Posts Tagged ‘religion’

Meanwhile for the “Religion of Peace” in America…

Posted: November 3, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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…It’s unfortunately business as usual:

Noor Almaleki has just died in Arizona. May she rest in peace. May her murderer, her father, be brought to justice. My condolences to those who loved her.

May American justice prevail. The prosecutor has described this as an “attempted honor killing.”

At a court hearing over the weekend in Phoenix, county prosecutor Stephanie Low told a judge that Almaleki admitted to committing the crime.

“By his own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter had brought shame on him and his family,” Low said. “This was an attempt at an honor killing.”

Michelle Malkin is appalled, Grand Rants is horrified:

This is the second known honor killing this year in America. I pray that it is the last, but I fear there is worse to come. As I said back in February: Unthinkable at one time, but no more.

And memeorandum is practically empty on the subject.

If you wonder why Pam Geller personally spends so much time and effort on the Rifqa Bary this is why.

Pretending this isn’t happening is no solution, or like minority children killed in black neighborhoods by minority drug dealers are we going to ignore them because these are Muslims being killed by other Muslims?

The Former is already a national disgrace the latter is going to become one, and like the former it will affect the entire land no matter how much we pretend otherwise.

Update: The Moderate voice opines:

Imagine for a moment that a segment of the Southern Baptist Church was supporting the idea of parents killing their teenage daughters for going out on dates. The public reaction would be swift and severe (and properly so). Media figures like Bill Maher would go ballistic, labeling the entire Christian Church with such behavior.

And yet when this exact thing is happening within the Muslim community the reaction seems muted. In the United States today there are parents killing their children (usually daughters) for engaging in ‘dishonorable behavior’. One parent recently killed his child by running her over with his car.

I am not suggesting that this behavior represents the mainstream of any faith. But it is something that ought to be condemned regardless of where it is being done and the PC silence on the topic is disturbing.

So close and yet still slightly in denial.

Today is All Souls day

Posted: November 2, 2009 by datechguy in catholic
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This is one of the most solemn days in the Catholic Calendar. Unlike yesterdays celebration of All Saints Day, where we celebrate those who have gone through the great trial and succeeded. All Souls is when we pray for and with the souls in purgatory to help them along their path to heaven. Although they are destined for heaven and are part of the communion of saints as they have not yet achieved heaven they would not be considered Saints in the colloquial usage of the term to wit:

When we talk about Saints in terms of the communion of saints we refer to all souls in heaven. Any soul in heaven is by definition a saint. The only difference between canonized saints and all the others is the Church’s direct acknowledgment of their presence in heaven.

It should be mentioned that in the list of saints there are also some that may never have existed. When the initial lists of saints was compiled centuries ago they included names from various traditions and area. In the current lists such saints are marked as such.

Souls in purgatory are all destined for heaven and “sainthood” but are in the state of purification necessary for the presence of God, Isaiah gives a quick biblical example:

Then I said, “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” Then one of the seraphim flew to me, holding an ember which he had taken with tongs from the altar. He touched my mouth with it. “See,” he said, “now that this has touched your lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” “Here I am,” I said; “send me!” Isaiah 6:5-8

They combined with us on earth equal the Communion of Saints. Our combined prayers are a powerful resource for all. The Saints in heaven get no direct benefit other than the joy of helping those toward God, the souls in purgatory get the benefit of shortening the time to their destination and we on earth get the benefit of helping to find the way along that path.

The prayers and sacrifices of the canonized saints, uncanonized saints and the holy souls in purgatory are yet another example of the many tools available to Christians in general and Catholics in particular to steer one on the road to the salvation of Christ.

In my opinion the divorcing of so many Christians from the Church in general and these aids in particular constitutes one of the greatest victories by Satan over the last 500 years. Through the grace of Christ many have found salvation even without them, but how many more have been stolen away for the want of that extra help that was simply there for the taking?

As usual the anchoress puts it better than me.

Why invistigate the nuns? Oh I don’t know maybe this?

Posted: October 27, 2009 by datechguy in catholic
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Outrage continues over the Vatican investigation of Nuns in America

“We can’t figure out why this is happening,” said Flannery, director of the Jesuit retreat house in Parma. “We’re just doing our jobs.”

The New York Times Maureen Dowd:

Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.

Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

And the letters backed her up:

I came away amazed and profoundly touched by the sisters’ faithfulness to tradition as well as by their spirituality, community, ministry and joy in vowed lives devoted entirely to the church’s mission. No Catholics on earth are more faithful to the Catholic Church.

