Venerable Fulton Sheen

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Susan Kehoe

I was ready for some good news this morning.  Thank you Rocco (H/T New Advent).

“In an audience this morning with his chief Saintmaker, Cardinal Angelo Amato SDB, the Pope assented to several decrees of canonization, beatification and the heroic virtue of souls on the path to sainthood.

Of them all, however, none are as likely to resonate among this crowd more than the declaration as “Venerable” of the figure who’s arguably the most celebrated and effective evangelist in the history of the faith on these shores, once the nation’s most-watched TV personality — the epic, great and beloved “Bishop Sheen”..“

Here is a fun video featuring the venerable bishop on a vintage TV show where the panel had to guess who the featured guest was.

Posted in Catholic Church, Saints | Tagged | 2 Comments

Health Care Bill is Constitutional

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Susan Kehoe

I was afraid of this.

“Basically. the justices said that the individual mandate — the requirement that most Americans buy health insurance or pay a fine — is constitutional as a tax.

Chief Justice John Roberts — a conservative appointed by President George W. Bush — provided the key vote to preserve the landmark health care law, which figures to be a major issue in Obama’s re-election bid against Republican opponent Mitt Romney.

The government had argued that Congress had the authority to pass the individual mandate as part of its power to regulate interstate commerce; the court disagreed with that analysis, but preserved the mandate because the fine amounts to a tax that is within Congress’ constitutional taxing powers.” Read more……

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Fr. Barron: “Why It’s Okay to be Against Heresy

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Susan Kehoe

Our betters keep telling us that Christians–especially Catholics–should not be allowed to voice our views in the public square.  Oh wait progressive modern Christian voices are just fine. Nuns on a bus? Great. US Bishops? Evil men attacking women.

Yawn.

You can find Fr. Barron’s article here.

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The Sons of Caesar, Still Pulling Peter Down

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Susan Kehoe

Elizabeth Scalia (AKA The Anchoress) has an excellent article over at First Things. It is a good explanation of why those of us who struggle to be in the world but not of the world make those who embrace the world so darn uncomfortable.

Excerpt:

“The sons and daughters of Caesar have always found the church to be disorienting: It does not perform the expected oblations at their printing presses and editorial boards; it does not acquiesce to tantrums or feet-stamping; it does not recognize the celestial language of people so highly credentialed by earthly entities that they feel empowered to birth prophetic new modalities of being.

The Church cannot recognize everything that is humanly ordained because it has been divinely ordained. Its charge is not to simply echo the zeitgeist but to deliver us from it; to free us from the rigid rootedness of “right now,” where ideas become bronzed and erected and proclaimed as the new eternal rightness, until they are tumbled and replaced by the next generation claiming its idolatrous moment.

The sins of the church, vast in number though they are, are of human origin. The humans within the church, from Peter to your lowly correspondent, have always wrestled with the shadowy mysteries of human brokenness. As Hillaire Belloc said, the church’s divine origins are proved by its continued existence, for “no merely human institution run with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.” 

The world and its children of Caesar disdain all knavish imbecilities except for their own; aware that human constructs do not last, they hastily deliver up their ideas in sterile, insulated environments and then quickly encase them into law books, which bear the name Authority. But in Peter they find a creature whose authority is other-originated—conferred upon a hapless fellow in the midst of a hot mess—and whose organization codified itself through slow, painfully thorough reasoning augmented by martyrdom. Her teachers are still tantalizing students with subversive notions, still turning the worldly world, in all its glamour, in all its empty promises, on its head.

Which is why the world, again and again, tries to turn Peter on to his.  Read more….

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Breaking News: Supreme Court rules

Posted on June 25, 2012 by Susan Kehoe

On the Arizona Immigration Law. No ruling on the health care bill.

 

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Day 2 of Fortnight for Freedom

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Susan Kehoe

Today we celebrate the martyrs  St. Thomas Moore and St. John Fisher. Fr. Longenecker has posted a timely reminder:

On this feast day of St Thomas More we do well to remember that the Tudor Revolution in England (sometimes given the euphemistic term: Reformation) was not immediately violent and catastrophic.

Father concludes his post:

As we begin the fortnight of freedom in the USA we should remember that the erosion of religious freedom always starts small. It seems to be a proper cleansing of wealth and privilege in the church. It is sold as a reform movement, or something that will benefit all the people. It is put across as a useful, modernizing action–one which will sweep away all the old inefficiencies and system of privilege in order to be fairer and more useful for all. I have written here of what this sort of revolution might look like in the USA. It will not be a persecution of bloodshed and torture to start with–instead it will be quiet and efficient and most people–most Catholics will go along with the “reforms.”Read the whole post…

Reflections for Day Two.

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Catholic Baby Boomers Have a Lot to Answer for.

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Susan Kehoe

The Crescat wants to buy the priest in this video a beer. Warning: video may cause orthodox baby boomers to hang our graying heads in shame.

This priest is truly saintly—talk about speaking truth with love. I really don’t know if I could have been so loving and calm. The women in the video offered every tired bumper sticker theology line from the Spirit of Vatican II playbook.

Oh and about half way through the video the thought crept into my head that one of the women will say that she has a degree in theology. Yup. She has TWO.

