8 November 2011

USCCB Media Blog: anti-Catholic bias at HHS (Obama Administration)

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Over at the USCCB’s Media Blog, Sr. Mary Ann Walsh has an interesting post. Here is the first part.

This gives us another example of how the war on the Catholic Church is manifesting itself in the public square:

HHS Exec Rivals Nixon With Line: ‘I am Not Trying to Get Anyone Off the Hook

The most memorable line since Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” has just come out of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Ta da: “ I’m not trying to get anyone off the hook here.”

That telling quote comes from George Sheldon, acting assistant secretary for HHS’s Administration for Children and Families. Sheldon offered his defense to Washington Post writer Jerry Markon for a front page story in the Post November 1.

Markon’s story investigated how the grant process at HHS was manipulated to keep an office of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) from receiving an award to serve victims of human trafficking. USCCB’s Migration and Refugee Services (MRS) had scored high enough to be awarded a federal grant to continue its very successful anti-trafficking program. But the decision was “overturned,” so to speak, when Sharon Parrott, a top adviser to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, stepped in to “have a dialogue” (her words) in the process because the award would go through a Catholic agency. Their problem?: the Catholic Church—though providing food, shelter, and legal and other medical services for trafficking victims more effectively than any other—is forbidden by conscience from referring those victims for abortion, sterilization or contraceptives. So much for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and other federal legislation that protects conscience—not to mention ordinary fair-play in picking grant recipients.

[...]

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Posted in The Drill, The Last Acceptable Prejudice, The future and our choices | Tagged anti-catholicism, HHS, human trafficking, Kathleen Sebelius, Obama Administration, Pres. Nixon, Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, USCCB Media blog, Washington Post | 4 Comments

CNS: Fordham U. Prof. defends late-term abortionist Tiller as “compassionate”

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From the Cardinal Newman Society:

Fordham Prof. Defends Late-Term Abortionist Tiller As “Compassionate.”

A professor at a Catholic college, who also sits on the board of a pro-abortion rights organization, described late term abortionist George Tiller as “compassionate” and said she believed working at a Catholic institution as well as a pro-abortion rights organization is “consistent.”

Fordham University Sociology Professor Jeanne Flavin, who moonlights as President of the Board of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, an organization committed to “advancing reproductive and human rights for all women and families” wrote a piece in which she defended late term abortionist George Tiller as “compassionate.”

In Footnotes, a publication of the American Sociological Association, Flavin wrote that she believed late term abortionist George Tiller delivered “compassionate” care.

[...]

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Posted in Emanations from Penumbras | Tagged abortion, Dr. Tiller, Fordham University, George Tiller, Jeanne Flavin, Jesuits, late-term | 20 Comments

Catholic League on The curious choices of The Star and SNAP

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From The Catholic League:

CATHOLIC LEAGUE

FOR RELIGIOUS AND CIVIL RIGHT
KC STAR OMITS STORY ON TOP EPISCOPAL BISHOP

November 8, 2011

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments as follows:

Yesterday, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) held a press conference in front of the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph to bring attention to a case involving an Episcopal priest, Bede Parry, who is being charged with molesting young boys while he was studying to be a Catholic priest. Parry was thrown out of the Benedictines of Conception Abbey in Missouri back in 1990; then he left for Las Vegas; eventually he became an Episcopal priest there. The person who knew about his record of abuse and still allowed him to join the clergy of the Episcopal Church was the Episcopal Bishop of Nevada, Katharine Jefferts Schori; today she is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the U.S., located in New York City.

The Kansas City Star, which has been relentless in its pursuit of clergy abuse by Catholic priests, said absolutely nothing about this case today. Is this because it involves another religion? Or is it because it implicates a woman clergyperson, thus getting in the way of the contrived narrative that Catholic bishops have some kind of special “old boy” network that inhibits them from being forthcoming? No matter, to think that the person who is the head of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. is named in a cover up involving the sexual abuse of minors—and isn’t even mentioned in the Star—speaks volumes about its politically driven agenda against Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph Bishop Robert Finn.

Then there is the politics of SNAP. Can anyone believe that SNAP would hold a press conference in front of a Jewish synagogue about a case involving the sexual abuse of a minor committed by a minister? So why did it pick the most prominent Catholic cathedral in the Diocese for its press conference, especially when the issue has nothing to do with the Diocese? (Parry was never a priest there—he was an order priest.)

