Hey, I’m not a Catholic, but truth is truth no matter the source, and this man, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, is layin’ it out to the Brits in no-nonsense, straightforward language that even a University graduate should be able to fathom.

Pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth: sometimes it feels as if Britain is in the grip of the seven deadly sins. There are arrogant politicians, greedy bankers, lecherous television presenters, furious trade unionists, obese children, competitive shoppers and an underclass of people who do not work. To the doom-mongers, British society is not broken, it is shattered.

According to the Archbishop of Westminster, the economic downturn could be the very thing that brings us to our senses. “It’s the end of a certain kind of selfish capitalism,” Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said. “This particular recession is a moment – a kairos – when we have to reflect as a country on what are the things that nourish the values, the virtues, we want to have … Capitalism needs to be underpinned with regulation and a moral purpose.”

“[A] moral purpose.” I don’t think that we’ve heard much about that these last couple of weeks with the Democrats’ ramming the Trillion dollar stimulus package through the Congress. The Cardinal goes on:

“One feels very sorry for those losing their jobs but in times of recession people have to rely on friends and neighbours and families and things that really matter to them. That may be a good thing. I think people did lose their way a bit. It has been difficult to bring up children with the kind of values we want. Let’s face it, we now have a ‘me, me’ society, a more consumerist society, a utilitarian society, and our values and virtues have become diminished.
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“Some of it has got to do with having too much. If your worth just depends on your wealth, that is not healthy. Your worth should depend on who you are.”

After that he spanks the bankers for their avarice and greed, but also the common folk who got caught up in the spendthrift mania.

“Everyone was cashing in. People kept borrowing as well as bankers lending. People kept shopping. I think shopping fills a void. If you have one car, you need two. Everyone wants the latest trainers and clothes. It is awful to go to a house and see in a corner hundreds of unused toys. It’s so profligate. What children need is security and love, not huge amounts of money.

“Maybe the Church lost a bit of confidence. We should have said more. [The recession] is not a punishment of God but the consequences of living a certain way of life. If you live a life that is consumed by overindulgence and greed, you eventually pay a price.”

And then there’s that little problem in Briton, the breakdown of the family.

“Clearly you have an obligation to look after people, whether one-parent families or broken families, but if all resources are put on them, it isn’t right. Every social policy should have, at its heart, benefit to the family.” He said that much of the benefits system “obviously doesn’t benefit people. The tax system must benefit the family. The greatest evil in this society is the breakdown of the family.”

Yeah, and we’ve got that in spades here, too! Who to thank for that? Why, us “boomers”, that’s who. While we went out askin’ “Why don’t we do it in the road?” and “What’s It All About, Alfie Bob, Ted, Carol and Alice?” those sixties/seventies pioneers of rampant narcissism tried to drive a stake clean through the heart of the traditional family and its values — tried and in a large part, succeeded! Check out any night of broadcast television, especially these interminable awards shows, and you’ll be face-to-face with a plethora of visuals and verbiage that would mortify our folks. But, back again to the Cardinal and his thoughts on Briton being a Christian country.

“There is a serious attempt by the [Richard] Dawkinses of this world to say we want as much right as the believers to post our unbelief.

“There’s not enough weight given to Christianity in schools. Children should learn about Christmas before Diwali and Ramadan. People should not be afraid to say we are a Christian country.”

I’ve written often on this blog that Europe, and Great Briton too, seem to be doomed. Too much malaise, too many Muslims infiltrating, not integrating, their societies. Too much sex, violence and rock & roll and not enough going to mass, church, temple.

What got me going on this topic today was those comments of the Cardinal’s on the importance of family, and that government wasn’t going to fix these problems by doling out tons of cash. It’s kind of freakin’ me out that the rest of the civilized world is starting to turn around and look toward being more conservative at the very moment in history that this great country of ours seems destined to become a modern day fascist Italy, or fascist Germany, or Soviet Russia — and with all pilin’ on the socialist-bullet-train to make it happen as fast as possible. God help us all!

We damn sure are gonna need it!

Technorati Tags: Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor

• The family must be strengthened . . . not redefined!
• Human life is paramount . . . and must be protected from conception to natural death!
• Now, more than any other time in history, a new generation must stand for truth!
• This election day, everything that you hold sacred, will need your vote!

