I know this is so last news cycle, but Obama has chosen Joe Biden to be his running mate.  Anyone else laughing?  Joe Biden was and is the very sort of candidate Obama proclaimed to be running against!  He is a long-time Washingtonian, he voted for the Iraq War.  Wasn’t that the main issue on which the Obama campaign was based?  What’s humorous to me is that this is the same Joe Biden who was marginalized early in the primaries, when he made the point that while Obama was nice and “articulate” he was in no way ready for the Presidency.  Apparently, “articulate” is race-code for “uppity” and the Obama camp pounced.  It’s not worth asking the Obama supporters, but do you remember?  Yet now it’s Biden for VP.  Biden is the one that Obama chooses, in direct contradiction to the entire message of a campaign driven by Obama’s cult of personality. 

Obama is a victim of his own success here.  He couldn’t tap Hilldawg for the spot because to do so would admit he was weak without her.  He couldn’t tap another woman like Sebelious without infuriating the Hillocrats.  He couldn’t take somebody like Kaine, with a comparable dearth of experience.  And all the time he needed a VP who would shore up his weaknesses in foreign policy and actual leadership. 

See how many times Joe Biden mentions what Obama said, versus what he did.  The question a Republican needs to hammer home in the VP debate is “That’s all well and good Joe, that Obama said that, but what has he done?”  Then make the point that Obama’s been running for President since before he was elected to the Senate and has missed half or more of the last 100 votes.  (Hmm, more like 75% by my rough, terrible math, go to the "by the numbers" box at the bottom)  See if Biden figures a way out.  It’s possible, he is an intelligent man.  But he’s also impatient and compromised in certain key areas.

Obama’s choice is direct, unabashed political pandering.  He is Obama’s blue-collar-getter, his Catholic-getter, his white-getter.  Workingman-like he is, white he is, but let’s make one thing clear:  Joe Biden suffers from the same diseased, compromised Catholicism that plagues the whole Democratic Party. 

He is an abortion trusty, and whether Catholic Democrats want to admit it or not abortion is a (if not the) central issue to the Faith and to a Catholicism that is engaged with the world.  Biden, Pelosi, et al. have never understood the idea that by your actions you can separate yourself from the Church.  They claim that there is no clear teaching on the subject, citing St. Augustine or some such luminary.  May I submit to them that the Church has had 1500 years since the time of Augustine to both refine and build upon a consistent teaching of respect for life?  Awfully progressive of them to mindlessly cite ancient Doctors of the Church and ignore shining intellects of the past 20, 50, or 150 years.

Make no mistake:  Barack Obama is an enemy of the pro-life movement.  He has never once stood in opposition to the interests of abortion providers.  Never.  Once.  He has refused to condemn what is, after all the rhetoric, infanticide.  Obama’s abortion record is not in any way softened by the selection of a Catholic who stands in opposition to a clear moral imperative from his Church.  It only highlights the hypocrisy.

 

Joe Biden is a man who has plenty of redeeming qualities.  The loss of his wife and infant daughter surely had a profound effect on him.  His principles, unfortunately, are not as finely honed regarding the faith to which he claims to adhere.  Obama made another of his famous errors in judgment with the choice of Biden as VP. 

Canada has been making a splash in conservative circles lately.  The reason?  They seem to be systematically destroying the right to freedom of expression up there. 

First came the news of Mark Steyn, author of the book America Alone, of which I have blogged.  An excerpt from this book was published in the Canadian magazine Maclean's some time ago, making essentially the same point as the book:  that demographic trends in the West are pointing towards an imminent Muslim majority and the traditional European cultures may be forced to accomodate radical Muslims. 

Wouldn't you know it, a Muslim group was offended by this. 

So Steyn was hauled before what I can only classify as the corporeal embodiment of a liberal wet dream:  a government sponsored Human Rights Tribunal.  This body, while not possessing the actual faculties of a court of law, is authorized to arbitrate complaints of discrimination and "hate."  With that authority comes the power to fine "offenders" and award damages to "victims." 

