The Real Excommunication Question, Do you love that soul enough to take heat?

Posted: September 8, 2021 by datechguy in catholic, Church doctrine
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Sir Humphrey: The church [of England] is looking for a candidate [for bishop] to maintain the balance.

The Bursar: What balance?

Sir Humphrey: Between those who believe in God and those who don’t.

The Bursar: Is there anyone in the church that doesn’t believe in God?

Sir Humphrey: Yes, most of the Bishops.

Yes Prime Minister The Bishop’s Gambit 1986

Lord Germain: Whatever may be the outcome of this, I shall not forget your [Friar Tuck’s] interference (rides away)

Sir William of Marksbury: I advise you father to be a little more restrained. It’s not a very sound idea to make an enemy of that particular lord.

Friar Tuck: Nor of my particular LORD Sir William.

The Adventures of Robin Hood Friar Tuck 1955

One of the spiritual works of mercy in the Catholic Church is to admonish the sinner, that is warn a person who is sinning that their actions put their soul at risk. However in the modern “touchy feely” church this is often forgotten or ignored by clergy who either:

  1. Do not believe

or

  1. Are cowards

This situation is exacerbated when the sin is public and even celebrated. To confront such a person brings a risk in terms of reputation and responses.

And that brings us to  Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone who will not rule out excommunication in the case of Catholic pols who publicly advocate abortion. As he puts it:

You cannot be a good Catholic and support expanding a government-approved right to kill innocent human beings.

And he also notes that during the civil rights era Excommunication was put to good use to cause public Catholic to repent from serious sin

On April 16, 1962, he [Archbishop Joseph Rummel] followed through, excommunicating a former judge, a well-known writer and a segregationist community organizer. Two of the three later repented and died Catholics in good standing.

You see that’s the point. If you are actually interested in saving souls and the normal methods do not work Excommunication is a powerful tool. It may not work in every case as noted above but that was two souls saved out of three.

Now of course there was a time when the threat of excommunication carried a lot of weight, when people of power actually believed and feared for their souls to wit:

These days however you are more likely to get a Catholic Pol and a Catholic Bishop more in line with my Sir Humphrey Quote than the Friar Tuck quote.

The real question is this: Do they actually believe? For a pol who doesn’t actually believe excommunication will not move them but the other question is do you have clergy who actually believe?

Clergy who believe will take this passage from the prophet Ezekiel to heart:

Thus the word of the LORD came to me: Son of man, I have appointed you a watchman for the house of Israel. When you hear a word from my mouth, you shall warn them for me.

If I say to the wicked man, You shall surely die; and you do not warn him or speak out to dissuade him from his wicked conduct so that he may live: that wicked man shall die for his sin, but I will hold you responsible for his death.

If, on the other hand, you have warned the wicked man, yet he has not turned away from his evil nor from his wicked conduct, then he shall die for his sin, but you shall save your life.

If a virtuous man turns away from virtue and does wrong when I place a stumbling block before him, he shall die. He shall die for his sin, and his virtuous deeds shall not be remembered; but I will hold you responsible for his death if you did not warn him.

When, on the other hand, you have warned a virtuous man not to sin, and he has in fact not sinned, he shall surely live because of the warning, and you shall save your own life.

Ezekiel 3:17-21

A member of clergy who either does not actually believe or fears man more than God will not act or wish to rock the boat.

But a member of clergy who not only takes this passage to heart, but has actual love for the sinner, a love strong enough to bear the opprobrium of a post Christian society will act both for his own sake and that of the sinner. And when the slings and arrows come his way he will comfort himself with Christ’s words:

 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Matt: 5:12

Hostile environment + politized classes = Bye Bye College

Posted: September 7, 2021 by datechguy in culture, education
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Apparently men have figured out that it’s not worth going into a lot of debt to be told that you’re what’s wrong with the world:

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

Now that the STEM stuff like math, physics, engineering and medicine are going woke with realty has taken a bad seat to ideology the cost benefit analysis will make even more men think twice.