Contact Star publisher Mi-Ai Parrish: mparrish@kcstar.com

Contact our director of communications about Donohue’s remarks:
Jeff Field
Phone: 212-371-3191

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Posted in Biased Media Coverage, Clerical Sexual Abuse of Children, The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Throwing a Nutty | 5 Comments

Must read: Archbp. Chaput’s address at U of Pennsylvania

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Everyone should read the Most Rev. Charles Chaput’s (Archbp. of Philadelphia) 7 November speech at the University of Pennsylvania.

HERE.

Excerpt:

[...]

Most of us here tonight believe that we have basic rights that come with the special dignity of being human. These rights are inherent to human nature. They’re part of who we are. Nobody can take them away. But if there is no Creator, and nothing fundamental and unchangeable about human nature, and if “nature’s God” is kicked out of the conversation, then our rights become the product of social convention. And social conventions can change. So can the definition of who is and who isn’t “human.”

The irony is that modern liberal democracy needs religion more than religion needs modern liberal democracy. American public life needs a framework friendly to religious belief because it can’t support its moral claims about freedom and rights with secular arguments alone. In fact, to the degree that it encourages a culture of unbelief, liberal democracy undermines its own grounding. It causes its own decline by destroying the public square’s moral coherence.

That leads to my fourth and final point. The pro-life movement needs to be understood and respected for what it is: part of a much larger, consistent, and morally worthy vision of the dignity of the human person. You don’t need to be Christian or even religious to be “pro-life.” Common sense alone is enough to make a reasonable person uneasy about what actually happens in an abortion. The natural reaction, the sane and healthy response, is repugnance.

What makes abortion so grievous is the intimacy of the violence and the innocence of the victim. Dietrich Bonhoeffer—and remember this is the same Lutheran pastor who helped smuggle Jews out of Germany and gave his life trying to overthrow Hitler—wrote that the “destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed on this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.”

Bonhoeffer’s words embody Christian belief about the sanctity of human life present from the earliest years of the Church. Rejection of abortion and infanticide was one of the key factors that set the early Christians apart from the pagan world. From the Didache in the First Century through the Early Fathers of the Church, down to our own day, Catholics—and until well into the twentieth century all other Christians—have always seen abortion as gravely evil. As Bonhoeffer points out, arguing about whether abortion is homicide or only something close to homicide is irrelevant. In the Christian view of human dignity, intentionally killing a developing human life is always inexcusable and always gravely wrong.

Working against abortion doesn’t license us to ignore the needs of the homeless or the poor, the elderly or the immigrant. It doesn’t absolve us from supporting women who find themselves pregnant or abandoned. All human life, no matter how wounded, flawed, young or old, is sacred because it comes from God. The dignity of a human life and its right to exist are guaranteed by God. Catholic teaching on abortion and sexuality is part of the same integral vision of the human person that fuels Catholic teaching on economic justice, racism, war, and peace.

These issues don’t all have the same content. They don’t all have the same weight. All of them are important, but some are more foundational than others. Without a right to life, all other rights are contingent. The heart of the matter is what Solzhenitsyn implied in his Harvard comments. Society is not just a collection of sovereign individuals with appetites moderated by the state. It’s a community of interdependent persons and communities of persons; persons who have human obligations to one another, along with their human rights. One of those obligations is to not intentionally kill the innocent. The two pillars of Catholic social teaching are respect for the sanctity of the individual and service to the common good. Abortion violates both.

[...]

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Posted in Classic Posts | 8 Comments

NY Gov. Cuomo: opponents of un-natural “marriage” are “anti-American”

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From LifeSite, a story from a few days ago:

New York governor: opponents of same-sex ‘marriage’ just ‘want to discriminate,’ are ‘anti-American’
BY PATRICK B. CRAINE
Wed Oct 26, 2011

NEW YORK, October 26, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An employee with the New York Archdiocese warned of an “impending persecution” after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called same-sex “marriage” opponents discriminatory and “anti-American” last week.

The governor, who was instrumental in the state’s passage of same-sex “marriage” in June, was asked at a New York Times forum which arguments against same-sex “marriage” he found compelling.

“None,” he said. “There is no answer from the opposition. There really isn’t. Ultimately, it’s, ‘I want to discriminate.’ And that’s anti-New York. It’s anti-American.”

Ed Mechmann of the Archdiocese of New York’s Family Life Office said it is “chilling” that the state’s top official would declare such a large segment of the population as “political pariahs.” He warned Catholics of an “impending persecution,” saying that Cuomo has effectively “declared us to be enemies of the state and nation.” [And there you have it in one. WDTPRS kudos to Mr. Mechmann.]

