"Catholic" Claire McCaskill Helps Vote Down Protections for Catholic Consciences

If she gains a single Catholic vote not named “McCaskill” in her reelection bid, then shame on us.


Since this is a certainty, shame on us.  


Read story here.

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Media Assault on Catholic Church over Homosexuality Continues

On the heels of the now-national outcry over the justified firing of the pro-homosexual “marriage” teacher in St. Louis, comes this story.  

The other day, a priest in the Washington, D.C. area denied Holy Communion to a lesbian living in an open and notorious relationship with another woman.  The Mass was a funeral Mass for the woman’s mother.  


The media outcry was predictable.


Perhaps also predictable was the undermining of the priest by the Archdiocese of Washington. 


The criticism by the Archdiocese assumes a set of facts that we don’t know, namely whether or if the priest advised the woman privately not to present herself for Communion.  But regardless, the Archdiocese’s failure to give the priest the benefit of the doubt is appalling.  “Lack of pastoral sensitivity”?  Puke.


Why, I wonder, do the bishops expect support from Catholics in the fight against the contraception mandate?  For which one of us will they go to the mat
when we get targeted by their liberal friends?

How many Apostles stood by the cross of Jesus?


You have to read the stories linked above.  The water is at 211 degrees, friends.

Another Thing

The picture on the previous blog post (and I put it above as well) about the firing of the music teacher who publicly announced his fake marriage is from a manuscript of Dante’s Inferno.  It depicts a scene in Canto XV where Dante and Virgil encounter Brunetto Latini, a former teacher of Dante’s who is consigned to eternal torment in hell for the grave sin of sodomy.


This Canto is a very poignant one, and presents Brunetto Latini’s many favorable characteristics and his positive influence on Dante.  He is noble, he is wise, he is a sympathetic character. Dante addresses these words to him:


Within my memory is fixed-and nowmoves me-your dear, your kind paternal imagewhen, in the world above, from time to time 

you taught me how man makes himself eternal;and while I live, my gratitude for thatmust always be apparent in my words. 

And yet, at no point does either Dante or Latini rail against God for the sentence under which the teacher suffers.  Nor does either defend sodomy as a lifestyle.  In fact, part of the sympathy Latini’s character engenders comes from his acceptance of his sentence, which his behavior shows is justly imposed.

My point is that the behavior of sodomy, which scripture includes as one of the sins that “cry out to Heaven for vengeance,” is condemned because it contravenes the natural law and leads souls to hell.  Any particular person who is tempted to this sin may have many outstanding qualities.  In fact, his struggle against the force of this temptation may be truly heroic, especially since nearly everyone in society today would tell them that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the act.  The duty of a Christian is to help them, not to encourage them to continue down a path that leads to temporal and eternal ruin.  Charity must inform our actions towards these persons; but charity must be supported by the truth.

Missouri Attorney General to Continue to Repay His Pro-Abortion/Pro-Cloning Backers

Remember Chris “All Prosecutor, No Politics” Koster, the Missouri Attorney General who abandoned the GOP for the Democrat Party before he ran for statewide office?  Remember how he had to make the “tough decision” that his election was too important than to let thousands of unborn babies stand in the way?

Yeah, that guy.  Well, he continues to pay dividends for his donors.

In a shocker (not), No Politics has announced that he will be appealing the ruling of the Cole County Circuit Court that the Missouri Science Innovation and Reinvestment Act (MOSIRA) violates the State constitution.  Although the STLToday story doesn’t mention it, pro-lifers had hailed the Judge’s decision because MOSIRA would have gone to fund so-called embryonic stem cell research at taxpayer expense, as foisted on Missourians by the deceptive and successful Amendment 2 campaign.  If you lived outside of the state or under a rock within it, that was the constitutional amendment that required the taxpayers of Missouri to fund the cloning and killing of little babies for the enrichment of junk scientists in the name of science.  It deceived the voters into voting to enshrine cloning-and-killing into the constitution by stating it was banning cloning, and then defining cloning as “not cloning”.

If only “pro-life” politicians were so loyal once elected…

Words from the Past

Isn’t it true that every honest [citizen] is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?

–from the first pamphlet of the White Rose, 1942

"Leviathan cannot brook a single opponent."

This line is taken from an excellent, insightful and foresighted article in Crisis Magazine.  Excerpts from the full article below:
  
Leviathan Groaning

by Anthony Esolen

On June 25, 2009, a seven year old boy was abducted at gunpoint from his terrified parents. They had just boarded a plane to fly to the country where the boy’s mother had been born, and where her kin still lived. They were leaving their own country for good, because they had grown weary of the harassment they suffered there from a syndicate of well-placed thugs. They themselves had broken no law.
 