But have no fear. Trade schools are still there and haven’t reached the point of wokeness and men who go into heating, plumbing, welding carpentry and electrical work, none of which need a degree will discover that they will be able to name their own price when highly educated woke folk with degrees on their wall need anything

9/11/1981

Posted: September 7, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

My 9/11 story started 20 years before the attack on the World Trade Center.

On Sept. 11, 1981, President Anwar Sadat expelled me from Egypt because I reported about his troubles with Islamic fundamentalists.

After he signed a peace treaty with Israel, Sadat faced various threats from his fellow Arabs, but the most serious one came from the mosques in Egypt.

Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, better known as the “blind sheik,” issued a fatwa against Sadat, who imprisoned about 1,500 of the sheik’s followers from a group known as Al-Jama’s al-Islamiyya, or “The Islamic Group.”

As a reporter for ABC News in Cairo, I interviewed some of Abdel-Rahman’s followers, who began widespread demonstrations after the arrests in September 1981. At a news conference shortly after that, Sadat told me, “If this were not a democracy, I would have you shot!”

The next day, I was ushered to the airport, where I boarded an Egyptian Air flight to Rome. I was the only passenger.

Less than a month later, Sadat died in an assassination carried out by Islamic fundamentalists.

The Egyptians arrested a lot of bad guys but eventually left them go free. Among the Islamists jailed after the Sadat assassination was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a confidante and colleague of the blind sheik. Together, he and Abdel-Rahman, who spent three years in Egyptian jails, spread the beliefs to the prisoners of what would become al-Qaeda.

Although many of al-Qaeda’s followers came from the war with the Soviets in Afghanistan, many more came from the prisoners held for the assassination plot against Sadat.

Al-Zawahiri received a three-year sentence for dealing in weapons and left prison in 1984. As a top leader in a key Islamist terrorist organization in Egypt, al-Zawahiri eventually joined forces with bin Laden and served as the second-in-command of al-Qaeda. He rose to head the organization when bin Laden was killed in 2011.

After Abdel-Rahman was found not guilty in the trials that accompanied the investigations into the attack on Sadat, the sheik made his way to Afghanistan, where he became a spiritual adviser to Osama bin Laden. In 1990, Abdel-Rahman set up shop at a mosque in New Jersey. There, he helped plan the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center for which he was convicted and spent the rest of his life in a U.S. prison.

I saw the 1993 attack as a significant escalation of radical Islam, and I tried to convince my bosses at ABC News to create an investigative team to look at the bombing. “Only four people died,” the executive producer of 20/20 told me. That disconnect between my analysis and that of ABC started me thinking that it was time to leave journalism, which I did a few months later.

As it turned out, the organizer of the 1993 attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, was so frustrated by the mission’s failure that he became obsessed with trying again. That’s one of the reasons he chose the World Trade Center on 9/11.

I often wondered if it would have done any good if ABC had backed my desire to investigate the 1993 bombing.

So, as Paul Harvey used to say, “Now you know the rest of the story.” At least my little piece of the story.  

Report from Louisiana: The Soros District Attorneys are Killing our Cities

Posted: September 6, 2021 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – Another violent weekend in Shreveport and our homicide rate continues to climb. The violence is literally out of control on the streets and as of this morning only one elected official has made any kind of statement (a city councilman).

Saturday night, shooting broke out at Tinseltown movie theatre leaving a thirteen-year-old boy dead, two critically injured, and an innocent lady who picked up her kids after a movie traumatized after her Tahoe was riddled with bullets. She was at a stoplight two blocks from the theater. The video she posted immediately after, while waiting for the police, is horrific.

A nearby hospital took at least six bullets through the lobby windows from this incident.

The mayor of Shreveport has made no statement about this violent weekend – possibly because he wasn’t even here. He went to California for the LSU game.

But there is a lot of discussion on local social media pages about this ongoing, and escalating problem. It isn’t just Shreveport where this kind of violence is happening; we realize this. The story is always the same, after every shooting: nobody saw anything. The no-snitch rule is in effect.

