Making History About Our Petty Selves

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Patron Saint of the Notorious

Patron Saint of the Notorious

In the new post-Christian Hell, statues honor our depraved selves, not the greatness of others.  Is Susan B. Anthony an American founder or just a historical revisionist’s invention?  What difference does it make?  Things mean only what we’re told they should mean, yes?

On Tuesday, the Assembly Committee on Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism and Internet Media, a California State Assembly committee, approved Senate Joint Resolution 4, a bill endorsing the replacement of the statue of Father Junipero Serra in the National Statuary Hall Collection on Capitol Hill with a statue of astronaut Sally Ride.

The bill, approved 6-0, will now be sent to the whole Assembly for final approval. The bill was barely passed by the State Senate in April in a largely partisan vote, 22-10, as Democrats voted for it and Republicans against it. 21 votes were necessary for passage.

Junipero Serra was saving indigenous people and founding every city in California, even before the American Revolution.  Sally Ride was a woman who went into space.  Going into space is an accomplishment in and of itself, but being a woman is accidental.  Why must we all honor it as if it were something heroic?

Some critics argue that the switch originated more from a desire to remove Serra, a controversial figure, than to honor of Ride. SDSU history professor John Putman–who teaches at the same institution where Ride once worked–told ABC 10 San Diego, “Sally Ride is a perfectly fine choice, but I think this is much more about Junipero Serra and removing a symbol of the past.” He added, “Without Father Serra’s venture, there would be no state of California,” allowing, “Opponents see him as a symbol of oppression.”

Everything good or loving is ‘oppressive’ and anything that’s been built.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a great man, a great country, a great business, or a great Church, we must now have equality, build bridges, withhold judgment, renounce our evil profit for the sake of the poor, the poor, the poor!  The poor are the center of the Gospel and the ‘human person’ (Can’t we assume each person in question is human?) must be the center of the new economic system!

A new system?  Does that mean the one where you produce something you want to sell and I buy it for the price I want to pay is going to be over?  I thought that was just life.

Everything must be turned upside down so I can continue my vacuous well-expensed UN peacocking.  Pope Francis condemns ‘un-Christian’ arms makers while he’s protected by a deadly corps, and have you seen the elite way anti-capitalist Naomi Klein lives?  What is hypocrisy in our new moral FrancisCode?

Communism isn’t about challenging wealth and oppression.  It’s about confiscating power.  Communism is just thuggery writ large and thug states like Cuba are the antithesis of God’s Commandments, His rule of law.  That’s why Democrats, Mafia, Communists, Unions, Illegals, Atheists, Gays, Gangster-Rappers, Planned Parenthood, Islamists, Satanists, and the FrancisVatican are all allied.  They share an agenda.

We are being buried under a mountain of manipulation with the truth nowhere in sight.  Of course we could always embrace the clear Christian witness of Laudato Si, yes?  Well, it has its good points though.

Ride, who admitted being a lesbian later in her life, was celebrated by the LGBT community. Jo Michael, legislative associate at Equality California, said, “Dr. Sally Ride is an icon and an inspiration for women and girls and for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. We believe it is high time for the LGTB community, and particularly LGBT youth, to be able to someone represent our community at this level and demonstrate that LGBT people can and do make history through their achievements,” according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Is that history?  Where is history?

 

 

 

 

 

In Praise of Alternate Popes

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Violent tempered, aggressive, unliked, and completely different than the Humble One.

Violent-tempered, aggressive, unliked, and completely different than the Humble One

John Allen has a piece of blatant pro-divorce propaganda today and he trashes the heroic and pious example of the victorious Egyptian Copts in the process.

As Pope Francis gears up for a showdown over divorce and remarriage at October’s Synod of Bishops, marking the latest chapter in a polarizing debate that’s left some Catholics delighted and others disenchanted, he can take consolation that he’s not the pope in the hottest water over the issue.

If you’re delighted then you’re not Catholic.  Only liberals get disenchanted.  That’s  because they’re so easily enchanted.  Faithful Catholics are just furious at the hijacking of our Church.

