Punditry

For 22 years, stressed-out parents in dire need of an emergency timeout from their children have found help at the Bay Area Crisis Nursery.

No matter the hour, the modest but attractive house in Concord has kept its porch light on for parents struggling to maintain their sanity while dealing with a range of pressure-cooker situations, from a lost job to a lost home.

Here, parents find a safe haven to leave their children while they take care of other pressing matters or get a needed respite. Parents can leave children for up to 30 days in the care of trained staff.

As the only facility of its kind in the Bay Area, the nonprofit organization rolls out its welcome mat to anyone in the nine-county region, with the one caveat being that it only accepts children 5 and younger.

Being unable to serve children in the 6 to 11 age group ate away at founder Sister Ann Weltz.
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“Emergency timeout from their children” and “get a needed respite” are statements that I find as evidence of the total selfishness of our culture. I know that there are situations where it is a good idea to get children out of the house while the parents sort things through, but in these cases it would be more accurate to say that the children need a emergency time out from their parents. Up to 30 days seems more like a kennel than a nursery.

I thought “The Italian Job” was biblically based and would be about an Italian who lost his children, oxen, servants, land, and was covered with sores and who had some jerk friends who kept telling him he was being punished by God for his behavior.

On a related note my wife and I watched Terminator 3 and I agree with Steven D. Greydanus of DecentFilms.com take on it. I found it enjoyable and definitely a worthy successor to the previous two films.

One good thing about the previews shown before the movie, I now have a list of about fifteen films that I don’t want to ever see.

SAN BERNARDINO – The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino has agreed to withdraw a cross-complaint filed against the Boston archdiocese seeking to hold it liable for damages in a lawsuit filed against both dioceses by an alleged sexual abuse victim of retired priest Paul Shanley.

The action was a show of support for Boston’s new archbishop-elect, The Sun in San Bernardino reported Saturday.
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There is just something about a diocese filing a cross-complaint. Is a cross complaint “Pick up the cross daily and follow me – gee do we have to, I don’t wanna.”

Theodore R. Connors, whose daughter was a seventh-grader at West Middle School this spring, said an English class assignment requiring pupils to write a suicide note was highly inappropriate.

“It’s a very dark, dark assignment,” he said.

Connors, who recently ran unsuccessfully for the Auburn school board, wants the assignment dropped next year and said the school district should advise parents of pupils who completed the assignment to talk with the children about suicide.

Auburn School Superintendent John Plume said Wednesday he didn’t think the assignment, as described by the school’s principal, was inappropriate.

Plume said he’s talked to the principal three times about the issue since it first came to light and that Connors has reached a conclusion that “is not based on fact.”

“I’m not a teacher, but I know that’s not an appropriate assignment,” Connors said late last week. “So how is it a teacher would not think that that’s not an appropriate assignment?”
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I think I would go farther then calling this “highly inappropriate”, this is just plain wrong and evil. Requiring seventh graders to think up reasons why they should kill themselves and to put this to paper is total lunacy. What I can’t believe is that they need to stop it from happening next year also. I wonder what they do for a science project – build a Kevorkian death chamber?

And while we are on topic of “Pubwick Educkatshun” here is another story:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Apparently the truths in the Declaration of Independence aren’t so self-evident. When Rep. Roger Wicker asked high school seniors in his Mississippi district to name some unalienable rights, he got silence. So the Republican congressman gave the advanced-placement history students some help.

“Among these are life,” Wicker said, “and….”

“Death?” one student said. So much for liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“It’s not so much that they don’t know the rote phrases and facts,” said Wicker, the sponsor of a House bill to improve civics instruction. “It just demonstrates a real gap in the education of young Americans.”
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This was bad enough, but an “advanced-placement history” class, the cream of the crop of students studying history.

An Ontario court judge has dismissed an unusual lawsuit that sought to impose the Canadian Charter of Rights over a 300-year-old British act establishing the Rules of Succession to the Crown because it bars Catholics from ascending the throne.

Rejecting the case against the Queen brought by a former Toronto city councillor, Justice Paul S. Rouleau of the Ontario Superior Court suggested such a change could see a return to the bloody past when civil wars raged over who would inherit the throne.

“If the courts were free to review and declare inoperative certain parts of the rules of succession, Canada could break symmetry with Great Britain, and could conceivably recognize a different monarch than does Great Britain,” he writes in his decision, released last week.

