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Post by hibernicus on Oct 1, 2020 23:04:11 GMT
I fear the deal with the Chinese government for the "sinicisation" of the Church in China may be seen as a dark blot on Pope Francis's record. Here we see the Chinese Communist Party rewriting the story of the woman taken in adultery to have Jesus stone her to death himself on the grounds that the law must always be upheld. (Moral: Thou shalt have Xi Jinping as your God and him alone shall you serve.) I know of instances of nineteenth-century Irish Conservatives complaining of Catholic sermons on Dives and Lazarus as politically subversive attempts to encourage hatred of the rich (even though the Irish Protestant churches also preached on the same text to the same effect). How those complainants would have loved to rewrite the Gospel in an opposite sense! (To be fair, I can think of quite a few Christians - ancient and modern - who practicaly spoke and behaved as if the Gospel had condemned Lazarus and blessed Dives. Fr Bernard Vaughan's THE SINS OF SOCIETY sermons about how fashionable society would have praised Dives for his parties, rejoiced that Herod and Herodias were "so much in love" and so forth may have been crowd-pleasers, but they have a certain sting.) www.lifesitenews.com/news/ethics-course-in-communist-china-has-jesus-kill-woman-caught-in-adultery?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com&utm_campaign=c0a41c4f21-Catholic_9_29_2020&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_12387f0e3e-c0a41c4f21-404542949
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 28, 2021 20:38:25 GMT
This piece by an American conservative commentator does make some reasonable points in criticising Pope Francis's views on social matters (e.g. the simplistic opposition he sets up between "the people" as always good and "elites" as always bad) but I'm afraid that overall it's another sad example of equating the American Free Market Way with the Gospel. The writer's exegesis of the Parable of the Good Samaritan correctly points out that the Samaritan is a type of Jesus, but it does not occur to him that this reading is not incompatible with the view that Jesus is praising the Samaritan for assisting the victim when others did not - that the same text can have more than one level of meaning. Worse, he takes up the interpretation which says that the priest and the levite did not help the man because if he was dead and they touched his corpse, this would render them ritually unclean and unable to participate in the Temple services, and assumes this means that the priest and levite in fact acted correctly, whereas Jesus' overall teaching in the Gospel makes it clear that he taught that ritual purity is less important than helping those in want and danger. The author doesn't seem to ask why Jesus should ask his audience to identify Him with the Samaritan, Samaritans being regarded by orthodox Jews as traitors, schismatics and impostors, rather than (say) the priest. lawliberty.org/book-review/the-worldly-categories-of-a-papal-dreamer/BTW you may understand the parable a bit better if you consider this instance where a wicked and dishonest man did something to protect the helpless (albeit from dubious motives) while one of our own co-religionists did not merely pass by on the other side but dipped his hands in blood: www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55844717
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 29, 2021 22:06:21 GMT
BTW you may understand the parable a bit better if you consider this instance where a wicked and dishonest man did something to protect the helpless (albeit from dubious motives) while one of our own co-religionists did not merely pass by on the other side but dipped his hands in blood: www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55844717Would you call Harry Truman wicked?