The boy’s name is Domenic Johansson. He is now going on ten years old, and he has seen his mother and father only very briefly since. The thugs, officials of the Swedish government, have allowed the parents very little opportunity to visit. Domenic’s mother has suffered a nervous breakdown, and is now quite incapacitated. The foster-woman into whose care Domenic was given has informed the boy that she will never let him return to his mother and father, no matter what any court might say. Domenic, once a cheerful little boy, looks haggard, crushed, dull, as if the heart had been ripped out of him.

What was the crime committed by Christer Johansson and his wife? They did not run drugs. They did not steal. They did not cheat the government of its yearly right to a third of their corn, milk, potatoes, and apples – or whatever it is that the Lords and Ladies of Stockholm now exact from their tenant citizens. Or what was the moral sewer wherein they were raising their little boy? It could not have been a sewer of fornication; the Johanssons are married, and the Swedes have turned fornication into their national pastime. It could not have been the dry gulch of nihilism; Christer Johansson did not work for Swedish television. The crime was simply that the Johanssons, a devout Christian couple, had pulled Domenic out of the state school and were educating him at home. It was, we should note well, perfectly within their rights by the Swedish law then in force to do this. It was also within their rights as specified by the European Union.

[…]

What makes for such cruelty? I cannot imagine the black heart of a man (or, alas, a woman) who struts before a simple little family, and steals their child away. That person, we would say, should be hauled before a court of law and then be banished from civil society. He – she – should be granted plenty of spare time to think again about the cruelty, while staring at the blank walls of a prison cell. How much worse it is, however, when the abduction involves an entire social organism: the long arm of a dull-witted and compliant police force, the convoluted brains of a corrupt judiciary, and the seething metaphysical hatred burning in the heart of politicians, who cannot abide a single little reproach, not even in the form of a happy little boy, against their claims to know what is best for everyone. So far from repenting in sackcloth and ashes, the Swedish thugs have compounded their sin by breaking their own laws, denying the Johanssons their right to choose their own legal counsel. The Swedish education domina has even written, openly, brazenly, that all homeschooled children should be abducted.

[…]
There was a time when certain things were considered holy. The family was holy: it was a realm of order and authority and love, not to be burst into by marauding benefactors. “A man’s home is his castle,” went the saying, meaning that the home, for father and mother and children, is as an independent dukedom, with its own traditions, its laws, its bonds of loyalty, its wisdom, and its hard-won wealth. So long as no crimes against God and man were committed, that castle was to be honored; for upon such families the whole social order was founded. One would no sooner set spies in the home to rat on mother and father, as the Soviets did, than one would burn down a church. It is not simply that one would refrain from abducting a child, as the Swedish government has done. One would not wish even to associate with someone who could conceive of so vile a thing.

Conscience was holy, too; as were the churches wherein the consciences were formed. I cannot imagine George Washington intruding upon a Quaker meeting to conscript men. He would have considered it a blot on his sacred honor to do so despicable a thing. I cannot imagine even that progressive Puritan, Woodrow Wilson, prying open the gate of a Catholic school to compel the nuns to conduct courses in state-approved licentiousness.

But the Leviathan has no such scruples. Consider the case of the current administration, wishing to compel Christian employers to provide insurance policies for free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs. Even before we consider the sheer harm these things have done to the common good, what decent person would want to bring the churches to heel? 

What kind of soul must one have, to wish to cow every religious institution into submission, so that one may gain one’s will? The same kind of soul that is required, I believe, to order policemen to board a plane and remove a little boy, screaming and wailing, from his mother and father he loved, all because they dared to oppose the lovingkindness of the State.

Let us be clear here. The American Leviathan loathes everything that is not Itself. It does not want self-reliant people who can take care of themselves and their neighbors. It does not want people teaching their children in their own way. It does not want free associations, like the Boy Scouts, who actually do things like clean a park or build a bicycle path, things that benefit everyone, and for little or no cost to their towns and cities. It does not want private schools with their own curricula. It does not want private universities with their own ideas about what sports to sponsor, or what people they should hire. It will allow the shells of these things, so long as the “free” truckle to its will, and the “private” strip naked to its searching glare. Its pact with the little people is simple enough.
The Leviathan will promote a false freedom, mere license, which helps to destroy every other social institution in existence, from the family to the neighborhood to the local school to the church. Then the Leviathan, having built a sufficient number of prisons, will come a-knocking on every door to help.