Well, I'm not here to write about Muslim relations today, because these Canadians look to be setting up an attack on Christianity itself. 

NEWS: Canada Orders Pastor to Renounce His Faith
Catholic Exchange
Pete Vere
June 9, 2008
In a decision that foreshadows the possible fate of Fr. Alphonse de Valk, Canada's leading pro-life voice among Catholic clergy, the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal has forbidden evangelical pastor Stephen Boisson from expressing his moral opposition to homosexuality. The tribunal also ordered Boisson to pay $5,000 "damages for pain and suffering" and apologize to the "human rights" activist who filed the complaint.

You'll forgive the obvious bias of the writer, as this is a Catholic publication.  Let's continue:

The complaint stems from Canada's debate leading up to state legislation recognizing so-called same-sex marriage. In 2002, the pastor wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper in which he denounced the homosexual agenda as "wicked" and stated that: "Children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights."

The activist subsequently filed a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission -- a quasi-judicial body that investigates alleged discrimination within the Canadian province. The government tribunal published its decision on May 30.

Interesting.  That's pretty standard stuff here in America.

While agreeing that Boisson's letter was not a criminal act, the government tribunal nevertheless ordered the Christian pastor to "cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals." Moreover, the tribunal's decision "prohibited [Boisson] from making disparaging remarks in the future" about the activist who filed the complaint and witnesses who supported the complaint. Many of Canada's religious leaders and civil libertarians have expressed concern that the government's human rights tribunals are interpreting any criticism of homosexual activism as 'disparaging'.

Not criminal?  Then why all the hubbub, bub?  Why muzzle a religious figure?

The tribunal also ordered Boisson to provide the complainant with a written apology for his letter to the editor. This last requirement threatens civil liberties in Canada, said Ezra Levant, a Jewish-Canadian author and lawyer. Levant, himself the target of an Alberta Human Rights Commission investigation, is facing the possibility the state may order him to apologize as well.

Never mind the $5,000 he was ordered to pay, they are going to force him to apologize as well?  So...

"Ed Stelmach's 'conservative' government now believes that if it can't convince a Christian pastor that he's wrong, it will just order him to condemn himself?" Levant wrote on his blog. "Other than tribunals in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China, where is this Orwellian 'order' considered to be justice?"

"This is like a Third World jail-house confession -- where accused criminals are forced to sign false statements of guilt," Levant wrote. "We don't even 'order' murderers to apologize to their victims' families. Because we know that a forced apology is meaningless. But not if your point is to degrade Christian pastors."

Welcome to the liberal end game.  This is what they want, this is why divisions run so deep.  A liberal used to be someone who challenged conventions without undermining the foundations of good government.  Our Founding Fathers were all liberals of a sort.  But today's liberal is more Mussolini than Madison.

In essence, the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal is ordering to the minister to renounce his Christian faith, since his opposition to homosexuality is based upon the Judeo-Christian Bible. The case against Pastor Boisson has been watched closely by practicing Catholics in the country, especially as news spreads about the current Canadian Human Rights Commission investigation into Fr. de Valk reported on in this space last Wednesday. The Basilian priest and publisher of Catholic Insight magazine stands accused of promoting "extreme hatred and contempt" against homosexuals for having publicly defended the Church's traditional definition of marriage. Some of the allegedly hateful statements are quotations from the Bible and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Fr. de Valk told Catholic Exchange.

Now, it's personal. 

Although Catholic moral teaching is generally more nuanced in its criticism of homosexuality, evangelicals and fundamentalist Protestants often appear to be used as test cases for the government commissions before targeting Catholics. Thus many Catholics fear the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal will attempt to use the Boisson case to muzzle Fr. de Valk from expressing the Church's traditional moral teaching, delivering a further blow to religious liberty and freedom of conscience in Canada.

