Is the Pope Catholic?

For later reading since I have been a bit busy:

The new "amazon" document that the German bishops were using to push their agenda was a fizzle for them. (link: Church militant via the Anglican site, Virtue on line)

Sandro Magister comes out of hibernation to discuss the back story and gossip behind what is going on.

Father Z puts his two cents in, and notes that the regular "reformers" are busy spinning their stuff in the press.

my take? Pope Benedict (with help from Cardinal Sarah) got past his keepers to draw a line in the sand.

IF the document had gone the way the "reformers" wanted it to go, the church would have gone into schism.

Meaning the Vatican would be able to keep all the loot from the heretical German church, but would continue hemorrhaging Catholics (and their donations) in the USA.

The drop in money from American Catholics (the ones who still go to mass tend to be like good protestants, to take religion seriously) has hurt their pocket book.

and a lot of ordinary Catholics have been praying to protect the church from those who would distort it into a NWO NGO church of nice.

But the Pope has surrounded himself with modernists, so one expects this to be only a temporary set back for them.

Indeed, one wonders if, like in previous documents, the "reform" agenda was hidden among the 15000 word salad document, only to be pulled out and pushed at a later date.

and then when people object, they will be told.... actually their objections will be ignored and the happy happy secularist agenda will do it's thing and hey, no schism because the Pope agreed with you (or did he? He says both A and B, and disdains you when you ask for clarity.).

Who would rid me... take two

One danger of calling for violence is that it could inspire a crazy person to actually act on the idea.

Fill in blanks here for your favorite horror story (left or right wing).

But a bigger problem, at least in places where rule of law is ignored/gotten around by the powerful, is getting the news out to pre arranged groups.. the massacres of Rwanda were by gangs previously trained who went to work after a politician died in an accident.

Similarly, Mugabe's "green bombers"...(2007) terrorized people to stop the opposition from forming.

all of this overlaps with what I discussed in the previous post: When the church is seen as the opposition to a tyranny, the church is a target.

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StrategyPage reports on the chaos (a civil war that has killed a lot of people but ignored by the world) in the Congo: The Catholic bishops brokered a peace plan in December, but the president did not sign the agreement.

and now they report:

March 1, 2017: The Catholic Church in Congo is making certain diplomats and foreign journalists are aware of the increase in attacks on church property and employees. Particularly alarming was a February 18 arson attack on a seminary. On February 19 a “youth gang” attacked a church in Kinshasa. The Catholic Church mediated the agreement between the political opposition and the Kabila government that supposedly will lead to new elections and Joseph Kabila’s removal from the presidency. The attacks look like attempts by Kabila supporters to intimidate the church. In fact a senior church leader said the church is “being targeted deliberately, in order to sabotage her mission of peace and reconciliation.”

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related item: UK Guardian (2016) on Mexican priests killed by their drug cartels

Although many drug traffickers consider themselves devout Catholics, priests have reportedly been killed for denouncing criminality, or even for refusing to baptize the children of narcos...

 Churchmen are not targeted “because they believe in Christ”, Mijangos y González said. “It’s because priests are an obstacle in the way of conquering local power.”

Before last week’s murders,
Mexico’s Catholic Media Centre had tallied the killings of 28 priests since 2006, most of them in states where criminal groups are powerful, such Michoacán, Guerrero and Veracruz.

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And a lot of clergy were killed in Colombia: 83 since 1984. by FARC, by the drug cartels who overlap FARC and I suspect some by right wing hit squads. And that doesn't include the Protestant clergy and laypeople massacred while attending mass.

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In Venezuela, tensions are high between the government and the church: This priest was killed last year for unknown reasons.

This small snippet in SP notes in Venezuela:


The pro-government gangs apparently have standing orders to attack any sign of public anti-government activity. This includes barging into churches during worship services and forcing the people to listen to a pro-government speech instead of what the priest was going to say about the problems most Venezuelans have to deal with.

