What Did You Expect, Part Two

Irony is a word that comes to mind when I read the nun who writes at Te Deum Laudamus about the deafening silence of the Church on contraception, as she has a sidebar encouraging prayer for Archbishop Viguron of Detroit.  OK, so you're saying that the Church needs to speak out about what it believes vis a vis the Contraceptive Mandate?  But then you are also supporting the Bishop who is trying to silence Michael Voris?  Call me crazy, but if the bishops of the United States would occasionally listen to Voris instead of demanding he stop calling himself Catholic, we might not be faced with a problem like the Contraceptive Mandate.  Follow your bishop, even as he advocates a program that compels you to pay for contraception and abortion!  And then act surprised!

What Did You Expect?

At Mass yesterday, a letter was read from Bishop Jenky of the Peoria Diocese strongly condemning the fact that no exemption from Obamacare's contraception mandate would be given the Catholic Church.  The bishop said that destroying Catholic institutions may well have been the intention of this action.  My reaction was something along the lines of "What did you expect?"  I watched with increasing nausea as various bishops welcomed Obamacare, often complaining it didn't go farther by including illegal aliens.  Cardinal Martino from the Vatican praised Obamacare.  And all the while lowly Estase with a blog nobody reads could see the writing on the wall.  Obamacare would necessarily fund contraception and abortion, and anybody who didn't anticipate this was willfully naive.  So for bishops to be entirely surprised by this development strikes me as nearly stupid.

As for the laity, I think the bishops had better give up.  One of the EMEs at my town's parish was a big Obama booster in 2008.  As Bishop Jenky's letter was read, the man in front of me shook his head, not in a "That's terrible!" way, but in a "Give it up!" way.  The days when people would die for the faith probably ended with Edmund Campion and Margaret Clitherow.  Now Catholics want to live the same jaded lives as everyone else.

St. Joseph's College and Abortion

Tip of the petasus to Cardinal Newman Society.  St. Joseph's College in Indiana chooses to celebrate MLK day by bringing in Professor Adia Harvey-Wingfield, a pro-abort who says the Republican Party is racist!  It is no secret most Catholic organizations hate Republicans, but can't they find a Republican hater who isn't also a pro-abort?  Unless St. Joseph's College is unsure of how they feel about abortion.

Friendly Fire, Part Two

Toure (don't you love people with only one name) has opined that Herman Cain making advances on a blond should be scary.  Yeah, if you're the Grand Wizard and you live in Missisippi.  What kind of a brother (oh yeah, the kind with one name!) brings up nasty racial and racist stereotypes?  Need I say, friendly fire?  Hat tip Adrienne's Corner.  Father Zuhlsdorf has another example--John Courtney Murray and Robert Drinan, both Jesuit priests and intellectuals, confabed with the Kennedys in 1964 to advise them on how to reconcile their opportunistic pro-choice positions with their ostensible Catholicism.

Return of the Mohocks

Last night PM Cameron said that the riots caused by angry British leftists will cause the insurance industry to pay out around 200 million pounds in claims.  It is much like the Tory Mohocks of the eighteenth century, whom Defoe suggested dealing with through the "Protestant Flail".  Closer to our own time, it is also like the 1926 General Strike, which is a sometimes-forgotten class war, also started by the left.

The YouCat, created for young Catholics has some detractors:  see www.recallyoucat.com.  On a similar note, Estase's decision to stop following Improperium Christi, the blog of slime artist Ron Conte has been solidified by a long tirade he published against New Theological Movement where he hypocritically claims Father Erlenbush insulted him, this after Conte tried to get him in trouble with his bishop, and routinely described him as a heretic.  I do not remember Father Erlenbush saying anything about Mr. Conte until after he started to out his true identity.  (He had, as I do, published under a pen name.  I have absolutely no objection to this.  In the real world, people have some right to their opinion without worrying about the professional implications of their opinions.  I think outing a blogger is pretty contemptible--about as bad as gay rights weirdos outing closeted homosexuals.)   Conte has some pretty heavy baggage to begin with, as he still regards as significant the Medjugorie apparitions that the local bishop declared heretical.  The final straw is his use of the term "extreme-right" to describe conservative Catholics.  Estase nominates Ron Conte as an honorary Mohock.

Impending Government Shutdown

Obama will shut down the government to piss off as many people as he can.  To mobilize a vast army of people dependent on government, he must convince them that, instead of trying to impose some sort of rationality on government spending, what Boehner really wants is to cut off government help entirely.  Which is really ironic, since the spending spree going on since Pelosi became speaker in 2006 has been what really threatens the basic ability of government to continue to provide assistance to the poor.  But perception, not reality, is what is important to politics, and Obama must make it the perception that Boehner is trying to hurt the poor, not that he is trying to destabilize the government through unlimited spending.

Thus, despite any efforts Obama may pretend to make, the shutdown is as inevitable as the death of Amy Winehouse.

On a completely different topic, the Vatican bitch-slapped RealCatholicTV's event at World Youth Day by making an unusual press release stating that the conservative's function is not sponsored by the official church.  On a similar note, slime artist Ron Conte defends the undefensible by claiming the Calvinist hymn Amazing Grace is totally consistent with Catholic Mass, despite the fact that it says that belief , not sacraments, are the source of grace.  Mr. Conte's war with New Theological Movement is becoming an unseemly display of his pretended orthodoxy winning out over Christian charity.