Two comments proffered by two disparate personalities yesterday reminded me how often we reveal what we really think or what our perspective is by what we do not intend to say but say it anyway in 'throw-away lines.'
The disparate personalities, who in actuality converged unintentionally, are a priest, commenting on the media and culture, and Harry Smith of the A&E channel's Biography, commenting on FOX News' Billy O'Reilly's upbringing in a Catholic family. As far as I know Harry Smith is not a Catholic, while Bill O'Reilly says he still is. The priest in question is a local diocesan pastor.
Both should have known better:
Father Pastor, in the course of his homily commented on how difficult it is to lead morally upright Christian lives in the midst of an immoral culture. Right enough there. But then he left reality altogether when he then said that in the previous generations Americans did not seem to love children as much as we [apparently] do now. As proof of this he cited the cases where families from the distant past did not get too attached to new-born children because so many of them died in early childhood, in order to save themselves from more misery.
Excuse me, Father. Saving oneself a little grief is not proof of detachment or a lack of love, but proof of the very opposite: proof that they at least loved children enough to have them in greater numbers, knowing of the hardships that may lie ahead, confident in the will of God and His grace to get through it all. And they did not have more children just because some of them died in infancy, because more survived than died and families were much larger in general they are today. Abortion was not part of the agenda or an option, nor was the abortifacient pill. Father, you forgot to mention those facts, that stood us well when Catholic families were strong as Catholic families. Father did not mention how prevalent abortion and contraception are today among so-called "practicing Catholics." He overlooked the higher incidence of child neglect, abuse and worse, the outright infanticide that occurs daily here in America. He overlooked all this the week of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Now, let's see if we have this straight: America is a tough culture [no argument there] within to practice heroic sanctity. But we are so much better anyway because we profess to love children more. Hmmmm?
This brings us to BIOGRAPHY'S show on Bill O'Reilly. I have no intention on critiquing the critique, because this is not my purpose here. After a brief prelude, Harry Smith opened with the telling anti-Catholic, biased line: Despite his upbringing in a strict Catholic family, he [Bill O'Reilly] managed to have a happy childhood. Or words very close to this. I can't recall if it was strict upbringing or family, but you get the idea: the association was that having good Catholic parents was not consistent with happiness in childhood. Now, of course, I am almost certain that Smith did not really mean to reveal his bias, or if the line is from O'Reilly himself instead, that O'Reilly did not intend to reveal this much, being so private about family matters as he is and rightly so. The source is not relevant here, the idea behind it is.
The Catholic Church, in its traditions and teachings consonant with that tradition, expresses the will of God; since God is perfect, He cannot ordain that which is harmful to His creatures so loved by Him that He sent His only-begotten Son to redeem them. Thus, a strict Catholic upbringing, which means a morally upright one that includes sound discipline and religious training, cannot but bring happiness, all other things being equal. Any unhappiness is caused by a defect in the persons involved, not in the principles of Catholic family life themselves.
Just substitute for "strict Catholic family" "strict Black family," "strict Jewish family," etc., and would that line have survived the editing cut? Three guesses and the first two do not count!
Look at all the unhappiness we have with today's perfect parents with all the social agencies and child advocacy programs. Never before have children been so neglected, both unintentional and intentional. That neglect includes spoiling them to make up for our lack of discipline, our unwillingness to risk being "disliked enough by our children" to refuse them the things that mark their entrance into this crass, degraded culture we are immersed in. Instead we close our eyes while our pre-teen girls dress like tarts and our sons have condom machines in dormitory halls and elsewhere. We send them to public schools knowing of the evils of sex "education" and more. We refuse to give up a comfortable lifestyle to home school them rather than destroy their souls in tax-supported anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, pro-Moslem, pro-pagan schools. And that is if, we even conceive them in the first place, past the normal 2 per. Things were not perfect back then, because things never are, but they sure were different. Which do you think was a happier time? Both for children and for parents?
Ironically, that stalwart, fierce independence of Bill O'Reilly not to kowtow to the politically correct was fostered in that same strict Catholic family where his father was the same. Of course we could always make the argument that this independence is the same that leads O'Reilly to reject Church teachings he personally disagrees with, which is ironically, oh so politically correct. But Harry Smith and Co. can't have it both ways as cannot the above mentioned Catholic priest.
