The Thomas Mirror

I just had a long conversation with a good friend about the new revelations coming out of Rome. Apparently, Pope Benedict XVI received a fully documented report on one or more homosexual rings of bishops and/or cardinals operating within the Vatican. These homosexual rings were affecting Vatican policy and praxis. According to the reports, Benedict resigned, in part, because he was overwhelmed by the extraordinary evil these homosexual rings represented.

My friend was concerned.

"Which priest," asked my friend, "can we trust anymore? How can a sodomite priest in a state of mortal sin actually pretend to give me a sacrament? How can I take the Body and Blood of Christ from a pervert?"

Good questions.
There are many aspects to the answer.

To the first question, the answer is "None of them. You can't trust any priest not to be a pervert, you can't trust any man to be as holy as he is held out to be. Ordination does NOT guarantee holiness, it does not protect a man against sinning. In fact, it makes him open to MORE temptations, more opportunity for sin, precisely because he becomes satan's special target by the fact of his ordination."

"But, to answer the second question, we have to realize that our trust is in the sacrament, not in the priest. I am saved by the sacraments, not by the priest. The sins of the priest are not communicated to the Body of Christ nor to me. He cannot sin for me, he cannot give me his sin or take away my grace, and he certainly can do nothing to God, present in every one of the sacraments. His sin is his own, to clutch to his breast as he descends into the horrors of hell. An active sodomite commits the most grievous sin of sacrilege when he consecrates the Eucharist or gives absolution. But his sin of sacrilege does not change the holiness of my encounter with Christ."

And as I spoke with my friend, it occured to me that we are all the Apostle Thomas now.

Remember Thomas?
He had lived for years with his friends, the apostles, all following Christ around Galilee, listening to Him, watching Him. He knew the kind of men his friends were. Jesus called His apostles many things, and almost never did He call them nice things.

When these men told Thomas, "We have seen the risen Christ!", Thomas recalled all of this.
He knew these men.
He had lived with them.
He knew the kind of men they were.

So when they told him this, Thomas responded in a reasonable way.
"Yeah, I don't believe you festering idiots, you cowards."

And how did Christ respond?

"Thomas, come and put your fingers in my side. See? It really is me.
Yes, I know the people who told you I was risen are cowards and idiots. I don't disagree with you. You should have believed them anyway. Not because THEY are trustworthy. They aren't. But because you knew ME."

"Thomas, you walked with Me.
You knew I could do it.
You knew I had the power to do it.
Yeah, they are idiots, but you should have trusted them because you trusted ME."

I don't trust that the priest is holy.
In fact, there have been occasions when, given a choice of priests, I have deliberately chosen to go to confession to the priest who had been unjust to me, because I knew I had to trust Christ, not the priest.

We encounter Christ in the sacraments, not the priest.
And insofar as we encounter the priest in the sacrament, the priest has injected himself into a relationship he has no business in. The priest is superfluous, unimportant, essential only in the sense that God chooses to deliver Himself to me through the priest.

The sacraments matter.
The priest, and whatever sins he commited, do not.

Oh, yes, he shouldn't have committed those sins.
Absolutely the Church should be cleansed of the sodomites - you'll get no disagreement from me on that. It is a sin for a bishop to ordain even a non-active homosexual.

But, ultimately, the Church is about my relationship with Christ via the sacraments. The priest is the janitor in the house of God. His service is important, but the house doesn't exist to keep the janitor employed. The house exists for me to meet and live with my Spouse, the living Christ.

We are not meant to look through a mirror, darkly.
We must look past the idiots, even the idiots in our morning mirrors, so that we can gaze upon the face of God.

Hilarious

Remember the Oath of Fidelity to the Magisterium that all Catholic theology professors are supposed to make, but almost none ever do?

Remember how strongly the bishops enforced that rule (cough, cough, cough)?

Well, it looks like the cardinals will get to try it out for themselves. The Pope is making some changes to the ritual for the installation of a new Pope:

One of the most visual changes, he said, would be the restoration of the public “act of obedience” in which each cardinal present at the pope’s inaugural Mass comes forward and offers his allegiance.

Why is it that when I read this, I can't stop laughing?

Peoria's Pea-brain Protocol

I was recently asked about the role of emergency contraception in cases of rape. Can a Catholic accept such a thing? The answer is a resounding "NO!", although the USCCB is rather confused on the issue.

As CatholicCulture.com website says:

Here's what the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Institutions (ERDs) from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops say about it:

"A female who has been raped should be able to defend herself against a potential conception from the sexual assault. If, after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already, she may be treated with medications that would prevent ovulation, sperm capacitation, or fertilization. It is not permissible, however, to initiate or to recommend treatments that have as their purpose or direct effect the removal, destruction, or interference with the implantation of a fertilized ovum."

A hospital in the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, developed a protocol for Catholic hospitals that face this situation. Called (appropriately enough) the Peoria Protocol, it was put together by the staff at OSF St. Francis Medical Center and theologians in the diocese working under then-Bishop John J. Myers. 

According to this theory, then, since the woman hasn't ovulated yet, the man's sperm can be considered an attacker, like bacteria. Since you can take prophylactic antibiotics, you can take anti-spermicide or anti-ovulatory agents. According to this theory, it isn't considered contraception since the sperm is in "attack" mode - I guess they have little green berets on or something.

The whole argument is absurd, and the monsignor who was instrumental in developing it (I knew him and worked with him on the chancery staff a few years after the protocol was developed), apparently neglected to consider the theology involved.

The only way a human life comes into existence is through God creating and infusing a human soul. If He doesn't do that, it doesn't matter how many sperm make it to the egg - no fertilization, no new life, will exist. Human life is the combination of soul and body. No soul, no human life, no embryonic growth, no way to implant, yada, yada, yada.

Now consider what would happen if no spermicide or anti-ovulatory agent is used and God never got around to creating and infusing the human soul. What would be the result? There would be no result. The sperm would do no harm to the woman. None. They would just curl up, die and disappear. They might make it to the egg, but without a human soul, what difference would that make? None. The sperm couldn't fertilize the egg in such a way that a new human life would appear. 

