Roman Catholic Blog

Bella's Eduardo Verastegui On Abortion, Obama & Proposition 4

[Warning] The video immediately below is graphic (those below it are not)...

Barbara Kralis Asks An Excellent Question In Her New Article...

Click here to read Barbara Kralis' article: How many times do we have to say 'NO' to same-sex marriage?

Click here to read this recent Time Magazine story: The Gay Mafia That's Redefining Liberal Politics

Food For Thought...

See also: What Could Be Scarier Than Halloween? Two Orange County Pastors Donating To Obama

What Could Be Scarier Than Halloween? Two Orange County Pastors Donating To Obama

(Above) Mission San Juan Capistrano Basilica Pastor, Fr. Art Holquin

(Below) Corpus Christi Parish Pastor, Fr. Fred Bailey

Mission San Juan Capistrano Basilica Pastor, Fr. Art Holquin, gave money to Barack Obama's campaign.

Click here: Holquin Donation

So did Fr. Fred Bailey, pastor of Corpus Christi parish in Aliso Viejo, of Halloween Mass & Barney blessing fame.

Click here: Bailey Donations

Click here to learn about Fr. Fred Bailey's "wife" Helen: Corpus Christi FAQ

Flashback Video Links:

Halloween Mass Video #1

Halloween Mass Video #2

Halloween Mass Video # 3: The Barney Blessing

See also:

California Priest, Fr. Art Holquin, Gave Money To Obama Campaign

Fr. Art Holquin: Homosexual Priests Are A Gift To The Church

More On Holquin: An Observation from the Diocese of Orange....

Open Letter To Tod Brown, Bishop Of Orange

A Good First Step: Archbishop Chaput Corrects Senator Biden On Abortion

Here's the link: Archbishop Chaput Corrects Senator Biden on Abortion

My thoughts:

This is good, but the fundamental problem is with Catholics thinking that remaining within a political party that supports abortion as a civil right and attempting to dismiss this fact by pointing to conservative support for things like specific wars (or war in general) or the death penalty neutralizes the scandal involved in belonging to such a group is a moral option.

When will Church leaders tell Catholics that it's as wrong to belong to organizations that support the culture of death, most notably through support for the legal option to kill preborn babies, as it is to belong to a Masonic lodge?

And when will so-called Catholic politicians who support legal abortion be told, without equivocation, by all bishops (including the Holy Father) that, by supporting the culture of death, these so-called Catholic politicians are not in union with Rome, may not receive Holy Communion, and will be excommunicated if they persist in supporting legal abortion?

Any thoughts?

See also: Can Catholics Support Obama?

Partisan Pastor?

Archbishop Charles Chaput has been very open about his commitment to the Democrat party, even going so far as to admit having voted for, and even having worked for pro-abortion candidates.

A recent article by Catholic author, Barbara Kralis, brought attention to the issue: Will Denver Catholic Archbishop finally enforce Canon 915?

Archbishop Charles Chaput's history has troubled many of the faithful, and some of them have attempted to encourage the archbishop to exercise his duty to teach, govern, and sanctify by denying pro-abortion politicians (regardless of political affiliation) access to the Holy Eucharist.

More after the jump...

Vota por la vida...

Mexican Supreme Court upholds legal abortion

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexico's Supreme Court has voted to uphold legal abortion in the capital.

Mexico City is one of only a handful of places in Latin America that allow abortion without limitations in the first trimester.

The court's support of the Mexico City law opens the possibility that similar measures could be adopted elsewhere in Mexico. It might also inspire other leftist Latin American cities to follow suit.

The Roman Catholic church blasted the court's decision Thursday, declaring itself in mourning and saying that church leaders would double their efforts to fight abortion in Mexico.

Conservative President Felipe Calderon's administration had appealed the law to the Supreme Court.

The court voted 8-3 to uphold it as constitutional.

__________________________________________

We should all pray to Our Lady of Guadalupe, Empress of the Americas, to intercede for our pro-life brethren to the South!

Farewell Oracle

"One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a giant in the defense of freedom in the 20th Century, has died. Many, if not most will remember him for his authorship of the troika of books known as the Gulag Archipelago. When Maximus and I were students at Servite High School in the 1980’s, it was required reading. I hope it still is.

