My comments first:
Ms. Inez Martin in the article below uses examples to support Pope Francis’ condemnation of the political use of religious symbols. She mentions some Slovakian and Italian politicians and their ultranationalist political interests. She also uses President Trump holding up a Bible in front of a premier Washington, DC Episcopal Church.
She does not use, but should have used, President Biden who attends Mass every Sunday and receives Holy Communion each time he does attend although he is pro-choice to the point of human genocide and the gruesome and cruel, inhuman partial birth abortion.
But certainly he too is implied in Pope Francis’ condemnation!
President Biden is to be included with the other politicians Ms. Martin mentions who use religion and religious symbols for political purposes and to gain votes of Christians.
My only other comment is about Pope Francis’ fundamentalism. He always speaks about a crucified Christ and Christianity and condemns a triumphant Christianity to include all Catholics seeing themselves a winning.
Pope Francis must be reminded of the Risen Christ, His ultimate triumph and that the Tridentine Liturgy as well as its fraternal twin the Eastern Rites point to our only hope to get out of a crucified existence!
That’s called HOPE, Holy Father! We are an EASTER PEOPLE who never forget Good Friday. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is a triumphant and glorified experience of the Crucifixion because of the resurrection!
PRESS TITLE FOR ARTICLE:
Francis condemns political use of religious symbols during Slovakia liturgy
16 comments:
I suppose I am committing at at least one sin, but I think he was using it as a convenient cudgel to beat someone with a political difference. Such speech has an impact in Slovakia that might actually have the opposite effect in the USA.
PF is upset with the Hungarian Govt for not allowing illegal immigrants, including Muslims, to destroy Hungary and its culture
I do not blame the politicians but their Bishops and by implicational of the upper hierarchy for not defending the Church from those politicians. The HF can be found playing politics every time he endorses same sex inspired clergy, when he gets involved climate change issues, every time he praises pro choice politicians, every time he does not stand up for politicians actually defend the role of religion in the public place. One could go on and on with his idiosyncratic behaviors ignoring the good and defending the un-orthodox behavior emanating from his ardent supporters. In and out side the Church. Slovak politicians call upon their Catholic constituents. Why should they not? Why would that be any worse than the Pope courting EU atheistic political women and men?
"In a country [USA] where nearly 80 percent of workers live paycheck to paycheck, undocumented (illegal) immigrants aren't just doing our dirty work; they are, quite literally putting food in our mouths."
https://www.browndailyherald.com/2020/10/06/shanmugam-23-illegal-immigration-good-america/
Fr. K
Obviously, finance or economics is not your field of expertise. You need to look around for a cheep subscription to the Wallstreet Journal. Living to paycheck to paycheck is a personal choice people make. Even so 80% is not fact, it is liberal propaganda, provocation. Problem is you swallowed it hook line and sinker.
Even though Biden’s position on the Hyde Amendment is disappointing, as is his recent publicly articulated position surrounding the Texas law brouhaha (and I have already indicated on another thread what I wish he had said, or been able to say), is there any reason to question the sincerity of his faith as he understands it and tries to live it? The following article, although a bit lengthy and one assumes written from a “sympathetic” point of view, seems to be a very fair and balanced treatment of his faith life. Indeed, it is almost pastoral in tone:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/09/05/joe-biden-catholic-church-509396
The following passage regarding the current controversy struck me in particular:
Biden never wanted to get near a vote on abortion, and he never grappled as publicly or volubly with the issue as Cuomo did in ’84. . . .
Biden held out until he had no choice. In 2019, locked in a Democratic primary of more than a dozen candidates, under intense pressure from progressives and reproductive rights groups, he changed his position on the Hyde Amendment. Everyone from members of his own campaign, including senior adviser Symone Sanders, to the activist and actor Alyssa Milano, who called Biden’s campaign manager in late spring, had lobbied him on the issue. “The conversation was direct but friendly,” Milano said in an email. “Others inside the campaign were doing the same thing.” Repealing Hyde, which disproportionately affects people of color, had been a part of the Democratic platform since 2016. “The tides were clearly turning,” said Destiny Lopez, the co-president of All*Above All, an advocacy group that has helped lead the Hyde fight. “I’m not sure that the president wanted to be on the wrong side of history on this one. There was some element of, for lack of a better term, peer pressure.”
But many Catholic leaders and bishops who are sympathetic to Biden believe that he was forced into a position he didn’t want to take. Some openly speculated that the president would never let a member of his family be party to an abortion. “I’d put my life on that,” said Thomas Groome, a laicized Irish priest and a professor of theology at Boston College. “Joe Biden and Jill would never choose abortion, personally. That’s his Catholic moral perspective.”
“He hung on when almost no one else did,” said Carr. “So I think his reticence is not just that his faith is private. It’s that he’s not comfortable. A lot of us can’t talk rationally or comfortably about abortion.”
What I honestly believe to be Biden’s sincerity, whatever his errors on the abortion issue, should be contrasted with the cynical use of religion by many politicians. David Brooks has addressed this in a recent NYT piece:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/opinion/autocracy-religion-liberalism.html
Even wannabe authoritarians in America and Western Europe are getting in on the game. The international affairs scholar Tobias Cremer has shown that many of the so-called Christian nationalists who populate far-right movements on both sides of the Atlantic are actually not that religious.