See, the real threat to these fascist dregs is a strong faith, grounded in reason.  Evangelicals are, I'm sorry to say, all too often hampered by their own zeal.  They emphasize the emotional relationship aspect of the faith, and allow that to color their interactions with a hostile world. 

 

But here's the deal folks.  They come after the Church, first.  Then they come after the people who don't vote their way.  Then they come after their own people.  That's how it worked all through the 20th century, and it seems that Canada is continuing the trend..

I am heading out this weekend to visit my good friends the Mercedarians in Philadelphia.  This religious order was founded in 1218 by one Peter Nolasco, since sainted, with its principle aim the ransom of Christian captives of the Saracens.  A Spanish order, it was a product of a time when the struggle between the West and Islam was apparent and immediate.  The Reconquista was proceeding apace, but unfortunately many Christians suffered as captive slaves of the Islamic Almohads. 
As was common practice in those days, captives could be ransomed back for sums based on their station in life.  A king's ransom would be something like the entire GDP of whichever kingdom he represented.  Or not, I am no authority on international law of the 13th century.  It was a sad reality that kings and lords were not the only people taken captive in this long and bitter conflict.  Many captives were simply too poor to secure their release. 
What distinguished this order (and in my opinion gives it particular valor) is its peculiar Fourth Vow.  All religious orders take vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience, with many opting for a Fourth Vow which is particular to their order and in line with their charism.  But the Mercedarians made the Solemn Vow to exchange themselves for captives if ransom could not be met.  They would replace these Christian captives, many of whom were in danger of losing their Faith by forced conversion, many of whom were in danger of execution.  They vowed to give their life to ransom back people who were in danger of losing their faith.
Think on this.  Today, Americans change religions like they change automobiles.  The belief that our Faith and its profession has eternal consequences has fallen by the wayside.  But in the founding days of the Order of Merced, the belief was strong that denying belief in God (or Allah, conversely) for an opposing religion would damn one to Hell.  The belief is so weakened today by the noxious fumes of relativism that the noble origins of this order seem quaint by our enlightened standards.
Yet how heroic they really were.  To lay down their lives in order to save the soul of another person required supreme faith and supreme courage.  The order had men of such quality, and it continues today to boast men of like caliber.  The specifics of ransoming those in danger of losing their faith are somewhat different, but the commitment to the salvation of souls remains strongly in place. 
In this age of soft values and hard realities, we need men who will bolster our Faith and help us to call on God for strength.  We need men who will meet the challenges of a both plunging cultural standards and militant Wahhabist Islam with Christian ideals.  We need more men like the Mercedarians, to whom I now go.

I was reading an article about the pope's visit to America, and was pleased to see that it was positive.  I'm excited about this opportunity for American Catholics to see and hear the pope address them directly.  It doesn't happen every day, you know. 
But this article, well, it was funny.  Because it was humming along just fine until the very last paragraph.  Here it is:

Soprano Kathleen Battle has been enlisted to sing "The Lord's Prayer" - a decision the White House defended as appropriate despite the overt insertion of religion into a public event. "I think we've struck the right balance," Perino said. "Many people across America and across the world say that prayer in order to provide themselves comfort and confidence in getting their day started."

Notice anything funny there?  Because to me, it looks like we're debating whether we should sing a song that mentions God when we're hosting the freaking Pope.  Does it matter if it's a "public event?"  We put God on our money, and we have prayer before the sessions of Congress.  This doesn't rise beyond that level of public acknowledgment of God.
I believe the courts have determined that the use of "God" on our money is defensible from a standpoint that it is not an endorsement by the state of a particular religion, but is merely in this day and age a reflection of our shared traditions and history.  If our mottos were coined today I'm sure they would sound something like the Obama campaign rhetoric, but fortunately they were laid down in a time when men were able to speak openly in a public forum of their faith and its influence on their decisions.
May my grandchildren see the end of political correctness, I pray. 

