The Pope’s Un-Catholic Scolding Against The Death Penalty Demeans And Cheapens Innocent Life

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Why is it that we support clubs of people who think they can impose some unjust law upon the whole planet?  How in the world is a collection of subsidized scolders, winers, and diners supposed to impose a worldwide moratorium on anything?  Why does the Pope think they can?

Pope Francis delivered a letter this week to the International Commission against the Death Penalty

With these letters, I wish to have my greeting reach all the members of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, to the group of countries that support it, and to those who collaborate with the organism over which you preside. I wish, in addition, to express my personal gratitude, and also that of men of good will, for your commitment to a world free of the death penalty and for your contribution to the establishment of a universal moratorium of executions worldwide, with a view to abolition of capital punishment.

Plato was clear, “When there is crime in society, there is no justice,” and if you look around you’ll find plenty of crime.  You’ll also find plenty of people teaching that actual justice is unjust or useless.

L.A. Archbishop Jose Gomez rolled out the tired pseudo-Catholic appeal against the death penalty once again this week, arguing that we’re so ‘advanced’ now it’s unnecessary, as if the point of an execution was to keep the convict from hurting anyone else.  If we’re so advanced, why is there so much murder, and why don’t we understand that the point is to keep ‘others’ from killing, not the one already in jail?

The justice of an execution is secondary to the value in it.  Is it just to execute a murderer? Yes.  But the value in that justice is its effect on society.  When criminals are executed swiftly and accurately, other crimes are deterred and the innocent are protected.  It’s not a new formula.  It’s been tried, proven for ages.

Gomez also argued that we are incapable of identifying the guilty parties in the first place so mistakes abound.  Again, if we’re so advanced, why can’t we even capture and convict criminals?  Might as well throw in the towel I suppose.  It’s all pro-life you know, unless you’re an innocent victim.  In that case it’s your business to die cruelly while killers go free or get life in prison in deference to their own ‘dignity’ and in light of other advances.

Everything is pro-life now if you are a Catholic bishop.  In the ‘seamless garment’ world illegal immigration, food stamps, unemployment benefits, government healthcare, and foreign aid are all the same thing as protecting unborn children from murder.  It’s because of ‘human dignity’ and poverty causes crime, you know. (Also, hate speech causes suicides.)

After listing some of the research he has performed, Pope Francis writes:

States can kill by action when they apply the death penalty, when they take their peoples to war or when they carry out extra-judicial or summary executions. They can also kill by omission, when they do not guarantee to their peoples access to the essential means for life. “Just as the Commandment ‘do not kill’ puts a clear limit to ensure the value of human life, today we have to say ‘no to an economy of exclusion and inequality’” (Evangelii gaudium, 53).

It’s eerie and frightening to think that a man who would conflate murder with ‘access’ to essential means for life – meaning free food, shelter, clothing, and healthcare; is the world’s leading moral guide.  If redistributive programs are all pro-life, they must also be murderous to thwart!  What is murder, what is justice, and who is guilty?  Enemies of the state are guilty I suppose.

Life, especially human life, belongs to God alone. Not even the murderer loses his personal dignity and God himself makes himself its guarantor. As Saint Ambrose teaches, God did not want to punish Cain for the murder, as He wants the repentance of the sinner, not his death (Cf. Evangelium vitae, 9).

Are we now expected to believe that since God was merciful to Cain, He was never just?  What about the rest of the Bible? Is he saying that St. Ambrose also crusaded against the death penalty in the name of the Faith, or is this just co-opting a great saint on behalf of his 23rd P.C. cause?  Were they like this back then?

On some occasions it is necessary to repel proportionally an aggression underway to avoid an aggressor causing harm, and the necessity to neutralize him might entail his elimination: it is the case of legitimate defense (Cf. Evangelium vitae, 55). However, the assumptions of legitimate personal defense are not applicable to the social milieu, without risk of distortion. Because when the death penalty is applied, persons are killed not for present aggressions, but for harm caused in the past. Moreover, it is applied to persons whose capacity to harm is not present but has already been neutralized, and who find themselves deprived of their freedom.

John Paul II, cited here, confuses the death penalty with stopping a killer in his tracks before he can do harm. If his argument applies, then it completely undercuts the nature of a just society or punishment; both which result after the fact.  A little hermeneutic of continuity needs to be delivered to contemporary papal expressions.

