If Only Pope Francis Could Start Fleets of Ferries Running From Libya

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Problem solved.

Problem solved.

South Florida’s Sun Sentinel reports:

For the first time in five decades, the U.S. is allowing ferry service between Florida and Cuba.

At least four companies said they were notified Tuesday of approvals by the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments, the first since Washington imposed a trade embargo on Cuba.

Licensed were Havana Ferry Partners of Fort Lauderdale, Baja Ferries of Miami, United Caribbean Lines Florida of Greater Orlando and Airline Brokers Co. of Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

A Treasury spokeswoman confirmed approval of ferry licenses but would not say how many were approved. Cuba also must approve the operations.

“I’m very excited, because this is a historical event in U.S.-Cuba relations,” said Havana Ferry’s managing partner, Leonard Moecklin Sr.

The ferry companies plan to offer trips that would be less expensive than charter flights, while allowing more luggage free. Many Cuban-Americans haul down hefty supplies for family homes and new private businesses.

Two weeks ago NY Gov. Cuomo was in Cuba looking at a new port deal.  Now it seems several companies have been approved to run ferries.  It’s cheaper than charter flights yes, but flying to Cuba has been generally restricted anyway.  Why all the new sea traffic?  Why the focus on human cargo?

President Obama since Dec. 17 has moved to re-establish diplomatic ties with Cuba and has eased travel and trade. The passenger ferries will be able to carry only authorized U.S. travelers to Cuba, including people in 12 categories who no longer need a license in advance to visit. Those categories include family visits as well as religious and educational activities, among others.

Americans still are not allowed to travel to Cuba for general tourism under the terms of the U.S. embargo, which remains in place. Only Congress can lift the embargo.

Only Congress can lift the embargo but Obama can give them twelve excuses to keep seven or so ferry companies busy.  My guess is there will be lots of one-way traffic.  That will free up empty boats to head back to Cuba with whatever heretofore illegal contraband Obama waves through.

Here’s what companies are planning:

• Havana Ferry Partners hopes to launch its ferry service between Key West and Havana within weeks, possibly with a 200-passenger vessel, Moecklin said.

Good bye, Key West!

It also plans to add overnight ferry service later from Fort Lauderdale and Miami to Havana using a larger vessel that could carry 300 to 500 passengers, Moecklin said. Plus, it’s eyeing Port Manatee on Tampa Bay as a gateway with Cuba.

Good bye, Tampa!

Prices are not set, but Moecklin said Havana Ferry aims to charge passengers roughly $300 to $350 roundtrip, less than the roughly $400 to $500 price for charter flights to Cuba. Passengers could be allowed up to 200 pounds of luggage free.

Why so much free luggage?

“We don’t know the costs yet, because we don’t know the costs on the Cuban side,” Moecklin said. “I’m booking my flight to Cuba now” for talks with Cuban officials, he said.

Someone may cover the costs of the Cuban side, yes?  Hello Caritas!

• Baja Ferries USA, an affiliate of United Americas of Miami, is looking to launch overnight service to Cuba possibly three times a week. It has held meetings with Port Everglades, Port Manatee and other Florida seaports to offer service.

“We’ve been waiting for this,” Baja Ferries executive Joe Hinson said of the license. The company already has ferry services in Mexico and between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

Three shipments a week and that’s just one company!

A few years ago in the middle of the night, while I was camping on one of the Florida Keys, a group of about fifty Cuban rafters floated ashore and were picked up and processed by immigration.  They were all ages, very happy and celebrating like it was midday, wearing thirty year-old clothes, and without one cell phone.  It’s a dangerous choice, especially if they get wind of it before you go.

So today, in the Francis/Obama Cuba Era, thousands of weekly Cubans will pay twice their annual salaries to come visit?  Were the conditions which made it necessary for people to risk the lives of children somehow eliminated?  Was that entire rafter phenomenon America’s fault, because nothing has changed on the Island from what I can tell.

Things are very different here though.  This isn’t about faith or charity.  It’s about turning Florida into a blue state, and that goal has nothing to do with Catholicism.  People who float over in rafts to escape Communist tyrants may vote Republican.  People who sneak over in ferries probably don’t.

Thank you, Pope Francis!  Now if you could just get a ferry system in place from Libya to Italy, you could make real progress on that new economic system with the human person at the center, instead of profit.

Maybe it’s time to stand on a rock at Lampedusa and scold people again.

 

 

Communism, Global Warming, the Church, and You

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united nations

Is this a new Catholic Church? Wait, I don’t see kneelers.

At ‘Blog for Dallas Area Catholics’ Tantumblogo has no illusions about the origins and ends of the Global Warming offense.

Some of the very, very first laws the Bolsheviks put into effect upon taking power in the former Imperial Russia were laws not just allowing, but encouraging divorce, contraception, and abortion.  Why in heavens would that be one of their earliest moves?  What could they possibly have to gain from diabolical efforts?  Control.

The left, most admittedly in its pure and distilled form of communism, but in all its forms, seeks to control people on a level never dreamed of by the most benighted despots of the past.  They seek not just control over  your political activities, or your economic life, or of your social involvements, but all these things plus much more besides.  They seek to control your inner thoughts and your relationship with God.  The left, as I have argued many times in the past, is ultimately at war with the Christian God and has been for hundreds of years.

