You boys need some churchin' up

John Muggeridge's favourite movie.

I'm not kidding. He said his favourite scene was the one with the Penguin.

Well, who doesn't love that one?

Now, who'd have predicted this?

Come on, hands up, everybody...

The government’s poor response has even invited military involvement. The army had to get involved over the Sukkur Barrage struggle, and the government may “face the threat of social unrest or even military takeover after its shambolic response to the floods.” Some disagree as to the level of future involvement, arguing that, “despite the government's perceived failure to tackle the crisis, a military coup is unlikely. The army's priority is fighting Taliban insurgents, and seizing power during a disaster would make no sense . . . .” Nevertheless, the government’s initial sluggish response has threatened the democratic process in Pakistan and provided an avenue for military control..

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to us either

Mr. Blair's new book has a few amusing anecdotes about his experiences with the High and Mighty.

He relates a conversation he had with former US President Bush at a G8 Summit:

He then turned to me and whispered, ‘Who is this guy?’

‘He is the prime minister of Belgium,’ I said.

“Belgium? George said, clearly aghast at the possible full extent of his stupidity. ‘Belgium is not part of the G8’.”

Mr Blair explained to Mr Bush that Mr Verhofstadt was there as “president of Europe”. Belgium held the presidency of the EU council at the time.

Mr Bush responded: “You got the Belgians running Europe?” before shaking his head, “now aghast at our stupidity”, Mr Blair writes.

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Sourpuss

...and everyone knows that pro-lifers are all sour, cranky and no fun...

Nothing to see here... move along...

Edmund Adamus, a fine chap and all 'round good egg, who has the no doubt thankless position of director of Pastoral Affairs for the Diocese of Westminster, told Zenit news this weekend that the pope is visiting a country that has become in the post-war years the “geopolitical epicenter of the culture of death”.

Britain has become an "aggressive anti-Catholic bias towards the church and the pontiff," he said, that exceeded even countries that violently persecuted Christians.

"Geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death".

Quite a nice little turn of phrase there, I'd say. If Edmund gets the sack, there is a future for him as a conservative Catholic columnist...if he can find someone who'll pay for it.

Britain is in “a time of shadows especially threatening to the fundamental cell of society -- the family -- and the rights of parents.”

He was likely referring to the laws that allow schools to teach children in their sex education classes the joys of gay sex and where to obtain abortions and contraception without parents’ knowledge or consent.

Britain a “selfish, hedonistic wasteland” indulging in the “objectification of women for sexual gratification” and “ever-increasing commercialization of sex, not to mention its permissive laws advancing the gay agenda”.

“Our laws and lawmakers for over 50 years or more have been the most permissively anti-life and progressively anti-family and marriage, in essence one of the most anti-Catholic landscapes culturally speaking than even those places where Catholics suffer open persecution.”

...

I wrote a piece for an American newspaper the other day in which I described Britain's response to the Pope's visit as reminiscent of

the reaction of teenagers who, left alone for the long weekend, are caught short by the sudden arrival of their parents early on Sunday morning. They have not had time to tidy up or hide the incriminating debris and so have chosen to stand defiantly amidst the wreckage of empties, take-away wrappers and broken heirlooms, arms akimbo, ready to deny all wrongdoing.

Now it seems that at least two British Catholic bishops are desperately trying to push the empties into the closet:

A spokesman for Nichols said the views expressed by Adamus "did not reflect the archbishop's opinions".

But this little duck and cover was as nothing to the glowing comments from Bishop Kieran Conry of Arundel and Brighton who wagged his finger firmly at such nay-saying: "I am often told by those Catholics who dislike the way our church operates in this country that they are the 'silent majority', denied a voice by people like me in the hierarchy. The reality is that they are a very small minority."


But get this...

Pope Benedict is coming to a country where Catholicism is unusually stable, cohesive and vibrant enough in the current overall context of decline of interest in the church in western Europe. Indeed, I think he may well be relieved to be coming to a place where, unlike some of his other recent trips, there are no big problems for him to sort out."

Now, if I'd made that up, y'all would have rightly told me that I was going over the top, that even an English Catholic bishop couldn't plausibly have said such things with a straight face. But the Guardian swears it's a straight-up quote.

Seriously.

I'll give it to you again, shall I?

"Indeed, I think he may well be relieved to be coming to a place where, unlike some of his other recent trips, there are no big problems for him to sort out."

...

Do popes still do interdict?



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So hard to keep score!

OK, let's see if we can get this all straight (pardon the pun).

Maybe we can sort it out in point-form.

1. The Pope/Catholic Church is evil because (among other things)

a) he wants to stop homosexuals from acting on their God-given impulses to put their parts into other men.

b) he didn't do enough to stop priests from molesting adolescent boys

c) he said that homosexuals shouldn't be ordained.