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In the Philippines, the most obvious "rid me of the troublesome priest" was the murder of a priest who defended the rights of the indigenous against big business/local crooked politicians who wanted to steal their land (resulting in the destruction of the environment by mining) for profit.

and the murder of clergy by right wing hit squads because of their supposed links to left wing causes. HRW report 2011.

this Wikipedia article has a lot of the pre Duterte killings listed,

In other words, when you read about "extrajudicial killings", remember it did not start with Duterte.

and a lot of these things are not "ordered" but hinted at by the big shots (whose minions then arrange the hits). So the big shots can claim they weren't involved.

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The Dictatorship of noise

DavidWarren quotes Cardinal Sarah on the problem of noise and superficiality in worship. (from Catholic world report)

I think that we are the victims of the superficiality, selfishness and worldly spirit that are spread by our media-driven society. We get lost in struggles for influence, in conflicts between persons, in a narcissistic, vain activism. We swell with pride and pretention, prisoners of a will to power. For the sake of titles, professional or ecclesiastical duties, we accept vile compromises. But all that passes away like smoke. In my new book I wanted to invite Christians and people of good will to enter into silence; without it, we are in illusion. The only reality that deserves our attention is God Himself, and God is silent. He waits for our silence to reveal Himself.

Philippine news: Druggies, fiestas, and a miracle or two

from the Inquirer:

Commuting's safer now but paranoia takes over

summary: late night robberies on Jeepneys used to be common, but now people feel so safe they pull out their smartphones while riding.

Shabu addicts are now discouraged from robbing the innocent.

But the reporter worries he might be caught in the crossfire.

As if Shabu addicts never kill during a robbery (at least three elderly folks in our neighborhood were killed in robberies). And of course, our nephew killed in the crossfire when a politician ordered a hit on his rival.

related item: Female cop stops robbery on bus.

and not all murders are by cops: a lot of vigilante justice is behind murders, because of the slowness of the courts. LINK...So why was this guy on the street? Anyone? anyone?

And PhilHealth will now pay for rehab.

update: This CSM article about meth in China (from 2015) could easily describe the explosion of meth use here in thee Philippines.

in Health news, there have been a few cases of Zika here, but put it into perspective:

There were an estimated 100 thousand cases of Dengue last year plus 600 deaths.

the bishops tell Catholics to keep the environment clean and get rid of standing water that breeds moquitoes.

Of course, once we see Zika here, the SJW will use this to push abortion legalization.

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our sermon in church was about not being greedy and buying lots of stuff.

Ironically, this was the 5:30 am mass, mainly filled with poor folks who have to go to work.

But one of the major social problems here is that the working class and even the farmers whose kids went to school, have family members who go overseas to support the family.

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below I linked to a film that reports about pentecostal healings and "miracles".

we have lots of religious celebrations with bodily and mental healings here, but associated with various shrines: nearly every week there is a fiesta or festival for one saint or another, combining miraculous healings, mass, prayers, a parade and, of course, family reunions with lots of food.
This week they celebrate our Lady of Penafrancia, in Bicol.

Wikipedia link.

There is also a big belief in relics and holy water and oil for cures for ordinary aches and pains.

Well, my yuppie American types and the middle class here use Chinese herbs, message, and mindfulness to do the same thing, and they work just about as good as the holy oil of Saint whoever.

Me, I use Ibuprofen because my religion is science but never mind.

The films above discussed golden teeth, jewels, gold dust and manna appearing.

Well, given the "miracle" of rosaries turning gold in Medjugoje, I shouldn't mock (it's a natural phenomenum, of course, when the silver coating gets rubbed off the rosary wires from saying a lot of rosaries).

But similar things have been reported with saints or shrine: Such as the famous shower of rose petals at Lipa.

Andrew Greeley once quipped that once the Catholics drop something, the Protestants take it up. So Vatican II threw out miracles, (along with fasting, prayer, liturgy, and other non SJW activities) and God found others in the most unlikely places to revive the customs that help ordinary folks link with the supernatural.

Lots of "miracles" occur, albeit most of them have "natural" explanations, although often what is amazing is that they just naturally occurred after someone prayed.

 I won't even go into the fact that saints need one or two certified miracles to see if God agrees with the enthusiastic public that a person is in heaven.

