The University of Notre Dame invited President Barack Obama and Catholics were stunned. Georgetown honored HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Catholics everywhere were horrified.

Meghan Myers, the Executive Director of the annual fundraiser for Catholic Charities, told LifeSiteNews that U.S. President Barack Obama was invited to keynote the Al Smith dinner by New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

And for the life of me I can’t see why Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s invitation to President Obama to the Al Smith dinner is any different. I know the Church isn’t honoring Obama but come on. [Creative Minority Report]

There is one difference in that Notre Dame officially honored President Obama with an honorary law degree. Other than that I am also scratching my head rather roughly in discerning why Cardinal Dolan thought this was a good idea. I am a fan of the Cardinal in many ways, but this decision I am certainly not a fan of.

We will of course hear “Jesus ate with sinners”, yes but he did not invite Pontius Pilate for a fundraising event. If this was some public event with both the President and the Cardinal attending this would not be a problem.

The ironies of this invite are rather extreme. According to the Obama Administration Catholic Charities is not a Catholic institution as defined by the mandate. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Catholic institution to be exempted from the mandate. That a man who voted for infanticide and has been a consistent anti-Catholic bigot is invited to a fundraising event for an institution he would tax/fine out of existence is hard to fathom.

I can understand efforts in the past to make this event a non-partisan affair and to reach out to both aisles as a worthy intention. Considering that Al Smith was a Democratic presidential nominee it is quite understandable that these fund raising dinners have invited Presidents and nominees. But the history of this event does not trump scandal and the non-invite of President Clinton certainly set a precedent. The militantly pro-abortion Obama recently promised not to “give any ground” on the mandate.

Now I am all for praying for our enemies and heaping coals of fire on their head.

Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

Inviting them as a prominent guest at a fundraising event – not so much. Though I pretty much would like to see Catholic institutions stop inviting politicians of any party. Surely we can do better in regards to inviting people actually living their faith. Heck I am not that happy with Gov. Romney’s invite, a man who thinks an attack on religious freedom “are not things that are part of my campaign.”

Al Smith’s presidential bid failed largely to anti-Catholic bigotry and this fact is only highlighted with the invite of an anti-Catholic bigot who is directly attacking the 1st Amendment.

Please you eminence make this problem go away like the shower scene in Dallas.

Back in May I wrote a post titled “Don’t feed the trolls?” regarding principally  Salvage the atheist commenter that haunts my blog.  My commenting policy has always been rather liberal and mostly will continue to be.  Though I have decided to finally ban Salvages comments.  No doubt some will get through at times, but future comments will all be deleted.

In some ways Salvage amused me in that if anything he only confirmed me in my faith.  Though it is a bad idea to let a single representative of a point of view stand for all even if they are somewhat representative of the so-called New Atheists.  The banning is due to the following reasons.

• Almost zero engagement.  Replies are pretty much always an exaggeration on the topic and make no effort to understand the countering-position.  You can understand an opponents positions without embracing it.
• Multiple streams of comments clogging up my comment boxes.  The spam like mentality is not an effort at a conversation, but just distraction.
• I don’t mind opposition to what I have to say or what the Church teaches.  It is very good to learn countering-arguments and to come to a better understanding of the issues involved.  I found instead that I pretty much stopped reading Salvage’s comments.

I see you’re deleting my posts / not letting me post anymore, that’s a win for me, if means that I finally presented a fact you simply could not handle, I guess the whole thing about the woman pro-creating herself to poverty and early death put it over the edge.

That’s the end game you’re trying to create with your so-called “pro-life” nonsense.

But you don’t care about that, you have a Heaven to get into.

You’re an idiot and a coward but hey, that’s theism!

Actually his comment only proved the point of what Archbishop Socrates Villegas said. The problem with poverty is not population. Poverty is nothing new and has been with us long before the present day. The poor have always been with us. But there is a vast difference between helping the poor and helping the poor to never exist in the first place. My wife is Filipino and I have seen first-hand the extreme poverty. But I have never looked on the face of the poor and thought – if only they didn’t exist. Maybe his reply was what broke the camels back in that this is a very serious subject for me and the Culture of Death attitude is not something I take likely and I just saw no positive fruits in future engagement.

So if Salvage considers he won – fine. Just not sure exactly what he won. But I am just another idiot and coward for theism -yeah.

Now I have been praying for Salvage daily and I will not be banning him from my prayer intentions. I hope the best for Salvage and his constant angry comments on my blog were not the best for him.

Dale Price posts:

To show you what the administration’s priorities really are, an employer that does not offer health insurance under Obamacare will pay a $2000 annual penalty for each worker.

But the penalty for failing to offer the pill is $100 per day per employee.

So, it’s $36,500 per year if you don’t cover an employee’s IUDs, but only $2000 if you don’t offer her anything *at all.*

Yeah, tell me how it’s all about taking care of the uninsured.

Cardinal Dolan so eloquently stated that the President had given us a year to figure out how to violate our consciences. Well that year is over as of today.

The problem with dystopian future fiction is it is not as fun as when you are living in a dystopian present.  The government forcing people to violate their consciences by the use of a hefty fine might have made good reading, but it sucks a an actuality.

“A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.” G. K. Chesterton.

Well President Obama made this a distinction without a difference where a hefty fine is called a tax as per the Supreme Court.

In Cardinal Dolan’s post today he ended by saying:

Over the course of the coming year, the effort to protect religious liberty and the freedom of conscience will continue.  In the end, this is not about bishops, it is not about Catholics, it is not about contraceptives.  It is about the ideals our nation was founded upon: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.  You can’t do much better than the First Amendment to the Constitution.  The founding fathers got it right.  The HHS mandate gets it wrong.  We are fighting to correct that wrong, in order to make sure that religious freedom continues for the generations to come after us.