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)