Vegans for life? Not quite

The case for not eating meat, by David Sirota, is also a case for mandatory scanning of fetus by abortion-seekers, but Sirota doesn’t make the fetus case.

One of his [11] commenters notes this: “Sirota echoes an argument from the anti-abortion folks.” He or she is answered with this: “Only if the mothers eat the fetuses.” Followed by: “first they come for the placenta…. “

Heh-heh: having fun with the opposition, and this on the somewhat religion-oriented, firmly pacifist and other sort of leftist position-taking Truth Dig site.

Notre Dame Holy Cross priest defends a brother

Rev. Wilson Miscamble CSC speaks up for Bishop Daniel Jenky CSC of Peoria in re Jenky’s vigorous, pointed analysis of Obama’s attacks on Catholic ministry:

His homily was a courageous homily which pointed to a pattern of behavior of a number of regimes to limit religious freedom and to attack religious institutions.

He was echoing rebuttal by ND law prof emeritus Charles E. Rice of letter by 49 Notre Dame faculty members who condemned Jenky’s sermon and called for his resignation from the Notre Dame board.

Bishop Jenky properly drew attention to the impending dangers to religious and personal freedom. The Obama regime . . . is substituting for the free economy and limited government a centralized command system of potentially unlimited jurisdiction and power. . . . The HHS Health Care Mandate imperils not only the mission of the Catholic Church but also the right of conscience itself.

Yet another Pfleger hullabaloo-who?

Wuxtry, wuxtry, read all about it!

Manya Brachear in her blog, Chi Trib’s only coverage of the latest Pfleger episode:

Pfleger’s flock fears that a new priest handpicked by Cardinal Francis George will dismantle anything that doesn’t adhere to church guidelines, but enriches their worship and brings them closer to God.

Careless, I hope. She meant to write “enriches their worship and THEY SAY brings them closer to God.” As I say, I hope she meant that. Otherwise, you have an unseemly, un-journalistic identifying with a subject, unworthy of her calling.

Moreover, she argues a position:

The mere fact that Pfleger is still at St. Sabina after nearly 30 years illustrates an exception to the rule that permits priests to stay at one church for two six-year terms, or up to 12 years. By-the-book Catholics have frowned on Pflegers exemption for years.

Unless “illustrates an exception” is a laboring of the obvious, that Pfleger has plowed his own path. We know that.

However, she has a good news item that I have not read elsewhere, though I suspected it:

[President of Leo HS Dan] McGrath [Leo alum, ex-Trib sports editor] said progress also has been made repairing the schools relationship with Pfleger, which had soured in recent years. [Italics
added]

It’s disconcerting, however, to read the lede:

The hullabaloo regarding whether the Rev. Michael Pfleger will stay at St. Sabina Catholic Church has become something of a traditional rite in Chicagos Roman Catholic Archdiocese, much like the 40 days of Lent. [Heh]

Here’s how it always unfolds: Rumors swirl with no one willing to confirm or deny them. His fans rally for him to stay. His foes rally for him to go. Non-statements are issued. The rumors are put to rest and everyone goes back to business as usual. Why do we care?

A blog is less formal, let-hair-down kind of writing, but no matter the venue, you don’t want to ask that question in the second paragraph article or item and then go on for many paragraphs more.

Flash: In a Breaking News story posted 20 minutes ago that draws heavily on the blogged one, Pfleger says he is writing a reponse to the archdiocese “but wouldn’t say to what he was responding.”

Stay tuned. Everyone loves a hullabaloo.

Jonah, Jesus, and persuading God

Diagram of saved city

Jonah 3 tells how God changed his mind (!) about Nineveh, thanks to Jonah’s pleading.  Luke 11.29-32 builds on this.  It took a Jonah, but a greater God-mover was among Jesus’ listeners, he told them, meaning himself.

More on this Jonah-Jesus comparison: Jonah was (a) thrown overboard at his request (b) to save his shipmates in the dreadful storm, (c) sacrificing himself for others.