Keep watching this Pope, my friends.  That includes you who aren't religious, and you who are primarily concerned with other things.  He may surprise you.  Suffice it to say that he can explain better than most of us why we believe what we believe about life, death, and what comes after.

Viva il Papa!

March has been a slow month for my Vox.  I haven't had much to say, and I still don't.  But I have an article to share.  It deals with the post-Christian element of our culture, and it makes me somewhat sad.  Essentially, it made me question just how I've been treating this most holy of weeks.  Do I act as a Christian should?  Not always.  I don't pray as much as I should, for one.  I go to Mass every week, without fail, but I feel uninspired at times. 
I'm planning a trip to Philadelphia to visit a community of friars.  I enjoy the experience of regimented religious life.  I come away from my visits to their community with a better understanding of my place in the world and how I should pursue my Faith.  But I live in the world while striving not to be "of" the world.  Is this possible?  Absolutely.  But it requires discipline that I sometimes fear I lack. 
What troubles me most about this article is the sad truth of it.  We live in a society that didn't even realize St. Patrick's Day fell during Holy Week, and so was actually moved.  People who would otherwise choose to oppose Christianity's ideological enemies would not necessarily embrace Christian life, especially if it should mean giving up Green Beer Night.  It's a phenomenon of cultural Christianity -- identifying oneself as Christian in the same way an American might call himself Irish despite a gulf of generations between him and Éire. 
My family went to Disney World when I was sixteen.  Stayed there for three or four days and went all over the park.  On our first day there, I think we were in Epcot.  Being sixteen, I decided I didn't want to hang out with my family all day.  We separated, and you must remember that this was in the days before cell phones were commonplace.  So I am alone until the park closes, wandering through a world of wonders and enchantment.  Distractions galore, all prefabricated and striving for authenticity.  An uncritical eye is pleased with the superficial effect, as I was. 
But then came night, and the inevitable closing time which none can escape.  And I found myself still alone, with not an idea where my family might be.  I thought that perhaps we had agreed to meet at a certain point, but there was an obstacle between me and it. 
Anyone who has been to Disney World at closing time might know that after the fireworks there is an orderly stampede towards the gates.  Thousands of people moving in one direction, shoulder to shoulder.  All nations, all races, all moving in one direction.  Well, imagine a sixteen year old me, moving opposite.  Surely, I reasoned, my family would be in this throng.  And surely I would see them.  So I made my way through the middle of the crowd, scanning for them and trying to remain visible.  I made my way across a bridge, where things became very tight.  Whole families locked arms, presenting a wall which impeded my progress tremendously.  It took me 20 minutes to cross. 
Have you ever gone against a crowd?  It is not pleasant.  I received literally hundreds of dirty looks, and several women loudly asked their husbands, "What is wrong with him?" while looking directly at me.   Still, I had no choice but to continue seeking my family.  And so I braved the crush of people, weaving as best I could but sometimes running into people headlong.
Then all at once I saw them.  The whole bunch of my family, blessedly standing still at the agreed upon spot.  Stressed and tired from the unpleasant experience of fighting thousands of people, I joined them and we made our way to the exit and back to the hotel, where I was allowed to order room service.
Sometimes the Faith feels like that for me.  Here's the article:

Easter, Anyone?
A cultural soul diminished.

By Charlotte Allen

For many years on Good Friday I would drive across town to a late-afternoon religious service at the house of a Catholic religious order in my city, Washington, D.C. Then, as dusk fell after the two-hour liturgy, I would drive back across town to my home. Each time I would be shocked to realize that I was a member of a dwindling minority of people who regarded Good Friday as different from the other 51 Fridays in the year.

Different neighborhoods on my route home provided little variance in this trend; whether the genteel and expensive post-Christian enclave in Northwest Washington where I lived, or the mostly African American and presumably fervently biblical ward in which the religious order that hosted my Good Friday liturgy resided, the general atmosphere remained consistent. A line of blue-jeaned college students snaked outside the door of my neighborhood pickup bar, the Cactus Cantina, as it did every other Friday night. Cars cruised and horns honked, and clusters of young people on the prowl for weekend adventure crammed the sidewalks.

