Sometimes the more you read progressives in the Church, be it at the NCR, Praytell, or Jesuits like Fr. Thomas Reese, you want to thank them because they show how incoherent progressive theology and ideology is and how deleterious their way of thinking is for the common good of the Church.
But, most of all, as I have been reiterating in the last few weeks, their babble about power, ecclesiology, Vatican II, lay participation, clericalism, women ministries, blah, blah, blah, reveals a deep rooted idolatry. They worship the Church they hope for that will one day exist in the future. Jesus is left out of the picture, unless they speak about Him as some kind of dead hero. You never hear from them about Jesus’ relationship with them in the most personal and intimate way and their with Him, the Risen Lord!
You hear nothing, absolutely nothing, from them about their personal testimony of how Jesus saves them from their personal sin and corruption and puts them on the path away from hell towards heaven. There is no hint of the worship of the True God and what God has done for humanity in the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is no vertical testimony only the blah, blah, blah of Church structures and the glorification of the horizontal and sociological aspects of the Church and their wanting to change everything to please themselves, not God.
Read Phyllis and tell me how God has changed her through her personal faith testimony and her gratefulness for God rescuing her from the fires of hell to save her forever in heaven:
30 comments:
You really ought to give "Fr. Z" credit where it is due...
Here is a pretty good article on Reese's latest dictat:
On banning the Tridentine liturgy, and selling the Edsel
By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 14, 2021
They never mention love of God.
They only mention love of people.
Which is always corrupted by self-interest and greed, minus the love of God, first and always.
Yes, I was told that by my parishioner. What they do is simply dry wipe them off of any excess poo.
Curious, how many Catholic groups do you think are active on the southern border handing out water bottles and encouraging illegal immigration? Did anyone notice that it suddenly became acceptable to use the word “Catholic” when Joe became “only the second Catholic president”, to quote Harris. Has anyone seen the Biden tee shirts at the border, that are being handed out near the border by a local parish? I read in the paper today Catholic Joe just eliminated another obstacle to abortion. No doubt this devout Catholic has the support of Pope Francis.
Actually, "progressives" (always and ever progressing to WHAT?) do mention the love of God, but only in God's love for them.
They ALWAYS neglect the other critical half of the equation of the returned love which both enables and requires keeping the Commandments, of which the first IS that love of God over love of anything else, especially including love of sin.
Their theology is that of the spoiled brat as opposed to the truly loving child who seeks to follow instruction from the parent out of love.
They mistake God for a really bad parent, who gives the child anything they want, no matter how badly the child behaves, which is really insulting God, who is the BEST and original parent.
The author of the article resorts to chorusing her own questions and using prejudicial terms, some of them popular culture references, to prosecute her imagined opponents. She is fanning the coals of her own resentments to warm her self imposed isolation.
Yes, the internet age has created a generation or three who stay inside, live vicariously on the internet, otherwise have empty lives and so to feel anything at all, are addicted to self-generated rage and hatred. This cuts across all subjects and boundaries.
Meanwhile, take any subject at which you are adept and a fairly decent subject matter expert, look up what is the prevailing opinion on the internet regarding that area of expertise, and you will find at least 90% of it dead wrong.
And yet, this is now the sole source of most people's "knowledge" about anything.
Ignorance+Rage=Bad Juju, every time.
I read the following article in The Economist today:
"The creation of part-human, part-monkey embryos will discomfit many - But the potential benefits outweigh the risks."
Can our era sink any lower?
I get tired of hearing about "progressives". They are liberals, period. But "progressive" sounds warm and fuzzy and helps portray conservatives as "regressive".
The ethical questions regarding using macaques as "host" organisms for human cells are very much in the minds of researchers.
One of the benefits: "Their work could pave the way in addressing the severe shortage in transplantable organs as well as help understand more about early human development, disease progression and ageing," said Prof Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte of the Salk Institute. (You might be able to grow a human kidney in a macaque and translaplnt it to a human.)
One of the potential hazards: "These embryos were destroyed at 20 days of development but it is only a matter of time before human-nonhuman chimeras are successfully developed, perhaps as a source of organs for humans. That is one of the long-term goals of this research," said Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and co-director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, University of Oxford.
It is not the first time, nor will it be the last, when researchers have to grapple with the ethical questions that their work raises.
