CHICAGO, Ill.–September 15, 2012 – Imagine Sisters, a new online organization founded to be the nexus for media and information about discerning a vocation as a Catholic Religious Sister, will launch its first viral vocation initiative, The One Rose Project, on October 1, 2012.
The One Rose Project invites Catholics around the globe to reach out to young women they know, personally inviting them to consider that God may be calling them to be a Religious Sister.
The campaign promotes a personal encounter on October 1, 2012–the feast of St. Therese of Liseux. Participants will invite the young woman they know to consider a call to consecrated Religious Life by giving her a single rose in the spiritual legacy of St. Therese.
Imagine Sisters has received substantial testimony that a personal invitation is incredibly powerful for young women who are open to a religious vocation. Imagine Sisters asks for prayers that this invitation will be used by God to plant the seeds of religious vocations among young women, blessing the Church with many new religious sisters.
The One Rose Project can be easily shared through social media networks, personal blogs and speaking engagements. Imagine Sisters has created a short video explaining the project, and encourages supporters to share this video as the primary means of transmitting the message virally.
In the spirit of The New Evangelization, Imagine Sisters embraces social and visual media to passionately propose the possibility of becoming a religious sister in the world today. Through the grace of God, the Imagine Sister website and Facebook interact with over 100,000 individuals each week, effectively working through the new media to reach young women around the world.
When Fidel Castro wanted Elian Gonzalez the Clinton Administration complied.
When the President of Egypt wanted a filmmaker arrested:
Though to be fair he is only being taken in for an “interview” which obviously is an operation involving lots of police officials.
The crafted narrative that some obscure negative film concerning Mohammed and Islam is typical political misdirection. As Ross Douthat amply explains It’s Not About the Video. We are suppose to believe according to the Obama Administration that the assaults on our embassies and subsequent deaths were just crowd dynamics that occurred on the spur of the moment. That somehow directed and coordinated assaults from multiple directions involving rockets was just mad crowds upset about a video on YouTube. “Hey lets go down to the U.S. Embassy and protest that video! Oh and bring a rocket launcher just in case.” The extend they are trying to push this obviously false narrative is frankly sickening. To ensure no blame is attached to them the State Department, Ambassador to the U.N., and the Obama Administration are treating us as fools and lying to us.
The attack on free speech is just another attack on the 1st Amendment by the Obama Administration. The fingerprints on the taking in of this filmmaker have the Justice Department all over it since they were involved in hunting him down. The call by Gen Dempsey to the Florida Pastor Terry Jones is just another branch of this attack amplifying a false narrative. That Muslim-baiter Terry Jones had little or nothing to do with the film is of no concern to an administration that would trample our rights to smooth gened-up bad feelings.
The total incompetence of the President just makes matters worse. Here is a man who probably really thought that his election would smooth over anti-Americanism among the radical Islamists. That really the hatred of America was all about George W. Bush and previous foreign policy. He was not only going to “heal the oceans”, but heal this hatred. That bowing down to foreign dictators and never talking about radical Islam that all the problems would just go away. That hobnobbing and partying with the Hollywood elite was going to impress Muslims who see the social corruption? Unfortunately the President naiveté was note just limited to him. Sec. Hillary Clinton first responded by saying “How could this happen in a country we helped liberate.” I am not sure what world they are living in, but I heard many people warn that the so-called Arab Spring could turn into the same situation that occurred in Iran in 1979. There were many people that warned about what could happen and indeed did happen.
Remember when Candidate Obama talked about having a “Humble foreign policy”? I guess that means bragging about killing Bin Laden whenever politically opportune. They were even chanting it at the Democratic Convention. I guess killing Bin Laden and killing many radical Islamist via drones has no effect, but a video on YouTube does.
It is sad that when Catholics across the land peaceably demonstrate against the HHS mandate the Obama Administration has no time for them and is totally unwilling to remove one jot or tittle form the mandate. Yet the pretext for violent riots which kill some of our citizens is met with the hunting down of and anti-Islam filmmaker. Whatever happened to “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death of your right to say it.” Yet an Ivy League professor called for the mans arrest along with others. That so many are willing to go along with this sham is a defining point in the direction this country is going.
Mocking of religion is fine, just as long as it is not Islam. Liberal kowtow to radical Islam because a bully respects another bully. They will raze the 1st Amendment to suit them. It is even sadder when Google has more of an idea on protecting free speech than the President’s administration has. If they move to remove anything that insults Islam, the Islamists will move the definition of what insults Islam. No doubt not accepting that Mohammed is the only messenger is an insult to Islam. Well we have a lot of work to do to make this world a safe place for radical Islamists to keep them in a reality bubble and not have to grow up.
This is the 31st volume of The Weekly Benedict ebook which is a compilation of the Holy Father’s writings, speeches, etc which I pull from Jimmy Akin’s The Weekly Benedict. This volume covers material released during the last week for 29 August – 16 September, 2012.