“In reality, Mr. Cuomo doesn’t just disagree with our arguments, he denies their existence,” said Mechmann on the archdiocese’s blog. “He clearly believes that they are pernicious, beyond the pale of proper discourse, and motivated only by hatred.”

“That is why he has now declared that we are ‘anti-American’ — that is to say, enemies of our nation,” he continued.

“This is legitimately frightening. We all know what the power of the state can do to its enemies,” he added.

This week, Rev. Jason J. McGuire of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms issued an open letter calling the comments by Cuomo an “attack” on half of America’s population and demanding an apology.

In July, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan warned that, if experience in other jurisdictions was any indication, believers in the traditional family “will soon be harassed, threatened, and hauled into court for their conviction.”

Christians in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere have lost their jobs, been dragged through lengthy “human rights” proceedings, and faced steep fines for questioning the dangerous homosexual lifestyle, declining to facilitate gay “marriages,” or even failing to acknowledge “gay pride” events.

“Like St. Thomas More, we’re willing to take the heat and even lose our head from following a conscience properly formed by God’s revelation and the teaching of His Church, even if it is politically incorrect, and clashes with the King’s demands to re-define marriage,” said Dolan.

Immediately following the passage of same-sex “marriage”, New York state officials moved to force marriage commissioners to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples.

Reacting in July to the news that the first commissioner had resigned as a result, Cuomo insisted that commissioners must put the law above their religious beliefs. “When you enforce the laws of the state, you don’t get to pick and choose which laws,” he said. “You don’t get to say, ‘I like this law and I’ll enforce this law, or I don’t like this law and I won’t enforce this law’ – you can’t do that.”

“The laws would have to be paramount, and would have to be paramount to your religious beliefs,” he added.

New York was the sixth U.S. state to recognize homosexual “marriage,” in addition to the District of Columbia.

Bishops must take a stand and do something. There are bishops in New York state.

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Posted in One Man & One Woman, Our Catholic Identity, The future and our choices | Tagged Archd. New York, Gov. Cuomo | 29 Comments

PRC CR & CTA – “Rebellion is Justified!”

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Immediately after reading a story about Call To Action, I found an article at the History Blog about the discovery in some forgotten box of rare paper-cut posters from China’s Cultural Revolution.

One of the posters… is entitled Eliminating the “Four Olds”. Launched by Mao and General Lin Biao, Mae’s second-in-charge and designated successor in a speech from the Tiananmen Rostrum on August 18, 1966, the Destruction of the Four Olds was one of the first campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. The “Four Olds” are Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas, and the poster shows a brigade of Red Guards sledge hammering, trampling, burning, burying Chinese literature, film, religious iconography and cultural artifacts emblematic of foreign imperialism and China’s feudal past. The large flag in the foreground with the image of Mao on it reads “Rebellion is justified.”

破四旧 or Pò sì jiù

Pò sì jiù

From the CTA conference:

The analogy with Call To Action breaks down a bit when you consider the youthful and handsome aspect of the heroes of the Cultural Revolution. Scarce at the CTA conferences, I believe.

A CTA “Ministry Activism Dancer”

Wǒguó wúchǎnjiējí wénhuàdàgémìng

Call To Action

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Posted in Our Catholic Identity, Pò sì jiù, The Drill, The future and our choices, Throwing a Nutty | Tagged Call To Action, CTA, Cultural Revolution, eliminating the four olds, Pò sì jiù | 13 Comments

Bp. Conley on “atheocracy” and growing hostility to religion

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From CNA:

Dallas, Texas, Nov 8, 2011 / 06:11 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Increasing hostility to religion and growing restrictions on religious expression are “the biggest challenge the pro-life movement faces,” Bishop James D. Conley told a benefit for a Dallas pro-life group.

“If we think it’s been hard over these past four decades, I think the biggest challenges we face lie ahead of us,” the apostolic administrator of the Denver archdiocese said Nov. 5.

“America today is becoming what I would call an atheocracy — a society that is actively hostile to religious faith and religious believers. And I might add — the faith that our society is most hostile toward is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular.”

The bishop’s comments came in his address to the annual benefit dinner for St. Joseph’s Helpers and the White Rose Women’s Center in Dallas, Texas.

Secularism, Bishop Conley said, is not simple neutrality towards religious beliefs. American elites are not neutral towards religion, but are “deliberately engaged in a process that aims to remove all traces of religious faith from our public life!”

This creates “publicly enforced religious indifferentism” in which Americans participating in civic life must first agree to think and act as if they have no religious convictions or motivations at all.

