Posts Tagged ‘catholic’

My hits are up so I’d better take the Pope to heart

Posted: January 26, 2011 by datechguy in blogs, catholic, internet/free speech
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By an odd coincidence just as my hits are way up the Pope warns me all that glitters are not hits:

Pope Benedict XVI told Catholic bloggers and Facebook and YouTube users Monday to be respectful of others when spreading the Gospel online and not to see their ultimate goal as getting as many online hits as possible.

Echoing concerns in the U.S. about the need to root out online vitriol, Benedict called for the faithful to adopt a “Christian style presence” online that is responsible, honest and discreet

When you are a public Catholic it is important to act like one, particularly if you call out other public Catholics who don’t.

In addition he warns of making a virtual reality for oneself:

“It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives,” Benedict said in the message for the Catholic Church’s World Day of Communications.

He urged users of social networks to ask themselves “Who is my ‘neighbor’ in this new world?” and avoid the danger of always being available online but being “less present to those whom we encounter in our everyday life.”

It reminds me of Screwtape #6 to wit:

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.and the theory where to put things

The Pope’s full message is here.

A post and an answer

Posted: January 23, 2011 by datechguy in catholic
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In response to my post concerning my neighbor the Jehovah’s Witness Lisa Graas wrote an interesting post:

For two millenia, the Catholic Church has named countless saints. These are people we know to be in Heaven. It is important to note, though, that the Church has never once named any individual to be in Hell. There is a reason for that. God saves whom He will.

The saints are people who lived lives of heroic virtue. DaTechGuy’s neighbor demonstrated an act of virtue. He did something that was ‘saintly’. Is he going to Hell because he is a Jehovah Witness? I have no idea. Having said that, I also don’t know if Attila the Hun is in Hell. I do know that St. Augustine is in Heaven. I know that St. Ambrose is in Heaven. I know that St. Jerome is in Heaven. St. Maria Goretti, the Martyrs of Cordoba, St. Joan of Arc, and St. Gemma Galgani are all in heaven ….and so on, and so on, and so on. They were all Catholic. Even Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha was Catholic.

That’s what we know for sure.

That is certainly true, it is also true by definition a Saint is a person who is in fact in heaven. There are a large amount of saints that we have never heard of or may never hear of.

She is also quite correct in the doctrinal errors of the Witnesses. I have regularly debated these errors with them when they come to the door and I let them in as I do with all the Millerite religions.

One must remember however that one of the requirement for Mortal Sin is an understanding of the sin, there is a difference between not knowing the truth and denying it. There is also the question of Baptism of intent as I wrote before:

The final method of baptism is called Baptism of desire and is explained here:

1260 “Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery.”62 Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity. emphasis mine

Thus a Muslim, a Hindu a Jew or a person of any denomination who does not know the Gospel of Christ or a native of Tahiti before the time of Captain Cook would all qualify assuming that they, seek the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it so in the eyes of the Catholic church anyone who does this IS a considered a baptized member of the church (although not in full communion with the Catholic Church).

Many non Catholics and non Christians are offended by this (as are some Catholics) then again some are offended by the teachings on adultery or on celibacy or holy communion or whatever. The church doesn’t change its doctrine based on feelings or polling..

Thus my friend across the street (assuming his Baptism is not considered valid) may in fact qualify as Baptized via this method.

All of this doesn’t change what I have said over and over: There is only one reason to be a Christian in general and/or a Catholic in particular. Because it is true and on that note there is no compromise, there is no equivocation.

This is an excellent opportunity to bring up my pastor’s excellent message from the Jan 16th bulletin on the subject:

Dear Friends,
John the Baptist makes a claim about Jesus which every Christian must affirm: “Now I have seen and testified that He is the Son of God.” Jesus is categorically different from any other great religious teacher because He claims for Himself Divinity, to be the fully divine incarnation of God on earth. Either He is delusional or we have to take Him at His word.

There is no middle ground. We cannot say He was mistaken in His core beliefs about who He was while at the same time assert that He is a great teacher. You can’t have it both ways.