2. Homosexuals

a) are all just interested in a normal picket-fence-ish, PTA meeting, mom dad-and-apple-pie sort of life as everyone else,

b) have just as much right to get married (to each other, that is) as everyone else and opposing "gay marriage" is a gross injustice

c) have no general predilection whatever for meaningless sexual encounters or young men

3. In general there is a vast difference between your "average" normal homosexual and a priest boy-molester because

a) priest molester problem is "all about power" and has nothing whatever to do with homosexuality

b) when a non-ordained homosexual is interested in 14 year-old boys, it's really only a natural, normal expression of his God-given sexuality that would be wrong to suppress.

Therefore we must arrest the Pope when he comes to Britain while we lower the age of sexual consent from 16 to 14.

Do I get a prize?



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Nice religion you got there, Abdul.

In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called "dancing boys" a "widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape."

So, why are American and NATO forces fighting and dying to defend tens of thousands of proud pedophiles, certainly more per capita than any other place on Earth? And how did Afghanistan become the pedophilia capital of Asia?

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are "unclean" and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli's team "how his wife could become pregnant," her report said. When that was explained, he "reacted with disgust" and asked, "How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?"

Very nice.

One boy, in tow of a man he called "my lord," told the Reuters reporter: "Once I grow up, I will be an owner, and I will have my own boys."

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"The Church teaches..."

I say it all the time. I hear other people saying it all the time. You read it all the time in the newspapers and magazines and on the 'net.

"The Church teaches..." that homosexual acts are sinful...that women cannot be ordained...just to take a few of the MSM's favourites. And sometimes you will even see the (1992) Catechism quoted (well, of course, not often and never in the New York Times, but occasionally) directly on the subjects.

But what is much more infrequently (ie. never) mentioned is the reason the Church teaches the things she does. And the reason she remains "intransigent" on things like women's ordination and same-sex marriage. Here's a little secret that we would like journalists to understand better: When a Catholic, from the pope on down to the parish tea-lady, says "the Church teaches..." they mean "it is objectively true that..." In other words, neither the Pope, nor the parish tea lady has any more power to change it than they have the power to change the rate at which gravity makes things fall down.

What is rarely understood is that the Church approaches these things like a scientist approaches an observable phenomenon. The scientist, when looking at something through a telescope or microscope, asks himself "What is this? What does it do? What is it made of?" He wants to know what is the actual, objective truth is about the phenomenon. He observes its characteristics and writes them down. He tests his observations by setting up experiments and repeating the experiments to see if the observations are always the same. He asks a set of questions about it based on axioms, things that are self-evidently true and are impossible to doubt. In the Laws of Rational Thought, an axiom is what you have to start with, to base your investigations on, if you want to understand anything.

For the Greeks, who invented the idea, an axiom was a claim which could be seen to be true without any need for proof. The deductive method of finding things out means observing a phenomenon, and asking questions about it based on existing premises, or things we already know. When all these pieces fit together, then you can be pretty sure (Thomas might say "morally certain") that the thing you conclude is true.

The Church, similarly, when presented with a new thing, cloning and embryonic stem cell research for example, starts by examining it and asking a set of questions based on what we already know. Both the Natural Law and Revelation give us a set of moral axioms to build with. "Thou shalt not kill," being one that most people are familiar with. Understood properly, it means no individual may kill another individual unless it is for self defence or defence of another.

From this moral axiom, we can draw all kinds of helpful conclusions about things that St. Augustine and Thomas never heard of, like the Vietnam War and germline gene splicing.

One of the best and contemporarily most useful documents the Church has put out recently demonstrating not only What the Church Teaches on embryo research, but the methods the Church uses to come to binding moral conclusions was Donum Vitae, the 1986 document put out by Cardinal Ratzinger's CDF on the new reproductive technologies.

I'd recommend reading it, or at least taking a look, because it really does give an excellent demonstration of the theological scientific methods used by the Church to make conclusions. The question and answer format makes it clear why, exactly, you can't do the various things the Church says you can't do to embryos. And here's the kicker, it's based on real science, not the pseudo-scientific mush most modern Bioethicists ("pre-embryo" anyone?) cite when they say that cloning and embryo research are just fine and dandy.

In other words, despite what the likes of the Dawkinses and the Sr. Grammicks of the world might think, there is really nothing arbitrary about Catholic teaching. And, as Michael says above, when a Catholic says, "The Church teaches..." he is saying, more or less, "It is objectively true that..." He is, moreover, saying, "...and we can prove it."



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Valuable History Lesson

It used to be that every schoolboy (and presumably school girl) knew the story of the king who tried to sit on the waves. And if he hadn't, he'd have learned about it later in life by reading 1066 and All That, a book which used to be funny but is now merely incomprehensible.



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I love the English

A little while ago, I was assured on Facebook that "access" is so a verb. At least, it's a verb now. The writer, you see, had used it as a verb. He insisted that he "could access the internet," which meant definitively that it is now a verb. So there.

But in spite of my lethal hatred of verbing, I have to admit that I am still a terrible speller. I know there are at least three ells in that word that means two long things going in the same direction, but I've never really got the hang of the distribution.



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