So, you can certainly say the rapist or whoever is attacking the woman. You can certainly try to prevent that attack. But you can NEVER say the sperm is attacking anything, because the sperm is not capable of causing any damage. The worst it does, in conjunction with God, is cause a human life to begin.

And if we're going to call the creation of a new human soul and a new human life an attack, then God is a serial rapist.

So, the Peoria protocol is complete crap, as I said. Human life is always a gift, unless you get in front of this particular monsignor and the bishops foolish enough to follow him, in which case human life is sometimes the combination of an embryo and God gang-raping a woman. 

But this is what passes for high-falutin' theological scholarship nowadays, don'tcha'know.

Sauce for the Gander

Here's a shocker.
More men then women report being subject to domestic violence.
Yes, you read that correctly.

The CDC 2012 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that each year as many men as women are victims of intimate-partner physical violence (Tables 4.1, 4.2 at p. 41). Per capita, more men than women each year are victims of psychological aggression. (see Tables 4.9, 4.10 at p. 46).

Prevalence Among Women (p. 39) More than one-third of women in the United States (35.6% or approximately 42.4 million) have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime (Table 4.1)

Prevalence Among Men (p. 39)Nearly half (45.3%) of American Indian or Alaska Native men and almost 4 out of every 10 Black and multiracial non-Hispanic men (38.6% and 39.3%, respectively) in the United States reported experiencing rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime (Table 4.4).

The Mayo Clinic recognizes the problem. Women are more likely to be "domestic terrorists".

The findings revealed just as many women as men could also be classed as abusive, coupled with controlling behavior with serious levels of threats, intimidation, and physical violence. Women were more likely to verbally and physically aggressive to their partners than men. “This study found that women demonstrated a desire to control their partners and were more likely to use physical aggression than men. “It wasn’t just pushing and shoving,” said Bates, Medical Xpress reported. Some of the survey respondents circled boxes for things like beating up, kicking, and even threatening to use a weapon. (emphasis added)

Time Magazine recognizes the problem.

Family and intimate relationships—the one area feminists often identify as a key battleground in the war on women—are also an area in which women are most likely to be violent, and not just in response to male aggression but toward children, elders, female relatives or partners, and non-violent men, according to a study published in the Journal of Family Violence....

...sociologists Murray Straus and Richard Gelles of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire found that women were just as likely as men to report hitting a spouse and men were just as likely as women to report getting hit. The researchers initially assumed that, at least in cases of mutual violence, the women were defending themselves or retaliating. But when subsequent surveys asked who struck first, it turned out that women were as likely as men to initiate violence—a finding confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence.

So, now that women are combat-ready, why is everyone is making such a stink about renewing the Violence Against Women Act? And if combat-ready women need this kind of a law, then where is the Violence Against Men Act?

Update:

Extensive Research: Women Initiate Domestic Violence More than Men, Men Under-report It.

1. “Analyzing data gathered from 11,370 respondents, researchers found that “half of [violent relationships] were reciprocally violent. In non-reciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more that 70% of the cases.”

Are We Due For A Council?

Given that the next pope will almost certainly not be personally associated with the Vatican Council II, I raised the question of whether the next pope might lead us into a council.

The question is not purely speculative. Let's take a look at the numbers.

Council	EndYear (AD)	Length (weeks)	Interval (Years)
1st Council of Nicaea	325	4
1st Constantinople	381	8	56
Ephesus	431	6	50
Council of Chalcedon	451	4	20
2nd Constantinople	553	4	102
3rd Constantinople	681	44	128
2nd Nicaea	787	8	106
4th Constantinople	870	20	83
1st Lateran	1123	4	253
2nd Lateran	1139	2	16
3rd Lateran	1179	2	40
4th Lateran	1215	3	36
1st Lyons	1245	3	30
2nd Lyons	1274	10	29
Vienne	1312	30	38
Constance	1418	130	106
Basel-Ferrerra-Florence	1445	728	27
5th Lateran	1517	216	72
Trent	1563	936	46
1st Vatican	1870	44	307
2nd Vatican	1965	164	95
		Average	81

People frequently say that the "average time between councils" is about a century, but this is highly misleading. In order to get this number, they use what is called the "arithmetic mean" to calculate what most people think of as the "average" of the intervals between the councils.

But the arithmetic mean or average is only appropriate to use in a data set that has no outliers, no data that is significantly above or below the norm. As can be easily seen, this data set has two ENORMOUS outliers - the distance between the Councils of 4th Constantinople and 2nd Lateran (253 years), and the distance between Trent and the 1st Vatican Council (307 years). I've highlighted those two intervals in red in the data set. Every other interval is at least half the 253 years between , several are only a quarter of that interval, three are only around 10% of that interval. Those two big gaps, totaling 560 years out of 2000, are really skewing the data.

So what do we do to fix this?
We use the geometric mean. As ehow says:

Statisticians use arithmetic means to represent data with no significant outliers. This type of mean is good for representing average temperatures, because all the temperatures for January 22 in Chicago will be between -50 and 50 degrees F. A temperature of 10,000 degrees F is just not going to happen. Things like batting averages and average race car speeds are also represented well using arithmetic means.

Geometric means are used in cases where the differences among data points are logarithmic or vary by multiples of 10. Biologists use geometric means to describe the sizes of bacterial populations, which can be 20 organisms one day and 20,000 the next. Economists can use geometric means to describe income distributions. You and most of your neighbors might make around $65,000 per year, but what if the guy up on the hill makes $65 million per year? The arithmetic mean of the income in your neighborhood would be misleading here, so a geometric mean would be more suitable. (emphasis added)

That's exactly the situation we have here.  About one-quarter of the values in the data set vary by a factor of ten from the largest value in the data set. So, the arithmetic mean is really not the appropriate way to calculate this, the geometric mean is. When we apply the geometric mean, we find the interval between councils is actually about 60 years (59.806, if you want it to 3 decimal places).