“In fact, Canada could arguably reanimate the debate regarding the heir to the throne, an argument that was resolved by the Act of Settlement. This would clearly be contrary to settled intention, as demonstrated by our written Constitution, and would see the courts changing rather than protecting our fundamental constitutional structure.”
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Are they serious? Civil wars over who is to be king seems rather strange in this day of age, even for Canada. You just know that if homosexuals were barred from succession that they would find a way to overturn that.

King David’s son Amnon raped his step-sister Tamar. Even though KIng David was angered when he heard about this he did nothing about “the situation” (sound familiar). King David in his naivet� had even originally sent Tamar to minister to Amnon who had pretended sickness. This lack of action in regard to Amnon festered among David’s children, especially Absalom brother of Tamar. This ultimately ended up with Absalom having servants kill Amnon. So in reaction to King David’s inaction we had Abasalom’s reform group Voice of the Wrathful� (VOTW) “Keep the faith, Takeover Jerusalem” do the wrong thing and to eventually go into schism. King David again did not prudently handle what Absalom had done and this ended up with Absalom taking people with him and trying a hostile takeover, which ultimately resulted in Absalom’s death. We had basically a good man in King David who’s decisions not to act in response to a situation further escalated into more and more problems.
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You know that an article that starts out with

“Christianity has always had a bleaker view of love – gay or straight – than any other faith”

is going to be a real treat. She selectively takes quotes from some Church Fathers to demonstrate this “negative” view of marriage. While it is true that some Church Fathers did to some extent hold this view this has nothing to do with constant church teaching. It is only with the Christian understanding of marriage does it reach it fullest understanding. That marriage is a reflection of the Trinity and the self-giving love that entails. Marriage that is not open to life, or pro-creation, cannot image the creative love of the Trinity. A purely secular understanding of marriage breaks down to feelings, pleasure, and convenience. Once the individual feels it is no longer convenient or that the pleasure is gone it breaks down in divorce.

…But in fact everybody reads the Bible selectively. If people followed every single biblical ruling to the letter, the world would be full of Christians who love their enemies and refuse to judge other people, which is plainly not the case. Christians would also be obliged to eat kosher meat (Acts 15:20) and stone their disobedient sons to death (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). The world has changed and practices that were acceptable 2,000 years ago have become abhorrent. We also have a more complex understanding of sexuality than the biblical writers.

“But in fact everybody reads the Bible selectively.” Well she certainly proved here thesis with her interpretation. Acts 15:20 was a temporary proscription to not cause other believers to be scandalized. St. Paul talks about this principle in 1st Cor 8:7-13.

However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through being hitherto accustomed to idols, eat food as really offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. Only take care lest this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if any one sees you, a man of knowledge, at table in an idol’s temple, might he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols? And so by your knowledge this weak man is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died. Thus, sinning against your brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food is a cause of my brother’s falling, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my brother to fall.

She also makes the common mistake of using the Mosaic laws as examples of what Christians should use today if they followed the Bible. The Mosaic covenant has been replaced by a new and permanent covenant which totally replaced the “works of Torah”, but not the natural law which is “written on their hearts.”

…Yet the Bible has to be read with care. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 condemns homosexual rape and the violation of the sacred rules of hospitality rather than homosexuality per se. It has nothing to say about the open, stable gay relationships that are essentially a feature of modern western society, and did not exist in their current form in the biblical world.

Well how about the command to be “fruitful and multiply”, it wasn’t “be a fruit and nullify.” The same problem with contraception exists for homosexuality, that there is no possibility toward being open to life and that a fundamental purpose of the sex act is denied.

…The Bible is not a holy encyclopedia, giving clear and unequivocal information; nor is it a legal code that can be applied indiscriminately to our very different society. Lifting isolated texts out of their literary and cultural context can only distort its message. Instead, we should look at the underlying principles of biblical religion, and apply these creatively to our own situation.
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She wasn’t doing too bad until she said “apply these creatively to our own situation.” One of the great graces of being a Catholic is that we don’t have figure out the Bible on our own. That we are also guided by Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium which helps us to eliminate possible meanings of the text. while the Magisterium will never define all texts or all possible interpretations, just knowing the faith and the constant teaching of the Church helps to guide us away from wrong exegesis. I know that when I first started to read the Bible outside of sacred tradition I inserted many heresies and misunderstandings into the text.

BAGHDAD — Saddam Hussein’s former information minister said in television interviews yesterday that he plans to write a book about his experiences in which he will reveal details about the collapse of the Ba’athist regime.

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, who amused international audiences with his wildly inaccurate claims of Iraqi victory over U.S. troops during the war, went public yesterday after his release from a brief period of detention and interrogation by coalition forces.
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Will it be called “Living History”, oh wait that was already used by a preeminent liar.

