The first test of the Vatican’s new
Zucchetto missile system in an apparent success.
As I wrote some years ago the best part of Thanksgiving is now I know
of whom to give thanks to!
Te Deum
We praise Thee, O God: we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship Thee and the Father everlasting.
To Thee all Angels: to Thee the heavens and all the Powers therein.
To Thee the Cherubim and Seraphim: cry with unceasing voice:
Holy, Holy, Holy: Lord God of Hosts.
The heavens and the earth are full: of the majesty of Thy glory.
Thee the glorious choir: of the Apostles.
Thee the admirable company: of the Prophets.
Thee the white-robed army of Martyrs: praise.
Thee the Holy Church throughout all the world: doth acknowledge.
The Father of infinite Majesty.
Thine adorable, true: and only Son
Also the Holy Ghost: the Paraclete.
Thou art the King of Glory: O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son: of the Father.
Thou having taken upon Thee to deliver man: didst not abhor the
Virgin’s womb.
Thou having overcome the sting of death: didst open to believers the
kingdom of heaven.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God: in the glory of the Father.
We believe that Thou shalt come: to be our Judge.
We beseech Thee, therefore, help Thy servants: whom Thou has redeemed
with Thy precious Blood.
Make them to be numbered with Thy Saints: in glory everlasting.
Lord, save Thy people: and bless Thine inheritance.
Govern them: and lift them up forever.
Day by day: we bless Thee.
And we praise Thy name forever: and world without end.
Vouchsafe, O Lord, this day: to keep us without sin.
Have mercy on us, O Lord: have mercy on us.
Let Thy mercy, O Lord, be upon us: as we have hoped in Thee.
O Lord, in Thee have I hoped: let me never be confounded.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and your families.
Catholic
Freebies is a new site that has a weekly drawing to give
stuff away such as books and DVDs.
The people behind the excellent free Catholic choral music streaming
radio
station Choral Treasures have started The
Catholic Music Shop to help you to find great music by
category. I have listened to Choral Treasures for years and
have no doubt about the quality of their tastes.
Ian at Musings from a Catholic Book
Store has a post on the The History of Christmas Cards that is quite interesting.
Inside Catholic produced the above
video and as you would expect
pro-abortion types on YouTube totally miss the message and decide that
pro-lifers are saying that women are just boxes.
HELLO! I am a PERSON, not a fuggin’
box.
Good God, the anti-abortion
people really don’t think women are actual people, do they? In their
view, women are either things whose only use is to incubate babies or
too stupid to make their own decisions.
InsideCatholic has other examples of these laughable arguments from people who don’t seem to understand what
a metaphor is.
Though I can’t say I am exactly
surprised that the moral argument that you shouldn’t act on a doubtful
conscience would miss it’s mark in pro-abortion quarters.
From Diogenes comes this story.
From Maryland comes yet another
while-you-weren’t-paying-attention story about Catholic priests who
just happen to be women. You don’t need to read it (by now you could
probably write it yourself), but the lede raises an interesting point:
Priest Andrea Johnson of Annapolis,
dressed in a white robe, the red swirls on her sash rippling like
water, lifts a goblet of wine to offer Holy Communion at the Stony Run
Friends meetinghouse in North Baltimore on Nov. 12. Behind her, Deacon
Gloria Carpeneto of Catonsville offers grape juice and gluten-free rice
cakes to those on restricted diets.
So we’ve got priests who aren’t priests offering food-stuffs that
couldn’t be consecrated even if they were. Here’s my question: does
there exist a woman priest or a supporter of women’s ordination who
would discountenance the Eucharistic use of rice cakes and grape juice
as invalid? Does anyone in fact maintain the Church is wrong about
valid matter in the one instance and right about it in the other? If
so, it would be interesting to hear the arguments for the Church’s
authority in the case where she’s got it right.
Just more evidence that those who
dissent on women’s ordination have more on their plate than just this
one issue. It is never the case that they are fully with the
Church on everything except just this one item. Though of
course their theological idea of authority isn’t exactly very strong
and when you ask them about final authority they just look into the mirror of their makeup compact for it. But then again when you are
your own authority obedience becomes quite easy.
I wonder if they sang “I am the Rice
Cakes of life” for the communion hymn?
Last week there was a humorous exchange at the Bishop’s meeting over
an apparent typo in the draft of Faithful Citizenship where it said
“end
marriage” instead of “defend marriage.”