Pope Benedict is leaving office on Feb 28, 2013, shortly after the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II (11 Oct 1962). Of the 21 ecumenical councils of the Church, 12 of them occurred less than 60 years after the previous council, 11 of them (just over half) occurred within 50 years of the previous council. This matches pretty well with what the geometric mean tells us.

In other words, we have exhausted the time interval that the Church has typically had between councils. Statistically speaking, we are definitely due for another council.

This, of course, raises a second question: if another council is called, how long will it last?

I've normalized the length of the councils by expressing the length in weeks, instead of the more common months and years. This makes it easier to compare the various council lengths.

The printing press was invented in 1453. Ignoring Vatican I, which was invaded by the Italian army and forced to an early end, no council in the last 500 years has lasted less than 130 weeks - that's over two years in session. Apparently, when it is easier to record the council, the council length extends to accommodate that technological advance.

Alternatively, you might argue that after the Pope voluntarily left office in 1415, the length of councils suddenly jumped to a new and sustained high. Is this causation or merely correlation? I don't know.

But, putting that aside, why would a council be called? There are a lot of reasons. Demographic winter now affects about 40% of the countries in the world, and nearly all the richest, most technologically advanced countries. Islam is a continuing threat. Growing rates of apostasy in the richest countries are a plague on all Christianity. There are the internal problems posed by the SSPX, the appropriate way to handle the new Anglican Ordinariate, the problem of creating a better coordinated response to corruption within the hierarchy. There are doctrinal problems created by the post-VC II catechetical crisis, and the problem of Modernism, which Vatican I was intended to address, but which has never really received adequate treatment.

Do any of these problems rise to the level that requires an ecumenical council? That's hard to say. We seem to be living in a new era. Never before has a Pope left office for reasons of poor health. If the Pope could leave office for a reason never before given, a council might be called for a reason never before deemed important enough to do so. I don't know the answers. I'm just raising the questions.

So, there you have it.
We might not just get a new pope, but a shiny new council to go with him.

Something Old, Something New

Benedict's resignation has set the Catholic (and non-Catholic world) a-twirl. Here, in no particular order are some thoughts to consider as Benedict's two-week notice runs its course.

1) Whether for good or ill, the two-week notice has given the cardinals a running start on electing a successor. This is certainly going to be at the top of a voting cardinal's conversation starters when he communicates with his confreres before they enter into the external silence of the conclave. Will this time period be useful in speeding the process along or will it create and harden voting blocs, making the process more difficult?
We haven't done this in 600 years, so anybody's guess is good on that subject.

2) Like anyone else, cardinals vote their issues. That is, they talk amongst themselves about the problems each one has, and each takes notice of how common any particular problem is amongst the others. Then they consider who among them is best equipped to handle whatever the most common problems are.

From where I'm sitting, the Church faces two pressing and inter-related problems: the demographic winter that most countries have now clearly entered and the problem of Islam. Since most Islamic countries have had decreasing fertility, but still show fertility rates in the 2.5-4.0 range, it is clear that world-wide Islamic populations will have a demographic momentum that most advanced countries no longer have. Meanwhile, most technologically advanced countries are slowly (or not so slowly) aging out.

Japan is actually losing population each year. It is living the future of the rest of the world. Italy has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. 25% of the conclave cardinals are Italian.

Demography might not have been on the plate a decade ago, but it certainly is now. Similarly, Islam can no longer be dismissed as a passing fad. More and more cardinals will be remarking on these two issues to one another. That is going to affect the voting.

Within the last century, three Popes were clearly chosen in order to deal with specific geographic problems: Pope Pius XII vs. the Nazis, Pope John Paul II vs. Communism, Pope Benedict XVI and Europe. Will the new pope be a member of that group? Once he is elected, a study of his background will yield an answer to that question.

3) Vatican II continues to recede into the rearview mirror. Pope Benedict XVI was the last pope who had a personal stake in that particular council. The next pope, whoever he is, won't be personally or emotionally attached to it, at least not to the extent that a peritus like Benedict was. I've long argued that Vatican II is a rather unimportant council in the grand scheme of things, and that it is destined to be remembered as Fourth Constantinople or Fifth Lateran is - that is, in another century or so, it won't be remembered at all because its "reforms" turned out to be fairly useless. The next pope will put it quietly to bed.

That leaves a host of unresolved problems, of course. The SSPX, the Novus Ordo liturgy, the catechetics crash, the Anglican Ordinariate, these are all things that require greater consideration.

If you throw out the unusual interval between the Council of Trent and Vatican I, ecumenical councils are generally separated by a period of about 50 years. Technically we are overdue for another general council.  Are we likely to get one with the next pope? It seems unlikely, but then, Vatican II wasn't exactly on anyone's radar screen when John XXIII swept into office.

The Church seems to do best when there's a council once every couple of generations. It gives all the bishops a chance to sit down and really consider what's going on in their respective dioceses, get a little perspective on the world.

We haven't had a papal resignation in 600 years. In the entire history of the Church, there hasn't been more than a handful of such resignations. Is the resignation good or bad? That I can't say. All I can do is recall a verse:

"Look", says the Lord, "I am doing something new."

Yes.
Yes, indeed.

It Doesn't Take A Weatherman

As our current American administration used to say, it doesn't take a weatherman to know the wind is changing.

The last Pope to resign did so in 1415 to end the Great Western Schism, when three different men were all claiming the papacy. Two were anti-Popes, so the real one resigned in order to allow the Council of Constance to resolve what had become an extremely nasty political situation.

That is, historically, the only real reason a Pope has ever resigned: to resolve a really nasty problem somewhere. Now, maybe this time is different.

Maybe.
But maybe not.

When Germany was at the height of its power in 1939, the man who was elected Pope had been papal nuncio to Germany for ten years. He understood the political situation in Germany as well as anyone alive. He was also instrumental in undermining Nazi authority and influence.