Today the death penalty is inadmissible, no matter how serious the crime of the condemned. It is an offense against the inviolability of life and the dignity of the human person that contradicts God’s plan for man and society and His merciful justice, and it impedes fulfilling the just end of the punishments. It does no do justice to the victims, but foments vengeance.

This is blather, is it not?  There’s that new MercyJustice I keep reading about, and it’s insidious.  How much wrong will the Pope advocate in the name of God?  Justice is not vengeance.  God is not unjust. He is only ‘also’ merciful.  The Pope’s blatant scolding against the death penalty demeans and cheapens every innocent life.

When an entire society from Pope down to serial killer becomes unjust and murderous, it’s left only to God to apply justice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do Communists Think Pope Francis is a Communist?

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The Peoples' Pope

The Peoples’ Pope

Why is it considered unsophisticated and hysterical to write about Communism these days when totalitarian statism has never been more accepted?  Why is it so difficult to see the effects of it’s influence, of it’s backers and their patient efforts, even inside the Church?

Communists see traditional Catholicism and the Ancient Mass as products of an oppressive elite?  Why not?  They see everything else that way.  Communists think of the new vernacular Mass as the “people’s” Mass.  So does Pope Francis, the same Pope who sees the difference between Catholicism and Communism as only one of semantics.

Take Communism and add some God and you’ve got the Catholic Church according to Francis; you know, a Church where the ‘poor are the center of the Gospel’ and all that, where if you don’t help the poor on the peripheries it doesn’t matter what ‘religious observances’ you follow.

Just as Communists praise Francis today, I suspect that Communists were quite happy with the Paul VI Mass.  Why?  What do they care?  It is because Communists are atheists who cannot realize their goals without thwarting the graces of the Church, causing widespread rejection of God, and a depraved rootless people.

Pope Francis is entirely wrong when he links Communism to Catholicism, but he’s not wrong when he links his own concept of the Church to it.  FrancisChurch, moving “forward” from Paul VI, is entirely compatible with Communism because it enables it quite well.

At Breitbart, Austin Ruse follows up on what Communists, and Reagan Era Communist-fighting men see in the New Pope of the People.

A largely overlooked column by human rights advocate Armando Valadares raises questions about the initiative of Pope Francis toward the “island-prison” of Cuba.

In early January, Valladares, who spent 22 years in Castro’s prisons and went on to write a highly influential book about it, says the recent opening to Cuba by the West is part of an “Obama-Francis axis” that he calls a “spiritual-political axis which… will now provide the repressive apparatus of the Cuban regime with rivers of money and favorable publicity.”

He says Pope Francis and President Obama are merely replacing the Soviet Union, then Venezuela, and finally Brazil as Castro’s financial enablers.

Two days after the simultaneous December 19th announcement by Rome, Washington, and Havana of the diplomatic rapprochement, Valladares reported a Cuban Coast Guard boat “began ramming a boat fleeing Cuba with 32 people on board, including seven women and two children, to sink the frail craft.” Valladares called it “a brutal action by a regime that feels back up by powerful allies. A criminal event so seriously damning for the Castro regime would deserve a worldwide outcry of repudiation but was hardly noticed…”

He said the event wasn’t even notice by “churchmen who should imitate the Good Shepard by being ready to give their lives for their sheep.”

Valladares, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission under Presidents Reagan and Bush, charges that the “most serious and tragic aspect of this agreement” between the US and Cuba, “falls upon Pope Francis, its most eminent architect and mediator.”

But, he says, “This is not the first time that Francis takes measures that objectively favor the political and ecclesiastical left in Latin America… For example, he personally attended the World Meeting of Popular Movements held in Rome from October 27 to 29. It gathered 100 revolutionary world leaders, including well-known Latin American professional agitators.” Valladeres called the meeting a kind of “beatification of these Marxist-inspired revolutionary figures…”

Valladares also points to Francis’s overturning the suspension of the Nicaraguan priest Miquel D’Escoto who had been the Foreign Minister of the revolutionary Sandanista regime, “a leading pro-Castro figure in liberation theology.”

Where Valladares might be described as a man of the right, a man of the farthest left sees the same thing in Francis and approves.