The world’s other major Christian leader who holds the same title, Pope Tawadros II of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, is also facing stiff blowback related to a divorce debate. Unlike Francis, however, some members of his own flock don’t just want him to change course, but they actually want him fired.

“He’s one of the worst spiritual leaders we’ve had in recent times,” said Wael Eskander, a well-known commentator on Coptic affairs, applauding recent calls from Coptic activists for Tawadros to be removed and sent packing to the monastery where he lived prior to being named a bishop.

“He’s playing a game he will lose in the end,” Eskander said.

Pope Tawadros is highly popular.  The Egyptian Copts endured a living nightmare after Obama’s pro-Islamist pressure helped topple their long-time president, leaving them ethnic cleansing and scores of churches burned.  Who are these ‘some members,’ and who cares what this ‘well-known’ Eskander thinks?’

Copts form the vast majority of Egypt’s eight to ten million Christians, and while most observers regard the idea of removing their pope as a long-shot, they say the uprising reflects real discontent over the extent to which Church authorities try to assert control over the private lives of their followers.

“People don’t like him very much, because he has a violent temper and he’s seen as aggressive,” said Mina Thabet, a Coptic researcher on human rights. “There’s a real problem between the pope and the people.”

I don’t believe that statement for a minute.  The only people who don’t like Egypt’s Tawadros are displaced Muslim Brotherhood.  But this isn’t really about Copts.  It’s about Francis and his brazen and heretical divorce coup.  Not that Francis believes in divorce, no.  He just thinks separation is mandatory in a host of vague and commonplace circumstances, streamlined annulments are in order, and Eucharistic sacrilege is ‘mercy.’

When it comes to the substance of the divorce question, Francis and Tawadros are drawing fire from opposite sides.

The Catholic leader is generally seen as a moderate, with conservatives alarmed that he might relax his Church’s rules banning communion to anyone who divorces and remarries outside the Catholic Church. Tawadros is seen as a hard-liner, staunchly opposed to allowing Copts to dissolve their marriages under virtually any circumstances.

Francis is not seen as a moderate.  He’s seen as seven steps to the left of Catholic.  If someone like John Allen calls you a hard-liner, it just means you’re nice.

In 2011, a movement was founded called “Coptic 38” to campaign to go back to the earlier, more permissive rules. When he took office three years ago, Tawadros rejected that suggestion out of hand.

Despite the criticism, Tawadros appears to have the backing of other Coptic leaders.

On June 25, a traditional Church body called a “millet council” in Alexandria rejected calls for the pope’s removal, calling the selection of the Coptic leader a “divine choice” that cannot be undone.

Certainly the generally conservative ethos of the Church’s leadership suggests Tawadros won’t find much resistance for keeping reformers at bay.

So much for that unpopular Coptic Pope on the brink of removal.

There’s little indication any such putsch against Tawadros is in the cards, yet there are signs his stance is driving a few Copts away. Estimates provided by Peter Ramses El-Naggar, a lawyer who’s part of the “38” movement, are that since 2008 some 1,200 Copts have converted to Islam, which permits divorce, and that 4,000 more have tried to pursue a civil divorce or joined another Christian denomination.

In a country of over 70 million Muslims, Tawadros is such a bad Pope that Copts jump ship at the rate of over 150 per year! (I’m sure none of them are simply caving under pressure.)

Aside from the coincidence that another pope is wrestling with the same problem, Francis may want to take note of the Egyptian debate for another reason. If he relaxes the Catholic position on divorce and remarriage, it could create ecumenical tensions with churches such as the Coptic Orthodox currently struggling to hold the line.

Isn’t that the opposite of a Catholic stand?  How in the world can a Pope ‘relax a Catholic position on divorce and remarriage?’ A Pope like Francis might lie about it, but he can’t actually do it.   We aren’t the Protestants here.

No matter what happens to Tawadros, the turmoil illustrates a hard truth which, by now, must be clear to his fellow pope in Rome too: When it comes to divorce and remarriage, somebody’s going to be unhappy no matter what you do.

