When desecration of the Eucharist became all the rage a couple of months ago, I predicted there’d be a rash of immature teenager copycat types trying to pull the same kind of stuff.  Unfortunately, I was right.  We have a post from the friendly folks at Priests in Crisis on the subject.

Now, it’s sick and wrong, but I don’t advocate signing the YouTube petition to get this kid’s videos taken down.  He’s got as much right to do his thing as I have to post to this blog, and his hate speech is protected.

The priests throughout America need to be paying attention to this kid though, memorizing what he looks like, and laying the catechesis on heavily from the ambo if necessary in order to simply make sure he can’t get any more consecrated hosts.

Here’s a story featured in the Catholic News Service today. It talks about how Canadian Catholics, and specifically Canadian Catholic politicians, seem split on supporting social justice issues and life issues.

Canada’s political battleground splits Catholic politicians between those formed by Catholic social justice movements and those who stake their Catholic and political identity on support for life and family issues, said a church historian.

“I’ve yet to see a politician make it work where these different things are wedded together,” said Mark McGowan, church historian and principal at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto.

New Democratic Party member of Parliament Charlie Angus, representing Timmins-James Bay, Ontario, is a former Catholic New Times columnist and a practicing Catholic. Tony Martin of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, also a New Democratic Party member of Parliament, comes from Irish Catholic working-class roots and speaks frequently about social justice and the church.

Liberals also have captured the imaginations of social-justice-minded Catholics.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, a Liberal Party member, is a churchgoing Catholic and a graduate of the University of St. Michael’s College. He has based his politics on Catholic social teaching, most notably in his commitment to debt relief for the Third World, an issue Pope John Paul II spoke about frequently.

The classic failure of liberal Catholics and the liberal MSM has been committed by CNS here also.  No one seems to realize that life issues are the cornerstone of Catholic social justice teaching.  Without protecting all human life, you can’t even start talking about social justice, because a person who’s dead doesn’t need social justice.  I think the reason it’s so overlooked is that the press makes the assumption that in order to be in favor of any part of Catholic social justice teaching, you have to believe that the government should be used to enforce that social justice (and I don’t blink at using the word “enforce.”)  I seriously doubt that pro-life Catholic politicians are opposed to the Church’s social justice teachings; typically they fall more on the conservative side of the aisle and advocate for government to get out of the way so the average joe can have more resources with which to fight for social justice.  The real shame is that the folks who want to use the police power of government to enforce social justice can’t see that they should be using the police power of government to protect life (which is actually a legitimate use of the police power of government) which is at the heart of social justice teaching.

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On the lighter side, R.A.G.E. Media has a list of Scott Hahn facts, inspired by all the great Chuck Norris facts you can find out there on teh interwebs.  A sampling:

Helen Keller’s favorite noise is Scott Hahn.

Scott Hahn ruins the ending of the Gospel of Matt for teenagers, just to
seem them cry with joy. When this doesn’t work, Scott Hahn says “I’ll give
you something to cry about” and shows them Matt 5:28.

If you can see Scott Hahn, he can see you.

If you can’t see Scott hahn you may be only seconds away from a Catechismic
kick to the face.

While he was on a mission trip to South America, Scott Hahn converted the
entire country of Russia over to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by yelling
“Rosary!”

Scott Hahn can say “transubstantiation!” faster than you can say “bang!”

I heard a brief interview by Sean Hannity with abortion survivor Gianna Jessen on his radio show yesterday afternoon.  I also heard the audio from the new ad in which she appears for BornAliveTruth.com.  It’s a great and powerful ad.

Gianna also appeared on Hannity and Colmes.  She got 5 minutes, but that was enough to eat Alan Colmes for lunch.  Enjoy!

Click here to watch the fun!

One other blogger I was reading suggested  that this may be Obama’s “swiftboat” except that Jessen has irrefutable truth on her side (whereas everybody knew the swiftboaters were telling the truth, it just wasn’t irrefutable.)

If you haven’t heard the story of Gianna Jessen singing the National Anthem before the general assembly of Colorado on the morning that they were to pass a resolution honoring Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood, go read it now!