When the Soviet Union was at the height of its power, the Church elected a Pope who had lived under both Nazi and Soviet domination. Pope John Paul II (Cardinal Kaqrol Wojtyla) was the first non-Italian in four hundred years and the only Polish citizen ever to be elected to the papacy. He understood the Soviet Union as well as anyone alive. He, Reagan and Thatcher helped engineer the destruction of the Soviets.

Between 2004 and 2007, Europe's Eurozone reached its height as several former Soviet satellites entered the union and joined the Euro. As Europe rocketed forward economically, the conclave elected the first German pope in centuries. Only nine of previous 266 Popes could claim German heritage. Hadrian IV (1522-1523) hailed from Holland, Stephen IX (1057-1058) from the French-German Lorraine region, and Victor II (1055-1057), was a Swabian. Again, the pick proved prescient. Cardinal Ratzinger took the name Benedict. The conclave turned out to have chosen a man with a superb understanding of Germany, Europe's most important partner, to stand at the helm of the Church as the European Union began its current course of self-destruction.

In short, in three out of the last six elections during the course of the last century, the cardinals have correctly predicted where the next world crisis would take place.

It would appear that the current major threat is Islam. As has been noted elsewhere, Muslim oil producing nations are probably at the peak of their power right now, as oil revenues are likely to start dropping with the invention of fracking and the discovery of shale oil reserves world-wide.

If the next Pope hails from a Muslim nation, if the next Pope understands and has lived under Islam for a significant period of his life, his election may signal a significant shift in the world's power equations.

Islam, this may be the end for you.

Learning To Swim in Ice Water

Reading this essay, I was struck by the hypocrisy of it all.
These teachers cling bitterly to the gun-free zones, their religion.
This essay is the difference between lefties and conservatives.

It is the difference between a pet owner and a parent.

First, notice this man has a pet, he has no children.
Why?

Because pets never grow up, pets never learn enough to be mature and "wild", pets are always subject to the benevolent dictatorship of the master, pets must have neutered sex, pets can never be free.

Why is the country moving to the left?

Perhaps because America has four times as many pet owners as parents.
Whether it is a cause,  a result or merely a correlation, the connection is significant.
Parents raise their children with the sure knowledge that these children will one day be independent, thinking adults, mature enough to make their own decisions, live their own lives. Parents who have children that may never gain such independence, due to physical or mental disabilities, experience sorrow and loss as a result of that knowledge. Parents don't want pet children, they want adults who were once their children.

Parents teach their children about violence because the world is a place of violence.
The classroom is a mirror of the world.
The classroom is a place of violence.

Always has been.

Teachers do violence to the ideas that the students carry into the classroom.
There is no other way to teach.

Teachers are fine with violence, the idea of violence.
As long as it is TEACHERS who are wreaking the violence upon the student.

This particular instructor is apparently upset by the idea that teachers aren't the omnipotent, benevolent dictators he thought they were. He isn't what he thought he was. He doesn't want his illusion shattered.

He is the only adult in the room, everyone else is a child.
He is the only one who can be counted on not to throw a tantrum, his students cannot be so trusted.
It is HIS religion that must be protected, and to hell with anyone else's.

Islam has suicide bomb jockeys, and this guy is their soulmate, willing to blow up the classroom by leaving rather than have actual discussions with other actual adults.

He doesn't want his students to teach him about the world by tracking bits of it in.
He doesn't want reality tracking into his classroom, he wants the Ivory Tower (tm).

Yes.
And people in hell want ice water.
Welcome to the Real, kid.

Notre Dame Zombies

Here's a question for the moral theologians among you.
"there is much concern over the direction Notre Dame has taken, especially with the diminishing number of Catholic faculty as well as the scandalous honoring of President Barack Obama in 2009, "

Let's say there were a pro-abort politician out there who had a policy on cleaning up the number of dead cats on the street. I *LOVED* the dead cat policy.

I want to donate to make sure the pro-abort politician is elected. I don't like his pro-abort policies, but I'm fascinated with his dead cat policy. I want to make a substantial donation: $200,000. But I don't have that kind of money.

So, I took out a $200,000 loan gave it all to the pro-abort politician, and spent the next 20 years of my life working to repay the loan.

Formal cooperation in evil occurs when the organization freely and directly participates in the objectionable action of another agent and/or shares in the object of that agent’s intention, either for its own sake or as a means to some other goal.

Because of the loan, I have now essentially dedicated my life's work to making sure the pro-abort politician can accomplish his goals. Is that moral?

How is a Notre Dame student, who gives ND at least $200,000 or more via tuition, different?

Homosexuality and Sharia

Riddle me this: how is homosexuality like being Muslim?
Answer: Neither one allows you to convert away.

In Islam, those who commit apostasy can be legally killed by anyone. 
Homosexuals deny that anyone can stop being homosexual.
Anyone who converts to heterosexuality is considered dead by society.

Whatever happened to the sacrosanct doctor-patient relationship, into which government was not supposed to enter? Or has that all changed with Obamacare?

Just another reminder that leftists and Muslims are cut from the same cloth.

Why Outlawing Guns Will Work

You see, havnig the really smart people get together and agree to outlaw guns will absolutely work.

As an historian, I know it will work because the Kellogg Briand Pact of 1928 worked so well.

You see, the Kellogg Briand Pact, also known as the Pact of Paris, outlawed war. Just about every nation on earth signed it, with France, Germany and the United States the first ones to ratify it.

Notice that we have had zero armed international conflicts since that 1928 pact.
QED.

