Is God Calling You?

As I tell my sons, in order to be a priest, you have to be willing to cover up the sins of other priests. That's part of the charism of obedience to your bishop.

Remember, the laity are lightbulbs, completely replaceable. All that matters is the opinion of your fellow ordained men. You will work with the priests in your diocese for the rest of your life. Lay staff you will work with, at most, for ten years, often less. Lay staff at a parish are meant to protect the reputation of the pastor. They exist so there is a scapegoat when things go bad. 

Lay staff can be fired, but you are a priest forever, and the bishop can't get rid of you like he can laity. Use the laity as they were meant to be used. Wipe the opposing field with them. When you fire one, just refill the magazine with more of them. They don't mind. 

The parish and the diocese have no safety net for lay people, nor should they. The diocese and the parish exist for priests. When laity leave employment, they generally do not get unemployment insurance because many American dioceses don't pay into that governmental nonsense. Laity, you have the clothes on your back - be happy.

If you can look at yourself every morning, knowing these things, then you are cut out to be a priest.

UPDATE:

Yeah, like I said. Even Vatican employees echo these descriptions: "Workers have decided this action only after all their demands and requests over years were left unanswered," she said."

What If Israel Wanted Hamas to Attack?

Netanyahu gave Hamas over one billion dollars. Soros (who is Jewish) and other Jewish organizations, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, funded pro-Hamas demonstrations on American college campuses. When you look at the money flow, Hamas is arguably a Jewish-funded terrorist organization.

Think about that for a minute.

Now, Netanyahu explains the payments by saying he wanted to use Hamas as a foil against the Palestinian Liberation Organization. But that doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense. The PLO, along with all other internal political opponents, had been pretty much wiped out of Gaza by Hamas shortly after Hamas took power. 

Now, keep in mind Gaza's 2021 total fertility rate was 3.54 children born/woman. 

On Jan 22, 2024, the Times of Israel reported that Israel's Jewish fertility rate between 2018 and 2022, had dropped from 3.17 to 3.03 children per woman, according to the Taub Center. In Feb, 2024, Haaretz reported Israel's TFR was even lower, at an average of 2.08 children per woman. 

Gaza's 2020 population was 2 million and growing, the Palestinian population in the West Bank is 3 million and growing, while Israel's population was 7.2 million and falling in both raw and relative terms. Israel's population is 72% Jewish, 28% non-Jewish. According to the World Bank, Gaza's population growth rate is among the highest in the world: 3.4 percent in the West Bank and 4.0 percent in Gaza, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. A full 45 percent of the West Bank population are children under 15 years of age, compared with 50 percent in Gaza. Meanwhile, only 28% of Israel's population is under 15 years of age. The fastest growing Jewish segment in Israel is the Haredi, who are exempt from military service. 

Within a decade, this would bode very ill for Israel. So, what if Israel's whole purpose in paying off Hamas was precisely to provoke Hamas into an attack so Israel would have an excuse to wipe out the growing population in the Gaza Strip?  

Remember, Israeli intelligence, commonly agreed to be among the finest in the world, was apparently oblivious to the hundreds of miles of tunnels being constructed in Gaza with Israeli-approved funding. That same intelligence service deliberately moved two entire commando teams away from the Gaza border just days before the attack. The IDF itself admitted that it had never formulated plans to deal with a surprise attack. 

But, once Hamas attacked and produced the necessary body bags, Israel was suddenly able to justify an overwhelming military response. Did that response include a plan to kill civilians? Given Israeli military attitudes, it certainly is not beyond the pale.

"A booklet published by... the Israeli Army promotes killing civilians encountered in war. "In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good."

While this booklet was later withdrawn, the very fact that it was published by the IDF Central Command and made publicly available at all speaks volumes about what Israel was prepared to do to a non-Jewish civilian population. As NBC News reported in 2009, attacking and mis-treating non-Jewish civilians is not exactly a new thing for the IDF:

Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."...

...In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

America's Christians know that Muslims do not share Christian values, but they often forget that Jews do not share Christian values either. While American conservative news sites take great pains to point out Muslim theological incompatibilities, no one ever takes the time to dissect Jewish theological incompatibilities. It is a an easily verifiable fact that Jewish theology has long held non-Jews to be less than fully human. Any Jewish political or theological leader is certainly aware that Muslim theology requires all Jews to be slaughtered. So, why did Netanyahu fund Hamas while simultaneously removing troops from the border with Gaza, when Hamas' bloodthirsty terrorist  propensities for violence were well-known to all parties?

Jews and Muslims are cousins, both genetically and theologically. Their respective theologies do not share any substantial moral points with Christianity. Despite the 20th century invention of the myth of  Judeo-Christian morality, there is simply no more overlap between the Christian view of the human person and the Jewish view than there is between the Christian view and the Muslim view. Despite Protestant evangelical myths to the contrary, Judaism and Christianity share very little in common. 

Hamas is a blood-thirsty, genocidal organization of rapist-terrorists. But the IDF is not opposed to being a genocidal organization equally willing to kill non-Jewish civilians if there be need. Given the demographics in the Middle East, it might be very easy for Israeli authorities to see a need for genocide in the Gaza Strip. 

Update:

Israel destroyed Christian churches, murdered Christians, but America doesn't care. 

Israeli police officers beat up the families of Hamas hostages. Think about that. Why on earth would you beat up the families of the people being held by Hamas?