On the New Catholic Suckers Movement?

by
Vote for Hillary or not at all?

Vote for Hillary or not at all?

At Spero News Clinton Gillespie has an interesting report which appears to be getting little or no coverage.  Donald Trump has released his healthcare plans.  From a man who is almost as short on specifics as Ross Perot, they’re surprising.

After dominating Republicans in Super Tuesday, Trump’s campaign pivots to the general election and released specific policy plans on healthcare.For months, Trump told supporters and the media that he will abolish Obamacare while providing healthcare for those who cannot afford insurance. Despite questions about his alternative, Trump remained tight-lipped about his plans until now. Even last week during the Republican debate on CNN, Marco Rubio accused Trump for not having an alternative to Obamacare. (see video below)

In Trump’s healthcare plan, which he said is just a start to reforming healthcare, he said he aims to eliminate the individual mandate and lower costs. “No person should be required to buy insurance unless he or she wants to,” Trump wrote. His plan would look familiar to most Republicans who have tried to reform healthcare over the past several decades, including allowing tax-free health savings accounts for individuals that can be passed onto their heirs, allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines, and allowing individuals to deduct health premiums from their taxes.

Eliminate the individual mandate, create tax-free health savings accounts, deduction of premiums, and insurance deregulation:  these are conservative proposals, the most striking being an end to the Obamacare ‘tax.’

Trump’s plan differs from previous reforms in two ways. First, he wants to allow cheap prescription drugs into the country and called on Congress to “step away from the special interests and do what is right for America,” he wrote. To accomplish this goal, the patent laws would need changed that afford innovators to have a monopoly on their discovery for a certain number of years. Trump said that although the pharmaceutical industry is in the private sector, drug companies provide a public service.

That may help drugs become more affordable but also discourage innovation.

Trump believes enforcement of current immigration laws would save $11 billion annually by relieving pressure on governments to care for illegal immigrants. “If we were to simply enforce the current immigration laws and restrict the unbridled granting of visas to this country,” Trump wrote, “we could relieve healthcare cost pressures on state and local governments.”

Here Trump doubles down on the rule of law and his strong pro-border position.  (It even pops up under healthcare.)

Making price transparency is also one of Trump’s goals to reform the healthcare market. Currently, prices for exams are opaque for consumers while prices vary wildly from doctor to doctor, even in the same hospital. For example, last September, clearhealthcosts.com discovered a mammogram in Queens, New York costs $50. But it costs $607 for the same procedure at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. “Individuals should be able to shop to find the best prices for procedures, exams or any other medical-related procedure,” Trump wrote.

Letting people shop.  Too capitalistic?  Restoring the free healthcare market destroyed by mandated insurance coverages is key, and conservative, so why all the Trump-hate?  Aren’t these recommendations specific enough for politics?  He’s a vulgar boor and an ignorant lawsuit-happy liar but he is communicating some concrete policy, no?  Why are we so sure that he doesn’t mean anything he says at all?

Is it so bad to challenge Paul Ryan or Pope Francis the way Trump has?  Aren’t they both sources of a lot of trouble?

Put simply, the Trump phenomena is a preference for fight over talk.  Trump confronts.  He may emit as much empty bluster as the next politician, but his fight itself is tangible and in a contest between something forceful and more helpless words people appear to be choosing the fight.

You may ask, “Isn’t this the essence of a strong-man government rather than a functioning democracy?”  Yes, it is.  A democratic republic requires a Christian society comprised of honorable men.  Those people are dead.  That’s why we have Obama and his GOP enablers now who pretend to represent us in some constitutional system.

The conservative movement itself is split.  In Ted Cruz many see a man with proven character, a Christian faith, and a conservative track record – but is it one of success?  Yes, Cruz may be the best the Senate has, and he’s resisted his opposition boldly, but as a lone voice what has he gained?  Why is he defensively reacting in this primary while Trump plays offense and stays strategically two steps ahead?  Attacks rain down on Trump from the press, from the Democrats, from the GOP establishment, from Mexico, from China, from CAIR, from the bishops, from Pope Francis.  He is certainly hated from all the right places.  How is it he still stands?

Maybe because he’s got something, somewhere that’s real.

Which brings me to what’s left of the Catholic conservative movement.  Those with media voices appear to fall between condemning Trump on his past, his character and his persona, and those bent on making their audience believe it would be a sin to vote for him at all, even in the general election.

Both camps are doing a grave injustice to the planet and the Church.  A radical left-wing tyrant in the Whitehouse and a pliant Congress is an evil reality with live with every day.  It should end.

There is a leftist strategy for the Catholic vote.  It has two fronts.

One: Move an uncatholic political tool into the papacy to skew the faith and turn the hearts of Catholics.  Use the hierarchy and the media to validate his new teachings.

Two: Suppress the remaining faithful, and reliably conservative, Catholic voter in the general election.

If and when Trump isn’t muscled out of a primary victory and he doesn’t run as a third party spoiler, all we are going to hear from the media are ‘megalomania’, low-life scandals, and dirt.  Why help them do it in advance and hand the Left their Catholic creation like a bunch of programmable lemmings?  What does it say about your pride that you would prefer Hillary over a man with some clear conservative ideas who shares your enemies, when you already know how cruel, unjust, and destructive she’ll be?

Francis might even call you a Pharisee.

