Fr. Barron vs. Voris?

No. Both Fr. Barron and Michael Voris of ChurchMilitant.tv believe that Vatican II was valid and good.

What is interesting is that Fr. Barron (second video at 1:51-2:17) answers Voris' question/comment (first video at 1:12-1:45).

Militant vs. Nice
"... No one in that [Spirit of Vatican II/"church of nice"] camp ever seems to be able to actually define what is meant by the spirit of Vatican II. ..."



The Meaning of Vatican II: A Commentary by Fr. Barron





Fr. Barron rightly clarifies that there is a split that developed between theologians after the council.

I wonder if that rift will ever close. I hope that it does soon, even in my Catholic parish.

On Graphic Abortion Images

                “You’re giving the prolife movement a black eye,” a male senior citizen angrily yelled out his open car window at me. It was a bright, but heated Friday afternoon at the bottom of a greatly-sloped hill on John’s Hopkins University in Baltimore City. As the loud motorist on Charles Street made the loud call, the vociferous Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) picture display of the Center for Bioethical Reform was being used to engage pedestrians — mostly students — and motorists that stopped at the red light nearby. (The GAP display used graphic pictures of various genocides, including abortion, to highlight the injustice of abortion.)

                It was the first time that I ever handed out prolife literature at a GAP display or engaged students on a college campus. It was to be expected that there would be counter-protesters and debates with many people along the prolife/proabortion spectrum, but how does the showing of abortion-killings pictures give the prolife movement a black eye? Doesn’t it open people’s eyes to the horror of abortion?

                A biology student at the display said that we shouldn’t show the gruesomely bloody pictures because young people might see the graphic abortion pictures, and it was also like displaying hard-core pornographic scenes. In a way, I always thought the same thing, but then I read about Lila Rose and others. Ms. Rose, the founder of Live Action (undercover investigations of Planned Parenthood’s racism and sex-abuse cover-ups), came to the prolife position at a young age from viewing a book in her parents’ collection that had graphic abortion pictures. From her eye-opening experience, she has become a strong advocate for showing graphic abortion pictures, especially on college campuses.

What the pictures are not is pornography. They are more akin to showing the aftermath of dehumanizing the women and men in the porn industry. If there were pictures of women with bruises, running mascara, and the like, they would more resemble the pictures of the GAP display.

                Really, abortion enables the cardinal sin of lust to run rampant which leads to the darkening of the heart and soul. What the widespread use of elective abortion does in reality is to allow the heart of the world to become lustful.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna.” (Matthew 5: 27-29)

                In my Bible commentary, Gehenna was described as the place of “an idolatrous cult” where “children were offered in sacrifice” (2 Kings 23: 10; Jeremiah 7:31). So, those who are “thrown into Gehenna” go with those who sacrificed their children. Jesus is saying that if one continues in a state of sexual sin, especially with committing abortion in the GAP context, that person is thrown into the realm of those idolaters who killed their children, too. Those who sacrifice their sons and daughters in the womb for lust through abortion may have the same fate as those who sacrificed their children already born for idols.

What I think the GAP project does is to help “tear [an eye] out” of the world so that the world is not thrown into Gehenna. The aim of the pictures is conversion of heart and mind, that is, turning towards the truth that abortion kills a child that is loved and wanted by God, made in the image and likeness of God.

                As a Catholic Christian, I love my fellow man too much to not help him in, what some translations say, gauging out his eye with a graphic picture of what the results of his decisions look like.
 

Fortnight for Freedom in Baltimore

Majority of People Participate in Mass

I just came back from the Basilica in Baltimore from where the fortnight for freedom kicked-off. It was a packed church, and it seemed like every person participated in the singing and prayers. Not since the Oratory in Pittsburgh during my undergrad days has a mass been so invigorating, even though the air itself was stifling (Archbisop Lori had to have many cups of water handed to him throughout the liturgy).