We want to blame someone for all of this: the mayor? He’s young, ineffective, a Democrat…whatever your logic. The police chief? The police chief stepped down last week after a vote of no-confidence from the city council although in truth he was doing the best he could with extremely limited resources. He is 100 officers short because the pay is abysmal. A week with an interim chief has made no difference and we are still 100 officers short.

Who else can we blame? Now folks are looking at the District Attorney. Our DA is a Soros boy; every time he runs for re-election, Soros pumps money into his campaign. In 2015, George Soros dropped $406,000 into James E. Stewart’s campaign. He was re-elected in 2020; his opponent in the race, attorney Patricia Gilley, was jailed for contempt of court a month before the election. A mug shot doesn’t do much for your campaign. So, we get Soros boy Stewart for another six years. In the 2015 special election for Caddo Parish District Attorney, James Stewart’s candidate was Dhu Thompson, who had a great chance to win until Soros pumped a fortune into the Stewart campaign.

“As a candidate and citizen of Caddo Parish, if an outsider was that interested in the race, I wanted to know exactly what he had in mind for the criminal justice system if he were to win,” said Dhu Thompson, a Louisiana attorney who lost a district attorney race to a Soros-backed candidate, James Stewart, in 2015. Soros gave over $930,000 — more than 22 times the local median household income — to the group boosting Stewart.”

Soros funded district attorneys across our nation are all heralding over escalating crime rates in their cities.  Soros has spent a lot of money on district attorney campaigns in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas. Why?  Because he wants influence over the criminal justice system; the candidates he favors are soft on habitual offenders, favors reduced sentences, plea deals, diversion programs, and aims to combat what he calls “racial disparity.”

In St. Louis, Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner has an “abysmal” relationship with the police department:

“I would describe it as abysmal,” Jeff Roorda, general manager of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, said when asked about cops’ relationship with Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner. “It has gone from bad to worse and now there is no cooperation.”

The city has suffered a crime surge since the Soros-backed prosecutor took office. Violent crime rose by 8.8% since 2006. In terms of violent crimes per 100,000 residents, St. Louis has surpassed Detroit as America’s most violent city.

Soros pumped almost $200,000 into Gardner’s campaign.

In Philadelphia:

“…homicides have again shot up, rising by 34% in 2020 and hitting 257 as of Aug. 3, according to police department figures.

District Attorney Larry Krasner won the office in 2017 running on his background as a defense attorney and litigant against the police department. In that campaign, Mr. Soros’ Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC spent $1.7 million supporting Mr. Krasner’s bid, a figure which startled a state’s political class that had never seen such sums spent in a district attorney race.

In San Francisco, same thing. The district attorney there is Chesa Boudin who was raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and according to The Washington Times, “While Mr. Boudin did not receive money directly from one of Mr. Soros’ multiple state PACs, a network of left-wing donors connected to the Hungarian-born billionaire helped Mr. Boudin raise more than $620,000.”

There is no question that this has been the most violent year in recent Shreveport history, and we still have four more months to go. We’ve seen gang violence in the ‘80s, and a terrible riot in 1988, but what is happening on our streets now is the worst we’ve seen in decades.

In response to the violence this weekend, the District Attorney posted on social media: “Unsupervised teenagers driving around with guns shooting at each other is at epidemic level. Parents, if your child is out of control, please go to the Caddo Parish Juvenile Court, 1835 Spring St., and ask for an ungovernable child petition. This will get your child under the supervision of a juvenile court judge and their authority.”

Once in that juvenile system, what happens? A probation worker meets with the kid once every few weeks and asks him questions. “Are you doing your homework? Minding your mother? Staying out of trouble?”  Then the kid goes on about his business.  Stewart’s post was met with ridicule.

Maybe it is time to quit blaming the police chief struggling with minimal resources. Maybe it is time to look at societal factors and why kids with guns are running the streets at all hours. Maybe it’s time to look at the DA who gives them a slap on the wrist, a fine, and sends them back out.

I’m not sure what will be left of this city when Stewart’s term ends in five more years. Perhaps it is time for him to step down.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and at Medium; she is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

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