WHOOPS! DID THEY REALLY SAY THAT?The local paper carried a news item this morning on the latest encyclical [unspecified as to title] from the Holy Father with the headline:
Vatican cracks down on doctrine
The Holy Father has issued this document out of concern about divorced and "remarried" Catholics still receiving the Sacraments, a source of scandal, and Catholics attending other denominations and participating in inter-communion services. The pontiff stressed [according to the article] that Catholics cannot remarry after divorce and those who do live in grave public sin and are to be barred from receiving Holy Communion; he also stressed that Catholics may not substitute services at a non-Catholic church for their Sunday obligation ... and so forth.
All well and good, of course, if things in Rome were otherwise. The reaction was expected: howls of complaint from the uncatechized, Protestanized typical Catholics in today's pews, not to mention the protests from all the "offended" Protestants [hence the name] who claim that this will set "ecumenism" back a notch. If only that were true. Let's examine the dynamics at work here.
1. John Paul II in a series of unprecedented actions, in complete violation of his duty to maintain Tradition and preserve the faith intact as it was handed down from the Apostles, has "taught and trained" the laity that one faith is just as good as another because they all lead to truth: to wit, he has kissed the Koran, allowed a Hindu to place a pagan [in reality a Satanic] mark on his forehead, permitted his Holy Office to promulgate the false teachings that Catholics no longer need to evangelize, that the Church of Christ merely subsists in the Catholic Church [in other words she is not a complete perfect society in of herself, outside of which there is no salvation, any issued clarifications notwithstanding as they serve to confuse the faithful further in typical Vatican II ambiguity] and on and on. So what is a little "inter-communion" on Sunday in comparison? Human nature, being what it is, it is obvious to anyone with a minimal power of reasoning that since the majority usually takes the path of least resistance, what else could he expect, especially since the Protestantizing of the Mass has turned almost two generations of Catholics into a congregation of minimalists that no longer believe in Transubstantiation, forget if they can spell it! The said congregations include the parish priest who is supposed to inculcate the faith into the people who make up those parishes. But since he is too busy coming down to the laity as a hail-fellow well met, just one of us, you know, completely divesting himself of his priestly dignity, while placing the laity into the role of "minister" of this and that and everything else some one can come up with-----the new minor clerical office-----well, human nature happens again and again and again ... and the rest is sadly, a history unlike any that preceded ours.
2. As for the scandal of the divorced and "remarried": Again, what ought he to expect after thirty years of the abandonment of Catholic moral teaching from the pulpits of cathedrals and churches alike, apart from the trendy "social gospel," meaning the left-wing of the Democratic party, or plain old socialism dressed up as the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If today's Catholic is so fortunate, he might have a pro-life sermon in January, but he has come to not count on even this and for many, that is a sigh of relief you hear. NFP courses, pre-Cana conferences and so forth all preach contraception disguised as licit morality in round about terms so as to not be "official" but official enough to pass muster with the couples.
This would be sermon enough to instill into the laity that the Church does not really mean what she says she means and that morality can change, even in the eyes of God. Contracepting Catholics are divorcing Catholics just as in the general society. But when this abomination is combined with the scandal of witnessing Sunday after Sunday the local or national politico, rabidly, and very publicly and proudly pro-abortion, etc., stand and receive Holy Communion, well as we just said, what's a little divorce and "remarriage" when it comes to the Sacraments? If this is not a scandal induced by manifest grave public sin, what else could it be? Thus far, no crackdown on bishops who refuse to excommunicate these politicians or at least bar them from Communion!
Examples from a local parish here in the diocese of Portland, Maine, will suffice to serve as a veritable infinity of the effects of Original Sin when combined with the "updated Church": Note, this is just one parish from over a hundred that could be used, but this parish, which I will not name, is one I once was a member of for many years but had to flee to save my faith and my sanity.