The working-class Latino neighborhood through which I drove, whose residents nominally shared my Catholic faith and for whom Viernes Santo is a solemn fast day commemorating Christ’s death, was unseasonably merry: roaring crowds on the sidewalks, glittering lights from the bars, beer bottles smashing periodically against the asphalt.

Each passing scene on my tour confirmed the cultural obliteration of Easter — that most sacred of Christian feasts — in a society whose members still define themselves overwhelmingly as Christians. The “war against Christmas” — the campaign to force everyone to say, “Happy Holiday!” and banish the crèche from public places — is still ongoing and met with considerable resistance, à la Mike Huckabee and his in-your-face December campaign ad reminding viewers that Dec. 25 celebrates the day Jesus was born. The war against Easter, by contrast, seems sadly over.

My latest issue of Fine Cooking magazine arrived the other day, featuring what would have been known in former times as an Easter dinner: roast lamb, asparagus soup, angel food cake. Here, it’s identified as a “spring” dinner, and the issue otherwise contains not a hint that some of its readers might wish to mark the spring by celebrating Jesus’ triumph over death. Not even a recipe for dyed eggs or baby chick-shaped cookies graces the pages of the magazine.

More ominously still, St. Patrick’s Day falls this year during Holy Week for the first time since 1940. The usual green-beer binges did not abate in honor of the solemnity of this week. The saint himself, famous for having brought the bonfires of the Easter Vigil to Ireland, may well turn over in his grave.

Millions of American Christians will nonetheless celebrate Easter this year with church and sunrise services, and family lunches and brunches. But these commemorations are nowadays generally private and muted. Most schools and workplaces drone on in routine without even acknowledging the holiday (except in Hawaii, whose Good Friday legal holiday somehow survived a constitutional challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union). The “Easter parades” of yore in which people strolled in their finery after church are much diminished, if they continue to exist at all. Even the famous White House Egg Roll on Easter Monday has turned at least in part into a political occasion for gay and lesbian parents.

Given the solemn nature of Easter, which celebrates not the happy birth of a child as does Christmas, but the awesome themes of suffering, death, atonement, and resurrection, it is always conceptually difficult to festoon the paschal season with the rounds of merrymaking that characterize the end of December.

Still, it is sad and disconcerting that the oldest and holiest of Christian festivals is simply ignored by the media (and almost everyone else), and that Christians have acquiesced to the near-disappearance of their highest feast day from public consciousness.

Though we may — like the soldiers who boozed and gambled at the foot of the cross as salvation unfolded before them — ignore the phenomenon of redemption, Easter is above all a feast of hope. And as Augustine of Hippo wrote, “We are an Easter people.”

— Charlotte Allen is author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.

I often highlight the faults and crimes of radical Islam on this blog.  In an attempt to be fair, here's something from my own people.  This happens every year.  Every year.  The fight in Jerusalem is also a yearly occurrence.  Don't mess with the Orthodox, because apparently they carry iron rods around with them to church.  Even Franciscans got into the mix a few years ago. 

Very much highlights the necessity of everyone coming back to the fold of the Catholic Church, in my humble opinion.  But that's a religious matter.  In political terms, this kind of stuff highlights the very strong convictions that can lead to violence, even among a religion that explicitly asks its adherents to turn the other cheek.

Priests brawl at Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus

View larger image

Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born. But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed. For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event. A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee. "As usual the cleaning of the church afer Christmas is a cause of problems," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh told AFP, adding that he has offered to help ease tensions. "For the two years that I have been here everything went more or less calmly," he said. "It's all finished now." The Church of the Nativity, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City, is shared by various branches of Christianity, each of which controls and jealously guards a part of the holy site. The Church of the Nativity is built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born in a stable more than 2,000 years ago after Mary and Joseph were turned away by an inn.