Though sometimes you have wonder. Last week Leon Suprenant posted
about the use of a book by a dissident theologian being
recommended by the USCCB’s marriage website at
www.foryourmarriage.com. A Daring Promise: A Spirituality of
Marriage By Richard R. Gaillardetz is promoted as
the book of the month. Gaillardetz is your typical dissident
theologian and Charles Curran admirer who apparently supports
homosexual
acts, women’s ordination, has a quite flawed view of the
structure of the early Church and a narrow view on papal infallibility
and the magisterium (though an expansive one on the sensus fidelium).
The book that is recommended is reviewed on the bishop’s site and says.
Several points may disturb some
readers. draws upon Pope
John Paul II’s theology of the body yet offers gentle criticism. After
admonishing couples to embrace church teaching on family planning
through sound understanding and surrender to the rigorous demands of
Christianity, he notes that a couple who still “cannot discover in
(magisterial teaching) God’s will” can follow their consciences. While
he says most “domestic churches” are constituted by marriage and
include children, he includes under that term other households.
Gee how could basically saying that if you
don’t want to follow the Church’s teaching on the grave sin of
contraception you just follow your badly formed conscience be
something to “disturb some readers?” Well I guess if you just
happen to be faithful to Church teaching and truth. Forget
about those “rigorous demands of Christianity” and for example “picking
up your cross daily.” If only Gaillardetz had been there for
Onan to explain to God how Onan’s was just following his conscience.
One Amazon reviewer noted about this book
“He comments on how he ran into a former classmate who was brilliant in
college and now she was married with kids and he couldn’t help but feel
sorry that she “sold out” and stopped using her God given mind.”
The comment section of the original post
has some detailed critiques of the writings of Richard
R. Gaillardetz.
In a new
post by Leon Suprenant.
Regarding our recent post on the U.S.
Bishops� new �For Your Marriage� website, we received the following
comment from marriage and family expert John F. Kippley regarding the
site�s recommendation of the work of Dr. Richard Gaillardetz:
�Thanks for directing me to the long analysis of the works of the
dissenting theologian, Dr. Richard Gaillardetz. It
appears that what he is doing is simply a repeat of what Fr. Curran and
others did in the Sixties . . . I thought the bishops were beyond that
stuff. . . . It is just crazy that the bishops would even mention works
by someone like Gaillardetz. . . .�
Another reader contacted the USCCB about the problematic site and
received this response:
�Dr. Gaillardetz is a well-known and respected Catholic theologian who
holds the chair in Catholic Studies at the University of Toledo. He has
been a guest presenter at a meeting of the Bishops� Committee on
Marriage and Family. I don�t know if you�ve read �A Daring Promise,�
but it presents a realistic�and hopeful�vision of married life in a way
that is accessible to average Catholics. It is an important book in its
field. I think our reviewer did justice to the book by identifying its
strengths as well as noting what might be disturbing.�
Despite this disappointing response, we have good reason to believe
that the shortcomings of the site are being addressed at this time, and
we�ll keep our readers posted regarding further developments.
I hope he is right, but I am not exactly
encouraged by the response. When you say dissenting from the
magisterium “might be disturbing” instead of saying that it is flat out wrong you are not exactly making your case.
If you have never heard the name
Jessica Beaumont, you are in good company. She is not a
politician, a lawyer, or a judge, but she is at the centre of a legal
proceeding that could well affect your right to quote the
Bible.
On October 27, the Canadian Human
Rights Tribunal issued a precedent-setting cease and desist order which
forbids Jessica Beaumont from posting certain Bible verses on the
Internet. If this 21-year old woman posts the wrong Bible
quotation online – even if it is on an American website – she could
face up to 5 years in prison.
Five years in prison for quoting
Scripture.
As the column notes Jessica
Beaumont does not have a website and was commenting on other sites
mostly in the United States. You can probably guess the Bible
references were to homosexuality. While she might have not made the
most charitable comments in connection with the Bible verses it seems
quite crazy that the so-called Human Rights Tribunal would pull two
scripture versus as evidence and so far every case involving Internet
content that has been brought to them has resulted in a conviction.