I was amused to read and listen to the sound bites from last evening’s interview by Charles Gibson of Sarah Palin, especially in the context of the cavity-inducing interview between Obama and Stephanopoulos a few nights ago.  Gibson was out for blood from the start, and Palin met him well right down the line

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Gibson tried to embarrass Palin by referring to her Christian faith in asking people to pray for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Palin countered by pointing out she was following the precedent set by Abraham Lincoln. ABC and Gibson focused on Palin as if she were running right now for the presidency rather than the vice presidency. He and other media pundits, by contrast, have never asked the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, if he has ever had to make a decision on anything. Gibson’s aggressive approach appeared to take Palin by surprise: He was clearly attempting to put her on point by presenting her as having extreme religious views. This again, however, appears to be a double-standard, as Palin grew up in the Assemblies of God, one of the largest Christian denominations in America with 16 million members, and is now a member of the Wasilla Bible Church. Even now, Obama has yet to receive any comparable grilling on his 20-year attendance in the congregation of the notoriously racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Of special interest in Charles Gibson’s ignorance of the Bush Doctrine.  The term was coined by Charles Krauthammer, and in a scalding editorial, he corrects Mr. Gibson.

He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?” She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?” Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

Wrong. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine. In his address to the joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush declared: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This “with us or against us” policy regarding terror — first deployed against Pakistan when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave President Musharraf that seven-point ultimatum to end support for the Taliban and support our attack on Afghanistan — became the essence of the Bush doctrine. Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq war was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of preemptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine. It’s not. It’s the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush’s second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

(post by Seminarian Tim)

COLUMBIA, S.C. – South Carolina’s Democratic Party chairwoman said Wednesday that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s top qualification seems to be not having had an abortion. She later apologized.

In an interview posted on the political Web site Politico, Chairwoman Carol Fowler said Republican John McCain picked a running mate “whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”

Fowler later apologized, saying she made the statement during an interview about single-issue voters.

“I personally admire and respect the difficult choices that women make everyday, and I apologize to anyone who finds my comment offensive,” Fowler said in a statement.

So its great that the chairwoman can twist her words from bashing Palin for never having an abortion, but then completely flip-flopping 180 degrees to say that its such a tough and difficult choice. That right, real tough. To kill or not to kill, that IS the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the ridicule of the pinko party, or to be a person of good moral standing and integrity; and by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep, perhaps to dream about whether it is a flesh of tissue. Ah, but that’s the rub, because in the culture of death, what life may survive? Thinking like this turns every lefty into a bigger coward than he (Yeah that’s right, I don’t use inclusive language) already was. When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprise of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action. — Soft you now, the fair Palin! — Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.

Be all of our sins remembered. Remember the best thing that we can do is to pray every day, unceasingly for the conversion of these souls.

Did you know there’s a law on the Italian books that says insulting the Pope is equivalent to insulting the President of Italy?  And this is a jailable offense?  It’s true.

But then she got religion, and after warning everyone that within 20 years Italian teachers would be vetted and chosen by the Vatican, she got to the punchline: “But then, within 20 years the Pope will be where he ought to be — in Hell, tormented by great big poofter devils, and very active ones, not passive ones.”

The joke may have gone done well with her crowd on the Piazza Navona in Rome, but not with Italian prosecutors. She is facing prosecution for “offending the honour of the sacred and inviolable person” of Benedict XVI.

Unfortunately, the story is from the London Times so the typical slant is written right into the story as though it’s news.  And unfortunately, the commenters are London Times readers…

Benedict’s been ridiculed even since his days as the leader of the CDF, and I am sure he really doesn’t care one way or the other about what an Italian Russell Brand says.  But, it is good to see a bit of parity…Muslim countries will string you up for saying something about Mohammed that they don’t like.  What’s good for the goose…

More

Barack Obama, confused about who he’s running against, is sharpening his jabs at Sarah Palin.  After talking about everything McCain would be identical to Bush on, he said, if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.  Naturally, lipstick being something females wear, it’s being logically assumed that this is a direct reference to Governor Palin.