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 30, 2021 18:03:26 GMT
I wouldn't describe Harry TRuman as evil in the sense I mean, no. I would say he did some wicked things (including the use of the A-Bombs on civilian populations; I submit to authority on that one though I have doubts about whether it was so much worse than other things done in modern war) but he was also, I believe, a faithful husband and devoted father, and he attended the funeral of the political "boss" who gave him his start in politics, although he could derive no benefit from attending the funeral and it was in fact politically damaging. Here are a few examples of the sort of people who strike me as wicked in that sense. Of course I am only going on their public record, and leave it to God to judge their inmost soul as known to him alone: The novelist Patricia Highsmith, who seems to have hated absolutely everyone, openly regretted that the Holocaust did not succed in exterminating all Jews, and took delight both in her fiction and in life at corrupting people. (I am not referring specifically to her lesbianism, BTW; if she had confined her predation to men it would still have been evil in exactly the same sense): www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-9148665/Devil-woman-realities-author-Patricia-Highsmith.htmlnewcriterion.com/issues/2021/2/vicious-highsmithMarcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who posed as a living saint while using the Legion as a facade to enable, financially and otherwise, his career as a sexual predator (including raping his own children). He refused the last sacraments on his deathbed, which was so terrifying that at one point an attempt was made to have him exorcised: onepeterfive.com/13-years-after-maciel-crimes-revealed-legionaries-of-christ-still-celebrating-his-legacy/www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/vatican-sixty-years-of-keeping-marcial-maciel-secrets/Jimmy Saville. I never understood the Protestant concept of "works righteousness" (i.e. someone who believes they can buy forgiveness for their sins through good works without repentance) until I came across his veiled self-justification (he told interviewers that God would forgive his sins - whose nature he kept under wraps - because of all the charity work he'd done): www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/09/plain-sight-jimmy-savile-review-biography-david-hareDavid Irving, the neo-nazi historian, Hitler apologist and holocaust denier. What I have seen of his interviews and writings gives me the impression that he is a man who revels in lying, in the belief that lies and falsehood give him power over others, and who despises even his fellow Nazis: www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/holocaust-denial-trial-who-david-irving-deborah-lipstadt-richard-j-evans/ Once again, I am not claiming to know the secrets of these people's souls - and we should note that all these people had miserable childhoods, which in the cases of Maciel and Highsmith included sexual abuse. Leave them to God. I am only saying that to study these people in any depth - and I don't like to do so more than I can help it - gives a sense of a fundamental orientation towards evil which may not be there in people who committed even worse crimes.
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Post by Young Ireland on Jan 30, 2021 18:25:57 GMT
I wouldn't describe Harry TRuman as evil in the sense I mean, no. I would say he did some wicked things (including the use of the A-Bombs on civilian populations; I submit to authority on that one though I have doubts about whether it was so much worse than other things done in modern war) but he was also, I believe, a faithful husband and devoted father, and he attended the funeral of the political "boss" who gave him his start in politics, although he could derive no benefit from attending the funeral and it was in fact politically damaging. Here are a few examples of the sort of people who strike me as wicked in that sense. Of course I am only going on their public record, and leave it to God to judge their inmost soul as known to him alone: The novelist Patricia Highsmith, who seems to have hated absolutely everyone, openly regretted that the Holocaust did not succed in exterminating all Jews, and took delight both in her fiction and in life at corrupting people. (I am not referring specifically to her lesbianism, BTW; if she had confined her predation to men it would still have been evil in exactly the same sense): www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-9148665/Devil-woman-realities-author-Patricia-Highsmith.htmlnewcriterion.com/issues/2021/2/vicious-highsmithMarcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who posed as a living saint while using the Legion as a facade to enable, financially and otherwise, his career as a sexual predator (including raping his own children). He refused the last sacraments on his deathbed, which was so terrifying that at one point an attempt was made to have him exorcised: onepeterfive.com/13-years-after-maciel-crimes-revealed-legionaries-of-christ-still-celebrating-his-legacy/www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/vatican-sixty-years-of-keeping-marcial-maciel-secrets/Jimmy Saville. I never understood the Protestant concept of "works righteousness" (i.e. someone who believes they can buy forgiveness for their sins through good works without repentance) until I came across his veiled self-justification (he told interviewers that God would forgive his sins - whose nature he kept under wraps - because of all the charity work he'd done): www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/09/plain-sight-jimmy-savile-review-biography-david-hareDavid Irving, the neo-nazi historian, Hitler apologist and holocaust denier. What I have seen of his interviews and writings gives me the impression that he is a man who revels in lying, in the belief that lies and falsehood give him power over others, and who despises even his fellow Nazis: www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/holocaust-denial-trial-who-david-irving-deborah-lipstadt-richard-j-evans/ Once again, I am not claiming to know the secrets of these people's souls - and we should note that all these people had miserable childhoods, which in the cases of Maciel and Highsmith included sexual abuse. Leave them to God. I am only saying that to study these people in any depth - and I don't like to do so more than I can help it - gives a sense of a fundamental orientation towards evil which may not be there in people who committed even worse crimes. I'm no fan of Donald Trump, and clearly it was a mistake to uncritically cheerlead him to the extent that many conservatives did, but I do think it's unfair to lump him in with pedophiles and Holocaust deniers. I don't doubt that Trump has seriously narcissistic tendencies and seems to view other people (especially women) as objects to further his own purposes, but while those actions are deeply distasteful to put it mildly, they're not in the same level of evil as the actions of the other individuals you mention.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 30, 2021 20:48:05 GMT
I only really asked the question about Truman to show how excessive the hostility towards Trump is.
