Contradictions

Seen recently on a box:
"M. Holland--The Gold Standard in Plastics"
       Which reminds me of another contradiction.  The week after Pope Francis basically said the Rosary wasn't "really" praying, I see the local Catholic bookstore selling a Pope Francis rosary.

Gutting the Catholic Church

Gary Gutting, philosophy professor at Notre Dame, says that since Catholics often contracept, the Catholic Church no longer teaches that contraception is wrong.  Which sort of implies that any sin, if practiced commonly enough, ceases to be a sin.  How I long for Ralph McInerny to come back from the dead and beat some sense into this guy!  Petasus tip to Cardinal Newman Society.

ATTENTION WAL-MART!  You need to stop selling Jane Fonda workout videos--now!  Sam Walton would spin in his grave if he knew Hanoi Jane was being peddled in his store.  The following is from Robert Coram's book American Patriot:The Life and Wars of Bud Day,
While near Hanoi, Fonda put on the helmet of a Vietnamese soldier and sang antiwar songs.  She sat in the gunner's seat of a AAA battery to "encourage" North Vietnamese soldiers fighting against "American imperialist air raiders."  She made numerous broadcasts over Radio Hanoi--broadcasts the POWs were forced to listen to over "CBS" {Camp Bull Shit} as she denounced Richard Nixon as a "true killer" and lamented his "crimes" against the Vietnamese and said he was "lying" when he said the war was winding down.  Over "CBS" the guards played a tape of Fonda and a group of women outside an army base in New Jersey singing a song called "Fuck the Army." 

Fonda came to Hoa Lo and met with seven POWs.  One of them, Navy lieutenant commander David Hoffman, was tortured until he agreed to appear.  (McCain says he was "knocked around" in an unsuccessful effort to make him meet with Fonda.)  Among the POWs who showed up voluntarily were Lieutenant Colonel Edison Miller {collaborator of the infamous "Bob and Ed Show" the camp inmates were forced to listen to} of the Marines and Commander Walter Eugene Wilber of the Navy.

The legal definition of "treason" includes a phrase about providing "aid and comfort to the enemy." Bud Day and, for that matter, almost all of the POWs say that Fonda had done just that and should have been tried for treason.

They would never forgive her.

Nor should Wal-Mart.

Petasus tip to Gateway Pundit.  They actually have the temerity to cast Hanoi Jane as Nancy Reagan.  Hollywood is shameless.

Is Denis Leary Going to Hell?

Sure, his recent Comedy Central special called the Pope a Nazi.  But is his calling priests and nuns homosexuals really going that far?  Most convents stopped being about Jesus about the time that they stopped wearing habits, and started spending all their time at anti-nuclear weapons rallys.  Even I refer to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious as the Lesbian Crack-addict Women Religious.  Last week, another blog I would hat-tip if I could remember which one it was, profiled a Dominican nun who escorts women into an abortion clinic.  Let me repeat this for effect.  A woman whose health care and living expenses are paid for by the Catholic Church spends her time making sure pro-lifers cannot annoy women about to kill their babies.  So is Mr. Leary too far off when he says nuns are lesbians?

As far as calling priests sodomists, Mr. Leary isn't doing anything the rest of the liberal media hasn't done.  Or anything gay rights activists haven't done.  Maybe one shouldn't drop the soap when showering with Mr. Leary.  The Jesuit rag America is always agitating for the acceptance of sexually active gay men as Catholic priests, so which came first, the chicken or the egg?   Sure Denis Leary is an irreverent slimeball, and an unfunny paddy, but what else is new?

Green Thomism and Other Nonsense

Thomism gives a simple view of the world--question and answer, right and wrong.  Similarly, liberals believe that right and wrong can be defined as liberal and conservative.  So when you give a liberal Thomism, it is like walking into a room full of natural gas with a lit cigarette.

Thus Catholic liberals can excommunicate their opponents with a breathtaking self-assurance because they have two forms of totalizing ideology--liberal statism and medieval scholasticism.  Think of MSNBC married to the Spanish Inquisition.

Uncomfortable Similarities

Why do I have issues with Novus Ordo, when it is basically the only kind of Mass Estase is old enough to remember?  I started thinking about this when I read Malachi Martin's The Keys of His Blood,where Martin questions whether the NO is similar enough to the Tridentine to actually be, theologically, a Mass.  Then there was my study of history, particularly Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars, which describes the English Reformation.  Three similarities:  1)The turning of the priest towards the congregation,2)Use of a table rather than an altar, 3)Use of vernacular instead of Latin.  If SVC did the same things as the English Reformation, how can one be good and the other bad?

Pope Appoints Pro-Abort to Pontifical Academy of Science

Hat tip to Rorate Caeli.

A doctor from Communist Brazil, Miguel Nicolelis, who is also a pro-abortion fanatic, was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to the Pontifical Academy of Science.  Why a pope would want a pro-abort as an advisor escapes me.

Bite Me, Liberal Catholics

I unsubscribed to a blog called The Western Confucian, because its purveyor thought something called The Catholic Fascist was a funny parody of conservative Catholics. The characters all had names bespeaking gun-toting and racism. The kind of Catholicism these characters preferred was, of course, pre-Vatican II Latin Mass. It isn't funny. Not even close. We conservatives are getting really tired of hymns like "Gather Us In" and "The Servant Song." We are sick of gimmick Masses, like Masses said on a hay bale instead of an altar. We are sick of being called intolerant for opposing leftist Bishops. And lastly, we are sick of snarky pseudo-Catholic trash calling us fascists. Yeah, I said trash. I am not a fascist, and if this is the Catholic Left's idea of humor I think there are going to be many more Greek Orthodox in fifty years.

Anti-Popery, Past and Present

A ninth grader was sent home from school for wearing his rosary. Wow, that's horrible isn't it?

I learned today about the link between Robert Harley and A.A. Cooper. Britain in the Eighteenth century is so much cooler than twenty-first century America. No one had yet imbibed the heady wine of 1848 style collectivism yet. The political debates were between the Tories and the Whigs. If you ask me, the Tories are the ancestors of today's liberals. They mistrusted the military (no standing army) and they believed in collective rights instead of individual rights. They also mistrusted businessmen, and saw great danger in "Popery" (see also today's reflexively anti-Catholic school system where rosary beads are contraband.

The only question is why so often the Catholic Church puts itself on the side of the Tories, those who hate Catholicism and all it stands for.

Catholicism Durbin-Style

"Is that all the church is about, is one issue? For bishops to announce that they are going to penalize Catholics on certain votes I think is. . .reaching too far." Senator Dick Durbin on his opinion of denying communion to lawmakers supporting abortion.

No, it is not one issue. Any time a Catholic feels they cannot follow the Church's teachings on any subject, whether it is abortion or their own personal sin life, that Catholic has NO RIGHT to recieve the Eucharist. This is not a new teaching, and it is not just abortion. Committing a mortal sin (and voting for abortion is a mortal sin) makes you unqualified to recieve communion. Look at a catechism sometime, Senator.

It is disturbing that anyone calling themselves Catholic would think that they are above this basic teaching of the Church. Until the Soros cult takes over the Church entirely, Senator Durbin should not mistake his soft-core socialism for Catholic teaching.