This is really the central meaning of the debate concerning whether the Catholic Church should provide for Fornication Protection Kits – for that is what we are talking about, though no one wishes to say so openly. The diktats from Levi come cloaked in the language of medicine, just as the diktats from Lotta and Lars come cloaked in the language of children’s welfare. But just as no one without a diseased mind can really explain why it is a benefit to children to be yanked out of their innocent mother’s lap and sent to live with strangers, just because mother and father wanted to teach them to read and write, so no one without a diseased mind can explain why it is a benefit to women’s health, or anybody’s health, to underwrite the sexual revolution.

The abortifacients and contraceptives heal no disease. They do not restore proper function to any organ or limb. They do not soothe chronic pain. They do not shield the taker from casual infection. If a couple were infertile, that would be a medical problem. It would require a remedy. That is why we call it “medicine.” But the problem with the fornicators is not that their reproductive organs are not working. They are working just fine. When people engage in a reproductive act, using their reproductive organs in a natural way, then reproduction is the healthy and natural and perfectly predictable result.

More than that: the sexual revolution itself is the cause of tremendous human misery. The problem with Pope Paul’s Humanae Vitae was not that the Holy Father was wrong in his predictions. He said that the sexual revolution – that is, the regime of Pill-popping – would result in more, not fewer, unwanted pregnancies and children born out of wedlock. The cognoscenti laughed at him, but he was right. He said that it would result in more, not fewer, abortions. The illuminati laughed at him, but he was right. He said that it would result in more divorces, and a debased view of women as mere objects of sexual gratification. The women’s liberationists laughed at him, and then proved him right themselves by turning men into those same objects. No, the Pope erred in not being pessimistic enough. Even he did not foresee that the reign of sexual license would destroy human communities and human culture. Even he did not foresee that the people of a once great nation would, as placid as pigs in a sty, give over their most precious civil liberties just to ensure a good roll in the mud.

Leviathan cannot brook a single opponent. The Johanssons learned this lesson, to their excruciating sorrow. We Catholics are learning it now.

Abp. Dolan to become Cardinal Tomorrow

P-D photo

The Post covers this story from the local angle.


Though the two things are unrelated, I think it is very good timing that the USCCB’s public spokesman in the effort against the contraception mandate is receiving the highest honor the Pope can bestow a cleric on this earth.

Review Covers More Help Coming from Non-Catholics

Again, on the contraception mandate:

Religious leaders of other faiths speaking out against health care mandate

by Jennifer Brinker

Leaders from Christian and other religious groups around the country have been stepping up to speak out against the federal health care mandate, which will require all health insurance plans to include free contraceptives, sterilizations and abortion-producing drugs.

Whether or not they hold the same view on contraceptives as the Catholic Church, all seem to view the mandate as a violation of religious freedom.
John Yeats, executive director of the Missouri Baptist Convention, which includes about 400,000 regularly worshipping members, this week called the mandate “a frontal attack on our religious liberty,” in an article in the Pathway, the MBC’s newspaper.

Yeats will be teaming up with Archbishop Robert J. Carlson and others next month for a Rally for Religious Liberty at the Missouri State Capitol.

“Pope Benedict XVI has called on people of many faiths — despite our differences — to put to work the unity that exists among us for the sake of the common good,” said Lawrence Welch, director of the archdiocesan Office for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. “The Rally for Religious Liberty will be a remarkable show of unity by people of different faiths who will be standing up for the common good of religious liberty.

Yeats noted that Missouri Baptist universities will be forced to deal with a ruling that “seeks to secularize the institutions of faith we have built for purposes of faith.”

According to the Pathway, the president of Southwest Baptist University, C. Pat Taylor, said he plans to speak with trustees later this month about the possibility of joining a federal lawsuit, filed in December by Colorado Christian University and Belmont Abbey College, which challenges the mandate. Also considering that option is Hannibal LaGrange University, another Southern Baptist institution.

Missouri Baptist Children’s Home, located in Bridgeton and which provides residential child care and foster and adoptive services, among others, also is considering how it would be affected by the mandate.

The president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Rev. Matthew C. Harrison, is calling on members of the second-largest Lutheran church body in North America to support efforts to preserve religious freedom. The synod has 2.2 million baptized members and is headquartered in Kirkwood.

[see my previous post here]

The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America also issued a statement last week, saying that it is joining with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in speaking out against the mandate and calls on HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the White House administration to rescind the ruling. The assembly includes the 65 canonical Orthodox bishops in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

“This freedom is transgressed when a religious institution is required to pay for ‘contraceptive services,’ including abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization services that directly violate their religious convictions,” according to the statement. “Providing such services should not be regarded as mandated medical care.”

Last December, more than 60 religious leaders, including Protestant and orthodox Jewish leaders, penned a letter to President Barack Obama, stressing that “religious organizations and leaders of other faiths are also deeply troubled by and opposed to the mandate and the narrow (religious) exemption.”