After the old orthodox, holy pastor died all hell broke loose, quite literally: One poorly trained radical priest after another came to divest-----no rob-----the parish of its Catholicism, still traditional even after Vatican II, with two well-attended daily Masses, lines for Confession on Saturday afternoon, sodalities, novenas, Benediction, plus. The first was a secret pederast who was not able to keep his hands off some of the young males who had their innocence stolen from them. He taught openly at adult workshops that masturbation was no longer a mortal sin, that one could miss Mass on Sunday if one had less than the acceptable reasons, and Our Lady was not a perpetual Virgin, among other atrocities. He was eventually found out on the pederasty but almost no one noticed the infidelity to doctrine: those few who did had to fight almost alone against odds too painful to recount here. After a couple of years of his "teachings" too many accepted his way because it was easier to maintain sin if truth can change and even Mary gave up her virginal purity. You would think that after the pederasty scandal they might want to rethink what he taught them, all so charmingly of course. He was a real comedian, doing take-offs denouncing tradition. But that would not be reckoning with human nature reconfigured by Original Sin. No, better to just not think about it all.
The next priest wore an earring off and on the altar, which should have been a clue! From him no pederasty but one muddled incoherent sermon after another and a series of childish outbursts, another clue. But he was celebrated and wined and dined just like the one before him, who, by the way, thought a trip to Atlantic City for shopping and some gambling was the ideal parish activity, and who was a good friend of the local politician who was claiming to be still pro-life while wanting "gay rights." Then came Father Super-Modernist; actually he came in twos, so to speak, the dynamic duo of Father Jung the paid psychologist curate who promised that he would charge fees to the laity seeking his advice and counseled unhappy wives to divorce their husbands and Father Screwball, the pastor. Between the two of them, anyone still standing and not fleeing had already lost the faith or were there by God's ordained will known only to them.
The latter priest counseled couples who were dating after divorces from others, that if they wanted to remarry, but did not want to bother with the year of waiting for our super-fast almost guaranteed annulment mill at the Chancery [the largest office space in the building], that they could "remarry" in the Church and in the church by undertaking what he called "the internal forum." This was simply the couple getting together with him or even alone and deciding for themselves that the first marriage was never valid, in their eyes and theirs alone. Forget God, He had no say in the matter! I saw one former traditional Catholic woman, who left her very abusive husband, morph into an internal forum gal with a "remarriage" as a trophy thanks to that so-called priest.
But that was not the first clue that something was very wrong and very lethal. That clue came in his first sermon on his first Sunday. It was a bombshell. He began by informing the parishioners that he was "surprised" by their traditional faith-----the novenas were still going on although Benediction had been given the axe-----and that he had just come from a parish [since closed] that had been as traditional as theirs but that in two years he had changed them into an updated parish for the most part. And that he was on a mission to do the same here as there. He almost boasted that it would take no more than two years to accomplish this and the boast was anything but idle. It happened and in two years. I no longer recognized most of my fellow parishioners, Catholically-speaking-----I had long since left never to return. A few finally woke up and left, thanks be to God, but they were the few. Then he left to take a sabbatical to rethink his vocation, is how I recall him putting it. The Jungian had already departed. Meanwhile any pro-abortion politician in the parish or outside could receive Communion with no qualms of being turned away. The first priest I told you about had denied Communion to a defender of the faith because she refused to support Charles Curran the dissenter, going so far as to castigate her from the pulpit. The last priest mentioned continued the tirade against orthodoxy and tradition by taking potshots at the same woman in daily sermons from time to time because she would not support "gay rights." She was considered "a bad Catholic" and was now socially shunned by some who should have known better. This was the same priest who sometimes did not do the consecration, if he ever intended to in the first place. By that time almost no one seemed to notice, but a few woke up and left after he started doing or should I say, not doing this. Just a handful. Even when he did the consecration he hurried so fast it was like a blip on the radar screen that disappears as fast it shows up. His sermons were much longer as were his walk-through handshakes at the "Kiss of Peace."
Now, you would think that this is about all a parish could take, wouldn't you? Well, you would be wrong! Now comes the current pastor, straight from being a honcho on a pornographic homosexual site, publicly known as such and not repentant, if his remarks mean anything, not to say his scandalous behavior. He says he also wants to take some time out to reconsider his vocation. But he has not left yet and the last I heard [I still speak with a couple of ex-parishioners who have parish contacts] he was doing his homo-promo number by flirting with a young good-looking homosexual parishioner, so overtly, only the dead could not see. A few more have left after this, but just a few. The parking lost is stuffed to overflowing every Sunday, and one of the parishioners I used to be friends with and who was a fellow soldier in the trenches against "gay rights" is no longer a stalwart soldier in this regard.