Darwin Taught Intelligent Design

It has been argued that explanations in terms of final causes remain common in modern science, including contemporary evolutionary biology,^[14][15] and that teleology is indispensable to biology in general for (among other reasons) the very concept of adaptation is teleological in nature.^[15] In an appreciation of Charles Darwin published in Nature in 1874, Asa Gray noted "Darwin's great service to Natural Science" in bringing back to Teleology "so that, instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology". Darwin quickly responded, "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noticed the point."^[14] Francis Darwin and T. H. Huxley reiterate this sentiment. The latter wrote that "..the most remarkable service to the philosophy of Biology rendered by Mr. Darwin is the reconciliation of Teleology and Morphology, and the explanation of the facts of both, which his view offers."^[14] James G. Lennox states that Darwin uses the term 'Final Cause' consistently in his Species Notebook, Origin of Species and after.^{[16]  (source)}

I have argued this extensively, and been roundly attacked for making such wild assertions.

But, apparently, modern evolutionists never actually bother to read Darwin.
When they do, they are apparently incapable of understanding what he said.

And these are the people we are supposed to trust.

Giving to the Church (State)

The Germans tell the story of a man condemned to death, who pleads for his life before the king.

"Release me, Lord, and I will teach your horse to converse with you as a man speaks with a man!"
"That's impossible!" replied the king.
"It is not!" insisted the condemned man.
So, the king deferred the man's execution for a year, to see if what the man said was true. Every day thereafter, the man went into the stable and tried to teach the horse to talk. A few weeks passed, and the livery boy finally had enough.
"You aren't doing any good, you know. You can't teach a horse to talk."
"Perhaps," replied the condemned man, "But who knows what might happen in a year? The horse may die. I may die. The king may die. Or perhaps the horse really will learn how to talk."

In the spirit of the condemned man, I propose an idea.

The USCCB has the odd habit of insisting that the government should take care of the poor instead of insisting that the Church should take care of the poor. That is, they seem to think that when the State confiscates our money via taxes in order to redistribute our money to the poor, this action is morally superior to NOT having the State confiscate our money so we can individually give what we will to the poor.

It occurs to me that I should take them at their word.

Now, a couple of things should be explained first.

Can. 222 §1. The Christian faithful are obliged to assist with the needs of the Church so that the Church has what is necessary for divine worship, for the works of the apostolate and of charity, and for the decent support of ministers.
§2. They are also obliged to promote social justice and, mindful of the precept of the Lord, to assist the poor from their own resources.

Anytime I do the work of the Church, or give to a cause that is the work of the Church, then I am financially supporting the Church herself, as Canon 222.1 explains.

That is,  when I give my children a Catholic education, I *AM* giving to the Church.
When I feed my family, I *AM* giving to the Church.
When I house my family, I *AM* giving to the Church.
And since parents are an ordo of the Church, when I feed, house and clothe my wife and myself, I am providing for the decent support of the Church's ministers. Sure, we may not be ALL the Church's ministers, but it's not possible for me to give money to EVERY minister in the Church, so we do what we can.

My family is the essential cell and ground of the Church.
As John Paul II said, without the family, we don't have a Church.

Now, sure, we should give what we can to the collection basket.

But I am responsible for my family before I am responsible for the parish.
The Church got along without parishes for the first thousand years.
It has NEVER gotten along without families.

And, in any case, when someone with a gun takes my money, that's money I don't have to give anymore. That's what the State does - it takes my money, money that I COULD have given to the Church. It takes it under threat of jail time for me and/or my wife. And the bishops are fine with that.

In fact, the bishops encourage the State in confiscating more and more of our money so that the poor can be cared for by the State. The bishops apparently don't trust us lay Catholics to do anything so noble. Only the government can really be trusted to exhibit virtue.

Fine!

So, if the bishops feel that I should give more to the government, then I must necessarily assume that first and basic Catholic principle - money that goes towards a work of the Church is going towards the Church itself.

The Catholic bishops believe the US Government to be the pre-eminent tool of Christian charity. That is, the bishops must want me to assume that the money going to the government, intended for works of charity, is thereby going to the Church. Since the government is doing the Church's work of charity, when I tithe to the government (or double-tithe by giving the State 20% of my income via taxes, or quadruple-tithe by giving 40% or more), then the bishops already have their share.

If they want any more money, they can go to the government and get what they want from their pre-eminent tool of Christian charity. I have given, at the point of a gun, to the State/Church and now my family gets the rest.

And if the bishops don't like that arrangement, then maybe they should change their attitudes about what the proper work of the State actually is. Perhaps they could spend some time in reflection on what the word "tithe" means, or meditating on what level of contribution American families already make.

And perhaps, if we try hard enough, we really can teach the horse to talk.

You CAN Outrun a Bullet

It takes a marksman about 3-4 seconds to set the sight on a target, so if you run away and weave, you greatly reduce your chances of being hit. In fact, you don't even have to weave.

Studies of New York police officer shootings show that if you can put 25 feet between you and the shooter, he almost certainly won't hit you at all.

In live fire situations, where cops were actively trying to hit a perpetrator, they managed to hit their targets:

• 38% of the time at a distance of 0-2 yards, 
• 17% of the time at 3-8 yards, 
• 9% of the time at 8-15 yards. 
• 8% of the time at 16-25 yards, 
• 4% of the time at greater than 25 yards 

So, what are teachers trained to do?
Lock all the children into a small room, just like you would lock sheep or cattle into a pen.

Yeah.
Brilliant.

Mortal Sin at Newtown

Did the teachers at Newtown, Connecticut commit mortal sin by failing to arm themselves in preparation to repel intruders?

2265 Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility. 

If a teacher FAILS to be properly armed and ready to shoot an intruder dead, has that teacher committed a mortal sin?

Hmmm...  Grave matter, full knowledge, refusal to do as Christ commands - quite possibly "yes."

I can choose to be a martyr myself, but I cannot choose, by my action or inaction, to make someone else a martyr. I cannot refuse to arm myself because I don't like the idea that I might have to use deadly force to protect the ones who have been placed in my care.

Now, when Cardinal O'Malley called for "more gun laws", perhaps he really did mean to say that all teachers should be trained in deadly force.

If that wasn't what he meant, he may want to read the Catechism.