I’ve embedded this before, but after reading this Hugh Hewitt post it bears watching again.

My friend Doc from PowderTracks blog has argued for a while now that the sleeping giant of the Catholic vote –energized, inspired and informed by the American Catholic leadership as never before– could be the huge wild card that pollsters are simply not paying enough attention to. The huge swing noted in this poll supports his belief that the Catholic faithful are breaking decisively towards Mccain-Palin.

And there are lots and lots of Catholics in PA and other battleground states.

Sure hope you’re right, Hugh.

I didn’t get to watch Meet the Press on Sunday, but if I had I’d have been riled up enough to get this out soonest. You see, when the Democrats try to show how religious they are, they usually stick both feet in their mouth. Now, I’m sure there are a lot of God-fearing, church-going Dems out there, it’s just hard to figure them out when their current supreme leader, Nancy Pelosi (R – Cal) shoots off her mouth. In response to Tom Brokaw’s question as to what she would advise Barack Obama on the beginnings of life, since good ol’ Barack says that question is “above his pay grade”, she said:

I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. And Senator–St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose. Roe v. Wade talks about very clear definitions of when the child–first trimester, certain considerations; second trimester; not so third trimester. There’s very clear distinctions. This isn’t about abortion on demand, it’s about a careful, careful consideration of all factors and–to–that a woman has to make with her doctor and her god. And so I don’t think anybody can tell you when life begins, human life begins. As I say, the Catholic Church for centuries has been discussing this, and there are those who’ve decided…

Brokaw reminds her that the Church states that life begins at the moment of conception, to which she replies

I understand. And this is like maybe 50 years or something like that. So again, over the history of the church, this is an issue of controversy.

I’m not a Catholic, the last church I was a member of was a Southern Baptist church, but even I know that the Catholic Church has never sanctioned abortion. Nancy Pelosi just went on national TV and told a whopper! And, at the same time, maligned an entire organized religion to boot. Way to go miss representative from San Francisco.

Now, it didn’t take very long for some high-ranking members of the Catholic Church to take note and decide that Nanny Nancy needed a bit of remedial-catechism. From Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl:

We respect the right of elected officials such as Speaker Pelosi to address matters of public policy that are before them, but the interpretation of Catholic faith has rightfully been entrusted to the Catholic bishops. Given this responsibility to teach, it is important to make this correction for the record.

Wuerl pointed out that the Catechism of the Catholic Church is clear, and has been clear for 2,000 years. He cited Catechism language that reads, “Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception … Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.

On the 25th, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver addressed Pelosi’s lies about the Church and its stance on abortion:

Since Speaker Pelosi has, in her words, studied the issue “for a long time,” she must know very well one of the premier works on the subject, Jesuit John Connery’s Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977). Here’s how Connery concludes his study:

“The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemna-tion of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it. Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term, abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion.”

Or to put it in the blunter words of the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“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.”

Furthering the re-education of the Dem wits on Catholic theology regarding abortion, the Archbishop had this to say to Obama’s VP pick, Joe Biden (D-Del), self-professed Catholic and huge abortion supporter:

I certainly presume his good will and integrity,” said the archbishop, “and I presume that his integrity will lead him to refrain from presenting himself for Communion if he supports a false ‘right’ to abortion.

The Anchoress, to whom I will defer all things Catholic, writes this:

[I]f Pelosi wants to quote Augustine’s saying “three months,” as somehow authoritative – even if the church does not – how does she reconcile that with her abortion voting record, which upholds later term abortions, partial birth abortions, embryonic experimentation, etc, etc. She says “I personally think the answer is 16 weeks,”, but that’s just an opinion, like anyone else’s opinion, even mine – and if she believes the answer is 16 weeks, how can she possible vote in favor of, say, partial birth abortion?
{…}
I mean, I’m not expert, and I’m far from brilliant. But one does not have to be brilliant to figure that out. Err on the side of life, not death. It might be a legislative conundrum, and a sickle into the side of free will and free conscience, but in simple terms of life and death, the moral calculus is not really that difficult.

Hey lady, you are brilliant! And, you’re dead-on correct on this one.