And I never got to the utter desecration of the Mass that has undergone a series of updates, but I don't need to. You see, once you permit a priest to tinker with the Mass you will let him meddle with your soul ...
Meanwhile the Pope in Rome just doesn't seem to get it. An encyclical of any force, a Papal bull filled with anathemas in fact, both are useless, unless backed up by discipline and this means consequences, because as today's Catholic knows, talk is so cheap you don't even take it for free. He just doesn't get it, apparently.Pro-life [not a perfect record] Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvannia-----I don't need to tell you the party affiliation, as by now you know it is Republican as Democrats almost always rate a pass-----was caught citing from a Texas Supreme Court case on sodomy and the US Supreme Court 1986 case on the same. In our hyper PC atmosphere the mere reference to another's statement can bring hysterical charges of "homophobia"! The rationale in both sodomy cases was that to overturn state laws against sodomy [Texas and Georgia to be specific] would be to remove the foundation for the ban against consensual incest, bigamy, polygamy and adultery. Given the natural trajectory of sin compounded by faulty liberal thinking, this was a safe assumption by both courts.
Both the Log Cabiners and Santorum are wrong and right! How so you ask?
Santorum in his reaction to the reaction refused to apologize or step down from his Senate leadership position [okay there] but made a point of listing his compassionate overtures and how diligently he worked with homosexuals on issues. What's to work on? There are no laws they need that they do not already have unless it is a way of selling out on the installment plan. Once you compromise or listen to militant homosexuals on the basis of their sexual proclivities you start to unravel and God appears to withdraw His grace. Santorum is reaping what he unwittingly sowed by making gestures of compromise in the first place. These groups are out for total surrender and little crumbs of compromise will never satisfy their bloodlust of overturning the natural law.
This brings us to the Log Cabin group and their cohorts in the Democratic party and in the media. Suddenly they are against "adultery"! Repeatedly the rant was that to compare homosexuality with adultery [and the other sins] was offensive to them. Imagine that! What the sodomites require most of all from us is a guilty conscience. The more we commit sins of lust the better for them. This is the first I have ever heard that crowd decry adultery! Well as they say nothing succeeds like a big lie and the Father of Lies must be licking his chops about now. The life of sodomy is a life of deceit in so many ways so why not this lie if it will serve the cause.
Actually both Santorum and the Log Cabiners have it wrong, while partly getting it right. Santorum, because sodomy is not like the other sins it is far worse, it is one of the four sins "crying out for vengeance from Heaven", the other three being willful murder of the innocent [abortion among other homicides], defrauding the poor and widows, and the not paying of a just wage to the worker. The other sexual sins while all too common and most evil are not sins calling for vengeance, punishment yes, but not vengeance [from God and by God], understood in the Catholic sense. All societies and empires and nations that fell to ruin first tolerated sodomy to the extent that God withdrew His grace and they ceased to exist as entities. Sodomy is so unnatural and harmful to society not just the sodomite himself, that the Bible specifically mentions it as a precursor and one of the signs, along with earthquakes, etc., of the great apostasy. It is as if God is warning us that tolerance for sodomy is a societal, human earthquake that disrupts nature so badly it causes deep, unremitting fissures.
The Log Cabiners are right to say that sodomy is different, although not in they way they want us to think, but wrong to claim that to cite the rationale behind a Supreme Court case is hate speech. If that is the case, no pun intended, then no one could cite from any Supreme Court case at any time, including the Court, because there will always be someone somewhere who claims offense. This is irrational. But then our official but unstated for now public policy is that it is unreasonable to be rational. Precisely what occurs when as Joe Sobran observes, we sacrifice the normal for the sake of the abnormal, in this case the unnatural.
IN a heated exchange between Pat Buchanan of MSNBC's BUCHANAN AND PRESS and famed feminist attorney Gloria Allred, she told him that she had no problem being for abortion and for the prosecution of Scott Peterson for double homicide in the murder case of his wife who was a month away from delivering their son at the time of the murder.
Allred maintains that it is the sole providence of the woman who is pregnant to decide if she wants her baby to live or not. Well, here is a message for Mrs. Allred:
You missed the point entirely. Let us examine your double-talk. The point is, is the child in the womb a person or not.[?] If the answer is yes, then the woman has no right to decide for death in the case of an innocent person, a baby. Period! If she has that right than it can only be under the natural law and by reason because the creature in the womb is not a person. And if the creature temporarily inhabiting the womb is not a person, then no one, can be charged with murder if he chooses to kill that creature. Period!