I wonder if I was on camera since my feet stood on the ground in about the sixth row in front of the Archbishop's chair (literally, the Cathedral). Cardinal O'Brien was looking directly in my direction on the other side of the alter underneath the pulpit. If you saw/see the EWTN broadcast (the camera was pretty much right in front of me), I am the tall guy with the blue shirt with white stripes and glasses.

The procession was long with many priests and deacons from the Archdiocese of Baltimore. My parish pastor was not there, but the pastor from a nearby parish was: St. Agnes.

The only thing that I did not particularly like was all the clapping for everything. There seemed to be to much horizontal pomp and clericalism for such a reverent setting. I love my Archbishop, but he doesn't need to be drowned in misplaced recognition. (Before mass, people gave a standing O for him when he passed by. Really?)

His homily had two aspects that I would like to mention.

Inherent or Inalienable?

First, he said that we have from God (our Creator) an inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is a curious change from inalienable to inherent. First Things had a very interesting take on "Rights You Can't Give Away" that analyzed the meaning of inalienable from a property point of view. Simply put, Austen's Darcy cannot just give his estate away, he has responsibilities to pass it on in the family.

However, is inherent more or less strong than inalienable? Legally, something has an inherent property if all instances of the thing or concept has that property; it simply cannot be called the thing without said property. Logically it's a necessary condition (to have a given property for that thing). So, any human inherently has a right to life, etc.

Perhaps the distinction is that inalienable rights are given by a creator, while inherent rights are defined as an integral part of the thing itself. In theory, couldn't God take away natural rights? However, if rights are inherent, the thing itself possesses rights internally which would make them not that thing if they didn't have it.

God couldn't change a human into a duck if God desired it so (or could it be?). However, God could take away rights since he endowed the rights (sort of like life can be taken or given by God according to His will).

Well, since both seem pretty indisputable (God hasn't changed a person into a duck and He can give and take life as he wills), either do seem to be equally fine. (Please let me know if I went somewhere wrong, it's late.)

Conscience Theme

Over and over he mentioned conscience as a driving principal in society. This is obviously important to a major degree since the Church's conscience is being trampled upon in it's charity toward Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

However, I wish he would have mentioned something either along the lines of developing a thrust towards "a well-formed conscience" or one formed by natural law principals (see Dr. Kings use of St. Aquinas here).

A Pelosi or Biden could easily say that they are following their conscience for pushing the HHS mandate, but a more explicit handling could have been useful.

Overall, the homily was very good, especially when he talked about St. More and Fischer. (He even plainly said that King Henry's Act of Supremacy caused St. More and Fischer to loose their lives for their conscience's sake.)

May God bless Archbishop Lori.

----

Oh yes, BTW, local channel 11 (NBC) was there besides EWTN.

HHS Mandate Demonstration in Ellicott City

I had the privilege to eat lunch with the organizer of the HHS Mandate Demonstration in Ellicott City, Maryland, Peggy Hagen. We were joined by the lead council for a religious liberty defense firm, his two children, and another woman protester.

One thing I realized is that you don't have to be a Princeton professor to set-up a demonstration. The Ellicott City organizer is currently a waitress (this is a good job too BTW).

One day, while writing against the HHS mandate on Facebook, she decided that she should do something besides write about the mandate. So, she organized both the March and June 2012 HHS mandate rallies. She also managed to get leaders from around the local area.

According to her, during the March rally:

The ministers in the first picture [below] are Fr. Terry Sweeney of St. Timothy's Episcopal in Catonsville (speaking) and Rev. Frank Revell of Cokesbury Memorial Methodist in Abingdon, who led us in our opening prayer. Also speaking were Bishop Rozanski from the Baltimore Archdiocese; myself; and Sandra Nettina, a local nurse and pro-life organizer. This is not a Catholic issue; this is not a gender struggle. This is a fight to retain our Constitutional rights, and it belongs to all Americans. Many thanks to all of those who recognized this and came out, in Ellicott City and in 140 other cities across our nation!

   I wonder how this country would be if more people decided to get out of their arm chair and stand up for Truth.