An Inconvenient Truth: Homicide Edition

Now that we've had another mass murder, everyone is arguing about gun control law. At the risk of making the discussion more rational, let's study some correlations.  Keep in mind that correlation is NOT causation - just because two factors happen together does not mean one caused the other. Both might be caused by a third, as yet unidentified, factor.

For instance, it is the case that child abuse has been dropping for five straight years. It is also the case that gun ownership has been skyrocketing the last five years. So, which one is the cause, which one is the effect? Have parents become so frightened of their own children that they no longer dare neglect them, and now choose to arm themselves against the little tykes? Or have children gotten a hold of newly acquired household guns and threatened their parents with death if the latter ever again breathe a word about eating spinach?

Well, probably neither. Probably, a third (or fourth) factor is at play - perhaps older parents are less likely to neglect their children AND more likely to buy a gun to protect themselves and their families than young parents are. Or maybe it's the phase of the moon. Who knows?

In fact, we don't know that the two trends are connected at all.
All we know is that both trends are real.

With that in mind, look at this Wikipedia world map of homicide rates, showing the murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants by any cause (not just guns), based on UN Office on Drugs and Crime 2012 data:

Murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants most recent year.    2-5    5-10    10-20    >20

Notice that liberals are always comparing the murder rate in the United States to the murder rate in Europe, but never to the murder rate in Cuba or Russia - both nations with strict gun control laws. Why? Well, both Cuba and Russia's murder rates are much higher than the murder rate in most of Europe. If we want to lower homicides, we should look at nations with lower homicide rates, right?

Well, maybe.
Or maybe not.

Let's take a look at another map, based on data from the CIA's 2009 World Factbook, comparing global median age ranges in various countries. The median age is the age which half the country is above, and the other half is below:

Notice how closely median age correlates to homicide rates. In South America and Africa, the correlation is darned near 1:1 - the younger the population, the more likely it is to be homicidal. Within the United States, FBI statistics bear this out - murders are committed primarily by males between the ages of 17 and 35, tailing off rapidly above the age of 50. So, it is not too surprising to find that countries whose median age is between 17 and 35 will have higher murder rates than those which aren't.

We also see from the map, that this correlation between youth and homicide is not perfect. Lithuania has a very old population (40+), but a relatively high homicide rate. The three Scandinavian countries are all old (median age is 40+), but have very different homicide rates. Similarly, Russia, America, China, Ukraine, Poland and Australia have similar median ages, but quite different homicide rates.

But, overall, the median age correlates well enough to the homicide rate for us to make one relatively safe conclusion: if we really want to compare apples to apples, we shouldn't be comparing homicide rates in the United States with homicide rates in the much older nations of Europe, but rather to the more age-equivalent societies of Russia, China, France, Ukraine and Australia.

When we compare these age equivalent countries, we can now see rather a different story. Russia has the highest homicide rate (10.2), followed by the Ukraine (5.2), the United States (4.2), France (1.1), Poland (1.1), Australia (1.0) and China (1.0).

What could account for those differences? It can't be gun laws or gun ownership.  Here is the list of gun ownership rates.

If you click the link, you will notice that countries with a lot of young people, and therefore extremely high homicide rates, also tend to have the lowest number of guns per person. That is, the lack of guns in a young population doesn't appear to inhibit homicide rates at all.

But we care about populations with median ages between 35-40. Below is a short version of the per capita gun ownership list for countries with a median age comparable to the United States. The number of guns per 100 residents is listed:

• 88.8 - United States (#1 on the list) 
• 31.2 - France 
• 15.0 - Australia
•   8.9 - Russia 
•   6.6 - Ukraine 
•   4.9 - China 
•   1.3 - Poland

Yeah, not much correlation there. Ukraine and Russia have higher homicide rates even though both have only one-tenth the guns the US has. France has three times the guns Russia has, Australia has twice the guns, but Russia easily outpaces the homicide rate in both those countries as well. The Ukraine is in the same situation - fewer guns than similar countries, but a lot more murders.

If gun ownership correlated to intentional homicide rates, the United States should top the list of homicidal countries. Instead, it is only about half-way down.

If we were to drill down into American statistics, it gets even more disturbing. Men make up only 50% of the population, but account for 90% of the murders. Blacks males make up less than 6% of the population, but they account for 53% of the homicides in the United States and 50% of the homicide victims. Most murder victims and offenders know each other, either through friendship or family relationship. And the majority of murders happen during or after an argument.

In short, if young black men who knew each other were to stop getting into fights, America's homicide rate could be cut by half.

So, what should we do? While we arguably have a problem with homicidal violence, the availability of guns doesn't appear to have much to do with it.

Apparently, if we really wish to stop homicidal violence in America, we would have to criminalize being male, especially being a young black male. We would also have to criminalize the establishment of interpersonal relationships, either via friendship or family. And having personal arguments would have to be categorically outlawed.

If we passed just those simple laws - jail young men, especially young black men, outlaw families and friends, and incarcerate anyone having an argument - homicidal violence should disappear. Additional gun laws don't even have to be considered.

See how easy it is?

Awkward

A stopped clock is right twice a day.
The National Catholic Reporter said something very profound:

Liturgy is not about taste or aesthetics. It is how the church defines itself. Those who rejected Vatican II and its liturgy were the first to understand the connection between liturgy and our self-understanding as church.  

Pope Paul VI also understood this. The rejection of the Vatican II liturgy is a rejection of its ecclesiology and theology.

There's one problem, of course.
It was precisely Pope Paul VI who rejected the Vatican II liturgy.

As has been noted by virtually everyone, the liturgy described in Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium isn't the Mass that Pope Paul VI implemented. He tossed the council's advice into the trashcan, created and promulgated his own liturgy. Nothing wrong with that - he's the Pope, he has the authority to do it.

But if we want to say "the rejection of the Vatican II liturgy is a rejection of its ecclesiology and theology" - and I think that is a fair statement - then we must admit that Pope Paul VI was the first to obviously reject Vatican II. 

QED.

Which is really awkward for everyone.