The ebook contains a table of contents and the material is arranged in sections such as Angelus, Speeches, etc in date order. The full index is listed on Jimmy’s site.
The Weekly Benedict – Volume 31 – ePub (supports most readers)
The Weekly Benedict – Volume 31 – Kindle
There is an archive for all of The Weekly Benedict eBook volumes. This page is available via the header of this blog or from here.
At yesterday’s U.S. House of Representatives hearing on the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) harassment of Catholic colleges and universities, Congressman Robert Andrews (N.J.-1st) reportedly put his foot in his mouth when he characterized the hearing as a “classic case of Nero fiddling while Rome burns”—apparently to give color to his complaint that the issues being considered by the committee were not “compelling questions.”
But the image of Rome’s destruction at the hands of a tyrant who hated Christianity, and the gruesome martyrdom of Christians who were blamed for the fire, was exactly the wrong image to put forward while attempting to dismiss the Obama administration’s violations of religious freedom as unworthy of a Congressional hearing.
[Source]
NPR has a story “College Course Lumps Homosexuality, Rape, Murder”
GetReligion posts on the one-sided nature of the story and asks “Is this a smear job or simply bad journalism?” Well as a Catholic I say “both/and”.
Tim Drake of the National Catholic Register has a solid piece on the story which includes the fact that the complaining group didn’t even contact the University first to complain before taking the story to the press along with other relevant details.
This type of conflation to portray things in the worst light possible is nothing new for opponents of the Church. Not that long ago when the revised norms (Normae de Gravioribus Delictis) issued by the Holy See included women’s ordination. Headlines shouted how the Church viewed women’s ordination as the same thing as child sexual abuse. Funny how journalist can’t make the simplest distinctions when it doesn’t fit their agenda.
Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry, “We will not be dictated to,” and proceeded to become stenographers – G.K. Chesterton
I was reminded of this quote do to the recent trend of S&M porn for women. It seems I can hardly get away from the book “50 Shades of Gray” which shows up in searches at Audible, Amazon, and appears on shelves in warehouse stores such as Costco. Recently I started seeing advertisement for a book of the same sick genre at Goodreads on their main page. This disturbing trend has hardly had any outcry from the professional feminist and some people even see it as female sexual emancipation. So we went from women who didn’t want to be tied down at home to women that want to be tied up at home – to update Chesterton’s phrase.
In related news of the perverse Mark Shea posts another example of sexual perversion moving from the “just a taboo stage” to arguments for acceptance.
Being part of the Amazon Vine program I eagerly scan through the books and other merchandise available for review when they send out their emails.
Recently one book I saw was called Breaking Through: Catholic Women Speak for Themselves
Considering all the media coverage and the phony “war on women” meme and the fact that Catholic women who are dissenters are constantly being presented to us this book is quite timely. This book is partly a response to the attacks on religious freedom and how the narrative was shaped concerning Catholic women and the use of contraceptives.
This book in some ways could have been called “Surprised by the truth of the Church’s teachings on sexual morality” as it is partly a “Surprised by Truth”-like format of conversion stories. Not the common Protestant-to-Catholic conversion stories but mostly concerning Catholic women who were in opposition to Church teaching and who came to see the wisdom and the truth of her teaching. These women from a variety of backgrounds and professional experience not only provide the genesis for how they came to accept Church teaching, but explain those teachings in a very accessible way. All of these chapters were very well written and had me quite captivated by their personal stories. Along with these stories are also a couple of essays that go with the subject at hand.
Seeing how God worked in these women’s lives was a joy to see and a couple of the stories related really had me praising God – which unfortunately is not something I do as much as I should. The story of one women’s affect on another headed to get an abortion is worth the price of the book – just so awesome! This book covers a lot of topics including: fear of children, contraception, same-sex attraction, beauty, the ends of dating, the sexual abuse crisis, stable marriages and family life, etc.
Even as a man I could relate to some of the background of the stories on how secular feminism had shaped their lives. Being raised in a house that subscribed to Ms. Magazine and Psychology Today and where Alan Alda was the pinnacle of what a man should be — it is not just women who get subverted by this message.
This book is a great antidote to so much of what we hear and it presents faithful Catholic women who can fully articulate their faith and who have had the same struggles as so many others. Maybe the title that confused me is a positive thing and I sincerely hope that those who struggle with the truth of what the Church teaches will pick this book up. They might be seriously challenged by what this book presents, but they won’t be talked down to or feel attacked by it.
Excellent speech give by Cardinal Dolan on religious freedom which as per her usual delivery combines humor, history, and analysis. The Venerable Archbishop Sheen story he shares is also hilarious.
Which brings us to now. For the threats to our “first and most cherished freedom” are abundant, but let me list just two.