If faithless sinners aren’t unhappy with the Pope then he’s not doing his job.  If, on the other hand, he’s pleasing faithless sinners left and right then, unlike Pope Tawadros II, he actually should be removed.

If a good pope can be threatened off the throne, a bad one can be taken down.  The Church can’t just let the world impose its own popes.  It’s becoming painfully clear that it just doesn’t work.

Church teaching isn’t going to change, and it isn’t going to hibernate until the world somehow becomes more virtuous. It’s going to sit there, Francis or no Francis, demanding action and assent regardless.

 

 

 

FrancisChurch: Global Warming is Real and Political Prisoners Imagined

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If there are no political prisoners in FrancisCuba, then how can there be Ladies in White?

If there are no political prisoners in FrancisCuba, then how can there be Ladies in White?

At Breitbart Francis Martel reports:

A Catholic church in the central Cuban city of Cienfuegos has banned female relatives of political prisoners from attending mass unless they no longer wear white, a color associated with political imprisonment in the nation. The slight to families of the abused follows the bewildering remark from Archbishop of Havana Jaime Ortega that Cuba no longer has prisoners of conscience.

Eight members of the Ladies in White activist group have attended Sunday Catholic Mass wearing white for years, sitting in the pews in silence unless participating in the Mass. No reports have surfaced of the women themselves–mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of prisoners of conscience–disturbing the Mass. Nonetheless, a priest in Cienfuegos expelled them from his service, ordering them never to wear white again in his church if they wish to attend services.

The priest, identified as “Father Tarciso,” told Diario de Cuba that the women were “disrespectful,” stating, “I had told them that the way things are could not continue to be. … I cannot allow our community to be further fractured,” he argued. He accused them of taking photographs inside the church, which the ladies deny. Miladis Espino Díaz, a representative of the Ladies in White, noted that they were expelled from the church and, upon walking out, could hear the priest apologize to those in attendance for not having done it sooner.

“We do not only go to church because we are Ladies in White,” Espino Díaz told the newspaper, “but because we believe in God. We sing, we pray, we participate, we do nothing wrong.”

Following their removal from the church, the women testified to being the victim of a number of offensive acts, including a man “exposing himself and urinating in front of them,” “obscene gestures using fingers,” and “being called prostitutes.”

Offenses to the Ladies in White are common as they attempt to attend Mass; in a particularly gruesome instance last year, one woman was tarred for wearing white to the service.

Two male supporters of the group, Emilio García Moreira and Alexander Veliz García, began a hunger strike Thursday to support the return of the women to Mass.

Catholic religion is heavily regulated in communist Cuba, where it is technically a counterrevolutionary activity but has managed to persist, particularly given overtures by Pope Francis towards the Castro dictatorship. “If he keeps talking like this, I’ll return to the Church,” Raúl Castro said of the Pope this year following his support of major U.S. concessions to the Castro regime. Pope Francis was a direct mediator between President Obama and Raúl Castro before the American head of state chose to strip Cuba of its State Sponsor of Terrorism status–despite no evidence in a change of support to either the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or Hezbollah–in exchange for nothing from Cuba.

Are the new enviro-apocalyptic totalitarian societies we’re being forced into just high-school popularity contests on steroids?  You’re either in desperately in or your nowhere?  What does a local homily sound like in Cardinal Ortega’s Cuba?  If he can’t get away with the ridiculous claim that there are no political prisoners, maybe he can make their wives and mothers disappear!

Is this what faithful Catholics have to look forward to in the new FrancisChurch –  government-loving flunkies posing as priests, calling true Christian witnesses ‘divisive,’ and kicking them out of Mass?  That would never happen in the free world, no!  The FrancisVatican officials are always respectful and welcoming of honest ideas.  Sometimes they’re even funny?  They never side with the enemy.

The Mass-going Ladies in White are nothing like prostitutes.  How twisted must a Catholic get before he can insult and attack these brave women?

I’m not looking forward to the new Global Warming Church.  I had to pray for all the rivers and various species at Mass today.  Now that there are no Catholics there to ‘fracture the community,’ gay marriage is going to catch on like wildfire in the Cuban pews.