Hiding From the Truth

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Francis

Being in the process of moving to a new city, I confess to having been remiss in posting any new articles over the past few months. Yet in that short time period the saner elements in our society seem to have been toppled by radical, left-wing wokeism, as evidenced by the absurd stories and lies being passed off as headlines. Consider the wave of crime and violent rampages sweeping through many of our major cities which the mandarins of so-called mainstream news networks attribute to food starved youth (all carrying expensive smart phones), or flash mob vandals who loot and burn businesses with impunity yet are blithely excused as exacting overdue “reparations” to which they, as minorities, are surely entitled. Besides, in a racist world the police who protect that racist system need to go, or at least be hamstrung in enforcing racist laws.

Meanwhile, in Nashville, a resentful trans activist cold-bloodedly murders six innocent children and teachers at a Christian school, but the White House chooses to identify itself not with the murdered nine year olds or their families but with the violent perpetrator of this horrific crime – supposedly a tragic victim of transphobic prejudice! Only a half-senile president would even fathom such an absurd narrative. What we are witnessing alongside the death of reason is the deliberate suppression of any truthful dialogue. The whole point is to support a political myth that white Christianity is a dangerous, toxic, and oppressive burden upon society that must be resisted and ultimately rooted out. Perhaps the real problem is not supposedly hateful Christians beating up on trans people but rather a blanket rejection of Christian morality which has enjoined a culture of violent, narcissistic, drug and sex abusers. What we are witnessing is a moral bankruptcy which the left for decades has been promoting as “progressive values.”

The progressive left has thus created a hive mentality which disproportionately affects those young people who have never acquired any good understanding of history, and so they are easily radicalized. Within these Alinsky styled tribal identity groups founded on shared resentments moral rectitude, self control, and even basic honesty are all equated with an attack on one’s basic freedoms. Evil they call good, and good is evil. And the masterminds of this whole diabolical agenda rely heavily on an essential tactic ~ hiding the truth, while hiding from the truth.

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Pope Benedict XVI ~ A true German Shepherd

Posted on January 5, 2023 by Francis

Today was celebrated the funeral Mass for Pope Benedict XVI, a loving and gentle father whose concern for the spiritual good of all the faithful was most deeply manifested through his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. The Ecclesial career of Fr. and later Cardinal Ratzinger, who would succeed St. John Paul II in the Petrine office as Benedict XVI, showed a commendable willingness to adapt his views from the abstract notions of the young intellectual to the concrete realities and challenges facing the Church. What I mean is that Benedict, like his predecessor, made valiant efforts to reconcile the novel teachings of Vatican II with longstanding Church tradition. History remains to judge whether their attempts to “square the circle” known as Vatican II succeeded or failed.

At this time we can only give both Pontiffs credit for making the effort, an effort which cost Benedict a great deal of opposition, criticism, and mental anguish. Although himself a progressive young periti or theological expert at the Council, time began to reveal that much of the Second Vatican Council was in fact a substantial miscalculation. I mean that instead of healing the rift between the Church and the modern world which the young, idealistic Fr. Ratzinger undoubtedly imagined to be possible, i.e., that the Church would finally convert the world through the means of modern social communications, in fact just the opposite occurred: secular values quickly invaded the Church.

Rather than the Church acting as a leaven in the world, the leaven of the world began to act within the Church through the power of those same means of social communication which flooded both clergy and faihful with its own secular messaging. Within the Church itself “pastoral” became the new catchword for “anything goes” while moral theology became hopelessly confused with sociology. The Council inadvertently opened those floodgates by allowing an admixture of true, long held doctrine to be sprinkled with subtle errors. This occurred when the former clarity in Church pronouncements was replaced by a verbal ambiguity in which, if one carefully reads the documents produced at Vatican II, one can sense the parsing of terms and even internal contradictions throughout many of those same documents. One consequence of the new “pastoral” guidelines being that a whole generation of clerics was trained to believe that the Catholic Church is no longer essential to salvation, therefore one can use means outside the Church to be saved. From this it is but a short step to the belief that all men, at least those of reasonably good will, are to be saved. The problem is that this teaching is not a part of the Apostolic tradition.

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Fear Not!

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Francis

Christmas is above all a season of hope, a chance to throw off all the media induced fear porn we have been bombarded with over the past eleven months and to renew our faith and hope in the One who alone conquers fear and death. Fear is the enemy of both true faith and hope, as the recent pandemic has so copiously illustrated. I say true faith and hope because today we are presented with a counterfeit version of faith and hope which contradicts, and even opposes, those great theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity whose proper object is the Son of God, of whose birth we are celebrating.