We can't leave it up to the politicians. Change starts with reviving the culture to the Way.

HHS Mandate Highlights Widespread Religious Stance

Last Friday, I went to my local Stop the HHS Mandate rally (more on that in a later post).

Many (if not most) of the people that showed up were Catholic. At least for myself, I think we realize that our Catholicism is not a hobby, but the Way (Acts 19:9) established by Christ Himself to lead the world to heaven hand in hand with Christ and other believers. Others do not see it this way.

Fr. Barron's video below explains well how this is. Below that, Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia (my original hometown Archdiocese) gives his take vis-a-vis President Kennedy in a speech.



***Archbishop Chaput's speech is here***. (It's great!)

I spoke to a neighbor on my block one day about things.

Gerry: So, what legislation have you been following? [His hobby is to follow bills.]
Neighbor: I've been pretty disgusted with National Politics. I've been following state ones [Maryland].
G: Which ones?
N: The dream act. And I'm really glad the same-sex marriage bill passed.
G: Oh. Sorry to hear that. I'm against it. I just took a training at [the local Catholic Church] to have petitions signed to put it to the voters in November.
N: Don't you think religion should stay out of politics?
G: No. Going back through our history, people through churches have gotten much done. Before the revolutionary war, preachers' sermons up and down the country [really colonies] were given that we should separate from England. Martin Luther King, Jr. used religious rhetoric all the time and especially in Churches to get rid of Jim Crow. Did you ever read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail?
N: I see.

I think this view is wide spread, especially in the North East, from my experience. Why is it this way? Perhaps because powerful ignorance buys power?

I wonder.

My Wife Takes on the HHS Mandate

My wife just took on the HHS mandate.

One of her Quaker relatives in PA posted the picture below on Facebook (click it to enlarge), so my wife saw it. The picture and quote of Obama put her over the edge. She usually doesn't comment on things like this, but this time she felt obliged to take the plunge.
 
She wrote the comment below:

First of all the complaint of the Church is not that they are not being able to practice a belief. It is that they are being asked to provide and pay for something, which the Church holds to be a grave evil. They are not refusing to allow their employees the use of birth control they simply do not wish to be made to pay for it. And since when was birth control a basic right? As far as I know one can live with out it. One can even live with out it with out being “punished with a baby”. I would be curious to find out if those supporting this administrations stand would do so if he were attacking another religious denomination other than the Roman Catholic Church? What if people’s right to object to military service was under attack. Many religious leaders across the country not only Catholics recognize this for what it is, a flagrant attack on the religious freedoms of American Citizens. The Church will not yield on this one. And some of the repercussions will be: the closing of parochial schools that provide education to thousands of under privileged children, The closing of hundreds of hospitals and clinics that care for those below the poverty level. Nursing homes like the one I visit every week with my children will be forced to cease their ministry to the elderly poor. And the list goes on. Why? Because those organizations are not considered religious organizations even though those running them do so because that is what their faith calls them to do. They will close rather than be forced to provide something they consider morally atrocious. And they are right to do so. Would we want them to sacrifice their beliefs? It is a tragedy that they are being asked to do so. And when they are forced to close who will fill in to take their place? Who will fill the whole that is left when the Church is no longer allowed to care for the poor? The Obama administration? It will be a sad day indeed. [original emphasis]

This was great! I'm so proud.

For this post on my blog, I thought I would expand on her logic with my article below. (I submitted the article below to a magazine, but they did not accept it. Where would you have submitted it?)

In Catonsville, Baltimore County, Maryland, where I live, The Little Sisters of the Poor serve the elderly with a level of dignity well above other nursing homes. They have several levels of care in various facility wings within St. Martin’s Home on Maiden Choice Road that meet the needs of the residence.

About every week, my wife and two smallest children go visit their “friends” at St. Martin’s with the hope that they’re “making the residents happy” by the display of their youthful energy. Tragically, the new rule by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) places The Little Sisters in jeopardy of severely reducing their beautiful mission to the poor. The rule mandates that employers directly or indirectly provide contraception and abortion causing drugs to the employees “of all faiths in [their] ministry”.

