“Cardinal Paul Newman” … “pre-empted many of the modernising reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.”
This is a picture from the latest women’s “ordination” that occurred on Apr 20th in California in an undisclosed location.
As Orate Frates points out “If excommunication was not such a serious matter the photo would be laughable.”
I do think that their croziers really point out a reality. These croziers that seem to be taken from a picket fence and then band-sawed into form speaks truly. These two-dimensional staffs that look more like a prop in a children’s stage play than a real bishop’s crozier is quite an accurate comparison. The reality of women’s ordination is that they are play-acting regardless of what they think will happen. The two-dimensional staffs also represent the 2D view in which they see the priesthood. For the women’s ordination movement priesthood is all about power and being part of a power structure. Service to Christ is something that never makes it into their press releases. Their 2D view does not have the humility to submit to Christ and to dive deeper into the theology of why Christ only chose men as his Apostles. To try to understand this in the false light of equality is to say that everybody must be the same part of the Body of Christ or we are unequal. The Church in her humility says this was willed by Christ and we do not have the authority to change this. The women’s ordination movement says that they have the authority to say that it does and that it can even trump the Pope. I wonder how long it will be until they elect their own pope? Or is it as in the case of all dissidents is that each one is his own pope? One of the things that annoys me the most about them is ironically how they denigrate women in the Church. Their view basically says that the role of women in the Church since the beginning has not been all that important and that only with women priest’s is equality created. That I guess somehow St. Teresa of Avila a Doctor of the Church is less equal than her friend St. John of the Cross also a Doctor of the Church since he was a priest.
This so-called movement likes to frame itself in bravery as going against the hierarchy and acting strongly. Yet they have “ordinations” on riverboats and unannounced locations. The martyrs in proclaiming Christ and reforming the Church were willing to lay down their lives for Christ and his Church. The women’s ordination movement goes into hiding from their local ordinary.
Please pray for these women who have incurred excommunication that they will repent and subsequently lead lives of holiness building within the Body of Christ.
Updated: In Philadelphia two women were “ordained” in a Synagogue (second time that has happened I believe).
Fresen, sitting at DiFranco’s dining room table, tried to reassure her that “excommunication only takes effect if you let it.”
I will try that next time I am pulled over by the police. “No officer I will not let this ticket take effect on me.”
“Nothing can put you out of the church,” Fresen said. “Once you are baptized, you are baptized into Christ.”
Of course excommunication does not remove you from the Church. But if you die in mortal sin baptized or not you will go to Hell. We can with our freewill remove ourselves from the effects of grace and lose sanctifying grace.
Fresen insists there is an underground of support for female clergy, even among the hierarchy. When a South African bishop she knew learned of her ordination to priesthood, she said, he not only blessed her “but asked me to bless him” as well.
No doubt there are underground supporters in the hierarchy and they are even more cowardly than the women if they hide their convictions.
I am producing a movie on Ron Howards family. In the movie based on my research I say his father was a drug pusher and his mother is a prostitute and that Ron Howard engages in S&M. All of the portrayal of Ron Howard and his family in my movie and the prequel I am doing later will be highly negative. I will present the Howard family as something totally based on lies and question whether his parents really were his parents in the first place. I will also attack his fans for being foolish enough to be a fan of him considering his background. My hero will follow clues that prove this evidence
Now of course this is just a movie so people should not be upset about my portrayal of the Howard family at all. It is just entertainment people – only a fool would take my claims seriously.
Some jerk named Phill Donahue, president of the Howard League for Religious and Civil Rights has been making claims about me that are simply incorrect.
Let me be clear: neither I nor my film “Ron Howard’s family are Demons” is anti-Howard. And let me be a little controversial: I believe the Howards, including most in the hierarchy of their fan club, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery,
Mr. Phill Donohue’s booklet accuses us of lying when our movie trailer says the Howard’s ordered a brutal massacre of drug buyers and prostitutes. It would be a lie if we had ever suggested our movie is anything other than a work of fiction (if it were a documentary, our talk of massacres would have referenced the Mafia).
So come on people – get a life. The claims in the movie are simply fiction and so should not bother you at all. Next I will be doing a movie on the Dahla Lama and his work with the child porn industry another exciting fictional thriller.
[Source]
One of the photos shows Karol Wojtyla, then the archbishop of Krakow, wearing a T-shirt, shorts and a red bandana scarf. An enormous fish is lying at his feet. Another photo depicts Wojtyla having a meal in front of his tent.
The photos were taken during a summer trip that the future pope took with his friends from the university. They slept in tents, went kayaking, fishing, contemplated nature and discussed such issues as love, responsibility and morality.
Andrea Tornielli, an expert on Vatican told Il Giornale that till now the existence of the photos was kept secret and they have never been publicly displayed till now. Soon the unknown photos of John Paul II will be published in a book on marriied life written by Wojtyla in 1968. [reference]
Make you nominations for the 2009 Cannonball Awards. This is the 2nd year of the Crescat awards and as always we get hilarious awards sections and an effort to honor the lesser known bloggers such as the category “BEST BLOG BY A RELIGIOUS WHOSE NOT FR.Z”
There are not exactly too many books that could be subscribed as a ecclesiastical thriller. The new book by Piers Paul Read called “The Death of a Pope” is certainly part of that small genre, but not limited by that.