Hey folks, it’s a right to life issue. Abortion is a right to end life, not save it, or make someone else’s life easier or more convenient. Barack Obama is the most abortion-supporting candidate ever to be at the top of a US national ticket for President. But, at least he isn’t out there miss-stating lying about Catholic Church doctrine. Naw, he’ll leave that one up to Slow Joe . . .

Technorati Tags: Nancy Pelosi On Abortion, Nancy Pelosi, Roe v. Wade, Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl, Archbishop Charles Chaput

Taking a short breather from the mania of the Presidential Primaries, as well as from the insanity manifest in the rest of the world, the ol’ Okie goes looking for something a bit more spiritual in context to peruse. In that regard, The Anchoress sent me a link to her Lenten post for today that explores the relationship between God and man in a myriad of insights into Original Sin, blood covenants and vulnerabilities, coming to this conclusion:

The mystery here is that there is no mystery beyond love.

I’m not gonna spoil it for ya with disjointed excerpts. As we are often want to say —

Read it all.

First of all, I’m not Catholic, so I feel a bit unprepared to write about Mother Teresa, someone who was beatified by Pope John Paul II and whose 10th anniversary of her death will be tomorrow, 9/5. So I won’t concentrate on her that much. However, if the last issues of Time and Newsweek are any guide, the MSM is just giddy over the release of the letters of Mother Teresa, especially of those that indicate that she had suffered a “crisis of faith” for the better part of her last 50 years.

In Time, the article is titled Her Agony (Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith) the piece opens with a showcase of two contradicting statements that she made, and then concludes:

[T]hat one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever–or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and–except for a five-week break in 1959–never abated.

After reading through the online version of this article, I don’t feel the bias as much as I did looking at the printed version in my wife’s office copy. There, sub-heads and image captions hit you time and time again with the message that Mother Teresa had nearly or nearly so lost her faith — a quick Cliff’s Notes type message to article browsers as opposed to readers. I’m used to this in the LA Times, where headlines often contradict article content, misleading the casual reader.

Not at all vague in slant is the Christopher Hitchens’ piece in in Newsweek, Teresa, Bright and Dark, where he asks was Mother Teresa:

[A] confused old lady who it [the Church] knew had for all practical purposes ceased to believe?

Hitchens, atheist author of the best selling god Is Not Great and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice has nothing much good to say about any religion or faith so I wouldn’t expect any less from him. It’s the timing, that Newsweek felt that this article should be published on the 10th anniversary of her death, that reveals the Newsweek editors’ own anti-religious bias, normally trotted out each Christmas and Easter. If they had any real editorial balls, they’d run an anti-Islam piece on the birthday of Mohammed, but that would take some actual courage. Not lost on these MSM decision makers is that Catholics and Protestants are not running wild in the world beheading and stoning those that berate Christ and the Church — so Christians are fair game.

Hugh Hewitt highlights a reply to Hitchens from Dr. Anthony Lilles, Academic Dean, St. John Vianney Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.

Whenever someone harshly criticizes a great person, they usually reveal to us more about themselves and their own culture than they actually do about the person they think they understand. This is difficult not to see in Christopher Hitchens’s article, Teresa, Bright and Dark. Although a very intelligent critic of her life, this author betrays a misunderstanding of her faith in general and a bias against her community of faith in particular. Both his bias and his misunderstanding completely color his interpretation of her experience — for him, she is as pathetic as the Church she promoted.

I have to admit, I seem unable to understand the mind of those that have zero faith. What I believe that Hitchens’ article shows is that he has zero understanding of the minds of those that do. Lilles believes that Hitchens’ completely missed the point of Mother Teresa’s life.

By her faith, what Mother Teresa did what every great man and woman has done, and every true Christian seeks to do. That is this: to live for others. She chose to do this in the context of her faith, even when her emotions and understanding could not support her. Here, the mystery of Mother Teresa’s faith is much richer than Hitchens sees. For Christians, faith means specifically to imitate Christ: to accept God’s love even when it cannot be felt and to love as he commanded even when it does not seem to make sense to do so. By her faith, even when she could not feel God’s love and wondered whether it was real at all, Mother Teresa chose to believe in that love enough to reach out to the world: to the lonely, to the abandoned, to the dying, and to the poorest of the poor. For Hitchens living out such a decision is a scandal. For Christians, it is the mystery of the Cross.