“It is emphatically not only Catholics who deeply object to the requirement that health plans they purchase must provide coverage of contraceptives that include some that are abortifacients,” the letter said. “It is not only Catholics who object to the narrow exemption that protects only seminaries and a few churches, but not churches with a social outreach and other faith-based organizations that serve the poor and needy broadly providing help that goes beyond worship and prayer.

“We believe that the federal government is obligated by the First Amendment to accommodate the religious convictions of faith-based organizations of all kinds, Catholic and non-Catholic.”

It Doesn’t Quite Make Up for the 95 Theses, but Thanks Just the Same

From STLToday comes a story about help from outside the Catholic Church on a matter that will affect everyone if not stopped:



Lutheran leader testifies in debate over contraception rule 

by Bill Lambrecht

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synodtoday joined the pitched debate over the reach of the new healthcare law, calling a new Obama administration mandate “a requirementthat violates our stand on the biblical teaching of the sanctity oflife.”


The Rev. Matthew Harrison, president of the St.Louis-based Missouri Synod, was among religiousleaders testifying that the requirement that employees ofreligious-affiliated institutions have access to birth controlcoverage violates basic rights to religious freedom.


The mandate, Harrison told the Oversight and GovernmentReform Committee, “will have the effect of forcing manyreligious organizations to choose between following the letter ofthe law or operating within the framework of their religioustenets.”


Harrison earlier had criticized the compromise spelled out lastweek by President Barack Obama in which insurance companies, notreligious institutions, would have the responsibility of providingcontraception coverage and paying for it.


“It simply described a temporary enforcement delay and apossible future change, a change that, unfortunately, would notadequately protect religious freedom or unborn lives,” he said in arelease.

Read more

A Moral Theologian (and I Mean One Who is Actually Catholic) on the "Great (non) Accommodation"

If you read this blog at all regularly, you know I admire the work of La Salette Father Edward Richard.  Formerly a professor of Moral Theology at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, he now pastors a parish in his native Louisiana, and thankfully for us internet surfers, has more time to devote to his excellent blog, Catholic Morality.


Enough praise.  Consider this a standing invitation to assume control of Saint Louis Catholic whenever he wants, but that is beside the point.


Like many other concerned Catholics, when Il Duce came out with his “Great Accommodation” I wanted to consider carefully (since I am not the head of Catholic Charities or a leftist nun) whether this accommodation cured the moral problems with the prior mandate.  Father Richard does the heavy lifting below:

We are going to hear all sorts of attempts to accommodatethe President’s Mandate “accommodation” within Catholic ranks. The chiefs of Catholic Charities and the Catholic Health Association wereobviously given the advance notice they needed to be ready to give thePresident the shout out on this. There will be many more. They willall make their comments based upon convoluted, moralistic platitudes about thegood of providing universal access to health care which, they say, trumps participation in moral evil.  These positions willbe mortally flawed.  Will they be corrected?  I would hope so.

Willing cooperation in grave evil inorder to secure a benefit for oneself makes the person who cooperates equallyguilty of the grave evil.  What is the goal, exactly, of agreeing with thePresident on this?  Is it because those who go along with the President’s mandate want people to have access to theseso-called preventive services?  If so, the cooperation in the program ofcontraception, sterilization, and chemical abortions is immoral and gravelysinful.  Is it because they want to maintain government funding and theability to “serve” the general public?  The cooperation is stillgravely sinful.

In fact, it is quite clear that these agencies and their affiliated institutions cannot cooperate in this plan to provide abortion, sterilization, orcontraceptives.  Indeed, this plan of the President’s is morally evil, initself.  It is what moral theology and Catholic doctrine refer to as”intrinsic evil.”  Yes, that’s right.  The plan itself, notjust the acts of abortion, contraception and sterilization, is intrinsicallyevil.

Please see the following Doctrinal Statement issuedby the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith on March 13, 1975.  (SLC Note:  you may read it at the linked post here).  Itwas called “Quecumque sterilizatio.” Some will argue that thisdoctrinal statement does not apply because we are talking about healthinsurance plans and not the health care institution as the statement does. I say, however, that this is a distinction without a difference.  Asa matter of fact, on the basis of principles espoused in the document itself,one must conclude that providing the approval ofa plan for such gravely immoral actions across a wide array of institutions and circumstances is itself a greater evil than a plan which consents to the evil in one singleinstitution. 

I will post later on the abortion drug issue. 

For convenience sake, I have highlighted some ofthe more pertinent elements of the CDF’s statement.  (SLC Note:  click the link below and scroll down to read).

RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS CONCERNING STERILIZATION IN CATHOLIC HOSPITALS