When Pope Francis Threw Open the Closet Door We Could Guess Where this was Going!

Vatican appointee says gay sex can express Christ’s ‘self-gift’

Well, if there were any doubts about where this pope stands and where he is taking us his appointment last year of Timothy Radcliffe as a consultor for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace should have alerted us. The Synod on the Family, the bizarre interviews and telephone calls, the pope's favorites -- they all are signposts along the tracks.

We're on the express circus train to Sodom and Gomorrah with Francis as the engineer and a whole host of evil clowns taking the tickets and rummaging through the baggage.

Papal Encyclicals and the Bard's Plays: What They Tell Us about Modern Villains

Liberal conspirators planning to smear Robert Bork, two
of the "howling pack" who killed his nomination.

I belong to an interesting book club. We alternate reading Church documents with reading the plays of William Shakespeare.

What's the connection?

The four of us just happen to be interested in both. But what I'm finding is that, as a Catholic, Shakespeare addresses the big moral issues just like the papal encyclicals do. The effects of the seven deadly sins: pride, avarice, anger (think of the number of tragedies that deal with murder), lust, etc. We've been drawing the plays at random, but choosing the encyclicals by interest (with the qualification of being pre-Vatican II). The second play drawn was Coriolanus. Despite two semesters of Shakespeare in college, Coriolanus is one of the few plays I'd never read.

How Would You Describe the Church Today?

Pope St. Pius X

Remember in the gospels how often we read that people followed Jesus because he "spoke with authority." How's that working today do you think? Do those serving in persona Christi inspire confidence because they "speak with authority?" If you had to pick a word or phrase that summed up what Catholics are experiencing now would "speaking with authority" make the list? Not mine (at least for most prelates). Here's my take on the current situation which was confirmed big time by the recent synod. I believe these words describe the state of the Church:

• confusion
• ambiguity
• error
• disharmony
• discontinuity
• silence on moral truth
• obfuscation

Dare I say diabolical disorientation?

Laudato Si': Who Really Cares about the Poor?

I've read the first 60 paragraphs of the 246 in Laudato Si' and have reached a portion the media is likely to ignore. Why? Because it challenges the population controllers:

49. It needs to be said that, generally speaking, there is little in the way of clear awareness of problems which especially affect the excluded. Yet they are the majority of the planet’s population, billions of people. These days, they are mentioned in international political and economic discussions, but one often has the impression that their problems are brought up as an afterthought, a question which gets added almost out of duty or in a tangential way, if not treated merely as collateral damage. Indeed, when all is said and done, they frequently remain at the bottom of the pile. This is due partly to the fact that many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population. This lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality. At times this attitude exists side by side with a “green” rhetoric....

50. Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate. At times, developing countries face forms of international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of “reproductive health”....

Evangelium Gaudium: Chapter IV

The Social Dimension of Evangelization

The first sentence of Chapter IV stresses Christ's call to the apostles to go forth and convert all nations. "To evangelize is to make the kingdom of God present in our world." What a mission - one that stretches from the first century to the twenty-first which, more than ever, remains in need of conversion!

When one thinks of all the places on earth where Christ is nearly invisible: Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic countries, nations where Christianity is persecuted, Communist countries with struggling underground Christian churches, there is much work to be done and workers needed for the harvest.  It is a work that continues to be an "absolute priority of 'going forth from ourselves towards our brothers and sisters.'” Evangelization, then, is not merely an option, but the vocation of charity for every Christian believer and "one of the two great commandments which ground every moral norm."

I have always loved the image of the two beams of the cross that illustrate the two great commandments.

Pope Francis' Encyclical on Faith

I just downloaded the pope's encyclical to my Kindle. It's available on the Vatican website. Go here to read it or download.

Social Development Begins with Respect for Life

A Commentary on Chapter 1 of Caritas in Veritate: The Truth Doesn't Change

Back in the 70s (before the term "rescue" was in common use) a group of pro-life activists, including myself, conducted regular sit-ins at an abortion mill euphemistically called The Northern Virginia Women's Medical Center. The Center didn't do any medicine; their primary business was killing children. The administrator of the facility was a young woman named Sharon. She and I conversed many times: during sit-ins, at recess in court - we even debated on a local radio station. I tried to witness in Christian charity and challenged Sharon to put her nursing skills to real use instead of killing children. She never stopped in the time I knew her, although one of her nurses, Pam, burned out and left.

Once when our group had again successfully entered the mill to block the killing even though the doors were locked (a nurse opened the door as we walked down the corridor), Sharon said to me in frustration, "You sound like a broken record; you always say the same thing." I replied, "Sharon, the truth doesn't change."

I thought of that as I continued reading Caritas in Veritate this week. The Church doesn't change. Even in the face of new technology and societal development, the principles that guide our actions always remain the same. Pope Benedict makes that clear by his heavy dependence on Pope Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progressio published more than 40 years ago and reference to the apostles and to the ancient fathers and doctors of the Church. Standing with one foot firmly planted in the traditions of the past and the other in the present facing new challenges, the Church remains solidly grounded in ancient, unchanging truths.

Pope Benedict describes the "two important truths" of Pope Paul's encyclical:

The first is that the whole Church, in all her being and acting -- when she proclaims, when she celebrates, when she performs works of charity -- is engaged in promoting integral human development....The second truth is that authentic human development concerns the whole of the person in every single dimension.

So human development is oriented toward the individual who is seen as an integrated whole: body, intellect, and will. Pope Benedict speaks the same message shared by the great reformers of every age, "the Christian ideal of a single family of peoples in solidarity and fraternity." Consider the Apostles going to the ends of the earth carrying the message of evangelization and baptizing people one by one. The central force serving this true human development, the very heart of social teaching, is "Christian charity" at the service of life.

Life ethics, Pope Benedict makes crystal clear, are at the very heart of social ethics. There can be no true "dignity of the person, justice and peace" where "human life is devalued and violated, especially where it is weak or marginalized." Human progress is essentially a vocation "that derives from a transcendent call." It "presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual" and recognizes that each individual is the "principal agent of his own success or failure." The Gospel, Pope Paul says and Pope Benedict reaffirms "is fundamental for development" and it must, to be true, "involve the whole man and every man."

The world often denies the necessity of the Church, faith, and God to bring about human progress. Instead worldly institutions (government, schools, charitable foundations, think tanks, etc.) are seen as the agents of change for the betterment of society. But the pope makes it clear that:

institutions by themselves are not enough, because integral human development is primarily a vocation, and therefore it involves a free assumption of responsibility in solidarity on the part of everyone. Moreover...it needs God: without him, development is either denied, or entrusted exclusively to man, who falls into the trap of thinking he can bring about his own salvation, and ends up promoting a dehumanized form of development.

Think of the paganized public school system attempting to solve the problem of teenage pregnancy by teaching children to fornicate without consequence (an impossibility) and you'll understand what the pope means by "a dehumanized form of development."

Pope Benedict stresses that the Church's social doctrine throughout the ages forms "a single teaching, consistent and at the same time ever new" that shares "the coherence of the overall doctrinal corpus....The church's social doctrine illuminates with an unchanging light the new problems that are constantly emerging." From the Apostles to the Fathers of the Church to "the great Christian doctors" Church teaching still speaks to us today. The great moral principles of the past never grow old, they simply find new applications.

From the very beginning of his encyclical, Pope Benedict makes it clear that respect for life and the dignity of the human person, man's own freedom and responsibility and call to vocation, lie at the center of any discussion of social progress and social justice. It is not a message the media welcomes or is likely to promote. So read the document, not the media spin on its contents.

TO BE CONTINUED...