Usually the National Catholic Reporter is good for some laughs but this article reads like a Chick Track. The title “Celibacy’s history of power and money” was a clue to the potential stupidity of this article from the Unrational Catholic Distorter.

Whoa, slow down a minute on the celibacy talk and married priests. Let’s remind ourselves how the Catholic church got into the celibacy mess.

It didn’t have anything to do with sex, purity and holiness.

It was the money.

And when one mixes money and the Catholic church, there’s usually a mess. That’s how we got a Reformation. Selling indulgences — guarantees of time off in purgatory.

If the church tried selling indulgences today it would be prosecuted under the RICO law.

Indulgences were and are guarantees signed and sealed by folks in no position to deliver on the promise. Indulgences were sold by those who had invented the idea of purgatory in the first place (there is no biblical basis for purgatory).

I guess there must not be any room in NCR’s biblcal canon for 2 Maccabees and verses 12:38-46. I always thought that their bible might be missing something, like the first 74 books. To them the Gospels are called the Apocrypha.

…Martin Luther, a sort of one-man medieval equivalent of the Securities and Exchange Commission (indulgences division) blew the whistle. And signaled the fate of all future whistleblowers. Obloquy, and a formal apology 400 years too late.

Well actually Martin Luther was post medieval when he posted his list on the cathedral door.

Religions have always had a place for virgins. But it customarily meant women, as in pagan Rome’s vestal virgins. Emperor Augustus, incidentally, frowned on celibacy. Celibate males weren’t allowed to inherit property. (Hold that thought from Roman law. A thousand years later it gave us today’s problems.)
Then came Jesus, and then came priests.

I would like to see one case where somebody being celibate caused a problem, all of the sexual abuse cases arose out of them not being celibate.

St. Paul wasn’t arguing for celibacy. Admittedly, he said it was easier to be a member of a missionary group if you weren’t encumbered with a wife and children, but the CEO of many a corporation harbors the same feelings (though perhaps remains reluctant to voice them publicly).

Now where in 1st Corinthians does Paul talk about celibacy associated with missionary groups. Of course it is funny to think of celibacy if you want a “missionary position.” What Paul actually said was:

I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; But the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman or girl is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please her husband.

The rest of the article just goes on with the canard about celibacy coming about to prevent the clergy from giving church property as inheritance to their children. That it was all about property and not propriety.

From Karl Keating’s latest E-letter.

A few years ago the Vatican released the text of the Third Secret of Fatima. You may remember the cover story we ran in “This Rock.” The Third Secret concerns an attack on a “bishop dressed in white,” and the Vatican said the image referred to the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.

Some Traditionalist groups, which have acted as though Fatima were their own wholly-owned subsidiary, objected to the Vatican’s interpretation. They went so far as to claim that the Third Secret, as given by the Vatican, was bogus and that the real Third Secret has yet to be released.

Without quite saying it, they implied that the Holy Father and the prelates involved in the release of the Third Secret were liars inasmuch as they passed off as genuine a story that was quite false.

Now there is a new twist. Other Traditionalists are saying that the Third Secret, as given, is basically correct, but the “bishop dressed in white” is not to be understood as the Pope. That bishop really was Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of St. Pius X. (Lefebvre was excommunicated in 1988 when he consecrated four bishops without papal approval. He was not reconciled before his death.)

The people who are proposing this new interpretation say it explains why the Third Secret was kept secret for so long. Rome was embarrassed by Lefebvre’s opposition to Vatican II and would have felt in an awkward position if it became known that Fatima, the Pope’s favorite private revelation, gave an imprimatur to a prelate who was in opposition to the Pope.

Interesting idea, but it doesn’t wash.

The Third Secret was given long before Vatican II and long before Marcel Lefebvre was known to anyone outside of the African see that he administered. If this Traditionalist interpretation were correct, the Third Secret would have been considered innocuous–almost meaningless–in, say, 1960, and there would have been no reason for Pope John XXIII to have kept it secret after he was presented with the text.

But the Third Secret was kept secret for another forty years, which suggests that he and his successors understood it to have a clear meaning, one which, for whatever reasons, they thought should be withheld from public consumption.

I appreciate the Lefebvrists’ devotion to their leader, but they do their cause no favor by trying to shoehorn him into the Fatima revelation. In fact, they make their cause look a little ridiculous when they offer up their interpretation.

Still, I give them credit for cheekiness. I wonder whether someone at the other end of the spectrum will take a cue from them and will propose that the “bishop dressed in white” really was Joseph Bernardin.