But I am willing to bet my last dollar that she has never read ANY of the 16 Vatican II documents or the Vatican document on the LCWR. Vatican II doesn’t come close to saying what she says it does. Yes I have read and studied the documents.

As for the Doctrinal Assessment?  Please read it; it is only eight pages long and an easy read.  It is very pastoral in tone, and it does acknowledge the good work that the sisters do for the poor and marginalized.

Too bad journalists no longer read or do research. If they had read the document, it would have been harder to spin this as “the Vatican’s war on women”.

I agree with the commentators on The Crescat blog forget buying the priest a beer. Send him a case of Scotch  Irish Whiskey.

Posted in Catholic Church, Women | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Day One of the Fight for Religious Freedom

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Susan Kehoe

Deacon Greg is at the Catholic Media Convention in Indianapolis where Archbishop Chaput gave an address on religious freedom.  First Things has posted the speech.

“Here’s my fourth point: Unless we work hard to keep our religious liberty, we’ll lose it. It’s already happening in other developed countries like Britain and Canada. The U.S. Constitution is a great document–historically unique for its fusion of high ideals with the realism of very practical checks and balances. But in the end, it’s just an elegant piece of paper. In practice, nothing guarantees our freedoms except our willingness to fight for them. That means fighting politically and through the courts, without tiring and without apologies. We need to realize that America’s founding documents assume an implicitly religious anthropology–an idea of human nature, nature’s God, and natural rights–that many of our leaders no longer really share. We ignore that unhappy fact at our own expense.

Here’s my fifth and final point: Politics and the courts are important. But our religious freedom ultimately depends on the vividness of our own Christian faith–in other words, how deeply we believe it, and how honestly we live it. Religious liberty is an empty shell if the spiritual core of a people is weak. Or to put it more bluntly, if people don’t believe in God, religious liberty isn’t a value. That’s the heart of the matter. It’s the reason Pope Benedict calls us to a Year of Faith this October. The worst enemies of religious freedom aren’t “out there” among the legion of critics who hate Christ or the Gospel or the Church, or all three. The worst enemies are in here, with us–all of us, clergy, religious, and lay–when we live our faith with tepidness, routine, and hypocrisy.

Religious liberty isn’t a privilege granted by the state. It’s our birthright as children of God. And even the worst bigotry can’t kill it in the face of a believing people. But if we value it and want to keep it, then we need to become people worthy of it. Which means we need to change the way we live–radically change, both as individual Catholics and as the Church. And that’s where I’d like to turn for the rest of these brief remarks.”   Do read the whole article….

The ball is in our court to fight for religious freedom.  As my Mom used to say, If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

The US bishops have a reflection for this first day of the fortnight for religious freedom to get us started.

Related:  Get Religion has an interesting post on the PR campaign that has been launched to combat the bishops.

Posted in Church and the Public Square, Culture Wars, Freedom of Religion | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Fortnight for Freedom

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Susan Kehoe

The US bishops have called for a fortnight of prayer, study, reflection and action for religious freedom.

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The Age of No Reason

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Susan Kehoe

Once again I have neglected this blog for far too long. Why? There isn’t one reason really. It’s a bit of this and that. MS fatigue. Work. Writers block.  Plain lazy.

But more than anything else, I am fed up and tired with the growing anti-intellectual noise rising from our culture. There are fewer and fewer people who provide reasoned arguments any more.

I don’t, for example, expect everyone to agree with orthodox Catholic arguments. Really.  But is it too much to ask that those in disagreement try to learn what the Church actually teaches and why, and then provide reasoned arguments?

Instead we get shrill sound bites that fit on bumper stickers. “War on Women”. “ Vatican beats up Nuns”.  Catholics are: stuck in the middle ages, brainwashed idiots, anti gay, anti women. Yada, Yada, Yada.

Oh and the zinger that is supposed to really sway me: Catholic priests rape children.

Certainly there are respectful reasonable voices out there. But they are few and far between. In the aging and dying main stream media they are downright nonexistent. Even mild mannered Deacon Greg, who used to work in the MSM, is asking MSNBC, What the hell is wrong with you?

The good thing about the blogging world is that one can choose to visit the more rational and civil sites on both sides of a given issue. But then you have to watch out for the comment section. Deacon Greg has closed comments (I hope it is temporary) on his site, because it was getting too difficult to moderate.

I am getting that urge to run off to a hermitage again.  But I can’t.  Jesus calls us to live in the world, and to make disciples. He never promised that it was going to be easy.

So am I going to attempt to keep this blogging gig going?  Yes. God has made it pretty darn clear that it is one of the things that he is calling me to do. And he hardly ever makes his will for me clear.

Well maybe he does, but I don’t listen.

Anyway, if I have any followers of this blog left, please pray for me that I have the resolve to face this keyboard at least once a day—except on weekends.

Related:  Msgr. Pope on the coarseness of our culture.

Good News: One of the most reasonable Atheists on the internet, Leah Libresco, is considering becoming Catholic, and she is in RCIA.  Please keep her in your prayers.

A ray of hope: Rebecca Hamilton is a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, a pro-life orthodox Catholic, and a (gasp) Democrat. If I lived in her state and district she would have my vote. Check out her blog!

Posted in Culture Wars | Tagged , , | 4 Comments