Archive for the ‘catholic’ Category

Today Stacy McCain has a piece about the Antifa riots titled: The Demonic Mobs of Antifa which includes the following quote:

These satanic forces control our nation’s cities. The streets of Portland and Chicago are ruled by mobs of demon-possessed monsters.

Well the obvious question is, if Donald Trump is such a horrible person why would there be Satanic forces against him? And if Satanic forces are against him, what is the evidence that he is being used by God?

I’ve not written much about it as the priest who origional told the story told it 2nd hand, but Lifesite news found the primary source and interviewed him directly and on camera, which certainly beats a lot of what the MSM has been spitting out lately.

Over to you Stacy.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, with distinctly non-white features, from Wikipedia

This past week we saw two very different responses to Shaun King, a self-proclaimed activist that called on images and statues that showed Jesus depicted as a white European to be taken down. On its face, that sounds legitimate because if Jesus came from the Levant, in all reality he would likely be more tan or brown color. It might make it appear that the Catholic Church was whitewashing Jesus.

Except its not hard to see past this. I’ve traveled a fair amount, and every Catholic Mass I attend overseas, I noticed that the statue depictions are different. Jesus in Turkey was more brown. Jesus in Ethiopia is black. The Blessed Mother appeared in Guadalupe with distinctly Mexican features. And so on. It only takes a brief pause from your cat videos to Google “Jesus around the world” to see this first hand. The fact that Jesus and his Blessed Mother take on the various characteristics of the local population is amazing to me. We have a truly universal Church. It really is for everyone, no matter your skin color.

(And as an aside, if he was a carpenter, he was probably ripped and muscular from working all day, and could have run a Crossfit gym)

Sadly, this is the first part of linking the Catholic Church to slavery. Already, there is vandalism on the Wikipedia page about the Church and African Americans. Already we have people linking vague actions by the Church, such as this article, to racism:

“The way the church would sustain or enable racism would be through the acts of the people who make it up,” he told Catholic News Service. “But the actions of all of those people are deeply influenced and shaped by social, political, and economic structures they inhabit.

“Many of them would not perceive their actions as enabling racism, but if they accept the structures uncritically, they are doing that, and they inhibit the church from realizing the full impact or engagement of its social teaching.”

The Boston Pilot

So, pray tell, what are we supposed to do with the above information? Feed the poor? Educate people? Help people find jobs? The Church already does these things! Has the author not looked at a Church bulletin lately? There is a ministry for all these things and more, limited only by people’s imagination and time.

As said before, the best strategy with people like this is to push back. Folks like Shaun King won’t stop with their demands, they are simply looking for weakness to exploit. I give Bishop Hying props for standing up to this mob, where he accepts that we need to have dialog and action while rejecting calls for destruction. Compare this with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is now “reassessing” depictions of Jesus as white.

No matter what the Anglican Church does, someone in the mob will find it as not enough and will call for further action. Mobs don’t stop. When they find weakness, they push harder. Pushing back forces them to stop. The Anglican Church isn’t going to get a break, and they are going to learn this rule, unfortunately, the hard way.

We live in a democracy, but if aren’t willing to enforce its rules, we’ll soon live in a mob state.

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.

Pearl Monument torn down, from Wikipedia

Not that long ago, the military sent me to Bahrain to work a particular mission. While I was there, I learned about the political differences between the King of Bahrain (a Sunni) and the majority Shia population on the small island nation. Protests against the King were somewhat common, and I would get text notifications if one flared up. The protests weren’t aimed at America (a nice change), but we were always advised to stay away from them because the mob mentality might make us a target of convenience.

Mobs make people stupid by allowing people to offload their decision making, and thus responsibility, onto the mob. The danger is that someone with a strong personality will use the mob’s power towards their own end. What starts as a peaceful demonstration can end in violence. That’s what happened in Bahrain, climaxing in 2011 with the demonstration near the Pearl Monument and its subsequent destruction by the government.

