Archive for the ‘catholic’ Category

What I missed, what they missed

Posted: February 15, 2011 by datechguy in catholic, special events
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Up early today and noticed Stacy McCain’s post on festivities at CPAC. There were an awful lot parties and I missed nearly all of them but Stacy has a ton of pictures.

Despite getting back to my Hotel in Largo at 3 a.m. one thing I didn’t miss was mass. The last time I was at one of these national events the next week I went to confession. I had been struggling with a particular sin and was rather pleased at my progress (spiritual pride, very dangerous) and was able to confess that my big sin was only missing mass.

Long shot National Cathedral


Fr.Bob looked at me and told me bluntly, “You had time for this event, that event, you made time to see the monuments and historical sites but you couldn’t find one hour for God?”.

I was deflated really fast and was determined that I would not make that mistake. My friend Steve who now lives in the area told me he would pick me up at 8 a.m. for at 9 a.m. Mass at the national cathedral.

If you’ve never been (and I hadn’t) you can’t imagine the place. By the time I was on the steps I could physically feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. Once I was inside my jaw spent the majority of its time on my chest.

One of the many sights above

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By arriving early I had time to gape at the chapels inside the church where mass can be celebrated. I was very taken by the individual displays of the mysteries of the Rosary.

The Annunciation

The Mass itself had a dozen celebrants and the ushers were all members of the Knights of Columbus. The cantor was incredible and the sermon was pretty solid. I love to sing and I really let myself go but I also found myself choking up a bit.

After Mass we had breakfast downstairs (it was incidentally the best meal I had in DC) I was a bit surprised to see speaker Gingrich eating at the table next to mine and was also able to grab a replacement Angelus prayer card in the gift shop.

Steve and I after mass

One thing that struck me as important. Just before you get to the Cathedral there is a small church (St. Anthony’s). For all of the presence of the holy spirit for all of the emotional and spiritual reaction I had in the Cathedral one must never forget the mass down the street is the same mass, the presence of Christ in the blessed sacrament is no less holy. The difference between empathy and saintliness is the ability to feel the presence of the spirit in the small church like the still small voice. That is the goal.

If I can afford CPAC next year maybe I’ll see about getting making a regular trip and arranging a trip to Mass for Sunday Morning Mass for bloggers who want to come. I don’t know how many I’d get but it would be fun to find out.

Meanwhile here is a slideshow of all the shots there:

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I guess we can call it a Soros fail

Posted: February 9, 2011 by datechguy in abortion, opinion/news
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…if you have CBS covering the Planned Parenthood videos that tells us then operation Journolist 2.0 is floundering.

Planned parenthood finds itself re-training their workers, Publius asks a funny question:

One would have hoped Planned Parenthood staff wouldn’t have to be “trained” to protect victims of sex trafficking. You’d think that just went along with being human.

Hey Publius, these folks kill kids for a living and you expect them to worry about sex trafficking?

This was a stupid fight for the left, Soros, and those who defend them.

If this was stuff like the Wikileaks documents that people would have to read it might have worked but videos are a different matter. People are more likely to watch videos via social networks even if kept off the news. You can’t suppress them. But since abortion is the linchpin of the cultural left any price must be paid to defend it, and if a few women have to die in 3rd world conditions in Philly or a few pimps of underage girls need to be covered for, well every revolution has it casualties.

Abortion is the linchpin to the left’s worldview

Posted: February 4, 2011 by datechguy in abortion, culture, opinion/news
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When you look at the planned parenthood and the Kermit Gosnell stories you might wonder why the left is so determined to counter them.

With New Jersey poised to investigate the Planned parenthood location that advised underage girls on abortion, and multiple locations in Virginia now revealed one would think the left would back away from such defenses, particularly with the details of Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors case still in play (although if you look at the national media you would think it was a blip on the screen.)