From Wikipedia: "The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA was an influential conference organized by Paul Berg to discuss the potential biohazards and regulation of biotechnology, held in February 1975 at a conference center at Asilomar State Beach. A group of about 140 professionals (primarily biologists, but also including lawyers and physicians) participated in the conference to draw up voluntary guidelines to ensure the safety of recombinant DNA technology. The conference also placed scientific research more into the public domain, and can be seen as applying a version of the precautionary principle.
The effects of these guidelines are still being felt through the biotechnology industry and the participation of the general public in scientific discourse. Due to potential safety hazards, scientists worldwide had halted experiments using recombinant DNA technology, which entailed combining DNAs from different organisms. After the establishment of the guidelines during the conference, scientists continued with their research, which increased fundamental knowledge about biology and the public's interest in biomedical research."
Father K,
But what is your gut reaction to this as a Catholic priest; not your reaction to it as one who was a biology major in college?
Anon 1:15 - I'm not two different people, one who was once a biologist and one who is now a priest.
My gut reaction, as one, integrated (I hope) person, is that the technology is very promising for those who are in desperate need of organ transplants. According to the HRSA, 107,000+ were on the transplant waiting list as of February 2021, and 17 die every day waiting for that transplant.
Continuing, my gut reaction is also that, since this involves human tissue, great care must be made in the decision-making process as the research continues.
That decision cannot be "The technology might be misused, therefore it must not be pursued."
I once heard a younger, wet-behind-the-ears priest make a blanket statement regarding how "evil" stem cell research was. It could never, he said, be morally acceptable. I spoke to him and explained the difference between the harvesting of fetal tissue stem cells and the harvesting of stem cells from adults. I also noted that the Church is very much in favor of the latter, that it is not judged to be evil, and that Catholics can and, in my estimation, should support it.
I will always be grateful for the background I have, especially in times where the challenges presented by technology, in particular those relating to various aspects of human health, are as complex as some we encounter today.
Anonymous at 1:15 PM,
I am not sure that I would ask any advice from a man who belongs to a political party that views abortion (an intrinsic evil) as "an essential healthcare service." I would ask someone like Father McDonald or Father Fox
In using human genes mixed with animal to grow living cells or organs or embryos, there are even many atheist researchers horrified at the inevitable misuses such "technology" will introduce, as well as the new and improved pandemic possibilities among the world population as inevitably some microbe infecting one of these combinations gets loose.
We are talking growing a significant chunk of a human, or an entire one, in a tank only to butcher for body parts, where they may tailor for no brain to develop, and then say it has no consciousness or soul, as if the brain the seat of consciousness, where formerly they said liver or heart (no telling what they may tag next), and ignoring the fact the brain simply an organ as any other organ, it acting only for sure as an INTERFACE between the mind/consciousness and the external world.
To claim they KNOW more than that is god-complex defined.
Just think of the wonder of a world where sex is only a nano-machine infusion away to reorder the entire body genetic code, where the same infusion of same machines custom crafts you into a creature with wings or gills or jellyfish build to colonize any planet desired, where disease is unknown, likely individual freedom unknown and humanity reduced to a shapeshifting cancer infecting the universe. Sounds marvelous. Where do I sign?
Again, this idea of growing organs boils down to the search for immortality.
And a willingness to make questionable or outright unethical moves to achieve that, while risking the population at large, total extinction, WHEN, not if, something gets loose.
There is no "maybe" about it. We have yet to do anything perfectly in all of human existence. This includes containing microbes.
While our religion holds that all life is fleeting, and this world is not our home, but only a school to enable us to learn how to find our way to TRUE immortality.
The people who push for every method of prolonging life and ending all suffering obviously have no faith in the Faith.
Nor much in the way of reason when willing even to gamble the existence of the species in the search for that chimera, where the consequences of such an achievement are ignored even when most all generally foreseeable outcomes have a high likelihood of being exceptionally bad. And their only response to such skepticism being, "We'll burn that bridge when we come to it."
I would far rather all that time and effort and wealth spent on teaching everyone to know God, so that they had true happiness here and for all eternity, and were able to laugh at the very concept of suffering and death.
Providing a lab-grown kidney to a patient with no kidney function who lives on dialysis is not part of a "search for immortality." By that reasoning, the use of penicillin to cure bacterial infections, or any disease-curing procedure, could also be considered morally suspect, if not unjustified.
This is not the Church's position. Catholic hospitals exist because we have a duty, a sacred obligation to heal the sick.
In doing so, suffering is ended, and a person's life may be extended by years, if not decades. These are not attempts to achieve immortality.