Truman chose to kill hundreds of thousands of non-combatants using the most powerful weapon ever devised, along with distinctly consequentialist moral reasoning.
Trump boasted about groping women (not against their consent), supposedly mocked a disabled journalist, and held a reckless rally that may have led to several deaths. His other misdeeds would be much of the same order.
There's really no comparison...the animus towards Trump is pure emotionalism, in my view.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 30, 2021 21:58:27 GMT
Sorry for the mixup above - I thought I was quoting Young Ireland's post in a new post, not editing his existing post.
Fixed now -with apologies: This is where we disagree. I don't mean to say that Donald Trump is a holocaust denier or child molester, but I think his wickedness stems from the same evil root as those - a fundamental view that other people are there for his aggrandisement, a complete absence of empathy. I formed that opinion during the Clinton impeachment, when Trump rang up the Howard Stern show to boast that when he was President he would have affairs with supermodels and not fat interns, and put on the supermodel of the week (literally; he dumped her less than a week later) to answer questions about his prowess. What shocked me was not the affair but the attitude to the woman as no more than a fashion accessory. The way he turned on faithful servants like AGs Sessions and Barr when they disagreed with him suggests the mindset of a Platonic tyrant for whom power is all and who is deeply disordered within. What is really shocking is that such a person as that, or the four others whom I named, can be saved by Divine Grace if there is an opening, however small, and that we all need that Grace to be saved. Remember that this exchange began because I compared Donald Trump to the Good Samaritan, as a way of recapturing how shocking it would have been for Jesus to identify Himself with a Samaritan. As I am often alone now I think back over my life and I often remember my secret sins in thought, word and omission and the harms I have done through neglect, pride and otherwise which can never be undone in this life, it amazes me that Jesus can forgive me. I know my own heart - I don't know Donald Trump's. Lord, have mercy on us all.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 9, 2021 23:37:06 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 10, 2021 9:54:55 GMT
This is good. I heard Father Kiely interviewed by Damian Thompson. He's a priest of the Ordinarate and he knows what he is talking about on Middle Eastern Christian persecution. He is also prepared to be critical of papal policy, for example the resurrection of Paul VI's Ostpolitik in relation to China
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 13, 2021 20:41:28 GMT
The blogger linked below seems quite interesting - he's a ressourcement theologian and Dorothy Day follower. Unlike the bloggers at Where Peter Is he doesn't seem to operate on the principle that Pope Francis can do no wrong anywhere, and unlike the prominent trads whom he criticised he hasn't succumbed to Francis Derangement Syndrome or taken the view that allwas rosy until 1958/1914/1878/1789 or whatever date you fancy. At the same time he acknowledges that trads are voicing legitimate concerns, but he knows enough church history to realise that some prominent commentators are unintentionally calling the magisterium into question, describing as insane positions which were held by major Church Fathers, ignoring the fact that Vatican II was a response to real problems etc. I don't know if I agree with him on everything, but he's certainly trying to get beyond polemics. gaudiumetspes22.com/
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Mar 18, 2021 9:45:47 GMT
Damian Thompson has a bit more to say about Pope Francis/. Can Hibernicus, or someone else, give a succinct definition as to what Peronism is as it seems to be all things to all men, at least in Argentina?
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 22, 2021 23:29:23 GMT
Peronism is a form of populism which emphasises the direct relationship between the leader and his followers and dismisses hard and fast rules of law, justice, ideological coherence etc as restrictions imposed by self-serving elites. (It's a reaction against the late C19/early C20 dominance of Argentina by an oligarchy self-described as "liberal".) In practice it means whatever the leader says it means, or whatever the followers project onto the leader. During Peron's second presidency (and that of his successor, his second wife Isabel) there was actually a low-level civil war between right-wing and left-wing Peronists, the former being backed by the Perons.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 29, 2021 23:55:11 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 25, 2021 8:47:30 GMT
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Sept 27, 2021 16:27:52 GMT
It is not so long ago since she was praising him, but she obviously reckons he did not deliver. Talking about how disorganised is probably won't help either.
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