As the March first statement of the Little Sisters indicates, “Because the Little Sisters of the Poor cannot in conscience directly provide or collaborate in the provision of services that conflict with Church teaching, we find ourselves in the irreconcilable situation of being forced to either stop serving and employing people of all faiths in our ministry – so that we will fall under the narrow exemption – or to stop providing health care coverage to our employees.”

Does the Obama administration through the guidance of Catholic HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius realize that the contraception mandate will cause cost effective religious institutions to function less effectively or shut down? Do they realize that practicing religion is more than going to a place of worship, especially as believed by those in the three Abrahamic religions? A clue to these questions came from a Washington, D.C. political pundit who has close ties to Maryland and the Obama administration.

On February 12, Colby King said on the program “Inside Washington, “Well, I was hospitalized recently at a Catholic hospital. There was no exercise of religion as far as I was concerned [laughter] - at any point. I just got medical care. ... The religion question never came into being. I was treated in that hospital the same way I would be treated in any other hospital.”

Others on the program tried explaining that serving others was an integral part of practicing the Christian religion, but no one laid out the facts from history or the Bible.

Going back to the early Christians in the Roman Empire, when Pagan Romans exposed their newborn children to the elements, Christians would rescue and care for many of them. In the Middle Ages and even today, convents were safe havens for newborns whose mothers could not care for them; they were the origin of the modern “Baby Moses Law”. Jesus Himself taught the Good Samaritan parable that revealed that all people should come to the aid of their neighbor in need.

Most of all, in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, verses thirty-one to forty-six, Jesus reveals that when anyone in the world helps the poor, they minister to Jesus. At the end of time, Jesus will say of those who served the poor themselves, “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.” (vv. 35-36)

When religious institutions act positively toward people who are poor in material and ultimately spiritual ways as revealed in Matthew twenty-five, they are in fact fulfilling their religious obligations through Love within the public square. Even though the care may seem to be the same whether through secular or religious institutions, the above spiritual undergirding of the sponsoring Church, Religious Order, or Ecclesial Community is present. Also, when I personally go to the local juvenile prison facility to help with math classes inside the institution, unless they ask me, they would never know that I come to see them as a Catholic layman in response to a calling by a sister religious from the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

When a non-Catholic hospital nurse or university janitor works in their respective institution, that employee is supporting the mission of the employer to uphold its Gospel mission. The Catholic employer also has Gospel and Church Tradition in mind when it makes the decision to provide health insurance that does not include contraception and abortion inducing drug coverage to their employees. The Gospel, or Culture of Life that the Church preaches does not allow these institutions to directly or indirectly materially cooperate with the Culture of Death by providing those materials.

Of course, there is a debate whether the government may force insurance companies and/or Catholic institutions to provide contraception under the U.S. Constitution. However, the fact of the matter is that religious oases such as The Little Sisters of the Poor would rather reduce their positive contributions to the world which Jesus loves than to cooperate with the evil that the government would force upon them.

SSM / Abortion Contrast

"Obama seems to think that the right to marry (which is conditional) is unconditional, whereas the right to life (which is unconditional) is conditional, as conditioned by the mother’s choice."

This is the best sentence that connects same-sex "marriage" and abortion that I ever read/heard.

(From here: "Praising the play while ignoring the performance: Obama’s misguided support for gay ‘marriage’" Lifesitenews.com)

HHS Mandate Slogans

Here are some HHS slogans by me (HT CMR):

I'll be at the protest in Ellicott City, MD tomorrow.

1. The predictions of Pope Paul VI were not a Fluke!

2. HHS mandate prefigures a China man without a date.

3. HHS mandate is one-child-policy-light.

4. The President swore to defend the USA, not allow China's policies to weaken us.

5. Be fruitful and multiply unnatural rights and kill natural rights.