Still Running Off at the Keyboard

REPORT ON GLOBAL ANTI-SEMITISM

In this January of 2007, I would like to think that America, said by many to be a Christian nation, would be as concerned about global anti-Christianity as our nation is about global anti-Semitism. To the best of my knowledge, the U.S. Congress is determinedly unconcerned in spite of growing evidence that global anti-Christianity is increasing.

Meanwhile Harmony Grant points out the inconsistencies in an article on the untouchable religion at thepeoplesvoice.org.

It's easy to slip into the habit of skirting all issues Jewish so as to avoid the anti-Semitic charge. Yet the Holocaust was not a get-out-of-sin-free card. There is as much evil in one religion as there is in another. Look at the present state of the Catholic Church! It would be wrong to insist that the world could not criticize the Catholic sexual abuse scandal. It is equally wrong to avoid and to make laws that preclude discussing evil in other religions, including the Jewish religion.

Man is universally capable of evil. No religion exempts him. Truth must replace political correctness, and truth must be brought to the interreligious dialogue table if we are going to learn to get along. Some of that truth is not going to be pretty. And talking about the ugliness can get you into a whole lot of trouble, as Benedict discovered not long ago in Regensburg.

FROM THE MAILBOX

Spirit & Life
"The words I spoke to you are spirit and life." (Jn 6:63)
Human Life International e-Newsletter
Volume 01, Number 51 | Friday, Jan. 19, 2007
................................................................................... www.hli.org
Pro-Choice Violence and American Culture

Author's Note: This is the third of three articles highlighting the reality of violence committed - and defended - in the name of "Choice."

One does not need to spend too much time in front of a killing center in the United States to know that the term "pro-choice" is synonymous with violence. I do not make that accusation lightly. I have seen the violence first-hand and it is not pretty. Nor am I talking about the killing of an innocent child which is intrinsically violent. I am talking here about the nature of the abortion business itself and its practitioners. Abortion breeds all kinds of other violence in the same way that a toxic waste dump causes cancer in the innocent people who live around it. The abortion industry has plenty of blood on its hands: violence committed against peaceful pro-lifers, men killing women who don't want to get abortions, abortionist-on-abortionist killings, plenty of domestic violence and just overall criminal viciousness. There is just no way to stop "pro-choice" violence because it is the infallible outgrowth of an unchained evil like abortion.

Just for the record, in my fifteen plus years on the front lines of the pro-life movement I have been threatened with death twice. The threats were issued by abortion clinic employees, and I had to take those threats seriously because it is not an unreasonable fear that people who murder babies for a living may just carry out a death threat on someone who stands in their way. At virtually every killing center in America pro-lifers have to deal with violent verbal abuse, property damage, assaults, threats of violence, attempts to run them down with their cars, ripping signs, video cameras and materials out of their hands, etc. All of these are summarily dismissed by the "pro-choice" movement and culture as pardonable under the rubric of "choice."

Ironically, however, there is a witness value in all this. Each time I go to Third World countries where abortion is generally still illegal, I highlight this phenomenon of abortion violence in the affluent west. International "pro-choice" demagogues promote abortion with all the teary-eyed concern for women that they did in America thirty-five years ago: they say women are dying from back alley abortions; they say the law is discriminatory since only rich women can get abortions; they have a false concern for the mother's "health" and make abortion a fake solution to rape, incest, fetal deformities, etc. Pro-life nations would fall for all these "choice" lies except for one thing: the truth. We can tell them, with thirty four years of experience and statistics to back us up, that "choice" and violence are synonymous.

In this case numbers don't lie. Let the "pro-choice" American culture do the math, and it should be shocked at what it finds. My colleague, Dr. Brian Clowes, has spent years looking closely at the abortion industry and its violence. It's not an easy job, but he's a former Green Beret and fit for the work! You will want to see the database he has assembled on violence committed in the name of "choice." The "State-by-State" link on the side bar will take you to his phenomenal documentation of the wreckage, but don't read it right before lunch or you may not digest your meal. The tally - that we know of - is 7000 total acts of violence including 880 homicides and other killings, 86 attempted murders, 23 arsons and bombings, 787 assaults, 1,798 sex crimes (including 169 rapes), 59 kidnappings, 420 cases of vandalism, 270 drug-related crimes, 1,577 medical crimes. And this is really just the tip of the iceberg.

As we gear up for the March for Life next Monday, let's remember that the babies are the first but not the only victims of American abortion violence. Let us pray with all our might that God will soon deliver us of all this evil after 35 years of suffering.

Sincerely Yours in Christ,


Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer
President, Human Life International

PROGRAM UPGRADES

Upgrading Internet Explorer to 7.0 gave my computer heartburn. Now I see that Constance Cumbey had even greater problems upgrading to Adobe Acrobat 8.0. If the software providers what to make us unwilling to ever upgrade again, all they have to do is keep up the current trend A little more quality control seems to be called for.

THE CREDO - "I" OR "WE" ?

We are supposed to change the way we say the Creed during Mass, from "We believe" to "I believe". I haven't been following the details of this change, but the way it's been working out where I've been attending Mass is certainly curious.

The pastor uses "I". One of the assistants uses "We". Last Sunday a visiting priest slid over the pronoun, beginning each instance with a slur of sound that couldn't be distinguished followed by a loud and clear "believe" each time it came up. Skip the pronoun altogether and avoid the controversy, I guess.