Jesus also sacrificed himself, as we know, but achieved more, ransoming us all from perdition, not just a city.  He is the hero of any day’s re-enactment of that self-sacrifice, namely the mass — a truly cosmic event.

Anglicans bring Anglican style to Rome

In England and Wales (as elsewhere), Anglicans are coming to Rome:

The ordinariate allows Anglicans to enter the Catholic Church while retaining “a love and gratitude for the Anglican forms of faith and worship.”

The ordinariate website explains that an interim governing council is meeting regularly to oversee the development of the organization. An official governing council will be formed after Easter 2011.

The governing council will have at least six priests, presided over by the ordinary. Half of the membership is elected by the priests of the ordinariate. It will have a pastoral council for consultation with the laity and a finance council.

The council will have the same rights and responsibilities in canon law that the college of consultors and the council of priests have in the governance of a diocese. Out of respect for the synodal tradition of Anglicanism, the ordinary will need the consent of the governing council to admit a candidate to Holy Orders and to erect or suppress a personal parish or a house of formation.

The council will also have a vote in choosing a list of names of a new ordinary to submit to the Holy See.  [Italics added]

These last two items demonstrate a distinctly reformist trend in Roman Catholicism.  Stay tuned.

More: This England and Wales ordinariate “would probably be a model for what we would do here in the U.S.,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Wash DC a few weeks.  He has been named point man for ordinariate-organizing in the U.S.

Don’t touch that steeple!

Allentown diocese here.

The Vatican has a position on closing churches:

Three years [after her parish church in Minersville PA
was shuttered], [Marie] Lutkus and parishioners at eight other shuttered churches in Pennsylvania‘s Allentown diocese have persuaded a Vatican panel to overturn the bishop’s decision to close them down an exceedingly rare reversal that experts say may signal a policy shift on U.S. church closures.

“This is a thunderclap. I am absolutely floored,” said Charles Wilson, executive director of the Saint Joseph Foundation, a San Antonio, Texas-based group that helps Catholic laity navigate church law.

What else?

In a series of decisions that parishioner groups began receiving in January, the Congregation for the Clergy the Vatican office in charge of the world’s 400,000 Catholic priests said the bishop had failed to come up with a “grave reason” for shuttering the churches as required by Catholic law. The panel ruled that parishioners must be allowed to use the padlocked buildings for worship.

“It does not bring the parish back to life, but it puts on the table what could be a workable compromise: to physically re-open the locked-up church as a Catholic place of worship,” said prominent Catholic activist Peter Borre of the Council of Parishes, which has spent years appealing church closures in the Boston area.

They can start with Bible services and maybe persuade a priest to come and offer the holy sacrifice. Who knows?

They also need a finance committee. volunteer maintenance, money, etc. Can it be done?

Going an extra mile or two

This fellow is tasty.

Holy tilapia!

And let me put in a good word for fasting, and I don’t mean the minimal requirements of the church.

For years, I did longer fasts of five to seven days and it was easier to do than imagined because a little button in my brain related to food just clicked off. I was usually hungry the first day, but not after that. The energy usually given to the digestive process was channeled into a higher state of spiritual awareness. And fasting brought up emotional issues big time, causing psychological as well as physical cleansing.

Fasting is a powerful spiritual tool I urge you to consider. And youre not going to starve or ruin your health in a few days, as some would have you believe. Fasting is great for your health and is recommended many times in the Bible.

Tilapia because it’s the fish we had for dinner that set off the smoke alarm because we left the kitchen door open and set off neither stove nor ceiling fan.

If this be penance, make the most of making fun of us holy people.

This NCReporter lady has obviously given the matter some thought:

Results are what we should be looking for this Lent, lifelong habits and virtues nurtured through our chosen disciplines.

We live in challenging times just as Jesus did, and to be a disciple of Christ requires much spiritual maturity and strength. Following Jesus example, lets go the extra mile and really expose ourselves to the sometimes scary influence of the living God, which just might turn out to be unconditional acceptance and love.

She’s on to something.

P.S. Lady of house did the tilapia, FYI.