Yet here is President Obama’s administration withholding abortion statistics for the first time in 40 years and Soros and company holding conference calls to find a united line concerning the Planned Parenthood revelations:

Instead of focusing on the fact that there is an organization who turned a blind eye to child sex-trafficking, an organization that receives forced federal funding, the group of senior fellows ostensibly chose the route which affords zero defense of women, born or unborn, thereby saving them from compromising their female-hostile ideologies: attack Lila Rose. These outlets don’t see the insanity in feigning disgust that the racket was exposed, not that it occurred at all.

The majority of the call was spent discussing ways to discredit Rose because of her funding. They surmise that some group which donates to her pro-life magazine is a group donated to by a group given money by the Koch Brothers. So says people who just cashed a $1 million-dollar check from George Soros.

Since what was done on the tapes clearly stepped over the line, why not just express outrage, and urge Planned Parenthood to be more careful in the future in such cases?

Because you can’t undermine western civilization without undermining life.

As science continues to make the case that the unborn child is not just a mass of tissue and makes viability earlier and earlier it becomes imperative for the left to counter the culture of life.

Judeao-Christian culture is built on the value and the rights of the individual, unless that is undermined you can’t go anywhere else.

Once you manage to get a society to decide that its weakest members are not worthy of life as a matter of narcissistic convenience then all the rest becomes easy.

You can deny care to the elderly , even euthanize them in order to save money. You can arbitrarily decide if a life is “worth living” or not based on a standard not held by the person who decides.

You can reward narcissism and strip people of their self-respect and dignity, maintaining that they should be wards of the state rather than the makers of their own destiny, and once they are subject to the state, if they are no longer serving it, are disposable.

Whole neighborhoods can be abandoned to crime and lawlessness that those same elites would reject for themselves, after all why waste the states valuable resources on mere vassals?

Life is the key, once you devalue human life, once you have an excuse not to care, the second excuse becomes extremely easy.

This is why the far left will always defend abortion in general and Planned Parenthood to the hilt, for without the culture of death the left’s worldview crumbles to dust.

Underage prostitution? No problem for planned parenthood; no story for MSM

Posted: February 1, 2011 by datechguy in abortion, opinion/news
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Yet another story that the MSM is not going to report on:

In the video the clinic manager of PP Central New Jersey’s Perth Amboy mill, LPN Amy Woodruff, tells “Joe” and “Gia” how to get abortions, STD treatment, and contraceptives for their brothel of adolescents as young as 14, some here illegally.

Woodruff coaches the pair on how to have the younger girls lie about their age. She gives them the name of a mill that is apparently schlockier than hers, Metropolitan Medical Associates, that will do abortions with fewer questions asked.

The AP story on this came out two weeks ago, but we have seen nothing in the news. Remind you of another story?

The Gosnell story—a story that by any measure deserved in-depth coverage, some serious discussion about regulation and responsibility, and a few features forcing the nation to consider just when a “late-term” abortion slips into the category of “infanticide” or what our leadership and politicians really think of all of this—proved too big and too messy for the mainstream media.

They did not want light shed on dark truths that cannot be prettied up with euphemisms and nebulous notions of “choice.” They did not want to have to ponder the likelihood of Gosnell’s stinking, body-piled-and-bloodstained rooms being replicated in other cities, in other states, where other authorities chose to look away from the carnage, rather than address it.

And the Anchoress asks the question that I’ve been thinking:

So, allow me to ask the impolitic question I have hinted at elsewhere: in choosing to look away, in choosing to under-report, in choosing to spin, minimize, excuse, and move-along when it comes to Kermit Gosnell—and to this whole subject of under-regulated abortion clinics, the debasement of women and the slaughter of living children—how are the press and those they protect by their silence any better than the Catholic bishops who, in decades past, looked away, under-reported, spun, minimized, excused, moved-along, and protected the repulsive predator-priests who have stolen innocence and roiled the community of faith?

Read the whole thing. They are different in that they do not fear a press reporting on their culpability of silence.

Always remember the bias in the media is not just in what they report on, but on what they DON’T.

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