THE CHURCH IN POLAND

may have more secrets to reveal than we have so far heard according to Sandro Magister at Chiesa:

He was the new archbishop of Warsaw, and Benedict XVI had supported him almost until the last moment. But then he ordered him to resign. There are many who have disappointed the pope – and some even in the Vatican.

ROMA, January 11, 2007 – The “rezygnacja,” the tearful resignation that Stanislaw Wielgus announced on Sunday, January 7 in the cathedral of Warsaw where he was supposed to be installed as the new archbishop, did not put an end to the storm that is shaking the Catholic Church in Poland and Rome, all the way to its supreme pastor.

Last May 25, on the first day of his trip to Poland, Benedict XVI entered that very same cathedral.

He knelt before the tomb of the heroic cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, pointing him out as a model for all.

And among the things he asked of the bishops, priests, and faithful of Poland were:

– “humble sincerity” in admitting the errors of the past;

– magnanimity in judging the faults committed “in other times and other circumstances”;

– pride for all the many good achievements of those years, in resisting a form of totalitarianism that “generated hypocrisy.’

But none of these requests was respected during the tumultuous weeks between the appointment of Wielgus and his resignation.


* * *

The external enemy is playing a role in the current “wave of attacks against the Catholic Church in Poland,” as Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi lamented on January 7: that enemy that works as a “a strange alliance between those who once persecuted the Church there and its other adversaries.”

But there are also enmities within the Church that are contributing to the carnage.

I have no opinions on this except that we have probably only begun to hear what potentially may come out of Poland unless it's put under wraps. Magister believes it has already touched the Pope, and that leads to the question, how did it touch the last Pope?

The following quote from the article brought me to a dead stop:

There are other clouds of suspicion surrounding the intellectuals of “Tygodnik Powszechny,” the historical Krakow weekly paper for which Karol Wojtyla wrote. Last spring one of its most illustrious authors, Fr. Michal Czajkowski, who heads the commission for Christian-Jewish dialogue, was accused of having spied on none other than the martyred priest Jerzy Popieluszko, before the secret police abducted and killed Popieluszko in 1984.

Not long ago I found and blogged the connection between the Communists, Pax Christi, and the Polish Catholic press which I would link if I were using my own computer, but will forego linking since I'm using this one.

Then there is this quote about Wielgus: He is a learned specialist in medieval philosophy... Hmmm. As in Kabbalah? As in Catharism? Questions, questions, questions...and mysteries. More and more mysteries.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

IT'S SNOWING IN OHIO WEST

Spirit Daily links a report on the snow at sea level in Los Angeles. Parts of I-5 were closed and there was an accumulation around the palm trees and on the cars in the parking lots near Wilshire and Santa Monica Blvds, according to the story.

Around here Ohio is looking normal again, with snow on the ground and temps in the 30s and below for at least part of the day. Windchill reduced the outside air to a feel of 6 deg. yesterday. The sun even came out.

THE PROBLEMS WITH RADICAL TRADITIONALISM

NOR has linked this report:

The 'Synagogue of Satan'
by Mark Potok



From a makeshift pulpit inside an Indiana Quality Inn, a baby-faced priest angrily denounces the Jews, saying they mean to "destroy all Christian nations."
In offices in State Line, Pa., an intense, bespectacled man tirelessly recounts how the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia "predicts the anti-Christ will come from Jewry" and warns of the Jews' role in the coming "New World Order."

At a gathering near the Philadelphia airport, men in priests' collars and brown monk's robes rage against the "Judeo-Masonic" conspiracy to destroy the Catholic Church, the "Marxist-Jewish" scheme to wreck American schools, and even an elaborate 9/11 plot, "predicted by the Blessed Virgin Mary 84 years ago."

For most Americans, the world of "radical traditionalist Catholicism" is so remote and little-known -- it entered the nation's consciousness, just barely, with revelations about the strident anti-Semitism of actor Mel Gibson and his father, Hutton -- that it may seem wholly irrelevant to the modern world. Is it really important what a group of people, many excommunicated and most gathered behind the walls of their monasteries and other institutions, think about the Jews? That many believe there was no Holocaust? That some say every pope since 1958 has been illegitimate, and a few even insist the real pope has been kidnapped?

The fact is, it does matter. As explained in a remarkable and sweeping story by the Intelligence Report's Heidi Beirich, the best estimates suggest there are 100,000 radical traditionalists in America, a number that appears to be growing. And while the size of this movement is dwarfed by the 70 million mainstream Catholics in this country, these energetic men and women are having an influence.

Continue reading...

There are as many problems on the Catholic right as there are on the Catholic left.

IT'S STILL RAINING HERE

It rained most of the night. It's supposed to get colder later today and we may get snow.

STILL HERE BUT...

I'm away from my computer and using a borrowed laptop for the next few days. Typing on this thing is a pain since I'm not used to it, so there won't be any new posts for the next couple of days till I'm back on my own system.

Meanwhile, it's still raining here. The Cuyahoga River is rising. The hyacinths are 3 iches tall. But there is snow and cold in the forecast for later this week. They are also predicting sun on Wednesday. We'd better look quick!