How is religion most intimately and effectively communicated from one generation to the next?  The family.  How can the left ever pry us stubborn God-botherers away from our magic talks with God unless they destroy the family and stand up the state in its stead?  And how can one destroy the family, anyway?  Well……turning sex into a competitive sport and loosing all the checks and balances God provided on human reproductive behavior was, and remains, a great place to start.  So you legalize divorce, fornication, contraception, and especially baby murder, and go from there.  As we have seen in this country, a few decades of such legalization will lead society to the precipice of self-destruction.  And even after the regime that foisted such evils on the people goes away, the evils remain for decades after.  Witness Russia today, with still one of the world’s highest abortion rates, and general death-wishing nihilism driving incredibly high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction, producing one of the lowest life expectancies for men of any largely developed nation.

Communism is nothing if not relentless.  They tried the direct method of competition with the more capitalist West and failed.  So now they are trying manifold other, less obvious but more insidious methods, like cultural marxism and environmentalism.  But these replacements are no different from their predecessor, and contain all the same assumptions and desires that the old Soviet state did – total control over the lives and thoughts of everyone on earth, the destruction of the family, the “death” of God.  Cultural marxism and environmentalism are of course as tied up in the sexular pagan death cult as the most fire-breathing Bolshevist of Stalin’s days.

Which brings me to the main point – this recent highly publicized and very important “climate conference” or “conference on sustainable development” at the Vatican.  Yes there have been highly unfortunate flirtations with the left wing socialists at the UN and in the environmental movement by the Vatican before, but never with such official approbation, and never with so much influence on official papal documents of doctrinal import. I say influence, because the Vatican itself widely reported that the meeting between Pope Francis and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, as well as the entirely one-sided conferences organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, were oriented towards providing input for the upcoming papal encyclical on “climate change” and sustainable development.  As I noted in the link above, the conferences featured some of the most prominent pro-aborts and population control zealots in the world today.  That pro-abort maximalists like Jeffrey Sachs (abortion on demand at public expense and without apology) were given a platform to speak – even if “only” on a subject intimately related to their population control obsessions, “climate change” and sustainable development – is hugely scandalous in its own rite.  But to openly tie this platform with the upcoming encyclical is completely unprecedented.

You can read the rest here.

This ugly unity between the worldwide Left and the NewChurch, emerging at Benedict’s abdication, and clear since Francis walked out on the balcony; is impossible to ignore.  It is not the place of the Christ’s Bride to collaborate with these actors and enable their murderous worldy goals and frauds.  That is simply not Catholic.  It’s the opposite.

What do we do with this encyclical then?  What will it mean for our Church?

 

 

Notre Dame Hosts Uni-Pole Conference Against ‘Catholic’ Polarization

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Putting principles over politics

Putting principles over politics

At RNS news, Jacob Lupfer writes:

Americans of all stripes bemoan political polarization. For people who claim to derive their political values from their religious traditions, polarization raises vexing questions. More than perhaps any other group, faithful Catholics struggle to reconcile their church’s teachings with the platforms of the two major parties.

Do all Americans bemoan polarization?  I thought only liberal politicians did that as a backhanded form of attack?  They want a uni-party.

And what is so difficult about reconciling Catholic teaching with politics?  That’s only hard if you’re unfaithful.  There’s no liberal policy that a good Catholic can endorse without enabling stealing, cheating, oppressing, killing, immorality, or hatred of God.

Last week at the University of Notre Dame, an ideologically diverse group of Catholic leaders gathered to discuss how political polarization affects Catholic life in the United States. Under the theme “Naming the Wounds, Beginning to Heal,” the conference sought to change the tone of political engagement by priests, lay people and the hierarchy.

Ideologically diverse?  If you took part that meeting you were either an actor or an enabler.

Conservative evangelicals can be faithful Republicans because their churches affirm the GOP’s social conservatism and sexual traditionalism but they speak only timidly on matters of economics, deferring to and accepting (if not outright sanctifying) market forces. Mainline Protestant denominations’ political teachings align neatly with the Democratic Party’s platform. This includes robust support for abortion rights and, increasingly, same-sex marriage.

Free markets are not something Southern Baptists ‘sanctify’ as if they were animists.  A free market is just people giving their time and property to each other.  If you don’t think that’s moral, then you must believe stealing and oppression is.

People have a God-given right to give and exchange what’s theirs.  They are obligated to use their gifts in a Christian way, but it is not your place to force them.  True charity (love) requires freedom.  Liberals don’t value love so they don’t understand freedom.  They want control, ‘equality,’ and materialist results.  The truths behind a free market are natural rights, not un-Catholic idols.

Moderate evangelicals, black Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox traditions cut across the two major parties. But since the Catholic Church spans the breadth and depth of America’s political landscape, it is important for Catholics to model Christian political engagement in a context of partisan and ideological polarization.

What?!

Robert McElroy, the newly installed Catholic bishop of San Diego, gave a brilliant speech last year about the moral dilemmas of partisanship. While acknowledging the parties’ role in nurturing mass participation in politics, he cautioned against the ways both parties can be hostile to human dignity and the common good.

No polarizing ‘partisan’ there, McElroy.

For the Christian citizen, parties pose a paradox. It is a good thing that we have ideologically distinct parties that will, when in power, pursue different policy goals. But when partisans — whether elected officials or ordinary voters — abandon their religious principles in order to fall in line with their party, Christian political engagement ceases to exist.

Nothing serves the interests of political parties more than interest groups that use religious rhetoric to promote secular ideologies and add, “Thus saith the Lord.” And Washington is full of them.

So is the American hierarchy.  Mr. Lupfer closes:

Polarization challenges Catholics more acutely than it challenges many other religious adherents. They should seek ways to promote fuller expressions of their church’s humane teachings in both parties. In elevating principles above party loyalty, they can witness to their faith and model authentically Christian political engagement.

But you must have principles in the first place.