I’ve been there — way to “French” for my taste. But Bob G. at Sweet Spirits of America sees trouble there.

So, if a prince of the Catholic Church is praying to Allah, is it any wonder blasphemy is rampant? Islam denies the divinity of the Christ and the Christian belief in a triune God. We do not worship the same God despite what the politically correct would try to tell us.

What happened to, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me.”

Woe to Cardinal McCarrick and the Belgian bishops.

Amen . . . (db)

I’m not a Catholic, and I am sure that the Anchoress is doing this some real justice, but catching the headline POPE TO REBUKE ‘SATANIC’ SOCIETY’ on Drudge this AM I just had to check it out, and what is there to disagree with? Absolutely nothing, in my book!

The 14 stations [of the Cross] begin with Jesus’s condemnation to death, take Christians through meditations of the “Way of the Cross” and the Crucifixion and end with the laying of Jesus’s body in the tomb. The Pope wrote the meditations himself for last year’s Way of the Cross in Rome. But today’s Catholic prayers, published in Italian this week and in English on the Zenit website yesterday, go further than most in their thorough denunciation of contemporary culture.

At the Third Station of the Cross, where Jesus falls for the first time, Archbishop Comastri has written: “Lord, we have lost our sense of sin. Today a slick campaign of propaganda is spreading an inane apologia of evil, a senseless cult of Satan, a mindless desire for transgression, a dishonest and frivolous freedom, exalting impulsiveness, immorality and selfishness as if they were new heights of sophistication.”

At the Fourth Station, where Jesus is helped by Simon the Cyrene to carry the cross, Pope Benedict and his followers will pray: “Lord Jesus, our affluence is making us less human, our entertainment has become a drug, a source of alienation, and our society’s incessant, tedious message is an invitation to die of selfishness.”

One of the strongest meditations warns against the attack on the family. “Today we seem to be witnessing a kind of anti-Genesis, a counter-plan, a diabolical pride aimed at eliminating the family.”

There is a moving meditation for the Eighth Station, where Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem, describing the “River of tears shed by mothers, mothers of the crucified, mothers of murderers, mothers of drug addicts, mothers of terrorists, mothers of rapists, mothers of psychopaths, but mothers all the same”.

The Pope will also confront the question of evil in the world in a meditation that asks: “Where is Jesus in the agony of our own time, in the division of our world into belts of prosperity and belts of poverty . . . in one room they are concerned about obesity, in the other, they are begging for charity?”

From my own conversations with many friends and acquaintances out here in So Cal, far too many today have no understanding that evil, as a real, powerful and dangerous entity actually exists. They believe that no one can be evil, because they were someones baby once. (I actually had that one told to me by an apparently intelligent individual!) They feel that it is possible to do evil without being evil. What they fail to understand is that action trumps intention every time, and when action and intention to do evil coincide — that needs to be dealt with.

Those of the Liberal bent cannot, or will not, see this as truth. They believe in the inherent goodness of human beings, although the history of the human animal on this planet should have dissuaded them of that. The last hundred years or so is the exclamation mark to that: Chemical warfare in WWI, the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks, the Holocaust, the Japanese atrocities on the Chinese, the Russian slaughter of 10 million of its own people by Stalin, Pol Pot’s killing fields, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, virtually the entire African continent involved in mass killings, 19 men with box cutters flying planes into buildings on 9/11.

If one cannot see that evil exists in this world, one is not looking . . . (db)

“Deus lo volt” — God wills it — the battle cry of the Christians during the Crusades. The Muslims had their own version of the same saying, “Allahu Akbar” — God is greatest.

Well, now the founder of the Dominoes Pizza chain has proclaimed that God has willed him to build a Catholic town in southern Florida, a little northwest of Miami. In this town, Catholic dogma would be observed by law. Uh, OK — is that legal under the Florida and U.S. Constitutions? Whatever, it certainly caught the attention of the TimesOnline in the UK and they are asking similar questions.

A FORMER marine who was raised by nuns and made a fortune selling pizza has embarked on a £230m plan to build the first town in America to be run according to strict Catholic principles.

Abortions, pornography and contraceptives will be banned in the new Florida town of Ave Maria, which has begun to take shape on former vegetable farms 90 miles northwest of Miami.