There is a very important difference between saying all religions should be respected and all religions are the same. As Catholic Christians, we insist on complete freedom of conscience and religious freedom for all. That is not the same thing as saying all religion is the same. All religions have the same rights, but as Christians, we must assert that Jesus Christ is the unique Savior of the entire human race. In a world of intellectual relativity, where nothing is fact and all is opinion, that seems to be the height of arrogance. But there is also such a thing as Truth. Truth cannot be imposed or forced on anyone. We are called to be witnesses to the truth with love. We are called to affirm our faith in Jesus Christ and to make Him known.

It is the duty of every Catholic in particular and every Christian in general to proclaim the gospel of Christ. As St. Francis of Assisi said:

Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words

Works for me.

Sad to say they sound alike

Posted: January 10, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news
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I took an unexpectedly long nap and ended up awake at midnight, looking around the net I saw this via Lisa Graas:

Is it just me, or is there an incredible lack of reason on the Left?

Incidentally, the way I found out about the shooting was through an avalanche of tweets calling Sarah Palin a ‘murderer’. I was even called a murderer for asking people not to point fingers of blame. There is certainly ‘vitriol’…..but it’s not coming from the direction the Left claims.

For two days I’ve been seeing people hurling the vilest accusations at the Tea party in general and Sarah Palin in particular without any factual basis. And if that isn’t enough everyone’s favorite Democratic Pastor Fred Phelps plans on jumping into the fray..

Phelps praises Loughner’s violent acts in this video, where he announces he will be taking his sick protest to the funerals of the victims of the Arizona shooting spree. He also refers to Loughner as an Afghanistan war veteran, even though initial reports of Loughner being a veteran turned out to be false.

It’s pretty bad, almost as bad as this reaction to the murder of another poll half a world away:

Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Pakistan’s largest city on Sunday to oppose any change to national blasphemy laws and to praise a man charged with murdering a provincial governor who had campaigned against the divisive legislation.

The rally of up to 50,000 people in downtown Karachi was one of the largest demonstrations of support for the laws, which make insulting Islam a capital offense. It was organized before the governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was shot dead on Tuesday in Islamabad by a bodyguard who told a court he considered Taseer a blasphemer.

Muslim groups have praised the bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, and have used Taseer’s death to warn others not to speak out against the much-derided laws.

Now what does a group of religions fanatics Pious Muslims marching have to do with the left?

Simply this. The Governor of Punjab by challenging his fellow Muslim’s belief was a threat to their mind-set. It’s much easier to eliminate people who challenge your religious beliefs than to defend those beliefs, much less thinking involved.

When I look at the left willing to blame Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart, the Tea Party and even Lisa Graas for inciting violence while both using violent rhetoric and ignoring their own violent rhetoric in the past the pieces fit together.

The left secular political beliefs have essentially morphed into a religion. The right feelings and opinions are the sacraments (much easier than having to follow actual commandments like traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs) if you have them you are considered righteous.

Conversely if you don’t share those beliefs you are outside, you are the devil and evil, and since you are evil any level of vitriolic rhetoric or action is permissible. Rather than praying for your enemies as Christianity commands one can hate them openly and feel good about it.

This is why above all Sarah Palin is their Anti-Christ. She symbolizes all that they hate, she is a person of action who lives her beliefs and does so publicly and unabashedly. She is a reminder of a reality that their religion needs to suppress. Screwtape 13 had it pegged:

The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method—by making him a kind of Childe Harold or Werther submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses—you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem.
But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures. How can you have
failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn’t you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value?

This is why the right in general and Sarah Palin in particular must be attacked here. Every moment that she is not brings the possibility that realization might strike, that the superficial might be replaced by a foundation in reality and that reality is anathema to all that has come before.

Today Elizabeth Scalia asks the question what is wrong with the world. Chesterton’s spectacular Catholic Answer was “I am” and thus stove to change and improve himself. A great example to all Christians in general and Catholics in particular but self-realization is a tough and painful process and many don’t want to face it. Much easier to carry on confident in one perfection.

