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If you were busy having a life with family and / or friends on Christmas day like most people then you may have missed our excellent Christmas show.
But no worries, thanks to the miracle of uploading the file show 6 with the Curt Jester, Damian Thompson and James Marley is available online right here.
And of course it will be available in the archive on the side as long as the blog is here.
For the only time so far we have taped our show, but we do have an original DaTechGuy on DaRadio episode.
Our Christmas Special has three Guests, from England Damian Thompson who writes the Holy Smoke column for the London Telegraph, The incredible Curt Jester and Poet, Polymath and Theology Scholar James Marley discuss Christ in Christmas and the Church and the Media.
So when 9 p.m. comes and Christmas dinner has been eaten and all the gifts are opened tune into WCRN 830 AM and give us a listen.
Apparently there is a hospital in Arizona that is unclear on the concept of what being a “Catholic” hospital means as Fr. Z explains:
St. Joseph’s Hospital, run by the Religious Sisters of Mercy with the administration of Catholic Healthcare West based in San Francisco, at the okay of their ethics panel, did a direct abortion. They have also provided contraceptive services and, apparently, done other abortions
Unless you get your Catholicism from MSNBC you know this is what we in Catholic Circles call Mortal Sin thus the local Bishop has done what a local Bishop is supposed to do in such a case:
By virtue of my Episcopal authority as the Ordinary of the Particular Church of the Diocese of Phoenix, and in accord with Canon 216 of the Code of Canon Law, I hereby revoke my consent for the following organization to utilize in any way the name “Catholic”.
St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, Phoenix, AZ
As you might guess some of the usual suspects are up in arms:
“Catholic Healthcare West and its system hospitals are valued members of the Catholic Health Association,” said that group’s president, Sister Carol Keehan. Her remarks came less than 24 hours after the Bishop of Phoenix stripped one of those hospitals, St. Joseph’s in Phoenix, of its Catholic affiliation.
You might remember Sr. Keehan as the $800,000 a yr. Nun who helped back Obamacare and its abortion provisions, as I noted before there is considerable inflation since 29 ad and 30 pieces of Silver.
The article goes on to explain who is in charge here:
As for who truly “speaks for the Catholic Church,” the cardinal left no room for doubt: “The bishops in apostolic communion and in union with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, speak for the Church in matters of faith and in moral issues and the laws surrounding them.”
That means if you want to be Catholic you listen to the Bishop and the church not to an organization contradicting them or a nun who has a flexible definition of the vow of poverty.
Fr Z bottom lines it:
You may be tempted to think, “Is that all the bishop can do? Remove this symbol? Remove the title ‘Catholic’?” But, had this been a Methodist Hospital, would it matter if the hospital lost its “Methodist” title? Would it matter if it kept it? No, because symbols are not important to Methodists in the way they are to Catholics. Catholicism is immersed in a profoundly symbolic world, like no other religion in history.
When a Catholic bishop issues a formal decree to confirm that you have stripped yourself of your Catholic identity, that is monumental. This is what schism smells like, friends.
Be clear: the administration of the hospital stripped itself of its Catholic identity and Bp. Olmsted confirmed their decision.
As for Sr. Keehan et/al they are certainly welcome to do what they want and say what they want and I’m sure the mainstream media and this administration will back and honor them for the rest of their lives…
…after that they’re on their own.
A few weeks ago a column by Bonnie Erbe to nobody’s surprise who is paying attention (PBS on their online site actually refers to her as “non-partisan” which says more about PBS than it does about her) noted church closing in the East and painted it as a result of the old church orthodoxy:
Dogmatic, dictatorial churches do not resound with today’s spirituality, and young people are not clamoring to join them. So sending a message that says, in essence, “Follow my rules or go to hell” might be a good way of retaining older parishioners used to such harsh boundaries. But as elderly parishioners die off, they take the church’s message with them.
I live in a city where 4 Catholic churches recently closed and it is a shame to see churches close in NY and other urban areas, yet lets look at Dave Weigel’s column today about redistricting which links to this rather good 8 decade chart at the NY Times and what do we see? We see a flight of people not from the church but in general from particular states.
More and more of the faithful youth are fleeing high tax liberal states and settling elsewhere as Michael Barone writes:
Texas’ diversified economy, business-friendly regulations and low taxes have attracted not only immigrants but substantial inflow from the other 49 states. As a result, the 2010 reapportionment gives Texas four additional House seats. In contrast, California gets no new House seats, for the first time since it was admitted to the Union in 1850.
There’s a similar lesson in the fact that Florida gains two seats in the reapportionment and New York loses two.
This leads to a second point, which is that growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.
I suspect that if you want to see where the church is growing and thriving just follow that electoral population.
My oldest son is a solid Catholic who is going to college on a full academic scholarship. As soon as he graduates he plans on getting out of this state and I can’t say as I blame him.
So Bonnie rather than your argument concerning the empty churches I would refer you to Stacy McCain’s explaining the demographic facts of life and Ed Driscoll who says this:
And it seems rather difficult to build an emerging Democratic majority when two of the most prominent “liberal” cities in America (very much in name only, given the mammoth regulatory mazes and bureaucratic armies these cities come equipped with) have such poor future demographics. Or as Mark Steyn, who inspired our headline above with this classic 2006 article, wrote about Europe’s similar (and not at all coincidental) demographic woes, “what’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?”
As even Illinois, which is among the democratic states losing a congressional seat, is learning you can’t vote the dead if you oppose them being born.
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