There is a cliché, "Out of the mouths of babes", another way of saying that the truth will out in the most unexpected places. The Scott Peterson indictment for double murder is a very inconvenient moment of truth both for the nation in general that has put its collective head in the sand, wanting it both ways on abortion, and for the feminists specifically. California, no rock bed of conservative, traditional morality, "the babe with the mouth" clearly recognizes the personhood of the unborn child at least at the 8th month of gestation. And so do some other states. The state will have to argue that baby Conor [already named before birth] was a person under the law of California in order to pursue the death penalty the D.A. says he wants. And if he is successful how can California and Gloria Allred argue that late-term abortions aren't murder? Either a baby is a person or not. If so, no one can kill him at will and if not, Scott Peterson, if found guilty of the murder of his wife, cannot be guilty of the murder of Conor under California law because one can only murder a person, not a non-person creature.
None of the above implies that we hold with states determining personhood because God has already done that [from the moment of conception]. We all know the danger of the state playing God with personhood definitions, from Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and so forth. Unwittingly the publicity shy Peterson may become the lightning rod for a much overdue national soul-searching, his guilt or innocence notwithstanding.Last week the White House made mention of Bastille Day in reference to France's lack of support for our assault on Iraq, that the holiday would not be honored in those environs. Apparently George Bush needs a lesson in history like so many Americans of French ancestry. Like the White House, I, too, won't be celebrating the "liberation" of the Bastille, but for far different reasons:
Every July a strange ritual occurs here in Maine, Bastille Day [July 14], when Franco-Americans celebrate their French heritage for a week. Strange because Bastille Day has less to do with true French heritage and more to do with an all-out assault on Holy Mother Church, the most important part of French heritage and culture.
On Bastille Day [BD] there are ethnic fairs, special music and food and a general merriment that I never experience, nor would even if I could. In fact, every BD, as a Catholic of some French lineage I am overcome with a melancholy, a deep sadness because my compatriots who are mostly Catholic, too, unwittingly memorialize an event that paved the way for the destruction of the widespread fervor of our deepest, most profound heritage, our Catholic Faith, in France, the "Eldest Daughter of the Church." France, Font of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, womb of St. Joan of Arc, ark of St. John Vianney, and later, miracle of miracles, the Apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes and La Salette. O whereth hast thou gone O eldest, fairest of the daughters of the Bride of Christ?
The First Bastille Day unleashed wholesale the slaughter on devout Catholics in the name of "liberty," especially the clergy and monarchy and nobility. Notre Dame, the greatest cathedral in all of Paris was sacked and stained by sacrilege when the rebels, drunk with power and wild abandon brought a prostitute in to revel on the altar of Sacrifice!
From that day forward the Faith was lost to most of France. The Age of Enlightenment, so-called, but really the satanic spirit of Freemasonry, took sway and priority. In the name of Reason, all reason was sacrificed itself, the hideous guillotine made no distinction as all blood machines and the forces that unleash them and put them to use always do. Revolution for the sake of rebellion was in the foul air and the French people, the masses, spurred by the "intellectuals," imbibed its bloody spirit much like the rebels of Vatican II imbibed the worldly spirit of that council. As the Age of Faith diminished, the Age of Enlightenment at last unmasked, revealed itself as the Age of Darkness, darkness over France: the government in control of Catholic schools and the revolution of revolutions, instead of the Church influencing government as God intended, the government influencing the Church. If France ever recovers, as she must, it will be the Traditionalists within the Church that save her, not the worship of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." The Masons worship this unholy trinity as well and openly. Almost every modern government calling itself "democratic" is Masonic in spirit, if not in name.
Now, having said all of this, rest assure that I know almost every person celebrating the festivities of the week of July 14 is not in favor of the guillotine, sacrilege on the altar, etc. But the choice of July 14 as the date for surrounding French heritage days is not accidental. Either an erroneous sense of history and its full implications or an actual Masonic spirit was at work, hardly a sign of vigorous Catholicism, without which one's French heritage is meaningless. I am challenging the local powers that be to select another date, there are so many French Saints to choose from, for just one set of examples. July 14 is not only Bastille Day it is Orangeman's Day as well, another anti-Catholic day.
