same for your local parish.

But more importantly all of these people need to be prayed for. It’s very likely that many of them have nobody to pray for them and we must not forget that the love of God for them still exists and Christ died for their sins as much as anyone else. Thanks to these events we know who these people are and can give their guardian angels a welcome boost through prayer.

The best way to beat the devil is to deprive him of souls. Pray for these people and help deprive him of theirs.

Baked-In Birth Control

Posted: October 3, 2020 by ng36b in abortion, catholic, culture
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The Holy Grail of Car Seats!!

Kids can be expensive. The first shock might be the hospital bill when you leave. I have friends that went into medical debt for their kid’s birth. If you escape medical bills, the next shock comes when you purchase a child seat. Really, its a throne, a really large, hard to use, plastic throne that your child will soil quickly. Because I have a large family, I noticed that these thrones couldn’t fit three across a seat. Even a booster seat seemed to magically bow outwards so that I couldn’t fit three kids in a backseat. I commented to my wife that it was a real disincentive for big families to not be able to fit three seats in the back seat.

Apparently, that was worthy of a study. A recent paper looked at just that, and noted that the new standards only saved 57 more people, but caused 145,000 fewer births since 1980. That’s a pretty significant difference.

That cost gets worse because it is near impossible to get a used car seat. When I worked at Goodwill, we wouldn’t take them because of liability concerns. To buy a new car seat for every kid gets expensive. Worse, the car seat standards change nearly every year. When it happened one year and I was told to throw out my old seats, I looked up the new standard (as in, I read the really boring, multi-page engineering standard) and noticed it barely changed anything. Going through the history of changes, most of the changes are minor. These changes serve to automatically deprecate car seats, to the point they’ve become like cell phones in that you can’t use old models, even though they may have plenty of life left in them.

This is just one thing in long list of items that makes it hard to have a large family. Unless you want to get the massive “Catholic Van,” you’re stuck with less kids. Now the government wants kids to sit in a car seat until they are 12 or 13. That’s kind of insane. Yet the same government is OK with a school bus full of kids that has no boosters, no seat belts and crappy bench seats. At least a passenger vehicle is designed with seat belts, air bags and crumple zones to keep people alive in a wreck.

Car seats is just one example of the quiet way we make it hard for responsible parents to follow the rules while also having a big family. As birth rates fall worldwide, governments are trying to find ways to promote larger families, with plenty of discussion on government child care and mandatory maternity leave. That might help, but if we’re not addressing the common day to day issues that face large families, people will continue to opt out of large families. Ironically, the most effective practices for governments might be to listen to today’s large families to understand their struggles, rather than viewing them as a burden.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Six Amy Coney Barrett Thoughts Under My Fedora

Posted: September 27, 2020 by datechguy in abortion, Always look at the bright side of Trump, catholic, News/opinion
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I keep seeing tweets like this from the left:

Now maybe it’s just me but doesn’t the fact that this is a woman who has had a decades long career as a Law Professor and is a current sitting judge logically blow away the whole idea that she is into women being some kind of submissive servants?

“Liberal logic” is an oxymoron.

There also seems to be a lot of worry about how she is going to handle all of these attacks.

Please.

Any woman who can balance a career like hers AND raise seven kids isn’t going to be phased by any of the hysterical nonsense that the Democrat / Media / Liberal left is going to throw at her.

Plus she was also the oldest of seven kids herself. She has a lifetime of dealing with childish brats like Democrats.

From what I’ve heard the Barrett announcement was supposed to be earlier in the day but was moved back several times.

I guess getting seven kids ready for an appearnece with the President while their mother is nominated for SCOTUS might be a bit of a pain.

“Where’s your tie. I just put your tie on the chair a minute ago”

“Dad I can’t wear this all the other girls will think I’m a loser”

“Get that frog out of your sister’s shoe!”

“Ma do I have to stand next to HIM, can’t I stand on the other side?”

“Turn out your pockets we aren’t leaving this house till I KNOW you don’t have that thing with you that makes the farting noise.”

I have a feeling each day sitting on SCOTUS in session will mean several hours of blissful peace and quiet for her by comparison.

Long before anyone knew the good Lord had decided to grant Justice Ginsberg’s wish not to see Donald Trump appoint her replacement to the SCOTUS Franklin Graham, the great Protestant Minister and son of Billy Graham, had scheduled a day of prayer in DC for the 25th of September.

So on the day that Amy Comey Barrett was announced as the President’s pick to fill the open SCOTUS seat flocks of the faithful in the tens of thousands will be on hand to pray for her.

Talk about working in mysterious ways.

There is also one other bit of irony here.

Reverend Graham is likely one of the best if not THE best known protestant ministers in the US if not the English speaking world.

And yesterday he led a huge flock of protestant in prayer while at the same time celebrating the appointment of a faithful Catholic woman to the Supreme Court.

Given the history of America’s founding all the way through today the degree of irony involved in such a thing is off the scale or as I put it on twitter:

While a lot of liberal are tearing their hair out today centuries worth of Anti-Catholic bigots are rolling in their graves.

Never forget that while you might not know what God is doing, he always does.

Speaking of irony, last night I watched two speeches by Amy Coney Barrett one after she was appointed by President Trump to the Federal counts at Hillsdale here. and a 2nd while she was still a law professor that she gave just a week before election 2016 at the Public Policy Institute at Jacksonville University at a time when just about everyone thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. She delivered a line that I found incredibly ironic.

“What would we have in a Trump court? Who knows?” [audience laughs]

Here is the delivery:

The irony overload is huge but it also illustrates why the left is so angry. They thought they were going to secure the court for generations to come.

Let me close with my favorite of all the tweets I saw on the subject yesterday.

https://twitter.com/willscharf/status/1309962107983724545
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