Despite the continual refrain that now ‘martyr’ Oscar Romero was not a Liberation Theologist, just ‘used’ by them; Romero is their hero, and the Pope has backed his cause despite years of it’s being blocked.  (Note the similarities between the populist ‘art’ surrounding Romero and the material produced by the Pope’s Vatican artist, Chinese propagandist, Shen Jiawei.)

Richard Greeman, a writer for the Marxist website New Politics, wonders if “Catholicism is the new communism.” He describes his years, after the Second Vatican Council, working in Latin America, participating in the rise of “liberation theology.” He says, “Liberation theology Catholics were consistently more revolutionary than Leftists of all stripes.”

Read the rest here.  The ties between Communism and the modern radical revolution in the Church must be revisited, not shamefully hidden, in the new Francis Era, if only for the fact that a disabled Church is key to the success of statism.

Ruse closes with a chilling reality that we must squarely face.

Greeman asks, “How did such an openly radical priest manage to get elected.” Valladares may be asking the same question.

 

Pontifical Household Announces Pope Not Having Official Meeting With Gay Group Today

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rainbow pope2

The Pontifical Household announced that the Pope isn’t having a meeting with a ‘c’atholic pro-Gay group today after Mass to screen a video.

Vatican City, Mar 16, 2015 / 05:35 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A Vatican official says there will be no papal endorsement for an LGBT activist video whose backers want it to reach Pope Francis.

Father Gil Martinez, C.S.P., a member of the development team for the video “LGBT Catholics: Owning our Faith,” intended to present the video to Pope Francis in a private audience after morning Mass on March 17, according to the website of the St. Philip Neri Parish and Northwest Paulist Center in the Portland, Ore.

The video contains the personal reflections from self-identified LGBT Catholics, several of whom reject Church teaching.

An official with the Holy See Press Office told CNA March 16 that the Prefecture of the Pontifical Household had not announced any public events for Pope Francis on March 17. This means that “no public or official meetings are scheduled.”

“The Pope can, however, meet whomever he wants, but this cannot mean in any sense an official endorsement, since every audience is intended to be kept private,” the official said. Such meetings are made public “only if some of the people involved speak out about it.”

Well, we can anticipate that someone just might speak out then.  It happens quite a bit these days.

The press release for the video said it is dedicated to “achieving the full acceptance of LGBT persons in the Catholic Church.” It said that the video evokes “the need for change” and will “reach thousands, including Pope Francis, many bishops and other prominent Vatican clergy.”

The St. Philip Neri Parish website said that Fr. Mark-David Janus, C.S.P., would also present Cardinal Walter Kasper’s newest book from Paulist Press, “Pope Francis’ Revolution of Tenderness and Love.”

The “Owning our Faith” video is produced and directed by Michael Tomae, a parishioner of New York City’s St. Paul the Apostle Church. Fr. Martinez is pastor of the parish, which shares a mailing address with the “Owning our Faith” project. Tomae is part of the parish’s Out@StPaul LGBT ministry, which is promoting the video on its website.

The “Owning our Faith” video includes interviewees who reject Catholic teaching on sexual morality and marriage.

Matt Putorti, a lawyer from New York City, criticized Catholic teaching in the video, claiming that the Church is telling gay people that “they need to be celibate” and “cannot live fully.”

Putorti said it is “inherently” discriminatory to say, “You can be gay, but you can’t live that life.”

Interviewee Matt Vidal, a lawyer from New York City in a same-sex civil marriage, said that leaving the Church would mean that “it’s never going to change.”

“So we have to continue living here, being an example and encouraging other people to be that example because that’s what’s going to change the Church.”

Another interviewee, Matteo Williamson, co-chairs the transgender caucus of the dissenting Catholic group Dignity USA, which aims to change Catholic teaching on homosexuality.

The “Owning Our Faith” website recommends a list of parishes on the website of New Ways Ministry, another Catholic dissenting group. In 2011, the U.S. Catholic bishops reiterated that the organization is not allowed to identify as Catholic and said that it puts forward positions that do not conform to Catholic teaching.

‘c’atholic group, Dignity USA just invited the vile, pornographic, and decidedly undignified Dan Savage as a speaker.  Why are these groups having non-meetings with Pope Francis to promote gay sex?