This “atheocracy” has no ultimate truths or inviolable ethical principles for its guidance.

“Hence, it has no foundation upon which to establish justice, secure true freedom, or to constrain tyrants,” Bishop Conley said, citing John Paul II’s warning that a democracy without values easily turns into “open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.”

“God, not government, is the only sure guarantee of human rights and the blessings of our liberty. We need to live as if we believe that,” the bishop said. “Only a people who believes these truths to be sacred and self-evident can build a society worthy of men and women created by God.”

[...]

Read the rest there.

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Posted in New Evangelization, Our Catholic Identity, The Drill, The Last Acceptable Prejudice, The future and our choices | Tagged atheocracy, Bp. Conley | 8 Comments

Sr. McBride awarded by Call To Action for approving abortion in Phoenix

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

CMR has this:

Excommunicated Nun Accepts Award for Abortion Decision

Excommunicated Sister of Mercy Margaret McBride received the 2011 Call To Action Leadership Award at their annual conference precisely for her role in a decision at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix to abort an 11 week old unborn baby.

She gives a short speech accepting the award where she talks of mercy and forgiveness and bashes the Church in the same breath.

Watching this is a surreal experience.

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Posted in Emanations from Penumbras, The future and our choices, Throwing a Nutty | Tagged abortion, Bp. Olmsted, Call To Action, D. Phoenix, Sr. Margaret McBride | 24 Comments

The Austrian Church version of Occupy Wall Street, but with worse arguments.

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From CWN:

Austrian dissidents escalate conflict, challenge hierarchy
November 07, 2011

Dissident Catholics in Austria have announced their intention to conduct liturgical ceremonies in which lay people act as priests, preaching and simulating the celebration of Mass.

“Church law bans this,” acknowledged Hans Peter Hurka, the leader of the We Are Church movement. [This lot likes to reduce doctrine to "laws" or "policies".] His group issued a challenging manifesto just before the Austrian bishops gathered for their annual meeting.

The lay-led ceremonies would violate not only canonical rules but also fundamental theological principles, ignoring central doctrinal teachings about the nature of the Eucharist and of Holy Orders. Nevertheless Hurka made the claim that his group’s stance is in accordance with the teachings of Vatican II. [I can hardly wait for the photos. Will they have puppets?]

The Austrian hierarchy already faces a challenge from the Priests’ Initiative, another radical group that has called for defiance of Church law. The nation’s leading prelate, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, has warned repeatedly that the dissident priests are creating a danger of “serious conflict” within the Church. However the cardinal has declined to take disciplinary action, saying that he is “counting on dialogue and cooperation.”

Reuters

Quae enim seminaverit homo, haec et metet.

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Posted in Throwing a Nutty | Tagged Austrian Church, Card. Schönborn | 33 Comments

7 November 2011

Devil face discovered hidden in a fresco by Giotto (+1337)

Posted on 7 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From The History Blog comes this very cool story about a detail hidden in a painting by Giotto, now “discovered”.

Devil in the details.

A restorer working on a fresco by Giotto di Bondone in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi has discovered a the face of a devil hidden in the clouds. Medievalist and St. Francis expert Chiara Frugoni divined the demonic presence in fresco number 20 out of a series of 28 depicting the life of St. Francis as written by St. Bonaventure. Bonaventure was the seventh Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor and was commissioned by the Order to write the official biography of St. Francis in 1260. Fresco 20 is the death and ascension of St. Francis, painted by Giotto between 1296 and 1304.

St. Francis is shown lying on his death bier, surrounded by mourning friars while his soul is taken to heaven by a host of angels. Bonaventure described the scene in Chapter XIV of the hagiography: “In the hour of transit of the blessed Francis a friar saw his soul ascend to the heavens in the form of an enormously bright star.” The profile of the demon is on the right side of a cloud underneath the bright star, staring at the crotch of an angel.

“It’s a powerful portrait, with a hooked nose, sunken eyes and two dark horns,” Ms Frugoni said in an article in a forthcoming issue of the St Francis art history periodical.

“The significance of the image still needs to be delved into. In the Middle Ages it was believed that demons lived in the sky and that they could impede the ascension of human souls to Heaven.

“Until now it was thought that the first painter to use clouds in this way was Andrea Mantegna, with a painting of St Sebastian from 1460, in which high up in the sky there’s a cloud from which a knight on horseback emerges. Now we know that Giotto was the first (to use this technique).”