Less well known is Solzhenitsyn’s address to Harvard University in 1978. I believe it will go down in history as one of the most prescient speeches ever given. In league with Pericles "Funeral Oration," Cicero’s "Fourth Philippic," Zola’s "Appeal for Dreyfus," Theodore Roosevelt on "The Strenuous Life," or his cousin FDR’s "Arsenal of Democracy" speech.

His moniker of "Oracle of the Twentieth Century" was well-earned.

The full text of his Harvard address can be found here:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html

Some salient quotes of his critique of the West:

"In today's Western society, the inequality has been revealed of freedom for good deeds and freedom for evil deeds."

"Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."

"This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists."

I always have looked at Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II as bearing essentially the same message, one in the political sphere, the other in the religious. While both were devoted to the cause of the defeat of Soviet Communism, they were also attune to the inherent dangers of the libertine society the West has become.

I think Solzhenitsyn, the "Gipper," and JPII are the triumvirate that brought down the Bolsheviks.

Is it Murder?

Words have such power. Beyond they're actual meaning, they can convey sense or attitude on a variety of topics, either positive or negative, by their individual choice.

My eyebrow arched as I saw a tv ad for the latest edition of the National Geographic Magazine. The article that drew my ire was entitled:

Who Murdered the Virunga Gorillas?

(See: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/07/virunga/jenkins-text.html)

Murder Gorillas? In the logical world in which I was raised, this title is itself an oxymoron. Murder is defined as the unlawful taking of a human life. I looked it up on Merriam Webster's and sure enough:

Main Entry:

¹mur·der

Pronunciation:

\ˈmər-dər\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

partly from Middle English murther, from Old English morthor; partly from Middle English murdre, from Anglo-French, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English morthor; akin to Old High German mord murder, Latin mort-, mors death, mori to die, mortuus dead, Greek brotos mortal

Date:

before 12th century

1: the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought2 a: something very difficult or dangerous <the traffic was murder> b: something outrageous or blameworthy <getting away with murder>

Well I thought, perhaps they changed the definition of "person?" "No" there too, it reads:

per·son

Pronunciation:

\ˈpər-s^ən\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

Middle English, from Anglo-French persone, from Latin persona actor's mask, character in a play, person, probably from Etruscan phersu mask, from Greek prosōpa, plural of prosōpon face, mask — more at prosopopoeia

Date:

13th century

1: human, individual —sometimes used in combination especially by those who prefer to avoid man in compounds applicable to both sexes <chairperson><spokesperson>2: a character or part in or as if in a play : guise3 a: one of the three modes of being in the Trinitarian Godhead as understood by Christians b: the unitary personality of Christ that unites the divine and human natures4 aarchaic : bodily appearance b: the body of a human being; also : the body and clothing <unlawful search of the person>5: the personality of a human being : self6: one (as a human being, a partnership, or a corporation) that is recognized by law as the subject of rights and duties7: reference of a segment of discourse to the speaker, to one spoken to, or to one spoken of as indicated by means of certain pronouns or in many languages by verb inflection.

National Geographic is far from the benign magazine of our youth. Regrettably, many, if not most, do not understand the seriously flawed philosophical argument it is attempting to covertly make when it speaks of the "murder of gorillas."

Anything in the name of "Health."

The late Malachi Martin once said to me, "In the USA you can get away with anything if you do it in the name of health." I believe we were discussing the unbelievably rapid, and shockingly unopposed, growth in classes termed "sex education" in public primary and secondary schools. These classes having little to do with "health," and all to do with social engineering and the debasing of our society. (Contrariwise, I'm not talking about reverting to total ignorance ala babies are delivered by storks)

This conversation came to mind when I read the following:

"Highway patrol officers visited El Camino High School in Oceanside, Calif., last month and told students several of their classmates had been killed in car wrecks. But it was all a hoax designed to dramatize the dangers of drinking and driving."

You can read the full article at:

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/teachers-defend-dwi-shock-tactics/20080612163009990001

Administrators plainly admit their goal was to "shock" and "traumatize" their students as to the dangers of drinking.

Your thoughts?