Related Articles

• Ash Wednesday (sacredheartcatholicchurchcrosbytexas.wordpress.com)
• What is Lent Anyway, Besides Strange? (logicandimagination.wordpress.com)
• Mark’s Tilapia alla Milanese (katcanblog.wordpress.com)

Scripture for dummies

It's got poetry.

Deacon Tom preached from Isaiah 58 this noon, at the mid-day ashes service:

5

Is this the manner of fasting I wish, of keeping a day of penance: That a man bow his head like a reed, and lie in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD?

6

This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke;

7

Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own.

 

Thus New American Bible.

I followed along with my King James Version:

⁵Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the LORD?

⁶Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?

⁷Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

NAB pedestrianizes it, to reach a new, I say lower, common denominator.

It gives up on the rhetorical questioning after verse 5, for one thing, and that lessens the impact.

Some phrases have the same effect:

⁵Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul?

becomes

5

Is this the manner of fasting I wish, of keeping a day of penance . . . ?

Another:

to loose the bands of wickedness

becomes

releasing those bound unjustly

A third:

that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

becomes

not turning your back on your own

Not good trade-offs, undue emphasis on the literal, the everyday.

Farrakhan out a billion, madder ‘n hell

Father Pfleger’s best friend Farrakhan has made an important list.  He is now one of the “World’s Top Ten Gaddafi Toads,” per Walter Russell Mead, who puts him at #6 position, between Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi.

 <— A real toad

Mead:

Like the ever-faithful Hugo Chavez, Louis Farrakhan is a Gaddafi loyalist who loves true and loves long.  Bitterly disappointed when the Clinton administration blocked the transfer of $1 billion of money looted from the hapless Libyan populace to the Nation of Islam back in 1996 (and, worse, blocked the $250,000 honorarium promised to Minister Farrakhan), Farrakhan is still calling Gaddafi a friend, and predicting that America is on the verge of a Libya style uprising.  Sure, Gaddafi has his critics, says Farrakhan, but what leader can count on 100% support?

Distinguished company.  Father Pfleger must be proud.

Elsewhere in the news, in the Jerusalem Post in fact, which has a very big dog in this fight, are a couple of stories that predate Farrakhan’s more recent defense of Gaddafi in Chicago.

Last June, he fingered Jews as black people’s “worst enemy.” 

And in March of ’09, again in Chicago, he fingered Israelis as “liars, thieves, murderers” who have “taken the position of God” and are out to “kill everybody.”

He has a way with words, to be sure.  Still, what does Fr. Pfleger see in him?  What need does he fill.  Father figure?  Hard to figure.

Tags: Louis+Farrakhan, Michael+Pfleger, Muammar+Gaddafi

Farrakhan on the Jews

What a friend he has in Muammar

There he goes again:

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan said on Tuesday that Jews and Zionists are trying to push the US into war and that Zionists dominate the US government and banks.

Farrakhan, 77, made the comments at the Nation of Islams annual meeting near Chicago.

His friend Muammar:

President Obama, Farrakhan said, if you allow the Zionists to push you, to mount a military offensive against Gaddafi and you go in and kill him and his sons, as you did with Saddam Hussein and his sons… Im warning you this is a Libyan problem, let the Libyans solve their problem among themselves.

Farrakhan called Muammar Gaddafi my brother and my friend.

It’s a matter of religious belief:

Some of you think that Im just somebody whos got something out for the Jewish people, Farrakhan said. Youre stupid.

Do you think I would waste my time if I did not think it was important for you to know Satan? My job is to pull the cover off of Satan so that he will never deceive you and the people of the world again.

Anti-Defamation League response:

ADL National Director Abe Foxman said in response that, Anti-Semitism has suffused the Nation of Islams message, and Farrakhan is the standard bearer and bigot in chief… Perhaps what’s more disturbing is that despite his anti-Semitic rants, he has not been made a pariah in his own community. What does it take for him to stop being a pied piper of hatred?

For starters, Fr. Michael Pfleger could disown him. Won’t happen, of course. What a reflection on Pfleger is his friendship with and endorsement of Farrakhan, including his anti-semitism. What a disgrace.