One comes from those called secularists, who will tolerate religion as long as it’s just considered some eccentric private hobby for superstitious, unenlightened folks, limited to an hour on the Sabbath, with no claim to any voice in the public square. Such, of course, is hardly “free exercise,” as Michelle Obama recently pointed out: “Our faith . . . just isn’t about showing up on Sunday . . . it’s about what we do on Monday through Saturday.”
Here is the PDF for the speech.
You can have you “deeply held beliefs” just as long as you don’t act on them is part of the pushing freedom of religion to mean being allowed to go to church
Currently on exhibit in China’s capital is a curious display of large placards describing the “evil deeds” of “heterodox religious cults.”
The exhibit was organized and sponsored by the Beijing Association for Resistance Against Heterodox Religions, and features descriptions of “heterodox cults” throughout the world, including quotes by cult leaders. What is most disturbing about this display is that the images of these cults and their leaders are largely depicted as what at first appears to be Catholic, even though Catholicism is not mentioned on any of the placards.
On “Placard 20,” the title, which states, “Stirring the People Into Rebellion,” is accompanied by cartoon images of Wang Yongmin, the cult leader, who is wearing a red skullcap, pectoral cross, and a red bishop’s cape, though Yongmin is not Catholic.
Placard 15 depicts a cult identified in the title as “The only ‘Holy Spirit New Testament [Protestant] Church’,” which was established in Hong Kong. This group remains notorious in China for promoting Hong Kong and Taiwan independence from the Mainland. Again, the leader is depicted wearing the clothes of a Catholic bishop, despite the fact that the group identifies itself as “Protestant.”
Placard 19 describes a Chinese cult called the “Changshou Teaching,” led by a man named Li Changshou. Again, this cult identifies itself as Jidujiao (Protestant), but Li is depicted wearing a Roman collar, red skullcap, and a bishop’s pectoral cross.
And in one odd cartoon, Li Changshou is featured next to a crucifix, though the corpus is a small version of Li himself, round glasses, red skullcap, and all. What makes these “heterodox” religions problematic according to the message of the placards is that they are critical of the current political authorities; it is concerning that this label is so visually associated with Catholicism, even if this attachment is implicit.
Well, as the Democratic National Convention also revealed, add another marquee Democrat to the list of blind faithful—a notably religious one, another former Democratic president: Jimmy Carter.
Carter has said many times, including very recently, that he can’t see how or where or why God or Scripture could ever justify abortion. That’s for sure. The Georgian Baptist has scoured his Bible on that one, and indeed found no justification for killing unborn human life. And Carter certainly never stumped for gay marriage.
And yet, there was Jimmy Carter, at the convention last week, stumping for Barack Obama, a president with a party platform that supports these things, and then some. To raucous applause from the “pro-choice” faithful, Carter gushed that Obama has given everyone an “equal chance in life,” creating a “fairer, stronger, and more inclusive America.”
The 87-year-old said he will be casting a vote for Obama “with confidence and conviction,” knowing that Obama has the “right policies” to lead America to a “better future.” [Source]
There are a lot of things that annoy me about Jimmy Carter – other than that I voted for him when I was 18. Mostly though what annoys me is the fact that he never really stood up for life in a meaningful way. He could have been the conscience of the party calling them back from the brink of full throated apologists for the culture of death. He might have been able to assert some leadership as a former Democratic President, instead he will mention that he is pro-life at times – yet it never stops him from endorsing increasingly pro-abortion candidates. This type of behavior from pro-life Democrats is pretty much the norm with few exceptions such as Rep. Rebecca Hamilton.
Now if only this type of behavior was restricted to Democrats. Unfortunately excuse making on the Republican side can be just as egregious. Often social conservatives are treated as an embarrassment and many pro-life issues are not even addressed. The issue of contraception is one that the GOP won’t touch despite the fact it is a gateway to abortion and that some forms of contraceptive are abortion-inducing. When Sen. Santorum would bring this up there was pretty much a collective shoooshing for him to be quiet about such issues. What was the last time you heard a “pro-life” politician talk about the numbers of children killed via IVF? Then there was the recent defense of the rape and incest abortion exception. Whenever it comes to fully following through on pro-life convictions it becomes more about political expediency than doing what is right. We point out the hypocrisy of pro-life Democrats voting for Obamacare and then push through a presidential candidate with no pro-life trail consisting of any action other than words. We make fun of how President Clinton focused-group everything and then make pro-life policy decisions with a concern towards polls. Certainly we can move forward incrementally in creating a culture of life – but we will achieve not even that when we compromise the protection of life and advance the fiction of the 100% pro-life politician.
It is one thing to vote to reduce evil, the problem is that we are minimizing the extent of the evil. Politics might be the art of the possible, but it is easy to forget that with God all things are possible – even being fully pro-life and supporting those that are the same.