Catholic Homiletics Porn

In popular usage, "porn" has become a very expansive term. We can talk about gun porn, tech porn, car porn... in fact, "porn" is now used to describe any communication that increases the obsession with or lust for a specific thing, any technique used for exciting extremely strong emotions about a subject.

One FSSP church I attend has a priest who does Catholic homiletic porn.

In what does this consist?

Well, Catholic homiletic porn is a homily that professes to talk about a specific doctrine, but in fact never gets around to talking about the doctrine. Instead, the congregation is subjected to a dizzying collection of quotes, stories, private revelation and sundry nonsense, none of which actually address the purported subject at hand, but all of which are intended to provoke a visceral emotional response in the hearer.

It's all about stirring up emotion, and the facts be damned.

Two recent examples will have to suffice.

Round One
Recently, the priest subjected his flock to a homily that purported to be on the anti-Christ. Now, there is not really much that anyone can say about the anti-Christ. In Scripture, the apostle John says the anti-Christ is anyone who denies that God came in the flesh. In that sense, any time any one of us sins, we substantially prefigure the anti-Christ. The CCC devotes two articles to the subject, to whit:

675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.574 The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth575 will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.576

676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism,577 especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.578

Ludwig Ott's "Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma" says not much more, except to add "the historical interpretation associated with a particular time (Nero, Caligula, and others) as well as this historico-religious explanation, which seeks the origin of the idea of the Antichrist in Babylonian and Persian myths, are to be rejected." (p. 487)

And that pretty much sums it up.
So, what did the priest have to say in his sermon?

Well, NONE of this.

He doesn't mention a single particle of doctrine through the whole long thing. Instead, he claims - with no particular evidence (Irenaus, Augustine, and Lactantius found the idea laughable) - that Nero is a "type for the anti-Christ". So, he goes on a long, long diatribe the heretical Donatists would have loved in which he meandered on about Nero: his predilections, his sins, his excesses, his persecutions of Christians; all the bloody, gory details he could comfortably include, while hinting that there was even more sordidness that he dare not speak, lest he offend the congregation!

Ah, the titillation it produced!

You could almost see the ripple of excitement through the congregation as the voyeurs contemplated the forbidden dainties the priest set before them!

This sermon produced not a word about Scripture or what St. John had to say, no mention of the CCC's passages on the anti-Christ, nothing from the Councils, no doctrine at all. No, just the life of Nero, which Ott's manual, quoted above, seemed to prohibit... but no matter.

He had successfully increased his congregation's obsession with and mania about the "end of the world", a mania to which he is dramatically (in every sense of the word) attached.

The sermon was a rousing success.

Round Two
So much so, that the next week, the same priest followed up with a sermon on the Last Judgement. Since he loves typecasting, he chose to assert that the Roman destruction of Israel was a type for the Last Judgement. This allowed him to go on a lovingly detailed description of the bloody sack of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple and the annihilation of the Levitical priesthood.

And... what was the point of this description?

Beats me. While the description of the sack stirred marvelous emotions, none of it had a thing to do with the Last Judgement.  In fact, not only did none of it have any relevance to the Last Judgement, quite a bit of it was simply wrong. As has happened in the past, he ended his sermon by using his assembled descriptions to assert that "the Old Covenant is dead, the Jews were destroyed along with the Temple."

Now, I've heard this nonsense before.
In fact, the idea that modern Jews are not really Jews because they don't have a Temple is really, really popular among rad-trads. And really, really stupid as well. Even Michael Voris got tagged by me on this one.

And, in order to keep this post from getting any longer, let it suffice to say that every single point I make against Voris' video can be brought against this pastor's sermon. It was, and is, a stupid, stupid, stupid sermon.

But to the Voris points, I will add just one more. The CCC points out:

674 The glorious Messiah's coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition by "all Israel", for "a hardening has come upon part of Israel" in their "unbelief" toward Jesus.569 ... St. Paul echoes him: "For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?"571 The "full inclusion" of the Jews in the Messiah's salvation, in the wake of "the full number of the Gentiles",572 will enable the People of God to achieve "the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ", in which "God may be all in all".573

If today's Jews are not real Jews, then the real Jews are gone. If the real Jews are gone, then there is no second coming to look forward to, for those long-dead Jews didn't, in the last analysis, recognize Jesus before they died out.

That's heresy, but that's the logical conclusion you are forced to draw after listening to this priest's homiletic porn on his personal mania, the Last Judgement.

Conclusion:
Now, I'm picking on this particular priest because he is the one at hand. Actually, most priests suffer from various forms of his delusion. They claim to teach some aspect of doctrine, but their homilies are actually simply intended to foment an obsession in the minds of the congregation. Whatever the pastor's pet peeve is, he intends to make his congregation's pet peeve. So, the whole orientation of the parish is slowly altered to reinforce whatever mindset the pastor has.

The teaching of Church doctrine stops, the teaching of personal devotions as dogmatic truths begins.
It stops being the Catholic Church and starts being the parish of Father X and his tribe of whirling dervishes, all of them rabidly focused on whatever fixation the priest has.

So, I know I am not alone when I contemplate this question every Sunday: should I go to the liturgically abusive Novus Ordo parishes, with their pablum sermons, or to the liturgically inscrutable traditional Mass, with its absurd sermons?

I wish it were a rhetorical question.

Pronoun Trouble

Here's a question for Latin Mass types.
When you who claim to love Latin pray in English, you always say "Holy Ghost"

But when post-Vatican II types, who hate Latin, when THEY pray, they always say "Holy Spirit".

And on the rare occasions when the two pray together, each glares at the other for their silly language pretensions.

Hmmmm....

Now, "Spirit" comes from "spiritus" which is Latin for "breath."
e.g., In nomine Patris et fillii et Spiritus Sancti.

But "ghost" is derived from the Old English "gast" which comes from the German "Geist", and back to a root which originally means "to be excited or frightened".

So, the people who HATE Latin in liturgy pray in... Latin.
And the people who HATE English in liturgy pray in... Old English.