Until those on the left can come to Chesterton’s answer and work to correct it we will see more of the same. Remember screwtapes final warning:

The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel,

Well here is some Chruch news that didn’t make the national media

Posted: January 6, 2011 by datechguy in catholic
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But you can read about it here:

In a stunning ten-page declaration recently submitted to the Los Angeles County Superior Court, veteran attorney Donald H. Steier stated that his investigations into claims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have uncovered vast fraud and that his probes have revealed that many accusations are completely false.

Counselor Steier has played a role in over one hundred investigations involving Catholic clergy in Los Angeles.In his missive Mr. Steier relayed, “One retired F.B.I. agent who worked with me to investigate many claims in the Clergy Cases told me, in his opinion, about ONE-HALF of the claims made in the Clergy Cases were either entirely false or so greatly exaggerated that the truth would not have supported a prosecutable claim for childhood sexual abuse” (capital letters are his).

Mr. Steier also added, “In several cases my investigation has provided objective information that could not be reconciled with the truthfulness of the subjective allegations. In other words, in many cases objective facts showed that accusations were false.”

I would have thought something like this might have gotten a headline for two but nope the first time I hear about it is when I’m checking out this story at Lisa Graas on a different subject (Andrew Sullivan and excommunication a good read btw), where I found this tidbit from October that I missed as well:

…in a report titled “Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth” released earlier this year, a federal Bureau of Justice Statistics survey found an astonishing 10.3 percent of more than 26,000 youth held in state-operated and other large juvenile facilities complained of a “sexual incident” involving facility staff in the previous 12 months.

A few years ago, The Associated Press examined sexual abuse of students by public school teachers. Although reporters couldn’t quantify total complaints, they did discover “more than 2,500 cases over five years in which educators were punished for actions from bizarre to sadistic.” Perhaps more disturbing, “The AP investigation found efforts to stop individual offenders but, overall, a deeply entrenched resistance toward recognizing and fighting abuse . . . . In case after case the AP examined, accusations of inappropriate behavior were dismissed,” while “deals and lack of information-sharing allow abusive teachers to jump state lines, even when one school does put a stop to the abuse.”

In other words, school districts were engaging in the same sort of institutional treatment of offenders that characterized a number of Catholic dioceses in the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, and which did so much to damage the church’s reputation.

Well that must be nothing compared to what’s going on in the church today right?

In 2009, by contrast, a total of only six “credible” allegations were lodged against U.S. Catholic priests or deacons for sexual abuse of a minor occurring that year, according to statistics gathered by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. That’s in a church with more than 41,000 priests and 17,000 deacons. Assuming the clergy will never be staffed entirely by saints — what profession is? — this figure may be about as low as it is likely to go for such a large organization.

that works out to about .58 per 1,000 clergy.

And Lisa has even more interesting numbers in a post from last month.

The newspaper that most attacks the Catholic Church on this issue is the New York Times. According to Laurie Goodstein, “Decades of Damage; Trail of Pain in Church Crisis Leads to Nearly Every Diocese,” New York Times, January 12, 2003, Section 1, p. 1., based on their survey, 1.8 percent of all priests ordained from 1950 to 2001 have been accused of child sexual abuse. The Associated Press found that approximately two-thirds of 1 percent of priests have charges pending against them.

Let’s compare this to Protestant ministers.

According to Philip Jenkins, Pedophiles and Priests (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 50 and 81, between .2 and 1.7 percent of priests are pedophiles. Among the Protestant clergy, the number is between 2 and 3 percent.

How about Jewish Rabbis?

According to the Awareness Center, the Jewish community is by no means exempt.

How about Public School Teachers?

According to Daniel Wishnietsky, “Reported and Unreported Teacher-Student Sexual Harassment,” Journal of Ed Research, Vol. 3, 1991, pp. 164-69, in New York City alone, at least one child is sexually abused by a school employee every day.

This will never make the national news because as the leading opponent of both Gay Marriage and Abortion in the nation (along with opposing the hook-up culture etc etc etc) the Church is and remains the leading opponent of liberalism embraced by the MSM.

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