They are motivated by nativist and anti-immigrant attitudes and then latch onto Christian symbols to separate “them” from “us.” In Germany, for example, the far-right group that aggressively plays up its Christian identity underperforms among voters who are actually religious.
In another Berkley Center essay, Cremer writes that right-wing American extremists “parade Christian crosses at rallies, use Crusader imagery in their memes and might even seek alliances with conservative Christian groups. But such references are not about the living, vibrant, universal and increasingly diverse faith in Jesus Christ that is practiced in the overwhelming majority of America’s churches today. Instead, in white identity, politics Christianity is largely turned into a secularized ‘Christianism’: a cultural identity-marker and symbol of whiteness that is interchangeable with the Viking-veneer, the Confederate flag, or neo-pagan symbols.”
These religiously cloaked authoritarians have naturally provoked an anti-religious backlash among those who understandably now associate religion with authoritarianism, nativism and general thuggishness. The rising and unprecedented levels of secularism in Europe and the U.S. over the past several decades have not produced less vicious cultural and spiritual warfare.
Theater. All theater and sold to the "faithful" like a box of soap.
Fr. K,
The first thing Biden did was fire union workers building the pipeline (which angered Canada, so much for smart diplomacy, and those building the border wall, which kept out illegal aliens burdening taxpaying citizens). Democrats are not the working person’s friend. The last Democrat who cared about the working guy was Jimmy Carter. Subsequent Dems, like Clinton, Obama, and now Biden, have become fabulously rich off of their government connections. Harry Truman would call them crooks. You really need to grow up
Mark,
Zeberkely? LOL - almost as bad as The New York Slimes. And David Brooks, faux conservative, pul-ease!
TJM:
And once again you trot out a tired ad hominem response instead of responding to the merits. Given that everything in the “New York Slimes” is “left wing” and worthless, I suppose you must also reject the following piece and now be in the “pro-abortion” camp:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/opinion/texas-abortion-pro-life.html
Similarly, I suppose you now oppose Archbishop Cordileone, who published the following piece in the Washington Post, which you have also dismissed as “left wing” and worthless:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/05/our-duty-challenge-catholic-politicians-who-support-abortion-rights/
Or could your operating principle possibly be, not where something is published, but whether or not you happen to agree with it?
Wake me up when you are ready to engage in rational discussion instead of exhibiting one logical fallacy after another.
TJM:
Instead of telling Father Kavanaugh to grow up, why don’t_you_grow up, stop engaging in playground taunting, and start arguing like an adult?
Mark,
You of "President Darth Trump" lecturing someone on maturity?
Every source you EVER cite is a leftwing. This own words applies to you in spades:
"Or could your operating principle possibly be, not where something is published, but whether or not you happen to agree with it?"
Bottom line, you and your buddy, Father K, support the party of intrinsic evil. Good day
TJM:
Okay, let’s try something else, as clearly what I have tried so far is not working?
Why do you do this? Please tell us the reason for refusing to engage on the merits of an issue and have a serious rational conversation about it, instead hurling insults either at me or at some source I cite? Is it that you are so blinded by your passion over the abortion issue that you are incapable of seeing anything else, or even seeing clearly about that issue? Or is it that you are so blinded by a fanatical devotion to Trump that, again, you see everything only through that lens? Or is it something else? Inquiring minds want to know.
And why can’t you get your facts straight? I never referred to “President Darth Trump.” I referred to Emperor Trump and Darth Vader Stephen Miller when discussing the Trump Administration’s response to Afghan SIVs. (By the way, someone who regularly refers to The New York Slimes and who regularly uses multiple other insulting names, in the style of the Great Leader, is hardly in a position to object to a popular culture reference when referring to Trump and Miller.) And I have also cited sources you would not call “left-wing,” recently including The New York Post. But, of course, the source is a formal matter and hardly relevant; the content is a substantive matter and what is relevant.
Mark,
Here is my issue with your approach:
One, you routinely cite leftwing publications as “authority” for your arguments.
Two, you always try the “moral equivalency” argument when there is none. One party supports and fundraises off of the killing of the unborn, the other does not.
Three, you will never change. I was a liberal Democrat and office holder until I grew up. Academics never change. Which leads me to, if there is “systemic racism” then the left owns it because the left controls the media, academia and the Democratic Party. Cities controlled by Democrats is where are of this supposed systemic racism abides.
Ps: i am sure you are a pleasant fellow and I count many of your type as friends. I don’t cancel people whom I disagree with politically like many on the left do
TJM:
Well, I certainly appreciate the more reasonable tone of your most recent post.
Taking your points in turn. First, you are a lawyer and, as such, I assume you would never ask or expect a court to ignore a brief because of who wrote it. No, you would engage with the arguments made. Why don’t you do so here?
Second, please give examples of me engaging in “moral equivalency” arguments. It is not moral equivalency to want to discuss topic X as a separate topic from topic Y. Your own tactic seems to be to distract from discussion of topic X by playing the trump card (pun intended) of abortion in a discussion about any topic.
Third, that is quite a sweeping generalization you made there. Academics do change, all the time—at least legal academics do. As for the systemic racism point, it cannot be reduced to issues in cities controlled by Democrats. But that is a whole other conversation about which books can be, and have been, written.
I don’t “cancel” people with whom I disagree either.
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