TESTING THE FAITH
Bishop urges Christians to call God 'Allah'
Catholic leader believes it would help ease tensions between religions

---

Posted: August 15, 2007
3:28 p.m. Eastern

© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Bishop Tiny Muskens (Courtesy Radio Netherlands Worldwide)

Catholic churches in the Netherlands should use the name Allah for God to ease tensions between Muslims and Christians, says a Dutch bishop.

Tiny Muskens, the bishop of Breda, told the Dutch TV program "Network" Monday night he believes God doesn't mind what he is called, Radio Netherlands Worldwide reported.

The Almighty is above such "discussion and bickering," he insisted.

Muskens points to Indonesia, where he served 30 years ago, as an example for Dutch churches. Christians in the Middle East also use the term Allah for God.

"Someone like me has prayed to Allah yang maha kuasa (Almighty God) for eight years in Indonesia and other priests for 20 or 30 years," Muskens said. "In the heart of the Eucharist, God is called Allah over there, so why can't we start doing that together?"

Muskens thinks it could take another 100 years, but eventually the name Allah will be used by Dutch churches, promoting rapprochement between the two religions, he said, according to Radio Netherlands.

However, a survey published today in the Netherlands' largest newspaper, De Telegraaf, showed 92 percent of the more than 4,000 people polled oppose the bishop's view, the Associated Press reported.

(Story continues below)

Some letters to the paper were filled with ridicule for the bishop.

"Sure. Lets call God Allah. Lets then call a church a mosque and pray five times a day. Ramadan sounds like fun," wrote Welmoet Koppenhol.

The chairman of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, Gerrit de Fijter, told the Dutch paper he welcomed any attempt to "create more dialogue," according to the AP. But he said, "Calling God 'Allah' does no justice to Western identity. I see no benefit in it."

A Muslim spokesman, for Amsterdam's union of Moroccan mosques, said Muslims had not asked for such a gesture from Christians, the AP reported.

Tensions with the Netherlands' 1-million-strong Muslim community have been high since the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim avenging a film critical of Islam.

Last week, politician Geert Wilders talked about banning the Quran, shortly after the head of a group of former Muslims, Ehsan Jami, compared Islam's prophet Muhammad with al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Muskens made similar remarks several year ago about using the name of Allah, Radio Netherlands reported. He also suggested replacing the national Christian holiday Whit Monday – celebrated the day after Pentecost – with an Islamic religious day.

The bishop also has offended Muslims, saying in 2005 Islam was a religion without a future because it has too many violent aspects

Ok, so when I said I'd ridicule another faith, I didn't really think it would be my own.  And of course, it's not actually my faith that's on the block here.  But this representative of my faith deserves some ire.

Firstly, the point I want to make is the one made by the Protestant.  Simply calling God "Allah" does nothing to encourage mutual respect and deference...the actual goal and the point in which Islam is lacking.  To simply give up our Western identity because we know a bunch of Mecca-lovers are going to throw a tantrum is spineless.

Which brings me to the point in which Christianity is lacking:  too much deference to a faith which doesn't deserve it.  In fact, I'd like to see more criticism like that levied by my pope, though after the riots that more than likely won't happen.  Because think about it...Catholicism is attacked almost daily, its precepts misrepresented in the media and its priests slandered because of the actions of a few.  I've always been a believer that turning the cheek needs to give way to institutional survival, and Catholicism needs to grow a pair. 

Forgive my earthiness, but it galls me that we can sit in little circles and talk about how we've got things right and we need to enlighten our Protestant bretheren and those of other faiths, and yet when Islam starts whining we have a bishop who advocates adoption of the Muslim name for God.  In a misguided attempt to appease our enemies (let's face it, we're in competition here) that would weaken our distinctive Western characteristics.  His point that the Church in Asia uses the name "Allah" is not relevant to the Church in the West. 

