extreme Catholic 

 
How to catch a pirate: New York Times

The strange thing about this roundup of solutions is that the authors who claim to know the real deal when pirates are concerned are fully of certainty only about what is not going to work. None of the know-it-alls has a solution other than wait and see what happens.

Labels: crime

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 11:40 PM   Permalink  

 
I made a pro-life connection when I first saw this image

Is or isn't this baby connected to his/her mother's body?

Are you satisfied you are looking at two people?

In any event, this is product for sale so let me plug the vendor Peekathru at mom4life.com and HT to urlesque.com

Labels: extreme, pro-life

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 1:58 PM   Permalink  

 
Vale, Edward Cardinal Egan

I wish Cardinal Egan well in whatever assignment he receives from the Pope. It is ironic that he is getting the greatest amount of local television coverage now at his exit. This wasn't true with his three predecessors during my life. Cardinal Egan was the master of his ecclesial domain and confronting the culture of death was a secondary concern for him. It will take the perspective of history to judge if he left the Church in New York in better condition than he found it.

As I blogged earlier the Cardinal made himself a prisoner of precedent and invited candidate Obama to the Al Smith dinner on the basis that while he was pro-abortion, he wasn't Catholic, and therefore not subject to the Church's "discipline".

Best wishes as well for Archbishop Timothy Dolan.

Labels: church, culture, new york, obama, politics

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 10:05 PM   Permalink  

 
I see a pattern emerging (and I will explain the pirate picture)

In the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandal it seems that legions of anonymous cowards have stepped forward to verbally defecate over every news item or blog posting that mentions "priest" to make a crude reference to child molestation. Before I give an example of this, so you too can recognize it, let me give you two core truths about the scandal of sexual abuse:

The scandal was to a very large extent (perhaps as high as 80%), about homosexual relationships between priests and sexually mature males -- many under 18 and many over 18. Another segment was heterosexual relationships between priests and unmarried women over 18 (immoral but not illegal), and women who were married (which would be both immoral and legally actionable) and the smallest segment: sexually immature (i.e. prepubescent) boys and girls - illegal and morally depraved.

Sexual abuse of children respects no occupational boundaries: it occurs more frequently among public school teachers and doctors. There are child sexual abusers among police officers and fire fighters, politicians and Wall Street executives, show business types and Internet technologists, venture capitalists and bloggers. It is in no sense specially prevalent in the Catholic priesthood.

Many people hate the Catholic Church. It is just a sad fact of post-Enlightenment post-modern and post-Christian United States. The task at hand is to call them out. Answer them with charity or answer them with sarcasm -- whatever fits the circumstances and audience and your blogging skills. I've been doing this for 25 years starting with USENET and Compuserve, and I am not alone. To the particular case of the Pirate and the Priest: One has to feel sorry for Father Commolly. Whether or not he said what was attributed to him, his goose has been cooked by the narrative given by Paul and Peggy Kanigoski. We should all give Father tactical support. The statue in full is soft-porn like a Victoria Secrets ad. It is objectifying the image of women. However, this is not high on my list of priorities. Women walk around with less on top during the summer in New York or any major city in the US. Sex sells. I think it more important to tell people that images like this subtract from human dignity rather that letting the Kanigoski's claim a cheap Larry Flynt-like martyrdom, and open door to the the sneers of the stupid comment boxers.

Here are the links:

WNEP (video link), I think this is the origin

asylum.com anti-Catholic comments

Reading Eagle (editor's blog) anti-Catholic comments

Baltimore Sun (comments)

Examiner blog (comments)

I have decided to post a modest picture of the statue. You can use your imagination or click on one of the above links.

Let me also mention that Curt Jester blogged on this earlier in the day.

Labels: anti-catholic, blogs, culture, extreme

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 8:17 PM   Permalink  

 
Going Wobbly Dept.

Maybe Notre's Dame's invitation could be good for the unborn

Archbishop Quinn in America blogged on googlinggod

The bigger question though which Bishop Quinn addressed in the first few paragraphs of the article is a doozy: How do unborn get served in the end by either withdrawing the invitation or by allowing President Obama to speak? Which ends up serving their needs best?

My comment:

Yet another pathetic "call to dialog" with the killers of the unborn. The foolish Catholics and Catholic institutions have been doing this since before Roe. It is easy to answer the question of "how does it help the unborn" -- because it can deny Obama (or his surrogates) an updated clone of the infamous Cuomo political cover "...as I said in my September 13, 1984 speech at Notre Dame..." which every pro-abortion Catholic pol uses today as their position slip to defy God and his Church.

This dialog has only served to confuse, confound, and contradict clear Catholic teaching on the right to life of the unborn.

Labels: pro-life

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 10:14 PM   Permalink  

 
Catholicism and Economics

At the Nassau Community College, Center for Catholic Studies

The speakers were

Charles Clark, the Democratic Socialist, St John's University

Michael Novak, the Democratic Capitalist, American Enterprise Institute

Thomas Storck, for the Distributists, The Distributist Society

It was not capitalism's day to shine. It's wasn't a classic debate along the lines of "Resolved: The United States should abandon capitalism for socialism." or "Resolved: The United States should abandon capitalism for distributism" it was more like put the texts of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations through Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse into a pinata and beat it around.

Really, there were so many lies and half-truths said about the "c" word, there would be scarcely any time to offer up criticism on socialism and distributism.

Michael Novak, I think, fell into several traps, citing government interventions into political matters as favorable evidence for capitalism. I thought citing the provision for patents and copyrights in the Constitution as a very odd way of defending capitalism -- an example of how the government grants a limited monopoly. Rather, it demonstrates that government often intervenes into markets.

Rather than convincing me to stop being a capitalist, I heard many familiar complaints which I could have answered like "capitalism necessarily increases income inequality", but I also heard a few that made me think about things: how different the country would be if it were not so easy to create limited liability corporations.

The lasting impact on me was a resolution to reread Rerum Novarum (1891) and its sequels through Centesimus Annus (1991) to get a better sense of how they connect to Catholic social justice.

Finally, if they do this again, it should include someone who can argue for more capitalism -- that the Louisiana Purchase was unconstitutional because it was not an enumerated power, and that "commerce clause" cases all the way back to Gibbons v. Ogden were decided in contravention of the principles of capitalism. Don't stop with unwinding creeping socialism in FDR's new deal, let's unwind all the way back to George Washington.

Labels: capitalism, distributism, social justice, socialism

posted by Patrick Sweeney at 8:07 PM   Permalink