Hat tip a
class=”blog”
href=”http://www.fivefeetoffury.com/:entry:fivefeet-2007-11-21-0005/”
target=”_blank”>Kathy Shaidle
I
find it quite hard to believe the device that Amazon is selling as it’s
new e-book reader the Kindle. Three years in the making and
much delayed and they came up with a device obviously designed by a
committee where little interest was paid to people who would want an
e-book reader in the first place. Now if I wanted to design
an e-book reader that was sure to fail and possibly serve as a tax
write off like in The Producers these are some of the features I would
include.
- Charge $399 for the reader.
- Make it really ugly with
lots of angles. - Make it incompatible with
the ebook format you use to sell. - Not allow you to add your
own files such as PDF, docs, and text without going through the
companies site with a fee attached. - Charge you two bucks for
books available for free at Project Gutenberg. - Allow you to read from a group of blogs selected by the
company and then charge you $1 to $2 a month for each blog you
subscribe to. - Have EVDO available but not WI-FI.
- Charge you $14 dollars a month to view newspaper content
freely available on the web. - Add a crappy cover that won’t last long.
Oh wait that is the Kindle.
The e-book revolution has been
forecasted to occur for a number of years and a device like this is
sure to delay that day or set that back. The first person you
have to please with new technology is early adopters who are willing to
pay a higher price point for cutting edge technology. Sony’s
second generation ebook reader uses the same screen as the Kindle, is a
hundred dollars less, and allows you to add your own content. But sales
of the Sony Reader have been dismal. Amazon will surely have a much
larger library and the built-in EVDO is a good feature that allow’s
people to use the device without a computer. Early-adopters though
probably have a computer and surely want to be able to place their own
content on their own reader. I know that is a deal breaker
for someone like myself who otherwise would like a solid portable
reading device and the ability to get books from Amazon.com.
Yesterday Wesley J. Smith announced
that their would be big stem-cell
news tomorrow and boy was he right.
Two different scientific teams have
“reprogrammed” skin and other adult
cells and reverted them back to a pluripotent stem cell state. (The
altered cells are being called “Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells” or
iPS.) One of the researchers was James Thomson–the Wisconsin scientist
who first derived human stem cell lines. As he wrote in SCIENCE (no
link available):
The human iPS cells described here meet
the defining criteria we originally proposed for human ES cells, with
the significant exception that the iPS cells are not derived from
embryos.
You would hope that if this truly bears
out that it will finally put the ethical problems of using embryonic
stem-cells behind us. But then again the whole debate was
always more about ethics than it was about science in the first place.
Culture of death advocates were more thrilled at the idea
trying to define human life down then they were about cures in the
first place. During the debate they managed to move the goal
line of pregnancy from conception to implantation for their purposes.
This was quite hypocritical considering that they really
think that human life begins at birth. You get the feeling
ESCR advocates might feel about this story the way many Democrats do to
good news in Iraq.
Though this will turn the debate on
it’s head in the first place. Previously most pro-lifers
would use the fact that ESCR has resulted in zero cures while
adult stem-cells are being used in multiple treatments. I
always wished that it had been the immorality of using human life for
experimentation that should have been the primary and foremost
argument. The other argument is quite secondary and not
really focused on the real problem. Though it could be a
useful argument for those who don’t clearly see the beginning of human
life. Now with the development of having pluripotent
stem-cells from an ethical source this argument will certainly fall out
of disuse. Though of course we still have no real idea of
when if ever these cells will be of practical use. Just how many states
will now rush to fund this new type of research? Will
government leaders now be telling their citizens that they must fund
this or else they we will fall into scientific backwaters as they did
previously?
It was good to see the inventor of
cloning give up and turn to more promising methods.
Previously the research was focused into two area.
Human cloning to develop the embryonic cells that would match
the person to be cured and then going on to use these cells to develop
cures. What has just happened is that one area was eliminated
where now more time, and energy could be devoted to the other
problem. So many lies were told by so many to develop
so-called reproductive human cloning and again they turned mainly
towards rhetoric and not science to make their case. They
never wanted to mention that without human cloning ESCR up to that
point had been a dead end that was more likely to result in tumors than
cures. That these cures required human cannibalism of our own
clones to be effective.
The reality is of course that ESCR
promoters will continue to promote it and say that we must continue
this research. Even if more evidence shows that the new
technique is equal to stem-cells acquired by human embryo’s I doubt if
it will curtail their advocacy. Once again it will be back to
fighting within the public sphere as to whether we can
finally shut down this human sacrifice on the altars of science.