And they each glare at the other one for praying in the language they profess to love.

Does anyone wonder why I say "A Pox on BOTH your houses!"

Why We Are Done For

So, if you read the conservative political class today, they tell us we don't have much to worry about. The US is still center-right. Elections come, elections go, we will soldier on. Lost a battle, haven't lost the war, etc.

Mind you, these are the same people who told us this was the most important election in our lifetimes, perhaps in the history of the Republic. But now that we've lost, we're apparently supposed to say "Ah, well. We'll getcha next time."

And here is where we part ways.

Two by Two

There are two kinds of conservatives: economic conservatives and social conservatives.

When the Tea Party formed, it was formed from equal parts of the two. The fight within the party was over which one would win out. The Republican party stalwarts hated the Tea Party, but they hated the social conservative wing a lot more than they hated the economic conservative wing. Most of the major Internet libertarian and Tea Party bloggers have been economic conservatives, not social conservatives. So, the Republican stalwarts and the libertarian economic conservatives joined forces to give us ... Mitt Romney.

Social conservatives hated Romney, but we hated Barack more, so everyone held their nose and voted for Romney.

Well, not everyone.

As we found out Tuesday night, conservatives, whether economic or social, are in the minority. We are in round two of FDR's interminable reign. More on that in a bit.

What I want to focus on right now is the dissonance from the economic conservatives. We have, on the one hand, people like Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse - supporters of gay marriage, not particularly opposed to abortion, libertarian economic conservative types - who tell us not to worry.

And as Andrew Breitbart often reminded us, the most important battles must be cultural ones, because culture and media inevitably shape the political choices we make together.
That war must begin anew. And it begins now. 

 But when these people use phrases like "the most important battles must be cultural", they don't mean by the word "cultural" the same thing that social conservatives mean. We mean "no sodomite marriage, no abortion, no euthanasia, no contraception, return to Christ". That is not what the economic conservatives mean. By "culture," the economic conservatives mean "no socialism. no government control," i.e., they mean economic culture, not moral culture. As one economically conservative commentator so concisely put it:

I’m not religious, and my political beliefs don’t rest on a religious foundation. Gay marriage (to pick one example) doesn’t bother me much. I did, though, find the various bizarre comments about rape from Republican candidates to be stupid and offensive, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they helped to cost enough potential Republican votes to sway the election.

We know how well economic conservatives are doing politically.
So, how are social conservatives making out?
Horribly.

To take one example, every exit poll in every state where exit polls were conducted showed majority support for abortion. Three of Sarah Palin's pro-life picks went down to defeat shortly after they announced pro-life sentiments. Given Palin's phenomenal success in picking winners, that's a substantive, significant loss. It is worth noting how the establishment Republicans reacted to these pro-life comments: repudiation, dismissal, abandonment.

Pro-lifers can mewl about how the majority of the population is pro-life. It may even be true on some level. But pro-lifers didn't show up to the polls. In fact, most people didn't show up to vote.

If pro-lifers won't vote against Barack Hussein Obama, pro-lifers won't vote. If pro-lifers won't vote for pro-life candidates, they aren't pro-life.

In short, we do not have a pro-life majority in any meaningful sense, no matter what the polls may say.

FDR Redux

I mentioned above that we are facing FDR redux. That has implications as well.

FDR stacked the Supreme Court.
Obama will too.

He may replace as many as four justices in his second term. The new SCOTUS will make the Warren Court look like Jerry Falwell's ice cream social club. Gun control, homosexual marriage, pedophilia, bestiality, sharia law, speech censorship - the new SCOTUS will have 20 years to implement the left's agenda, and they will put that time to good use.

The moral culture, what's left of it, will be shredded.
Obamacare will rip the belly out of the American economy.
It isn't coming back.

FDR bought his majorities. He used tax dollars to put people on the dole, thereby buying votes. Once on the government dole, people were afraid to leave it. He reigned 16 years because he turned Americans into beggars. People stopped believing they could succeed on their own, create small businesses on their own, and regulations prohibited them trying. He controlled the culture through government regulation.

The battlefields of WW II destroyed FDR's beggar mentality. America's men learned, quite literally, to innovate or die. Those who couldn't innovate fast enough did die. Only the lucky and the smart survived. Many people attribute America's post-war dominance to her lack of competition in the world market, the fact that her factories were not destroyed. All true.

But there is something else. American casualties were not as high as that of Russia, Germany, Japan, Britain, or France. For America alone, the war killed off our lousy innovators without cutting deeply into the ranks of the superior innovators. For most other nations, the men who came back from the war did so in body bags, and were buried. For America, the men who came back from the war were alive, they were the ones who could think on their feet.  These were the men who built the Apollo program, the electronic revolution, the age of passenger jets.

That generation is gone.

Obama's win demonstrates that the United States has again descended to the beggar mentality of FDR's America. But this beggar mentality has something new. This beggar mentality combines with the morality of the alley cat and the stray dog, the morality of the animal that eat its own children when hunger gnaws. This is the morality of the rich pagan elite, who gleefully kill each other for a chance at power.

For the entire life of the Church, there have been generations plagued by evil priests and bishops. Many Catholics, not just in this generation, but in many that came before us, have spent a lifetime waiting for bad priests, bad bishops to retire and/or die. Nothing else could be done but wait.

In this political situation, while white Catholics voted against Obama, Hispanic Catholics voted overwhelmingly for him. The populace, both Catholic and non-Catholic, has been beggared in both economics and morality, where the population affirmatively chooses murderous despotism, there is nothing to do but wait. Such a generation will have no children, of course.

The future belongs only to those who do have children, to those who manage to keep their children unstained by the muck of the rabid culture that surrounds them.

The wise man does not get into hand-to-hand combat with a rabid dog. If he lacks a rifle or a bow - and we lack both - then he just stands off in the distance, and waits for the dog's inevitable death. America will not survive this election in any recognizable form. At this point, we can preserve only the ideas she once stood for, preserve them in our children, and wait for the dogs to die.