Quite frankly, I would rather live in a world minus all modern medicine and all its life extending benefits, but populated entirely by saints who knew and passed along happiness here and into eternity.
And such growing of organs is not limited to some one-off deal to extend life another decade, and at what possible moral cost and what eternal risk to claw out a few more years of empty and miserable life in the main and by most, and to what purpose?
No....you bloody well know it will lead to endless succession of such organ sources and uses, with the ultimate aim of staving off death entire.
Except, it will not work that way, it will only work for the privileged and wealthy, and later only for those judged worthy of such life extension.
In that, we are already there in this country and the world. All so that ever fewer can have more stuff, where children discarded as dirty rags for more personal prosperity, and elders left to die minus critical care or even teeth with which to eat so as to not starve.
All you really are promoting is even more such horror, a vast unleveling of the playing field, of staving off the ultimate equalizer for those who can afford to stave. And others need not apply.
And in the exceptionally unlikely event that life extension to whatever degree possible is granted to any and all, we live in a world of finite resources, where we have already seen huge increases in world populations brought about by modern medicine, where now abortion and birth control pushed in order to compensate, and your own pro-abortion arguments argue that such radical attempts at life extension/preservation not be used for the common good.
"...you bloody well know it will lead to endless succession of such organ sources and uses, with the ultimate aim of staving off death entire."
No, I don't know that, and neither do you. Again, that kind of reasoning would lead to the conclusion that ANY medical advance should be avoided.
I don't agree at all that a "world minus all modern medicine" would be desirable. It would, in fact, be contrary to the command we have been given to heal the sick. Are you suggesting that the Good Samaritan should have passed by the man beaten by robbers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho?
Making adequate health care available to more people - even all people - is achievable. It isn't necessary to discard all medical treatments because they aren't currently available to the poor.
Fr Kavanaugh,
Yet YOUR party believes Abortion is an essential health care service
Anon TJM 8:37 - Isn't that "Father" Kavanaugh to you? Or have you been sufficiently chastened by John Nolan's comment? John, if you have succeeded, I tip my hat to you for penetrating TJM's doltishness.
Anonymous,
I guess you can't read. Fr has always been acceptable abbreviation for the full title, but thanks for your display of doltishness
Anon TJM 10:14 - Nah, nah, nah, you can't get away from it. You were called to task by John Noland for referring to Father Kavanaugh as "Father" Kavanaugh. And, of course, if John Nolan has said it, you must hear and obey! (Again, tip of the hat to Mr. Nolan.)
Man up and acknowledge it.
Anonymous K at 10:54 AM,
You are a delicate little flower, so consumed with externals like a title. I think you should take your own advice and man up
First, my apologies to Fr. Fox who should have received credit for his words to TJM about using "Father."
John Nolan, I hope my error did not worry you.
And TJM, you've painted youself into a fine corner now... Will you use the quotation marks or will you now?
Ladies and gentlemen:
For heaven's sake, all this bickering and trading of insults, and this business of putting "Father" in quotes, is childish, passive-aggressive, and extremely unbecoming. I can't be surprised that it frequently happens under cover of anonymity!
There are serious challenges out there, and serious points to be made, and questions to be asked. We can either have discuss serious things in a serious way; or else we can have some levity; either is preferable to this racket, that reminds me of the back seat of my parents' car when my brothers and sisters would behave so badly that my mother would turn and say, if you don't knock it off, your father is going turn around and go home. He did it, once.
Father Fox,
I think we should be more concerned about priests who vote for a Party that supports intrinsic evil rather than how they are addressed. This is the same person who has always been quick to disparage former President Trump in extremely vulgar terms, a man who actually tried to improve the lives of American working men and women rather than cater to the “sensibilities” of the comfortable preening elites who view Abortion and Gay Marriage as sacraments. The Catholic Church has shed millions of Catholics for failing to address these issues and toss out or discipline clerics who side with the sick culture they helped foster because they did not adhere to Church teaching.
This is no small matter or a food fight. This is good versus evil.
Yes, Fr. Fox, there are serious challenges out there.
That's why worrying about the style of the arrangement of altar candles, the use of a missal stand, the importance of the maniple, how many steps there are to reach the level of the altar, etc., are a total waste of time and energy.
Anonymous @12.32am,
Spot on! You nailed it!
And then there are those who Cafeteria Catholics who choose to believe what they want to believe about voting, rather than listening to and taking to heart the guidance of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the successors to the Apostles and Teachers of the Faith.
Yes, these are serious challenges...
Post a Comment