Tom Monaghan, the founder of the Domino’s Pizza chain, has stirred protests from civil rights activists by declaring that Ave Maria’s pharmacies will not be allowed to sell condoms or birth control pills. The town’s cable television network will carry no X-rated channels.

The town will be centered around a 100ft tall oratory and the first Catholic university to be built in America for 40 years. The university’s president, Nicholas J Healy, has said future students should “help rebuild the city of God” in a country suffering from “catastrophic cultural collapse”.

Don’t get me wrong, I can completely understand Tom’s sentiment and desire to create a community centered around faith. As I walked my dog up our alley here in Santa Monica this AM, right past a pile of loose human feces 20 feet from the intersection, out in plain view of half a dozen apartments, I was thinking to myself what kind of community creates a situation where the drunk, drugged and deranged homeless wander our streets and alleys all hours of the day and night, devoid of human dignity? And no, I don’t mean that we owe these individuals life on the dole, except perhaps those that should be in mental institutions but aren’t, thanks to past ACLU actions. I keep asking, why can’t we make these (mostly) guys, live like human beings? Of course, looking at the world at large, maybe they are. So that has to change to civilized human beings — and that takes standards, laws, self-control — exactly what is being flaunted by our homeless out here in So. Cal and proposed as lawful edict by Monaghan in his Florida venture.

But I do digress too much. The TimesOnline continues:

Sources close to the project said Monaghan was particularly disturbed by what he regards as the failure of western civilisation to resist Islamic fundamentalism. In a speech to students last year Healy warned that Islam “no longer faces a religiously dynamic West”.

Healy described the “virtual collapse of Europe” as “one of the most profound and unsettling developments of our new century”. He added: “If you consider the more telling signs, such as its plummeting birth rate, Europe does not even seem to believe in a future . . . children are a sign of hope and the fruit of obedience to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.”

I agree with him again about Europe. Still, this is the United States of America. It just doesn’t feel right. Like the Batman villain Two-face, I’m of two minds about this and trying to think it through. If a large group of folks want to establish a community and live a certain way, can they legally keep anyone of different mind out? Except to stir up trouble, why would someone opposed to Catholic principles want to move into this community? The ACLU, never a group to leave anything religious alone will force the courts to answer these questions. So, until that happens, Monaghan will continue to spend his money and build his town.

Lawsuits appear inevitable once the new town begins functioning in 2007, but Monaghan believes he has more than the law on his side. “I think it’s God’s will to do this,” he said.

“Deus lo volt” reigns supreme? Maybe not in American politics. Yesterday I watched an interview with Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney on FoxNews Sunday. Chris Wallace had asked Romney, an LDS member, if he believes in the Book of Mormon and if he practices the tenets of Joseph Smith’s religion. Romney answered like this:

You know, I’m never going to get into a discussion about my personal beliefs and about particular doctrines of my church, and so forth. I’m very proud of my church. It was the church of my father, and his father, and his father before him.

But what I can say is this. And I go back to a speech that Abraham Lincoln made when he was 28 years old, the Lyceum Address, when he said that America has a political religion and that people who are elected to office subscribe to this political religion, which is to place the oath of office, an oath to abide by a nation of laws and the Constitution, above all others.

Don’t know Tom — your little berg might not make it here . . . doesn’t sound very American! (db)

Technorati Tags: Tom Monaghan, Catholic town, Ave Maria, Mitt Romney

I watched Lost last night and was moved by its writers’ sensitivity to the subject of a Nigerian drug runner, his Catholic priest brother, terrible circumstances and horrible decisions for children to have to make, and a reverence for the reciting of scripture that hasn’t been seen on the tube since the last airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Doug TenNapel comes back to his blog to weigh in on this, too.

TV gets Christianity so wrong so often that you have to give them credit when they get it right. Last night’s episode of ABC’s Lost (titled The 23rd Psalm) got it right.

The episode’s lead character Eko is this Nigerian drug runner who has a religious decision to make. Catholicism is treated with respect, historical dignity and potency. Notice how America didn’t freak out and turn the channel. Notice how you don’t have to mention child-molesting priests and grease-haired fakes. Nobody in the TV audience melted, planet Earth didn’t blow up. Your liberal friends will still have lunch with you.

Makes NBC execs look like a bunch of heathens! (db)