The figure hasn’t been seen until now because it’s almost impossible to spot looking up from the floor of the basilica. It took carefully examination of close-up photographs to find the little devil.

Sergio Fusetti, the chief restorer of the basilica, notes that theology may not have been Giotto’s entire motivation. He could have included the demon as a private joke, perhaps to spite someone who had done him wrong, or perhaps just for the fun of having a hidden image in the clouds.

There are some more pictures — unfortunately all of them small — on the Franciscan website.

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Posted in Just Too Cool | Tagged Giotto di Bondone, St. Bonaventure, St. Francis of Assisi | 14 Comments

Christmas Pudding: really aged edition!

Posted on 7 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Once again this year I shall make a Christmas Pudding. Stir-Up Sunday is getting close!

With that in mind, I thought I would share this interesting article from The History Blog:

112-year-old Christmas pudding found in cupboard

What is probably the oldest Christmas plum pudding in the world, tinned 112 years ago in 1899, has been found at the back of a kitchen cupboard in Poole, Dorset and donated to the National Museum of the Royal Navy at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard in Hampshire. It was donated by a woman who found it in her cupboard after her husband’s death. She knew nothing about it other than the date stamped on the can — 1900 — and that it had been in her husband’s family for years.

[...]

Read the rest there.

Sadly, in the article we learn that this is marked “Peek, Frean & Co’s Teetotal Plum Pudding – London, High Class Ingredients Only.”

A Teetotaler Pudding? Really?

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Posted in "How To..." - Practical Notes, Just Too Cool | Tagged Christmas Pudding, Stir Up Sunday | 22 Comments

Some fruits of the Big Apple

Posted on 7 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Some of the high points of New York City so far.

Three new Met button colors of the sixteen possible!

I couldn’t get out to the Bronx Zoo, so I went down to Zuccotti Park instead.

Just nice!

Central Park.

A snack on exiting the Met.

I will have to come back in February, if I can. Prokofiev’s R&J at NYC Ballet and a Chinese troupe are coming!

The images inside the Met Opera on the right and left are Chagall.

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Posted in On the road, What Fr. Z is up to | 17 Comments

Catilina a-dressing

Posted on 7 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

From rogueclassicism:

ante diem vii idus novembres

ludi Plebeii (day 4) — the major festival in honour of Jupiter continues
63 B.C. — Cicero accuses Lucius Sergius Catilina of various misdeeds (the so-called Second Catilinarian Conspiracy) …
8 B.C. — Death of Maecenas, patron of Vergil, Horace, and many other artists in Augustan Rome

“Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?” - Oratio in Catilinam Prima in Senatu Habita

And then…

Vile potabis modicis Sabinum
cantharis, Graeca quod ego ipse testa
conditum levi, datus in theatro
cum tibi plausus,

care Maecenas eques, ut paterni
fluminis ripae simul et iocosa
redderet laudes tibi Vaticani
montis imago.

Caecubum et prelo domitam Caleno
tu bibes uvam: mea nec Falernae
temperant vites neque Formiani
pocula colles.

- Horace, Ode 1.20

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Posted in Just Too Cool, SESSIUNCULA | Tagged Cataline, Cicero, Horace, Maecenas | 5 Comments

Suggestions for airlines

Posted on 7 November 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Airlines are in it for the money, no matter how much they say it is all about us.

Since I have to leave NYC fairly soon – alas – and I am thinking about how pleasant it has become to fly, especially with Delta, I have a few suggestions – developed with the help of a friend – for how Delta can make even more money from their guests, whom they are so pleased to serve.

1. Since Delta announces on their flights that they are now “cash free”, give your appreciated guests the opportunity to dip their credit or debit cards for 15 whole minutes of overhead light or the use of the air jet. This has the added objective of increasing the passengers aerobic activity on longer flights.

2. Seat recline auctions. Bid against the person in front or behind you over who can recline the seat… and how far! Think of the excitement, the thrill of the live action! Will the person in front of you bid more and be able to recline his seat? With the person behind you prevent you from reclining yours? Only you can decide! Courtesy of Delta!

3. Inflight insurance against asphyxia! Delta is always concerned about the safety of all passengers. It is their foremost goal! However, you can be doubly sure that you will receive adequate oxygen, in the rare case that it is needed, by depositing a small, non-refundable fee. And remember, Delta is a cash-free airline!

We are sure we’ll come up with a few more. In the meantime, we apologize for the delay. Thank you for your cooperation. It has been our honor to serve you. Thank you for chosing WDTPRS! We look forward to your business in the future.

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