By certified, I mean something that science cannot explain.

So when some of our Indian nurses said the reason that Patricia WhiteBull woke it was because her family had just finished a novena to Kateri Tekakwitha. But for docs, it wasn't a miracle, but it was because she had been given an anti influenza medication that also is used for patients with parkinson's disease.

so Kateri has to wait (her certified miracle was a recovery from flesh eating bacteria)


Last week, the last half of this C2C am is a discussion with a doc who collected such "miracle" stories from other doctors.

My "miracle" story is a 2 pound premie who kept going apneic with bradycardia... we worked on her for almost an hour, with weaker and weaker responses, until we got no response at all, so I told the nurse to baptise her and we would stop CPR.
Nurse Petronilla baptised the kid "Mary" and voila, the kid took a deep gasp, and from then on was breathing normally. She even ended up going home (which is unusual: we lost nearly all babies born under 4 pounds...This was 30 plus years ago in Africa and our "incubator" was a wooden box where we used a 100 watt lightbulb to regulate the heat, and regulating the oxygen flow by giving enough for the kid to stay pink).

The local priest admonished me that I shouldn't have baptised her without mom's permission, but I figured hey, when nothing else works, WTF you try a miracle.

Fake Religion

AnnAlthouse links to an article (and no I won't post that link) about the latest yuppie craze for taking a mild hallucinogen from the Amazon that makes you vomit.

Isn't this cultural appropriation?

By severing the drug taking from the discipline of traditional ceremonies, traditional religious beliefs that are behind the ritual, and from the community, and pushing it as a way to egotistical self knowledge and power, you are more likely to become delusional and to resurrect the "demons of the id" than actually find the deity.

Leslie Nielsen call your office.

longer musing at my bitchblog.

The Schoolmarm

DavidWarren has an essay on Mother Teresa, pointing out that before outsiders made her an icon of charity, she was a schoolmarm:

She was a school marm, on top of her other virtues; she had been principal of St Mary’s convent school, in Calcutta... She was officer-class: could command obedience. I interviewed once Sister Nirmala, her successor (who died last year, age eighty-one). She assured me that our twentieth-century Saint Teresa was no putz. Her nuns had to deal with lepers, with the dying, with abandoned babies, and hard-case orphaned kids. This is entirely unlike a vacation.

Nobody elected Mother Teresa. The only permission she got was from her (male) superiors. Having got this permission, she then went, precisely where the Spirit led her: from the modest office in her nice clean school into the darkest, dankest slum.

Those who nit pick her for minor problems like taking money from the corrupt rich (Uh, Zaccheus anyone?) ignore that for years before anyone ever knew her, she was teaching street kids in the slum, changing bandages of lepers, and caring for the dying.

I first heard about her a year or two before Malcolm Muggeridge made her famous: One of my fellow docs during training belonged to the order who ran hospital in India where she trained to do basic nursing. This sister never met her, but only could shake her head at the folly of working in the huge slums, where thousands were living on the street.

Reality check: a lot of the complaints against her are by those who never walked the walk, or are using  university hospital standards of 2016 to judge her care of the dying decades earlier... and overlooking that the only alternative was to die on the street.

Reality check: It's not like in the movies you know.


Street kids are not the happy orphans of filmland: They are sociopaths, feral kids who are street smart from necessity, often getting high and stealing everything in sight.

Dying people don't just need their hands held but careful feeding and being cleaned up.

as for lepers: I remember when we had a patient with a terrible (and odoriferous) foot wound and asked one of our sisters if she thought it could be leprosy. She barely looked at the wound, but explained: It didn't smell bad enough to be leprosy.

I remember when Mother Teresa retired, and was asked what she would do now: She replied: well, I am still good at cleaning latrines.

Hmm...religion not as a warm fuzzy but serving God in the boring duties of our daily life. Who wudda thot? LINK

We are at Jesus’ disposal. If he wants you to be sick in bed, if he wants you to proclaim His work in the street, if he wants you to clean the toilets all day, that’s all right, everything is all right. We must say, “I belong to you. You can do whatever you like.” And this is our strength. This is the joy of the Lord.