Just imagine for a moment if anyone in the blogosphere or in right-wing talkradio had every used a comment about lipstick and Mrs. Clinton in the same sentence.  Heck, for that matter, consider what happened when David Schuster talked about the Clinton campaign “pimping” Chelsea…

Sadly I predict no MSM attention to this statement.

Oh yeah, here’s the video.

In a totally unsurprising move, Cardinal Rigali has released a statement on behalf of the USCCB regarding Biden’s unfathomable comments on Meet the Press this past Sunday; the CNS blog is currently reporting it, and we’ll likely see it on the USCCB website shortly. In part, it says:

However, the Senator’s claim that the beginning of human life is a “personal and private” matter of religious faith, one which cannot be “imposed” on others, does not reflect Catholic teaching.  The Church teaches that the obligation to protect unborn human life rests on the answer to two questions, neither of which is private or specifically religious.

The first is a biological question: When does a new human life begin?  When is there a new living organism of the human species, distinct from mother and father and ready to develop and mature if given a nurturing environment?  While ancient thinkers had little verifiable knowledge to help them answer this question, today embryology textbooks confirm that a new human life begins at conception (see www.usccb.org/prolife/issues/bioethic/fact298.shtml).  The Catholic Church does not teach this as a matter of faith; it acknowledges it as a matter of objective fact.

The second is a moral question, with legal and political consequences: Which living members of the human species should be seen as having fundamental human rights, such as a right not to be killed?  The Catholic Church’s answer is: Everybody.  No human being should be treated as lacking human rights, and we have no business dividing humanity into those who are valuable enough to warrant protection and those who are not.  Even this is not solely a Catholic teaching, but a principle of natural law accessible to all people of good will.  The framers of the Declaration of Independence pointed to the same basic truth by speaking of inalienable rights, bestowed on all members of the human race not by any human power, but by their Creator.  Those who hold a narrower and more exclusionary view have the burden of explaining why we should divide humanity into the moral “haves” and “have-nots,” and why their particular choice of where to draw that line can be sustained in a pluralistic society.  Such views pose a serious threat to the dignity and rights of other poor and vulnerable members of the human family who need and deserve our respect and protection.

While in past centuries biological knowledge was often inaccurate, modern science leaves no excuse for anyone to deny the humanity of the unborn child.  Protection of innocent human life is not an imposition of personal religious conviction but a demand of justice.

This level of spine is something we’ve been longing for in our Bishops.  We regularly saw it in statements of those like Burke and Chaput…to be getting responses out of so many Bishops who often let the CCB do their talking for them, well, it leads one to believe B16’s visit to the USA is bearing real fruit among the Bishops.

Joe Biden, not knowing how to stop when he’s behind, said the following today:

“I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there’s joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don’t you support stem cell research?”

Curt Jester points out that although he doesn’t say it, he must be referring to embryonic stem cell research, since no one on the planet has ever seemed to have a problem with adult stem cell research – which has two strikes against it in the mind of the left: it doesn’t kill anyone and it is actually useful.

My youngest brother-in-law, Tim, embarked upon his seminary adventure last week.  He’s now metriculating at Papal College Josephinum, located in Columbus, Ohio.  He’s written and called a few times.  He’s so far been very happy about the depth he’s experienced so far – the corporate liturgical prayer, like-mindedness of his classmates, and even the highly-structured schedule.  Mandatory study periods every evening, mandatory bedtimes, etc.  Perhaps I can talk him into squeezing a blog post in here every week or something.

Incidentally, he also mentioned he’s been printing out some of these blog posts and leaving them in common areas for other seminarians to read them.  Hopefully, this will get my readership up, and more importantly get some comment threads going.  I might develop a delusion of relevance as a Catholic blogger, you never know.

So, to you friendly folks at the Josephinum, welcome to the blog.  You’re already more qualified than I am….have at it.  If there’s an item of Catholic importance that needs airing, email me the link and I will look into posting about it.