No, I am first and always a Catholic, above any other allegiance, and I can never celebrate the anniversary of the betrayal of the Church and civilization, not even for an ostensibly good purpose, French ancestry, no matter how many of my fellow Franco-American Mainers attempt to persuade me otherwise. And this is why I will never celebrate Bastille Day and it is time that a Franco-American said so.During a taped interview, Sharon Rocha, mother of the murdered Laci Peterson and grandmother of Laci's preborn son, Conor, said: "Conor was a person." This was in reference to her lobbying for a federal law that would make the killing of a pregnant woman a double murder, one for the woman, the other for her child in the womb. This says it all, succinctly, factually and emphatically.
Now if Conor was a person, as indeed, he was, and is, as he is enjoying at least an eternal natural happiness, then how can it be licit for a mother to decide to kill him with impunity? Either a person is or is not a person. No innocent person forfeits his right to life and the state has the duty to defend his life when he cannot. Period.
This is one more wake-up call for America; will we hear it? or will we continue in the fiction that women can kill their babies in the womb by hiring a contract killer, the abortionist to do it for her, but that if another decides to kill her child, it is murder, even if it is the father exercising "his right to choose" whether he wants to be a father or not? It is so hideous to even consider any father doing this-----and we are not saying that the husband of Laci Peterson is guilty or if he is what his motive was-----but it is even more hideous to think of a mother killing her own child who is so helpless. If mothers are not expected to guard with their very lives their children in the womb, how can we expect others to? Evil has its own logic. It also has its own illogic, to wit the current debate about the proposed federal law.
In a related matter, New York Gov. George Pataki, a Catholic, changed his mind about becoming a Mason when he learned he would be self-excommunicated, stating he wanted "to avoid scandal." Hmm ...
Pataki is an abortion rights defender and promoter, another public scandal and another "grave sin" like Masonic membership. This ought to the Vatican's wake-up call. Will it hear it? If the threat with with loss of the Sacraments can deter Masonic membership, should not the enforcement of the same Canon law in re abortion participation have some effect? No one needs to be a Mason to be a "progressive" [code word for liberal] while liberals always support abortion "rights," so perhaps the effect of such disciplinary action may not be as outstanding, but surely the Catholic lay person will take due note, at long last. No politician can win without "the Catholic vote" because Catholics are 25% of the electorate, the largest group among voters. This means every pro-abortion politician in office is there by the express will of the Catholic populace in general: either by deliberate intention in support abortion rights per se or by not caring enough to care, which is even more untenable. Recall what the Gospel says about the lukewarm and their fate ...The state of New Hampshire has recently lost one of its tourist attractions, "The Old Man of the Mountain," a craggy outcrop structure of rocks formed long ago on the side of a small mountain. When viewed on the profile it closely resembled the features of a human head, that of an "old man." Its image was a regular staple of seasonal broadcast clips. In fact, so popular was this miniature "natural wonder", that an almost reverence or sacredness had surrounded the attraction. Tourists and New Hampshire natives made regular trips to view it. Now splendors such as this are awesome to behold and justly merit long-standing appeal as a human good to be appreciated. A few months ago, the "Old Man" collapsed and fell into oblivion.
Now there is talk of engaging a craftsman to re-"create" the natural wonder. News of this possibility gave me much pause. While I am sure the local people are well intentioned and that the artisan is among the best available for the commission, the new "Old Man" will not be a natural wonder, but a work of man-made art, in of itself no small feat and something to be admired also, but what was lost can never be recaptured except in one's imagination. What made the original "Old Man" so special was that it was not formed by human hands but by God using the forces of nature [perhaps]. But "he" was not the work of man. What God giveth He also taketh away again. Now, since we cannot know the express will of God in this matter, there is nothing wrong in wanting to have the artisan attempt the re-"creation."
But we should stop to contemplate whether we ought to do something just because it is humanly possible, or leave things alone, at least for now.
I say this because of the almost sacred quality that craggy old image invoked in some quarters, or at least seemed to, while all around, in the same state as well as in nearby Maine, and in other states, such as Kansas, the images of Christ and His Holy Mother were not so honored, in fact were desecrated either by word or deed. It is also noteworthy to mention that the New Hampshire diocese still "bans" the Traditional Roman Mass, the word ban in quotes because the Vatican has admitted that the Roman Mass was never abrogated but the powers that be prefer not to let this truth be widely known for their own purposes, which is neither Christlike nor Catholic, that is, "banning" tradition.
