Monthly Archives: March 2015

CruxMag has the official line on Vatican Press Office’s Fr. Thomas Rosica’s capitulation on his legal threats against a Canadian blogger. First we must be clear that Father neither works for nor represents the Vatican.

Despite a frenzy in the conservative Catholic blogosphere, a high-profile priest who volunteers as an English-language assistant to the Vatican press office says he’s not planning to take legal action against a Canadian blogger who had criticized him, and considers the matter closed.

The Rev. Thomas Rosica, also a Canadian, said Wednesday he never planned to sue the blogger, and also insisted that he’s not a “high-ranking Vatican official” and hence there was never any prospect of the Vatican taking action.

Crux’s Ines San Martin writes:

On Wednesday, Rosica released a statement saying he had only responded “as an individual and in no institutional capacity to the Vatican or to my place of work, to the continuous false, [and] slanderous statements of the blogger.”

“It was never my intention to sue, but rather to issue a letter to ‘cease and desist’ the frivolous calumny,” the statement said.

That frightening letter sure sounded like it was his intention to sue. To her credit San Martin gives a good recap of beseiged blogger Vox Cantoris’ line on Fr. Rosica:

Through Vox Cantoris, Domet also has questioned the legitimacy of Francis’ papacy and described last October’s Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family as a “New-age laity psycho-babble.”

In the wake of the synod, Domet accused Rosica, who helped the Vatican’s press office as a spokesman and translator for English- and French-speaking journalists, of “manipulating” the synod and the press coverage.

Donet wrote that Rosica was lobbying for changing Church teaching through “stealth, by the change of practice under the guise that which is considered pastoral.”

One gets the impression that the writer may not think those assertions ring true. After covering Cardinal Burke’s helpful indirect defense of the Vox Cantoris last week, she closes with the not-high-level Rosica’s high-handed condemnation of bloggers who won’t tow their establishment line. You know, those jerks.

Popes Benedict XVI and Francis have taught clearly that the Internet and blogs can be of tremendous service to the building up of the Church and of humanity,” Rosica’s statement said. “They have never taught that blogs and social media should be used, in the name of fidelity, to engender slander, hatred, reviling and destroying.”

Rosica also said that those in the Catholic blogsphere who have contributed to spreading the faith and defending all that is good and beautiful about it and the Church should be congratulated and encouraged.

“Others have chosen to turn the blogosphere into a black hole of vitriol, anger and profound sadness,” he said. “As Catholics, the great privilege and freedom of expression and access to social media also has certain obligations of decency, integrity, honest and charity that reveal who we really are.”

Talk about a ‘black hole of vitriol!’ How many ways can one insult the free Catholic press, Fr. Rosica? It’s a privilege to speak is it? Who grants it? It’s an obligation to say what you permit? This all still sounds threatening.

Intimidating, smearing, and attacking honest faithful Catholics won’t make you one of them. How long will you pretend?

The Daily Beast reports on the new homeless-friendly Vatican state.

It is nearly 8 p.m. on a Tuesday in early March, and the Vatican is locked up for the night. A few stray tourists pose for pictures in front of the glistening basilica of St. Peter, and cassock-wearing clergy skim the perimeter of the square on their way home to dinner. In the shadows of the famous colonnade and extending to the foot of the grand boulevard known as the Via Conciliazione, dozens of men and a few women settle in for the night in Vatican-issued sleeping bags. They are the welcomed guests of Pope Francis, though not everyone in the neighborhood appreciates their presence. Joey, a Romanian who used to bed down in Rome’s squalid Termini train station, moved to St. Peter’s in late February. “We are all moving here,” he told The Daily Beast. “Everyone else spits on the homeless. But not here.”

Do they really spit on you everywhere else?

After describing the new showers, other accommodations, and pro-homeless policing, the Beast’s Barbie Latza Nadeau shifts to one of the local store owners.

The generosity of the pope may be well received by those in need, but it is not without complications. Store owners along the Via Conciliazione have complained that the number of homeless people and beggars detracts from business and that every morning they have to forcibly remove those in the papal sleeping bags from their storefront steps. A woman at a religious trinket shop who asked that she not be named lest she upset the pope said his kindness was now a magnet attracting the city’s poorest people. “I don’t want to group homeless people with pickpockets and thieves, but we have also seen an increase in petty crime here since the homeless moved in,” she said. “There has to be a balance in finding the peace between those of us who pay a lot of rent to run our businesses here and those who cash in for free.”

Rent! They charge rent in the Vatican to store owners? And what about this other troubling reality: Is this money-grubbing business person saying that among people who can find no home that will take them, nor any productive work to do, there are more thieves and criminals? That’s akin to saying that they tend to be more prone to other vices! Perhaps they’ve grown accustomed to having large organizations give them things.

Are these ‘poor at the center of the Gospel’ because they have nowhere to go, or because they may be in some ways lacking in Christian character and self-discipline? Are sinners at the center of the Gospel too? What about saints? Are they around the corner of the Gospel?

There is also a logistical issue with the increase in street people. The city’s charities and soup kitchens do a fine job feeding the poor, but there are very few public toilets for the homeless to use—and a scant few that are open overnight—which means that full corridors of side streets along the flanks of Vatican City are littered with human feces and drenched in urine. Street sweepers have acknowledged that they now spray down full sections of the areas around St. Peter’s Square every morning before the tourists arrive.

So the center of the Holy Catholic Church is now covered in human excrement. Is there some deep spiritual significance to this?

 

When communists and redistributionists talk about food or farming, it’s always frightening.

Peasant groups appealed to Catholic bishops to support the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill, instead of pushing for the extension of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.

They still have peasants in the Philippines and they have ‘peasant groups’. I wonder how poor those peasant groups are?

The Anakpawis partylist and Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) made the statement in response to the recent appeal to President Aquino made by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. At least 81 Catholic Church leaders have signed the appeal that says, “’give new life and glorious finish’ to the 27-year-old CARP by passing the twin measures House Bill 4296 and House Bill 4375 for the sake of Filipino farmers.”

“It is helpful that the bishops are voicing out their support for the farmers’ interests, and so we appeal that they support GARB that proposes free land distribution and the nationalization of agricultural lands, Anakpawis Representative Fernando “Ka Pando” Hicap said in a statement.

GARB not CARP. GARB is the one that nationalizes everyone’s land and then hands it out to other people. 81 ‘Catholic leaders’ support GARB but apparently not enough bishops.

The group said farmer-leaders have officially submitted to the CBCP’s 107th Plenary Assembly in July 2013, an appeal urging “the Filipino peasantry including our Bishops, to unite and make a stand for a new, genuine and truly distributive land reform program… and, pray that our beloved bishops reconsider their position on the sham CARPER and to continue taking the side of the oppressed and exploited toiling peasants who have been struggling for genuine land reform.”

In their appeal to the CBCP, the KMP called CARP as “the longest-running and most expensive agrarian reform program in the world and is not meant to address the problem of landlessness and rural poverty. Enacted on June 10, 1988 during the administration of then President Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino, the law was crafted to exempt Hacienda Luisita and other vast haciendas in the country from land distribution.”

So they already have a land redistribution system in the Philippines, it’s just that it only redistributes smaller farmers’ land. Rich farmers still get to keep what’s theirs. So, it’s a choice between bad and worse.

Will the bishops shift? What would Pope Francis do? Organize co-ops?