The fear mongers in today’s world are working hard and long to distort and secularize the authentic theological virtues so that they are no longer religious, rather they become transformed into humanist values. Faith thus becomes a misplaced faith in human science and progress, not faith in God and His providence. Our hope is no longer for eternal salvation but only a brighter future here on earth. Charity which is an ardent love for God becomes an exaggerated love and concern for nature and the planet. In order to draw our minds away from contemplating the divine Creator as the proper object of faith, hope, and love, the enemies of God are using fear to heighten anxieties over temporal concerns. Thus they redirect the theological virtues towards purely materialistic ends. And the catalyst they have used over and again to effect this devilish transformation is fear.

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That They May Be One

Posted on October 31, 2022 by Francis

Alongside the thorny question of Sacred Tradition v. Holy Scripture, those doctrines concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary have proven to be some of the more contentious barriers for many non-Catholics to reconcile with their understanding of Christianity. On this last day of October, the month of the most Holy Rosary, I thought it appropriate to post some of the Church Father’s thoughts regarding Scripture and Tradition, Mary’s perpetual virginity, the Catholic Church, and even infant baptism. Because without some agreement on these key doctrines Christian unity will never be achieved.

Religious diversity has been a cornerstone of our Western culture for so long now that it has become a given, even among Christians whose competing sects number in the thousands. Nonetheless, the essential question for any serious Christian today, yet rarely asked anymore, remains: is there only One Church founded by Christ or many? Did our Lord intend for there to be countless churches claiming his name or did he mean for there to be a single united body of believers, for as He himself prayed, “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one… I do not pray for these only but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they may also be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me.” (Jn 17: 11; 20-21)

Christian unity is thereby identified by Jesus Christ as one of the visible hallmarks that will attract the world to belief in the Gospel. If today’s world is sinking back into the abyss of neo-paganism then undoubtedly part of the cause must be the scandal of disunity among Christians which translates into a kind of religious adventurism allowing each person to follow his or her own take on the Gospel. Like a marketplace, modern Christians feel free to pick and choose from among those items which may appeal to their fancy (while ignoring more challenging demands): Tradition or Scripture (alone); preaching or sacraments; grace or good works; ordained hierarchy or lay governance, priests or ministers of the Word; sacrificial worship or a memorial communion feast. While all these things are important elements of the Church founded by Christ, they are not stand alone tenets but rather ingredients able to congeal together and form a tightly integrated whole which, bound together, forms and expresses a rational and unified deposit of faith.

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Considerations on Roe v Wade

Posted on June 29, 2022 by Francis

It was the most disastrous social experiment in our history. No I don’t mean slavery but a far more destructive horror – Roe v Wade – a judicially imposed policy to enlarge “women’s freedom” which in effect claimed over 60 million unborn American lives. Put into context that is roughly 100 lives lost for every single fatality suffered during America’s Civil War, the deadliest conflict in our nation’s history. Just last Friday five justices on our Supreme Court finally recognized the travesty of that Constitutionally flawed decision, laying to rest its blood-stained legacy after 49 long years.

Forty-nine years is itself Biblically significant: seven cycles of seven years each which have transpired between Roe and Dobbs v Jackson. The date of that decision, June 24, was also highly significant for it marked the conjunction of two major feasts in the liturgical calendar ~ The Feast of the Sacred Heart and the Birth of St. John the Baptist. The last time these two feasts fell together was on June 24, 1960, exactly one day after the FDA had approved the first hormonal oral contraceptive, an event which greatly ushered in the sexual revolution. Development of that first oral contraceptive, Enovid, was largely funded by Margaret Sanger and her Planned Parenthood organization. The work itself was performed by Gregory Pincus and Dr. John Rock, an lifelong Catholic who would eventually leave the Church rather than submit to Humanae Vitae which deemed use of the pill for contraceptive purposes to be objectively immoral.

Sandwiched in between those 62 years (1960-2022) separating the conjoined feasts of the Sacred Heart and St. John the Baptist, who leaped for joy in the womb when his own divine kinsman approached him in the maternal womb of the Virgin Mary, one can witness the anti-conception movement known as the sexual revolution. “For in those days they will say, ‘blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.” (Lk. 23:29) And so, over this span of less than one lifetime the sexual revolution has greatly exhausted itself in an orgy of angry, destructive self-indulgence. Rather than enhancing intimacy between men and women this revolution has rejected the bonds of conjugal intimacy and family life for a narcissistic expectation of endless self-gratification, an unrealistic expectation which then morphed into today’s angry resentful brand of feminism which regards human fertility as a curse.