I wonder if God, in permitting the loss of this "natural wonder", wants us to rehonor His images and those of His Mother, Mary. Maybe He wants what happened in New Hampshire to be a warning to Kansas that He will not abide pornographic photos of women in certain nude poises to be referred to as "An Apparition of the Virgin Mary" at the state university. The Kansas legislature is attempting to regulate that sex course but the outrage was focused on the pedophilia aspect and the raw nature of the classroom presentation, not on the blasphemy, in of itself, most telling. Perhaps God wants New Hampshire Catholics to have what is their right, the Traditional Roman Mass. Since God the Father is often portrayed as an Old Man with a beard, perhaps He permitted the Old Man of the Mountain to fall because His [God's] honor and His images were being given second place, if at all, in all too many public places. It is less that the state was New Hampshire in of itself, but simply because that was the only state where the Old Man was. Let us first turn back to God in repentance, which means restoring all the desecrated churches to their former traditional Catholic awe-inspiring altars and surrounds; then by all means replace the Old Man, but let us do this in the right order. We have already given in to the allure of pantheism in its modern forms, too much already.
FOX News' Bill O'Reilly, dilettante Catholic and host of the "O'Reilly Factor" had as a recent guest a dedicated Catholic defender of the Faith, a Mr. Patrick Reilly of the Cardinal Newman organization, a Catholic college action group which seeks to ensure that Catholic universities are what they purport to be, Catholic, not secular with a Catholic name. The topic of the interview was abortion and pro-abortion speakers invited to speak at graduation ceremonies at some Catholic institutions.
The host of the Factor or "No Spin Zone", had plenty of his own spin to spew against the Newman representative. O'Reilly told Reilly that he was free to be pro-life -----how tolerant of him!-----but that he should not bring his Catholic views to bear in the public sphere because that was "ideology." The spin O'Reilly was hoping we would not detect was that his views of Catholicism, the cafeteria kind ["I decide for myself what parts of the Bible I believe;" "I disagree with the Church on contraception;" "I disagree with the Church on homosexuality;" etc.], was the more reasonable one and that because he would not have imposed Catholicism on Catholic colleges, he was thus free of "ideology", unlike his guest from the Newman Association. Well the spin stops here at Catholic Tradition, O'Reilly. Your views on religion and public life [religion for you serves a secular purpose, a symbolic purpose, such as the Ten Commandments] is in itself an ideology, for what else is an ideology but a system of beliefs that one holds strong enough to want to act upon it. To not want to "impose your Catholic beliefs" is as ideological and religious in nature as that of devout Catholics who do not separate Catholic morality and tradition from the public sphere, most especially when that sphere calls itself "Catholic".
O'Reilly is always on the rant when the ACLU and other radicals want to remove religion from the schools and elsewhere. Yet he bases his objections on the neutrality of religion since it serves a secular purpose, which is to marginalize it. The Factor thinks he can have it both ways, taking a misguided middle way, so much so that he admittedly separates himself from his own religion when Catholicism does not fit in with his own views [ideology], and now he wants the Newman group to do the same, so that Catholic colleges can continue to be Catholic in name only. What's the point? O'Reilly wants people to be non-hypocritical and say what they mean and mean what they say. Should not that apply to Catholic colleges also? He is all for hypocrisy there.
Do not be lulled into his Trojan Elysian fields of "independent thinking." While the Factor blasts with passionate vigor the pedophiles [and he should] and defends the Boy Scouts, [Ibid.] he taketh away with his left hand what he giveth with the right: Homosexuals should just be quiet about their sexuality when it comes to adoption [his advice to Rosie O'Donnell]; Dr. Laura Schlessinger is entitled to oppose homosexuality but she has no right to ask for a boycott in that regard because innocent people are hurt by economic boycotts; and on and on. Of course he hopes we also won't notice that when France refused to support the US war on Iraq he called for a boycott of French products. Apparently all the innocent children in France don't concern him. So much for ferreting out hypocrisy in the "No Spin Zone". What he really seems to mean is you and I can't spin there but he is free to be cause he is the host. If this isn't spin I don't know what is.