 

 

Replace Francis

by

Amazing how my day has finally come to free the peoples

The world is reacting to the latest spate of Catholic attacks from the man in white.  Most will agree with him on contraception.  Many will be furious about countries, borders, and the true freedom of the Gospel.  All of them will feel a despair somewhere deep within their souls.  Faithful voices are clear-headed and angry.  The respectable catholic press has closed ranks with some contempt for decent people.

Does it make your skin crawl to hear Francis say, ‘Blessed Paul VI?’

I’m not the only Christian who feels discouraged and helpless in the face of this statist political tool, ‘Pope Francis.’  The entire world and its machine honor him as Pope and perhaps he is, but it really doesn’t matter because he’s not Catholic.  He’s not part of the Church Militant.  Many may read this and say it’s sedevacantism, but it’s not.  I’m not claiming to know Francis’ actual status.  I’m simply saying that spiritually what difference does it make to God when you’re in the Hell line anyway?  If you’re standing in the Hell line, does Christ consider you part of His Church?  No.  He doesn’t.

You may ask, “Are you saying Francis is going to Hell?”  Well, he’s a heretic, and despite what so many ‘catholics’ say today, Heaven is for the faithful departed.  Simply put, Francis is a pope who teaches heresy.  Do the conditions exist for canonical heresy?  I don’t know, but I suggest any canonist who continues to dismiss the Pope’s heresy should place himself before the throne of God.

  • Contraceptive sex is not a moral response to any possible negative consequence of birth, much less so for a trumped-up political and faux-scientific health reason.
  • It is not unChristian or anathema for a politician to protect and control a country’s borders.
  • It’s sacrilege for Lutherans to receive Holy Communion if their consciences happen to approve.

These things are all blatantly heretical and there are many, many more. Don’t spin me about context, formality and interpretive angles. The Church cannot be led by a heretic.  It will only die, and it surely is dying.  It doesn’t matter if if someone funds a new building to teach Human Ecology at Fordham.

The Church Militant is being smothered by an official parasite Church.  Francis has made the reality even more stark.  Today everywhere is China.  There is the state church and the true Church.  But unlike the Chinese underground Church in our time, we can no longer look to another land for a vicar who speaks the truth.  Still, that doesn’t mean we can forget Christ or the Church’s doctrine.

We now have a false and organized Church.  We also have a group of faithful who either sinfully enable the false part of the Church or refuse to resist it.  Are they part of the Church Militant?  Well, that’s not very militant.

The question is:  How do we, the true and faithful Church, respond to a false Church and its unCatholic Pope?  What does God want us to do?  I can think of two things:

  1. We must shore up and organize into a group which preserves the teachings and the economy of God’s grace in union with the Church.
  2. We must never honor anything falsely.  We must never ever treat something or someone pretending to be Catholic like part of the Church.  WE ARE NOT THAT.  THAT IS NOT US.

In doing so, we need to call for Francis to be removed or step down simply on the grounds that he is not a believer.  He’s not Catholic.  To do so would be the appropriate and measured amount of honor we should give him as Christians.  It’s impossible for the Church to be led by a Protestant, if he can even be called that, and it has dire need for a faithful leader today and always.  We must have no fear of being called schismatics and heretics by schismatics and heretics, no matter who they are.  Christ was calumniated the same way.

Catholics don’t worship popes.  They are led by popes to Christ.  Francis should be removed and replaced by a Catholic Pope.

In all things we need to draw the line.  Build the wall.  Then we can attach the arches and spires.  The Church is a living thing.  It can always slowly rise up again through a crack in the bleak and crumbling sidewalk.

 

 

 

 

FrancisFan Breaks Boundaries, Doesn’t Get Mercy

by
I stay on my side and you stay on yours!

I stay on my side and you stay on yours!

In a week where a remaining bulwark of Christian duty and civilization was found with a pillow over his face in a remote ranch an hour from the border and nothing was done, a note of chaos accompanies Francis through Mexico.

In one of those tightly controlled political events where Francis meets the peoples, some greedy or mischievous person pulled the tottery old Pope over.

For a moment there was no mercy.  The joy that only God can give did not radiate. The closeness with the One whose name happens to be Mercy, whose mercy you can only feel when you permit yourself to be embraced by Him and know that mercy is always first and justice is in last place vanished, and mercy no longer covered sinners like some wet Lutheran blanket.  Francis lost his cool and yelled at that “selfish” someone.  Suddenly it was the family-Francis, the guy they know in the kitchen and sometimes the dinner hall at the Domus Sanctae Marthae condo.

Now selfish is an odd word for a Pope to use.  It’s not fine-tuned.  It means putting yourself before others or perhaps taking too much of something for yourself.  This grabber in the crowd, Pope Francis felt, was trying to have too much of the Pope.  You can’t just drag the Pope over the carefully placed partitions because then there won’t be enough Francis for the rest.  You can’t hog the Francis.  It is for the whole world to share equally.

But one might ask, “What about embracing closeness?  What happened to going out to the boundaries and peripheries?  What about evil laws and rules that erect walls which keep people out?  Perhaps someone thought there was a Holy Door of Mercy right there instead of a police barricade.   Maybe he or she just wanted to dance with Francis one time, but he ruined it by getting mad as if something was violated.

Los Federales are predicting a couple hundred thousand will travel to Francis’ Holy Mass to Erase the Southern Border today, but don’t count on it.  All we ever hear are predictions and estimates.  We  see ‘selfies’ but we never get complete photos.  Actual Catholics don’t visit Francis so much, and one gets the sense that those few ‘faithful’ who do may be more of the pushy sort.