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Ten Commandments or Ten Suggestions?

Posted on June 11, 2022 by Francis

Do our bishops really understand the difference?

Fifty-five years after passing the nation’s first liberalized abortion law, Colorado has shamefully doubled down by approving an Unrestricted Abortion Access Act fraudulently labelled as the Reproductive Health Equity Act (RHEA). Such deliberately misleading terminology has sadly become a staple of modern political discourse. Referring to the grisly process of abortion as “reproductive health” is an utterly absurd twisting of word meanings, intended only to mislead and deceive John Q. Public. Imagine legislators passing a bill to encourage and subsidize smoking called the Healthy Lungs Act! Yet that is precisely what the RHEA designation does. It turns the plain meaning of words upside down. Abortion provides neither a health benefit to an unborn child whose health is utterly destroyed through willful death nor to the mother whose emotional and often physical well being can be compromised by chronic depression, a perforated uterus, or permanent sterility. And where is the “equity” achieved for an aborted unborn child who has been unceremoniously stripped of all legal protections.

RHEA is a heinous and cynical effort to make Colorado a safe-haven for abortionists and a center of “abortion tourism” for surrounding “less progressive” states where life in utero may still be cherished and protected. It allows unrestricted access to abortion from conception right up to the moment of birth, for any reason whatsoever including gender selection. (But wait! I thought that parents no longer had the right to choose their child’s gender once they have reached kindergarten age. Yet before they are born it’s okay to unilaterally make such a choice by pruning out an unwanted gender, thus exposing the current hypocrisy of the leftist political class.

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Stolen Elections

Posted on May 23, 2022 by Francis

The story of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty’s confrontations with Hungarian Communists immediately after World War II is a gripping tale of intrigue, deception, and power politics. After watching the recent documentary film 2000 Mules I was particularly intrigued by the many parallels between what we had witnessed in November, 2020 and the convulsions Hungary was subjected to during and after the 1947 election that ensconced a Soviet puppet state that would maintain its totalitarian grip over the Hungarian people for the next 42 years. At the time the only organized opposition to the Communist takeover came from the Catholic Church under the strong leadership of its Primate of Hungary, Cardinal Josef Mindszenty. Ultimately Mindszenty himself would be targeted by the Communists, arrested, and imprisoned for his intransigence towards the totalitarian ruling power.

But in order to show the world that a Communist takeover was “the will of the people” that crucial 1947 election had to be rigged to obtain the desired outcome. According to Dr. Nicholas Boer, a Catholic priest who was himself an important official in the Ministry of Education, “In the West and elsewhere, everybody knew that the Hungarian elections of August 30, 1947 took place under an anti-democratic electoral law (which excluded a considerable part of the voters)… We do not want to discuss in detail how the Communists committed numerous abuses with the so-called “blue slips” which enabled a man to vote at various polling stations several times.” Just an aside, as an election judge in Denver County in the early 2000s I personally witnessed something very similar to this after the county had abandoned precinct voting to set up various “polling stations” around the city. I remember reporting to my supervisor that the ticket given to a voter after initial check in then remained in the voter’s custody and could then be simply re-used at any other polling station to vote again without having to check in. My complaint was simply ignored.

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Broken Down by Wokeness

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Francis

Back at the founding of our republic John Adams famously prophesied that the Constitution was designed to govern a religious and moral people, emphatically adding that it was not fit for any other kind. Now, some two plus centuries down the pike his observation is being proven out in real time. Wokeism is plaguing and eating away at the foundations of American society. Confusion reigns in the public square because the American people, too many of whom have fallen away from religion altogether, are being relentlessly gaslighted by their own leaders and public officials, greedy to obtain ever more power and control over our lives, our families, even our inmost thoughts.

This unpleasant fact was forcefully brought home to me recently as I watched a televised interview featuring a state senator from a wealthy suburban Detroit district. Identifying herself as a typical educated white Christian female she went on to rail against those parents who were upset by their five and six year old children being exposed to LGBT sexual ideology in the public schools. She was utterly dismissive of the notion that any kind of sexual content presented to kindergartners might either be age inappropriate or something rightly reserved to parents to discuss with their own children. Instead she turned the table on the parents insisting that they were essentially hateful bigots for wanting to shield their innocent offspring from sexual indoctrination wrapped in the fig leaves of “education” and “equity.”

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