I agree, nuns are the rock of the church in America, it’s not as if they were out there supporting Abortion publicly. Oh wait:

A Dominican nun has been seen frequenting an abortion facility in Illinois recently – but not, as one might expect, to pray for an end to abortion or to counsel women seeking abortions, but to volunteer as a clinic escort.

Local pro-life activists say that they recognized the escort at the ACU Health Center as Sr. Donna Quinn, a nun outspokenly in favor of legalized abortion, after seeing her photo in a Chicago Tribune article.

Well it’s not as if her Prioress was backing her, oh wait:

And what about the pertinent Dominican religious superior? Why, she’s going to bat for Sister Donna’s right to choose the choice she has chosen:

Sr. Patricia Mulcahey, OP, Quinn’s Prioress at the Sinsinawa Dominican community, said in an email response to LSN that the nun sees her volunteer activity as “accompanying women who are verbally abused by protestors. Her stance is that if the protestors were not abusive, she would not be there.” Though Sr. Mulcahey claimed that her sisters “support the teachings of the Catholic Church,” she declined to comment on Quinn’s public protest of Catholic Church teaching.

See a contradiction here? Well you’re wrong. It might look a little odd at first glance, but in reality this is an example of the healthy and fully renewed religious life called for by the Second Vatican Council.

Well it’s not as if this was a violation of Canon law, now that you mention it:

1. Canon 695 calls for the mandatory dismissal of a religious guilty of the delict of abortion described in Canon 1398. A case can be made, I think, that Sr. Donna is an accomplice to abortion under Canon 1329, which, in turn, might bring her within the scope of the dismissal provision of Canon 695. The novelty of nuns serving as murder mistresses at abortion clinics means that there is not much jurisprudence for such cases, I grant, but it is still a theory worth exploring.

If, however, a more direct process is desired, Canon 696 seems a better place to start.

2. Under Canon 696, dismissal from religious life can be imposed against one who gives “grave scandal arising from culpable behavior”. This unusually broad language allows superiors to move against a religious whose specific conduct could not have been predicted when the revised Code was being drafted (perhaps, like Sr. Donna’s, it could scarcely have been imagined!), but which we now know can be both imagined and committed. So, to the extent that conducting babies to their death is scandalous behavior for a religious woman, Sr. Donna deserves dismissal.

3. Various provisions of penal law, for example Canon 1369 (authorizing a “just penalty” against those who use the means of social communication to gravely injure good morals or to excite contempt against religion or the Church) are applicable, I suggest, in response to the kind of verbiage that Sr. Donna directs from time to time against religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. But again, all of this seems self-evident.

Hey ya know maybe there is something to this Vatican investigation after all?

As I’ve said before Catholicism is a voluntary activity. If sister Quinn wants to push Abortion and aid at abortion clinics, it’s a free country, she just shouldn’t do it as a Catholic nun. If she insists on doing it as a Catholic Nun and her superiors do nothing then they ought not to be whining about the Vatican investigating them. It’s a variation of the murder your parents cry as an orphan business.

In the end Sr. Quinn will do what she wants and the media will fawn on her and she and her superiors will be celebrated for the rest of their lives…

…after that they’re on their own.

Lawrence O’Donnell thinks of something I didn’t about Married Priests…

Posted: October 23, 2009 by datechguy in catholic
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…I mentioned the difference in pay but on Morning Joe just they were talking about the Pope and the Anglican communion etc and the suggestion was it might lead to changing the rules on married priests. (I think it’s a bad idea but there is certainly nothing that would contrast with eternal truth) O’Donnell said the Church even if it wanted to can’t afford it, (the quote is from memory):

Right now the church has to pay for health insurance for its priests, how are they going to afford health insurance for wives and 9 kids since married priests won’t be using birth control.

That thought never occurred to me. When O’Donnell isn’t dealing with a topic like Iraq or Palin that afflicts him with Sullivan’s Syndrome he can be quite wise. He also said something else that was telling (again quote might not be exact):

Nobody has asked priests for marital advice for 50 years, go see a shrink instead.

I can certainly believe that, perhaps if people were taking advice from their parish priest instead of their shrinks the divorce and illegitimacy rates wouldn’t have gone through the roof over the last 50 years.

Personally I don’t think that the decline of marriage was a bug of the 60’s, I think the people who celebrate the turning away from the church consider it a feature. Certainly the other side would.

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