The novel starts with a trial for a laicized priest who had been working for an international Catholic charity and had been arrested for trying to buy nerve agent. The plot builds from there in the last weeks of Pope John Paul II’s life and it follows a serious threat as you might expect from the thriller genre. The main characters follow a range mainly along a faithful Catholic and lapsed/liberal Catholic divide that includes a Cardinal, priests, a reporter, and various personnel from security agencies.
The split between faithful and less than faithful Catholics is part of the plot of the book and some of the dialogue concerns hot issues of the day such as condom use, women priests, etc. Though the book never lapses into just a vehicle for apologetics that is artificial and the issues raised are totally consistent with the plot. One thing I liked though is that the more liberal or fallen away Catholic characters were not described as unlikable stereotypes. They were treated as real people as where all the characters in the book. As you would expect from a novel published by Ignatius Press the sympathy of the book is certainly in an Orthodox Catholic direction – but again I liked it focusing on plot and characters and not making the novel a soapbox which is always a disastrous decision.
“The Death of a Pope” was a thoroughly satisfying read from the start to the end and totally satisfying how the plot resolves. While it is an enjoyable read for Catholics, the novel is quite well written and should see a large audience. The novel will be available on May 15th and has been well received by several Catholic novelists.
Via a reader
We the students of the University of Notre Dame have called for a Rosary Crusade in response to the recent announcement of the honoring of President Obama on our campus. During the Rosary Crusade, which began on Wednesday of Holy Week and will last until Sunday May 17th (the day of President Obama’s commencement address at ND), we will be praying the Rosary each day for the following three intentions:
1) The conversion of heart of President Obama regarding the sanctity of life.
2) For the Catholic character of the University of Notre Dame.
3) For a greater respect for the dignity of human life from conception until natural death around the world.
We truly believe we can have 1,000,000 Rosaries prayed by May 17th, but we need people to know about our campaign in order for that to happen. We at Notre Dame realize that the scandal given by the honoring of President Obama extends much further than the Notre Dame campus and we recognize that we, the students, have been given the great opportunity to be leaders (at least for this small portion of time) in the Catholic Pro-life movement around the world. Please encourage your readers to join with us in praying the Rosary for these intentions and logging the number of Rosaries they have prayed on our website at http://ndresponse.com/counter/ . Facebook users are encouraged to join our event. If any good is going to come from this situation, that good will be motivated and brought about by prayer, especially the prayer of the Rosary.
No mission or cause is too great for God, least of all the cause of those who are the weakest amongst us. We trust Our Lady will watch over us and recommend our prayers to Her Beloved Son.
Thomas at American Papist was exactly right yesterday when he said that Bishop Carlson would be announced today as the new Archbishop of St. Louis.
St. Louis Catholic has some details on the Bishop and will be doing more analysis later.
American Papist has a couple of posts on the subject and no doubt will be providing more coverage especially with the press conference occurring latter on this morning.
The nicely revamped Archdiocese of Saint Louis website also has good information and you can follow the Archdiocese on Twitter.
Like Archbishop Burke who he succeeds he is also a canon lawyer and not a Bishop afraid to speak out about pro-abortion Catholic politicians. All evidence points to the fact that the people of St. Louis have got themselves another solid bishop.
When the Prince presents the Duchess of Cornwall to Benedict XVI as his wife for the first time, he will receive a gift that may strike an unwelcome chord: a “luxury facsimile” of the 1530 appeal by English peers to Pope Clement VII asking for the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
It is intended as a gesture to help to heal five centuries of schism between Rome and the Church of England, of which the Prince will one day be the head. It is also a reminder of the causes of the rift and of the Vatican’s stern views on divorce.
Only problem is that the story from the Guardian is totally false. As the Vatican Press Office wrote “This news is completely untrue and has no basis whatsoever in fact.
I am glad the Vatican Press Office requested a retraction so quickly, thought it has not yet been retracted. A copy of the letter signed by Fr. Federico Lombardi S.J. available here.
The Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University, and a Jesuit priest, says the guidelines “will not satisfy those who want no embryonic stem cell research,” (including the Catholic Church) although “they do show the administration takes seriously the need for ethical guidelines for scientific research.”
Reese was particularly pleased, by “strong rules for informed consent,” and that “research will be limited to stem cell created from embryos that would have been destroyed anyway because they are no longer needed for (in vitro fertilization) purposes.” These rules match up with several of the criteria that Reese mentioned in March as ones he hoped to see when Obama lifted the research restrictions.[reference]
When you kill one innocent person you do not give a whit for ethical guidelines – you only care to show that you pretend to have such a scruple. Say for example there was a decision that a 100 prisoners were possibly slated to be harvested for their organs so as to save plenty of other people. Then they decided to restrict this to only five prisoners – would you say they had an ethical guideline? To be ethical is not to restrict the evil you do – but not to do any evil in the first place.
Of course there is one major problem with all the people in both sides of the political aisle who have talked about restricting embryonic stem-call research to use so-called leftover embryos from IVF. If there is every an actual breakthrough in ESCR then they will need a supply of embryos much larger than this to supply the demand because of tissue match problems and problems getting permission from the parents. So this type of “ethical” rule would be quickly tossed aside with such an event. To pretend that this is any kind of ethical restriction is a lie – it is purely political and will change in the future if they want it to. Fr. Reese is once again a useful idiot for the most pro-abortion administration ever.
Another thing is that that this is further cover for politicians. Outside of federal funding there are pretty much zero restrictions for other researchers. They can continue to attempt to clone embryos and experiment with embryos from other sources. There are no restrictions on them fertilizing eggs and creating their own embryos for experimentation.