I think that the time for nancy-boy Christianity has passed.  It never actually had a time given to it, rather I feel my faith has been usurped by short-sighted institutional martyrs who want to embrace the oblivion that is relativism.  On my blog I'm often accused of bigotry...how can believing that I am right (and by extension, that others are wrong) about God make me a bigot?  I don't deny anyone the opportunity to come around to my faith.  I have staked my claim to truth, and I refuse to compromise on it.  Unlike this bishop.

One more thing:  like most of the problems with cultural apathy, this is what seems a subtle and insignificant change.  What does it matter if we call God "Allah" anyway?  But it'll make it that much easier for the Muslims to make inroads in Europe.  And I don't want that, frankly.

Hardly anybody ever makes the point that the L.A. diocese, with its rampant "progressive" Catholicism, also has had to dole out the most in sex-abuse money.  It's gotten so bad that the Prince has had to sell his fancy new office buildings.  I found a site that will soothe my worries about the Los Angeles diocese under His Eminence Roger Cardinal Mahony.

This is Sherwin Nuland from New Republic via Amy Welborn:

...I found myself at a luncheon where alumni of a large Ivy League university had gathered in the interest of educational sodality and fund-raising, a variety of rite commonly favored by organizations of aging graduates and their alma maters. Perhaps to prepare the mood for the postprandial speaker--a visiting art historian about to discuss the works of Leonardo da Vinci--one of the group's officers was holding forth at my table on a thesis so consistent with common preconceptions about the intellectual backwardness of the Catholic Church that it always finds a receptive audience. With a forcefulness honed by decades as a trial lawyer, he was regaling his attentive listeners with accusations of the obstinacy with which the church opposed human dissection during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This, he pointed out as emphatically as if he were addressing a jury, had necessitated all kinds of clandestine and gruesome activities on the part of those whose aim was to study the human body, whether for scientific purposes or because they were artists of the caliber of Leonardo, Titian, and Raphael. Not only was medical knowledge thus stunted in its advancement, he added in his summation, but such opposition necessitated the well-known horrors of grave-robbing in order to obtain cadavers for study, an unnatural activity that marred the image of the profession of healing until late in the nineteenth century.

Were Benedict XVI present to act as advocate for his long-ago predecessors, he would have entered a plea of not guilty on their behalf. And the pope would certainly have won the ensuing debate, because the overwhelming weight of evidence supports his long-dead clients. Stated simply, the persuasive lawyer was dead wrong. Whatever difficulties may have been faced by Galileo and several other prominent scientists of that and later eras, the anatomists and the artists had few such obstructionist forces to contend with, at least from the Catholic hierarchy of the time. The truth of the matter differs markedly from what might have been thought by the old alums listening with such knowing accord to the disquisition being presented to them.

Not only did the church not stand in the way of dissection, but it frequently provided an atmosphere and means to facilitate it. Perhaps the most direct demonstration of such a supportive philosophy is to be found in a Bull issued in 1482 by Pope Sixtus IV, who responded to a request from the students and faculty of the University of Tübingen by permitting human dissection providing that local clerical permission was granted. In doing this, Sixtus was only acknowledging practices already in effect at the universities of Bologna and Padua, in both of which he had been a student and in neither of which had church authorities ever prevented the opening of corpses for the purposes of research and teaching.

Leonardo's first such studies took place in the mid-1480s, probably at Milan's Ospedale del Brolo, a unit of the Ospedale Maggiore licensed to allow dissections with the consent of the local bishop. And scarcely a decade after the Bull of Sixtus, the prior of the Church of San Spirito in Florence gave dissecting permission to, among others, a young painter named Michelangelo Buonarroti. As for grave-robbing, it is no historical aberration that the best-known escapades of famous grave robbers and their ghastly doings happen to have taken place in Protestant countries, such as England, Scotland, and the United States. The explanation for this phenomenon is clear: it was primarily in Protestant lands, not Catholic ones, that bodies were difficult to obtain, because there were stringent, often clergy-driven, laws against dissection.