The scary part about mobs is that the people pulling the strings typically don’t have a peaceful end state. President Trump understands this and pointed it out in 2017 that tearing down statues to appease the mob isn’t going to work. Plenty of people ridiculed him, including Slate:

“So Trump’s comparison there is dumb. It doesn’t really even make any sense. And the notion that there’s some slippery slope is dumb.”

-Slate article, 2017

Doesn’t look so dumb now. It’s one thing for a city government to remove a Confederate statue or the federal government to rename a base. I’d be happy renaming Fort Gordon to something else, since General John Gordon seemed more capable of getting shot than being an effective general, and was probably a KKK member. There’s a system for doing that, so we should use that. We don’t need a mob for these things.

Worse, this mob mentality isn’t going to end anytime soon. We’re now seeing Catholic churches targeted in California. My wife alerted me to an FSSP parish in San Diego, where the address was being posted in order to mobilize a protest. The right to peacefully protest is a good thing. It allows things like praying outside a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic. But it should be fairly obvious from the above Instagram picture, which makes plenty of assumptions on the church members, that the point isn’t to be peaceful, but rather intimidate people from attending church. Think about it, would YOU walk through a throng of angry protestors to attend Mass?

Mob leaders want people to submit to mob control. Worse still, when mob leadership adheres to Antifa ideaology, it will violently attack any authority that opposes it. This includes Church authority, especially Catholic teachings.

Prediction: we’re going to see attempts by the mob to link Catholicism to slavery, Trump, COVID-19, and whatever else comes to mind in order to justify defacing and tearing buildings down. This, despite a decent Church history of opposing slavery, even having a Pope that was a former slave. Remember that actual history doesn’t matter to the mob.

The question we have to start asking Catholics now is: are you prepared to wade through a mob to attend Mass? Will you tolerate a mob defacing or tearing down your Church? Because the mob is coming for Jesus. Which side will you be on when it arrives?

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.

Yes, someone actually used this as a pick-up line

The COVID-19 shutdown has had many changes, with a notable one being more time spent at home. For couples, this had lead to more…alone time, if you know what I mean. More alone time means that 40 weeks from the start of pandemic in the United States (so around Christmas time) means we might be seeing a surge in births.

While definitely under-reported in America, other countries are reporting signs that we might see a large increase in babies. Indonesia saw a 10% decrease in birth control use, and in countries like Nepal, which already don’t have good transportation, family planning is out the window. India, already set to overtake China by 2050 in population, is likely seeing a surge too. Even in Ireland, pregnancy test purchases are spiking in some cities. It seems everyone is using COVID-19 as a bad pickup line to get it on.

What does this mean long term? First, a surge should help stave off economic downturn. World War II saw a decline in population of almost 2.5% worldwide, but a surge in the birth rate after contributed to the regrowth of the population and economy to boot. With better health care and schooling, a jump in birth rate means more workers to produce more , which long term should raise GDP.

From Reddit

Second, the population will change dramatically where it is located at. China, already on decline, will likely decline more, falling behind India faster than 2050. That may put pressure on China to consolidate gains made by the One-Belt-One-Road Initiative and territoriality in places like the South China Sea. Russia faces a significant loss in manpower and may struggle to maintain control over its vast territory, which could lead to civil war. African nations like Nigeria and Ethiopia, with relatively democratic governments, could become huge markets for goods and the new source of manufacturing for companies escaping China.

Lastly, COVID-19 exposed that how we manage the elderly, especially in America, is a borderline death trap. Nursing homes, already struggling to keep workers, are the single largest source of COVID deaths in America. But longer life spans and the tendency of nursing homes to suck every penny out of retirement funds means that people will be likely outraged and desire to move aging parents into safer facilities. Expect to see a focus on cleanliness at nursing homes plus a boom in new homes being built with mother-in-law suites for aging parents.

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.