I do not mean to imply that my tablemate was an ignoramus, or that his hearers were swayed by his argument because they were uneducated in the facts as presented in standard descriptions of early modern history. It is hardly their fault that current-day literature and even many textbooks have portrayed an imaginary scenario in which the church stood inexorably opposed to the Renaissance mood of rapidly emerging scientific discovery, particularly with respect to delving into the secrets of life. Every schoolboy knows that the new humanism that is the hallmark of the period manifested itself, among other ways, in a fascination with the structure and function of man's body, but every schoolboy has also been taught that the Catholic Church did what it could to halt or at least slow the scientific progress that might be the inevitable result of such a fascination. If he did not learn it in the classroom, the schoolboy read of it as portrayed in every example of the literary fiction that deals with the subject.

Katharine Park's important book has two major themes, and putting to a well-deserved rest the erroneous image of a thoroughly resistant church is one of them. True, there were certainly conspicuous instances--and again, Galileo's is the most prominent--of theological wrongheadedness and maleficent obstructionism, and even an underlying current of belief that made certain scientists of the early modern period interpret objective findings in a way that did not clash with church teachings. But in general Catholicism has taken a rap much more severe than it deserves, especially in the area of anatomy...

There have been many times that I've been in the company of those who are unaware of my Catholicism, who have put forth similar misconceptions about the Church with sure certainty.  And it is true that there are stories about the Church that every young Protestant is told...some taken for granted to be accurate.  Part of that is an American problem, since America has never been particularly receptive to Catholicism. 
I have a friend whose father takes particular pleasure in making jabs at Catholicism in my presence.  He seems alternately to imply that because of the sins of individual members of the Church the institution is rendered defunct, or by ascribing political motivations for Catholic practices (eating fish on Friday, for example) attempting to cast aspersions again upon the institution. 
I find religious discussion with others must always move towards ending at a simple declaration of belief or the conversion of one party to the other's Faith.  To end a discussion otherwise is like unto ending a sentence with a colon:  In truth, I find colons rude little fellows and any concept which can be tenuously connected to them to be distasteful.

I think that my friends who are not Catholic would say that I do not bash people over the head with my religion, nor do I lean on them to convert, but I do draw lines and rise to challenges against my faith.  Sometimes this means I myself am "rude."  Had I been at the dinner equipped with this knowledge, why I would have interrupted that lawyer's grand oration with nary a second thought and ruined everyone's five minutes of entertainment.

Book shows Pope is not infallible

Agencies in Rome
Wednesday April 18, 2007
The Guardian

Pope Benedict XVI's new book sold more than 50,000 copies on its first day on sale Monday - the pontiff's 80th birthday - said the Italian publisher Rizzoli, which has decided on another printing.

In Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict's first book as pontiff, the German-born theologian offers a personal meditation on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and criticises capitalism's exploitation of the poor and the absence of God in Marxism. Rizzoli said yesterday the new edition would bring the printing to 420,000 copies. The 448-page book was published in German, Italian and Polish. An English-language edition is due on May 15 and translations are planned for 16 other languages.

Yesterday, however, Catholic bloggers took up the Pope's invitation to criticise his work by pointing out that he wrongly identifies a US theologian. In a paragraph citing books about Jesus, he identifies John Meier, a professor at Notre Dame University, Indiana, as a member of the Jesuit order of Catholic priests. Mr Meier is not a Jesuit but a priest of the New York diocese.

"The Pope is not infallible - there's a little mistake in his last book," Italian journalist Sandro Magister said in his blog Settimo Cielo (Seventh Heaven).

The Pope, who began writing the book before his election in 2005, said in the introduction that his portrayal of Jesus was his personal view and not official Roman Catholic teaching. "Therefore, everyone is free to contradict me," he wrote.